"Was It My Fault?" What a CPT Therapist Wants You to Know About Self Blame After Sexual Assault

If you typed something into a search bar tonight like "was the sexual assault my fault" or "how do I live with myself if it was my fault," I want you to know something right away.

You are not the only person asking that question tonight.

I'm a therapist in Missouri and I regularly use Cognitive Processing Therapy, which is one of the most researched treatments for PTSD. I have sat with client, after client, after client in the past 15 years who has asked themselves the same questions you are asking yourself now. I can tell you honestly that most of the clients I've treated with CPT have had some version of this thought. Not a small percentage. Most of them.

"I should have known better." "I shouldn't have gone." "I froze instead of doing something." "I kept going back." "I drank too much, so I'm partly responsible."

If any of those sound like the sentences running in your head at 2am, you're in extremely normal company. That doesn't make the thought true. But it does mean there's nothing broken or shameful about you for having it.

Why hasn't it helped when people tell you it wasn't your fault?

Somebody has probably already said it. A friend, a partner, a nurse, a detective, your mom. Maybe they said it kindly and meant every word.

And it bounced right off.

That's not because you're stubborn or because you aren't trying hard enough. Being told something and believing something are two different processes. Your brain has already run the argument. It has evidence. It has a timeline. It has that one decision you keep circling back to at night.

So I'm not going to spend this post telling you it wasn't your fault. That's not how this works, and I think you already know that. Instead, I want to show you what's happening underneath the thought. Then I'll give you some of the same questions I'd ask if you were sitting across from me.

"It was my fault" almost never shows up as one thought

Early in CPT, I sit down with a client and we make a list of their stuck points. These are the beliefs that got wedged in place after the trauma and haven't moved since.

Almost every time, "it was my fault" shows up several times on that list. Not once. Several times, wearing different clothes.

Here are some of the versions I hear:

• "I shouldn't have gone to his apartment."

• "I shouldn't have been drinking."

• "I should have left when I got that feeling."

• "I should have fought harder."

• "I froze instead of saying no."

• "I didn't scream."

• "I went out with him again afterward, so maybe it wasn't really assault."

• "I stayed in that relationship for two more years."

• "I flirted with him earlier that night."

• "I shouldn't have trusted him."

• "I should have told someone right away."

• "I let it happen more than once."

• "My body responded, so part of me must have wanted it."

They feel like one belief because they all land in the same place. But they aren't one belief. They're a dozen separate conclusions, each one built on a different moment, each one holding up a piece of the weight.

This matters practically. In therapy we usually can't take one swing at "it was my fault" and be done. We work through several of them. That's normal, and it's part of why this work takes a little time.

Hindsight bias is doing a lot of the work here

Here's the thing about looking back at that day. You're looking at it with information you did not have at the time.

You know how it ended. You know what that person turned out to be capable of. You know which comment was a warning and which one was nothing. From where you're standing now, the signs look lit up and impossible to miss. It feels like the version of you who walked into that room should have seen them too.

But that version of you didn't have this map. You had partial information, in real time, while also thinking about work and your friend's mood and whether your phone was charged.

I sometimes use a driving example with clients. Picture someone going 76 in a 70 on a long stretch of highway. Technically over the limit. Technically a choice they made. If they get in a wreck that day because another driver blew a stop sign, we don't say the wreck happened because they were speeding. People drive a little over the limit every single day and get home fine. That's exactly why nobody looks at a car doing 76 and thinks that person is asking for a collision.

And honestly, that comparison still gives too much ground. Speeding is actually against the law. Going to a party is not. Having a drink is not. Trusting someone who had been kind to you is not. Wearing what you wore, texting back, going on a second date, staying in a marriage, being alone with someone you'd known for years.

None of that is a violation of anything.

But what if I really did make a bad decision?

Sometimes, my clients HAVE made bad decisions. Decisions they usually wouldn’t have made. Or that they used to regularly make but now blame for the trauma. Sometimes a client tells me they drank far more than they meant to. Sometimes they left with a stranger. Sometimes a friend had already warned them about that person and they went anyway. Sometimes they went back four times.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you those things didn't happen, or that they were all wise choices. You know your own story. If you made a decision you'd make differently now, you get to know that about yourself.

Here's what I want you to sit with anyway.

