Brittany is the heart and soul behind Clearing the Rain’s mission. After experiencing all the pain and suffering that one experiences with rebuilding your life after sexual abuse, molestation and rape, she’s sharing her gifts and insight with the world. You can find out more about Brittany Whitehawk at https://www.clearingtherain.com/
“Those who have survived sexual trauma don’t really have other resources, aside from traditional therapy to really help them get back to the point where they’re living their lives…”
There are many different situations that make people feel sexually traumatized, like:
- Narrowly avoiding being raped
- Harassment in the workplace
- Sexual violence or rape
- Molestation
- Having to fend off unwanted advances
Because each person processes trauma differently, the size fits all just doesn’t work for survivors or victims of sexual trauma.
Most of Brittany’s clients have already been through traditional therapy. Brittany works more on empowering people to live their lives after having experienced trauma.
Many people who have experienced sexual trauma either try to control everything in their lives, becoming control freaks; others will go to the other end of the spectrum, becoming people pleasers. The control freaks usually don’t have control at all and the people pleasers end up losing who they are.
And people do these things as survival tactics.
Whatever happened, that other person who violates another person leaves their own bags of guilt and shame with the person they violated.
Victims of sexual trauma might not like to hear it, but they sometimes continue to victimize themselves. Telling someone who has survived something as traumatic as sex-related trauma, that they are, at this point, victimizing themselves – people get really pissed off about that and I get it, but, if you can take a step back and look at things from an objective point of view and you can go, “Oh. I did that. That sucks. I don’t like doing that to myself.
I forgive myself because I can see why I did that.”
Self-forgiveness is a big part of Brittany’s work. According to Brittany Whitehawk, “There is so, so much empowerment and being able to forgive yourself so that is… just another aspect of how I help my clients and group to actually get to being a “liver.”
“The “liver” is something that Sue and Brittany talked about in the days prior to the interview because Sue wondered, “Are you sure you want to use the term, liver, but you have a really great perspective on why you use that term…”
Brittany feels that there are 3 stages to trauma:
- The Victim Stage – right after the traumatic experience happens. It’s a period when the victim processes the incident, asking questions like, “Why me?” and feeling very upset about the incident.
- The Survival Stage – the person does day-to-day chores and tasks, like going to work or caring for children. They aren’t striving too hard, but, at the end of this phase, the person starts to realize that there is more to life than being stuck in auto-pilot and goes on to the final stage.
- The Liver Stage – This is not only in terms of living life but also like the organ, the liver, which filters toxins from our bloodstream. Toxins are a trauma to our bodies. The Liver is learning to filter out the trauma from his or her life and the toxic results caused by not healing from the experience. The Liver doesn’t negate the experience or try to act like it didn’t happen. They learn to live again, to trust themselves.
For more information about Brittany and her mission, contact her on Facebook.
