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“I recently worked with a survivor of sexual violence who was early in her healing
process. She was by turns angry and despairing and frozen—and she was afraid all the
time. Though she had been practicing meditation for a long time, the intensity of her
emotions felt too big for her to allow them to move through her; they bottlenecked
inside her. She felt panicked and stuck in the pain. She wanted to know what to do
with all the feelings, how to fix them. She wanted to know how to stop hurting and
how soon the pain would end.

“All I can tell you,� I said, “is that everything you’re experiencing, all the
contradictory feelings and all the pain, is a normal part of the healing process.
Everyone goes through it differently, and there’s no way to know how long it will
last. It sucks for a while, and then gradually it gets better. But I can tell you this for
sure: Every single survivor I’ve ever known has found their way through it.�

We sat in silence while she absorbed the idea of not knowing when the pain would
end and having to simply trust her body and her heart to heal in their own time. At
last she said, “It’s like . . . I’m sitting with a stunned bird in the palm of my hand. If I
get tense and try to hurry it, it will just stay frozen. But if I’m still and patient long
enough, the bird will wake up and fly away.�

Yes. That.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life