Telling Your Partner: What I've Learned About Saying "I'm a Survivor" Out Loud

"Can I just hug you?"

That's what my new boyfriend said the first time I blurted out that I was a survivor of sexual violence. We were on a date, both of us soaked through from a typical DC October rain. I took a breath and said, "I was sexually assaulted in high school. It was more than just that, though. Are you open to hearing more?"

Before I shared more, we hugged. And then I didn't really share a lot. He understood trauma and loss as a young widower, and that hug meant everything to me in that moment. We never talked about it again. It was a deep moment of connection. That was fall 2019 — five years before I would disclose my past publicly.

I didn't say it for decades. Not even to my former husband. Why? I was scared of being judged. Or that it would become all anyone wanted to know about me. Then I published my book, Believe Me.

What I didn't fully understand yet in 2019 is that disclosure gets even more complicated when part of what happened to you involved images — which is its own particular kind of hard, and the reason I wanted to write this.

If 1 in 5 American women experience completed or attempted rape in their lifetime — before you even add image-based abuse into that count — I know I'm not the only one who has had that inner conversation about when, or if, to share your past. To be honest, not every experience of sharing was as kind as the one I just described. Some were terrible.

I've learned a lot, and I want to share it with you.

Telling someone you trust that you're a survivor of image-based sexual abuse is not the same as telling them almost anything else about your past. There's a specific cruelty built into this kind of abuse that makes disclosure harder than it should be: the images themselves get treated, by too many people, as if they're evidence against you instead of evidence of what was done to you. Somewhere in the back of your mind, even with someone you love and trust, there's a voice asking whether they'll see it that way too. Whether they'll ask questions like "but why did you send that," or "why were you even with them," or "didn't you go to the police?"

They should be asking, "Are you okay?" They should be saying, "Thank you for trusting me enough to share."

I've had this conversation more than once, in more than one relationship, and I want to be honest with you: it has not always gone well. And it hurt. It angered me. I might have clapped back or shut down a few times, too. In one case, I disclosed and he asked me for proof to back up what I'd shared. In another, when he tried to force sex on me, he said, "I guess you don't want to because you're a rape victim." I replied, "Do not weaponize my trauma to advance your agenda." But his words stung anyway, long after I walked away.

What I've learned about deciding when — and whether

You don't owe this to anyone on a timeline. Not your third date, not your sixth month, not before you say "I love you" for the first time. You get to decide when you tell someone, if you tell them at all, because it's your story, and it's yours to hold onto for exactly as long as you need to.

A few things I've come to believe — not as rules, but as the closest thing I've found to a compass:

You're not responsible for managing their reaction. You can hope for tenderness. You can prepare for it not to come. But their reaction — whatever it is — is theirs to have, not yours to control or fix in the moment. If they need time to process what you've told them, that's allowed to be true without it meaning you did something wrong by telling them.

Have your own heart centered and grounded before you have the conversation. For me, that's ten deep breaths — box breathing, four seconds in, hold for four, four seconds out, hold for four. Or I look around wherever I am and notice five things I can see, four I can feel, three I can hear. Whatever grounds you, know it before you walk into the room, not after.

Decide in advance what you need to be true about yourself, no matter what they say next. This is the part that took me the longest to learn. Their response can be loving or clumsy or somewhere in between, and either way, what happened to you is still not your fault. That has to be settled in you before the conversation, because you can't out-argue someone else's bad reaction into believing it in the moment — you can only already know it.

If it goes badly, that's information about them, not you. When that man said I didn't want to be intimate with him because I was a rape survivor, it hurt. I'm human. But I've learned that was more about him. He couldn't hold space for depth and empathy. That means he wasn't a match for me. Good to know now rather than ten years later.

If it goes well, let yourself actually feel that. Survivors like us get so practiced at bracing for the worst that sometimes we forget to notice when someone shows up exactly the way we needed them to. That counts, and we should feel it. When the man who asked to hug me looked me in the eyes, I felt that. Relief. Respect. It's how he should have reacted — but it also just felt really good.

You are allowed to need support around this, not just during it

If you're feeling the depth of this, that's very normal. You can reach out to The Digital Identity Foundation, The Sanar Institute, or a trusted advocate or friend. You are not alone. You are not the first person thinking about how to share what you went through with someone you care about.

The last thing I want you to know

You truly are so much more than the bad things that have happened to you. They might inform how you navigate intimacy. They might inform how and when you trust another person. We all deserve love, and it starts with you. Please reach out to us at The Digital Identity Foundation for community and support.

If this is bringing something up for you right now, you don't have to carry it alone. Talk to an Advocate