A Literary Prescription for
For reclaiming your body, your story, and your sense of safety, at whatever pace that actually takes.
Whatever happened to you, however long ago, and whatever your relationship with telling that story looks like right now — this space is for you. Healing from sexual trauma is rarely linear, and it is never something to be rushed by anyone else’s timeline, including your own past expectations of yourself. The books, poems, and words gathered here come from survivors and clinicians who understand both the depth of the wound and the real possibility of healing.
“What happened to you was not your fault. What happens next is your choice, made in your own time.”Georgia Clare
Books
Books from survivors and clinicians who understand both the wound and the path through it.
Written specifically for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, this remains one of the most thorough and compassionate guides available — covering the full arc from acknowledging what happened through to genuine healing, always at the survivor’s own pace. It does not rush, minimise, or impose a single path; it simply offers steady, knowledgeable company.
Engel addresses the shame that so frequently attaches itself to survivors of sexual trauma, regardless of the actual circumstances, and works systematically to dismantle it. Her central message — stated plainly in the title — is one many survivors need to hear repeatedly, in different forms, before it begins to feel true.
Van der Kolk’s landmark work explains why trauma, including sexual trauma, is held in the body and not just the mind — and why purely cognitive approaches to healing are often insufficient on their own. For survivors who have done talk therapy without feeling fundamentally different, this book explains why, and points toward body-based approaches that frequently help.
Herman’s foundational text on psychological trauma, drawing on decades of clinical experience with survivors of violence and abuse, established many of the frameworks still used in trauma treatment today. Her three stages of recovery — safety, remembrance and mourning, reconnection — remain one of the clearest maps available for the long road of healing.
Melinda stops speaking, almost entirely, after being assaulted at a party the summer before high school, and the novel spends its length watching her find her way back to a voice on her own timeline, not anyone else’s. It has become a touchstone for survivors precisely because it never rushes the silence.
Poetry
Poems for reclaiming a body and a story that are entirely your own.
“Still I Rise”
Maya Angelou, 1978
The poem is built around a single recurring gesture — an image of rising returning again and again, each time a little more unstoppable than the last — addressed directly to everyone who tried to keep her down. Angelou wrote often and openly about surviving sexual violence in her own childhood, and the poem carries that history without ever naming it outright; instead it answers it sideways, through swagger, through laughter, through a body that refuses to apologise for taking up space. For survivors, that indirection can matter as much as the defiance itself: it models a way of reclaiming a life without being required to relive or explain the wound first. Find it in And Still I Rise.
“Phenomenal Woman”
Maya Angelou, 1978
Angelou spends the poem cataloguing the specific, physical details of her own presence — the way she walks into a room, the way people react to her without quite understanding why — and insists, repeatedly, that none of it depends on conventional beauty standards. It is a poem about a body fully inhabited and fully owned, with nothing held back or apologised for. For survivors whose relationship to their own bodies has been disrupted by trauma, that full, unguarded inhabiting of a body is exactly what can feel furthest away — which is part of what makes the poem useful: not as a demand to feel that way immediately, but as a picture of somewhere to aim for, in your own time. Find it in And Still I Rise.
“I had been hungry, all the Years”
Emily Dickinson, c.1862
Dickinson describes how strange and even painful it can feel to finally receive something good after a long deprivation — safety, gentleness, care that doesn’t come with conditions. Many survivors find that healthy touch, trust, or intimacy feels disorienting at first precisely because it is unfamiliar, not because something is wrong with them for finding it so.
Quotes & Prose
For whatever stage of healing you are in right now, at your own pace.
The most important thing to remember is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.
W.E.B. Du Bois
You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become.
Carl Jung
Healing is not linear. Some days you will feel strong, and some days you will feel like you are starting over. Both are part of the process.
Unknown
There is no timestamp on trauma. There isn’t a formula that you can insert yourself into to get from horror to healed.
Dawn Serra
From Georgia
A short practice for sitting with sexual trauma, whenever you need somewhere to land.
Self-Compassion Meditation: A Meditation For Inner Peace
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