Taking a risk is not the same as causing a harm. Plenty of people drink too much and wake up hungover and embarrassed. Plenty of people go home with someone they just met and have a perfectly ordinary night. The thing that made your night different wasn't your decision. It was another person's.

You are allowed to change your mind. At any point. After you got in the car. After you walked in the door. After you started kissing him. After you'd already said yes to something else. Consenting to one thing is not consenting to everything that follows, and a yes you gave an hour ago is not a yes you're locked into. If you stopped wanting it and it kept happening, that is assault. It doesn't matter what came before.

Being impaired doesn't transfer responsibility to you. If anything, it's the opposite. Someone who noticed you were drunk and used that is someone who made a deliberate choice.

Doing something risky doesn't mean you deserved the outcome. We don't apply that standard anywhere else in life. We don't tell the person whose house was robbed that they deserved it for leaving a window open.

So you can hold both. "I wish I'd made a different call that night" and "what he did was his decision" can live in the same sentence. Regret is not the same thing as responsibility.

What else is feeding your self blame

Hindsight is usually the biggest piece. It's rarely the only one. See if any of these are familiar.

Outcome bias. Because the ending was horrific, your brain assumes the decision that came before it must have been reckless. But a decision isn't reckless because of how it turned out. It's reckless or not based on what was knowable when you made it.

Helplessness is harder to sit with than guilt. "I failed to stop it" can feel more bearable than "I could not stop it." Guilt at least implies you had power. This one is worth reading twice.

Wanting the world to be predictable again. If it happened because you missed a sign, then you can watch for signs and it won't happen again. If it happened because someone chose to hurt you, then the world is a lot less controllable than you'd like. Self blame is sometimes the price people pay for a feeling of safety.

Beliefs you already had. If you grew up believing you were responsible for keeping everyone comfortable, or that good decisions protect you from bad outcomes, the assault gets absorbed into a framework you were already using.

What other people said. "Why did you stay?" "Why didn't you fight?" "You knew what he was like." Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's a church. Sometimes it's the person who hurt you, saying it over and over until it started sounding like your own voice. If you didn't report, or didn't report right away, you may have gotten a version of this from people who had no idea what they were asking. There are a lot of real reasons survivors wait, and none of them are evidence against you.

Misreading your survival response. Freezing, going along with it, appeasing, going quiet, floating outside your own body. Those aren't choices you made. Your nervous system picked them without consulting you, and it picked them to keep you alive. Later the mind reinterprets them as consent or as weakness. They're neither.

Guilt treated as proof. "I feel guilty, so I must be guilty." Feelings are real information about your emotional state. They aren't evidence about who was responsible. Shame and guilt after trauma are their own tangle, and they deserve their own attention. But the feeling of guilt and honeest responsibility? They are two very different things.

The questions I'd actually ask you as a trauma therapist

In CPT I don't argue with a stuck point. I ask questions and let the person do their own thinking. The only version of this you'll ever believe is the one you build yourself.

Here are some of them. Take a few at a time. You don't have to answer all of them tonight.

• What specifically do you believe you did that makes you responsible for what happened?

• What information did you actually have at the time? What do you have now that you didn't have then?

• How obvious were those warning signs before you knew how the story ended?

• What choices were realistically available in that moment? What made the other options difficult, dangerous, or impossible?

• If you had to put a number on it, how much control did you realistically have, 0 to 100? Who had the rest?

• Have you made similar choices before, gone to that place, trusted that person, had that drink, and nothing bad happened? How were you supposed to know this time was different?

• Did you intend for this to happen? Did you know with reasonable certainty that it would?

• Was your reaction something you consciously chose, or was some of it automatic?

• What would "doing enough" have looked like? How would you have known you'd done enough? Is that a standard an actual human being could meet under that much stress?

Even in a therapy session, I don’t ask you all of these. We start with one or two that I carefully select based on what you’ve told me so far. We go through your answer slowly. You sit on it. We built on that.

A coupel of things to think about

If someone you love told you this exact story, would you say it was their fault? Most people answer no immediately. Then I ask the follow up. And would you mean it? Usually they say yes, they'd absolutely mean it. Which raises the obvious question. Why does a different standard apply to you?

There's one more, and it's often the last wall standing. What are you afraid it would mean if this wasn't your fault?

