While you talk, get angry. That’s another culturally incorrect construct in our country: women must not get angry. Anger is the backbone of healing, go ahead and get angry. But please differentiate between physical anger, verbal anger, abusive anger and the one you really want—healing anger. Direct your anger accurately and appropriately at the person who violated you. Often anger gets directed at parents, specially mothers, because they are seen as the greatest of betrayers; you feel that your sexual abuse happened because they were collusive, contributing, weak, passive, withholding or inattentive. Maybe they were, and you need to work that out within you too; it is not only your right that you express and validate those feelings but it is also an essential part of your healing. However, unless your parents were your actual abusers, please do not direct all of your anger towards them. Remember, the abuser holds—always, always holds—the ultimate responsibility for your sexual abuse when you were a child. Thus it is he, or she, who deserves your legitimate anger.

When you think about your abuser and allow yourself to get angry, you will be filled with seething anger; if you observe yourself carefully, you might also find it to be destructive anger. You do not need destructive anger; you have been through enough destruction. Deal constructively with your anger by doing any, or all, of the following to heal:

• talk, talk, speak, talk, speak to a good friend
• try the writing technique described above
• then create an anger ritual with what you wrote, burn it; or tear it into tiny, then tinier bits
• go for a long, brisk walk
• join exercise classes, and visualize yourself punching and kicking the abuser while you do these exercises
• dance, at home, in the disco, at parties; dance an anger dance like a Shiva taandav

Feel free to create your own outlets for your anger; some have even broken old dishes and felt better. Just remember at all times that your expressions of anger need to be positive ones.

If you decide that you must eventually see a professionally-trained counsellor, please choose one who has worked with Child Sexual Abuse cases. Please do not place your trust in those who have not worked with adult or child victims of Child Sexual Abuse. Even if they have been sexually abused in their childhood themselves. And please do not feel the need to talk about it in front of groups, you are not a member of the Alcoholics Anonymous which encourages men to stand up and admit they have been wrong. That technique works very well for alcoholics because they have, indeed, been wrong. You are not. ‘Non-specialized counselling can do a lot more damage,’ points out Anita Ratnam who works with college students all over the country on different aspects of Child Sexual Abuse.

If the abuser is still around, healing is not about settling scores with him or her. Healing is for one’s self. However, there is a very recent case where confronting the abuser has been followed through with family support and it has made all the difference to the victim. Kalindi Muzumdar who has been working with Child Sexual Abuse cases since a while handled this case where there was a ‘confrontation’ between a twenty-five-year-old victim and her seventy-year-old perpetrator.