For a lot of people the honest answer is something like, "then I couldn't have stopped it, and I can't guarantee it won't happen again." That's a real fear and it deserves real work. But notice what it tells you. Your self blame isn't a conclusion you reached from evidence. It's protection. It's been doing a job for you.

If this has turned into something heavier

Sometimes "it was my fault" grows into "I don't deserve to be here."

If you're anywhere near that, please don't sit alone with it tonight. You can call or text 988 any time to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to your nearest emergency room. RAINN's hotline at 800.656.HOPE will also connect you with support near you.

That isn't me handing you off. It's me saying this is heavy enough that you shouldn't have to hold it by yourself until your first appointment.

What working on this in therapy actually looks like

Cognitive Processing Therapy is a structured trauma treatment. We go after the conclusions the trauma left behind, and we do it with worksheets, questions, and practice between sessions. Self blame is usually one of the first things we take on, because so much else is sitting on top of it. If you want the mechanics, we have a full guide to how CPT works.

Two honest things about it.

First, it works best when you come regularly. This isn't therapy you drop into once a month. You're stopping the avoidance you've been running on, and the material between sessions is where a lot of the change happens. If you can only make it every few weeks right now, tell your therapist. It's better to plan around that than to start and stall.

Second, some people feel worse around session three or four before they feel better. That surprises people, so I want you to hear it in advance. You've spent a long time not looking directly at this. When you finally do, it gets loud. That's not a sign the treatment is failing. It's usually a sign you're actually in it. Your therapist should be talking with you about this and checking in as you go.

Our goal as your trauma therapist to work ourselves out of a job. By the end, you should be able to run these questions on your own thoughts without me in the room.

Some people do this weekly. Some do it as a trauma therapy intensive, meeting twice a day over the course of a week. Both work.

Does CPT actually work?

Yes, and the research is unusually strong for a talk therapy.

The VA's National Center for PTSD lists CPT as one of the three most effective trauma-focused psychotherapies for PTSD, alongside Prolonged Exposure and EMDR. In a systematic review of randomized trials, people who received individual CPT improved by roughly 13 more points on a standard PTSD symptom measure than people who stayed on a waitlist or received usual care. Those gains held up at follow up.

Research describes averages, not promises. Some people improve a lot, some improve some, and results depend on a lot of things no study can account for. But this is not an experimental treatment. It has been tested for decades, across civilians, veterans, and survivors of sexual violence specifically.

Here's the part I find most useful for a thought like "it was my fault." Research on CPT suggests that when trauma-related beliefs shift, symptoms tend to shift with them. Spending session after session on this one stuck point isn't a philosophical detour. It appears to be a lot of where the change comes from.

Start Trauma Therapy in Columbia, Lee's Summit, or Online in Missouri

You don't need to have this figured out before you start. That's the work, not the prerequisite.

More than half of our trauma therapists at Aspire Counseling are trained in Cognitive Processing Therapy, and we have an active CPT consultation group where we keep sharpening how we deliver it. We see clients in person in Columbia and Lee's Summit, and online anywhere in Missouri, which means you can work with one of our CPT therapists from Kansas City, Springfield, or a small town with no trauma specialist for an hour in any direction.

If you'd like to talk it through first, we offer a free 30 minute consultation with the therapist we think fits you best. Reach out online, or call our Columbia office at 573-328-2288 or our Lee's Summit office at 816-287-1116. Both numbers reach the same person.

Not sure what the first appointment is like? Here's what to expect when you start trauma therapy after sexual assault. You can also read more about our counseling for survivors of sexual assault.

You've been carrying something that was never yours to carry. Whenever you're ready for effective care and lasting change, we're here.

About the author

Jessica Oliver, MSW, LCSW (previously Jessica Tappana) is the founder and clinical director of Aspire Counseling, with offices in Columbia and Lee's Summit and telehealth throughout Missouri. She has been practicing for more than 15 years and specializes in trauma.

Jessica first heard Dr. Patricia Resick, the developer of Cognitive Processing Therapy, speak in St. Louis in 2017. She has since seen Dr. Resick present in person twice more, completed a multi-day CPT training online, and read her books and much of the published literature on the treatment. She delivers CPT both weekly and as one-week trauma intensives, and she actively participates in Aspire Counseling's CPT consultation group.