The Cornell Case Is Bringing Back My Past
By Stephanie Newman, PhD
When disturbing news awakens a painful response, does it mean your recovery has failed?
Content note: This column discusses sexual assault and trauma.
Dear Psychoanalyst,
The Jane Doe/Cornell story has brought up memories of a sexual assault during my college years. I’ve paused on news and social media sites, but I keep replaying what happened to me that night. Now I’m having nightmares and crying nonstop. I’ve tried to move on with my life (transferring schools, reporting my attacker, and for some years seeing a therapist), but the news cycle has brought my anxiety and anger back, and worse; what was a quiet drumbeat of negative background music has now become a nonstop scream in my head. It’s overwhelming.
I thought I had done enough to get through this but the overwhelmed feeling is taking over my daily existence. I am confused by the intensity of my reaction. What am I supposed to do now that my past attack has been triggered by what is in the news?
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
Words aren’t really going to cut it here—so please know that I mean it when I say I’m sorry this happened to you and concerned to hear that the news has flooded you with disturbing memories, thoughts, and feelings.
You say, “I thought I had done enough,” which makes me worry that you are primed to become locked into a cycle of harmful self-criticism and self-blame. Sexual assaults often leave behind a complicated trail of feelings like shame, anger, fear, and doubt. Questions may linger about safety, responsibility, trust, timelines, and one’s own body. Please try to ease up on the self-doubt and self-blame. There is no set amount of time that it takes to feel better. The road to recovery will likely be arduous, painful, and take ongoing work. Talking to someone will help.
My recommendation, A., is two-fold: talk therapy and a psychiatry consult. I hope you will allow an experienced psychiatrist to evaluate the intrusive thoughts and anger, that “scream of background music,” and the reexperiencing of past trauma, as well as the upset and tearfulness you mention. The doctor will help you figure out how acute your distress is; a medical crisis, if this is one, should be addressed immediately, whether by medication or a combination of medication and talk therapy. Please don’t wait.
Equally important is that you find a therapist to help you sort through everything you’ve endured and continue to deal with, A. Psychotherapy will help you to break the cycles in your thinking and allow you to process the disturbing images and emotions that have been triggered by recent news and social media stories.
Collage by Austin Hughes
Trauma—and let’s be clear, that’s what you are experiencing—is complicated. While it’s a word that gets tossed around loosely these days, sometimes to describe almost any painful event, I am using trauma here in its clinical sense to refer to an experience that overwhelms your capacity to process it and exerts psychological and bodily effects long after the danger has passed. It is very common for such overwhelming feelings to be made worse by new experiences that recall the original traumatic ones, making you relive unsafe feelings from the past while fearing for the future. So, the “intensity of your reaction” actually makes sense in the context of trauma, as challenging as it is to live with.
Trauma is disorienting in part because the past may not feel past. A present event, such as a news story, can reactivate old fears and feelings with startling immediacy. Do what feels right: continue to step away from the news and social media coverage that is intensifying your distress. You don’t need to keep reading to prove that you’ve recovered, or because you think you ought to be able to handle it. I also encourage you to build a support system of trusted confidants and trained mental health professionals.
When you look for therapists, A., I recommend that you seek out a trauma-informed therapy where you can begin to integrate and regulate all of your overwhelming thoughts feelings experiences and memories. Go slow. Wait until you feel safe with the therapist and your memories and fears. You might try EMDR, which is a focused type of psychotherapy that helps patients process distressing experiences that seem to be stuck and not integrated into experience (see What Can EMDR Do for Trauma? below). After addressing the trauma, you can continue to talk to a therapist for support and perhaps engage in longer-term psychological insight-oriented work.
I hope you will follow my advice, A., so you can move past the frozen experience of trauma and the overwhelming feelings and put an end to the disturbing reexperiencing of your past. Medication (if indicated) in tandem with a trauma-informed talk therapy can help—it’s not an either/or.
With support and time, if you continue to process what comes up—perhaps rage at the attacker, anxiety, shame, a feeling that you haven’t done enough—I think things will get better. One thing you should not doubt, A., is that you deserve a release from the past and a future without daily anger, sadness, and fear.
Sidebar: What Can EMDR Do for Trauma?
I asked Angela Giuffra, LCSW, a psychotherapist who is trained in trauma-focused work and certified in EMDR, how trauma presents and how it is experienced in the body. “People come into my office flooded and many worry they are going crazy.” The traumatic experiences are not wrapped in a bow or occurring in an organized linear way. “Clients have intrusive symptoms like upsetting thoughts, feelings, and cognitive confusion. They tend to avoid external reminders of a traumatic event, such as places or people that remind them. They frequently experience a lingering and pervasive sense of a perceived threat—a lack of safety at all times—resulting in a state of hypervigilance, in mood disturbances, in difficulty focusing, and in emotional dysregulation.”
A trauma-informed approach pays particular attention to how disturbing experiences may affect a person’s sense of safety, emotional regulation, relationships, and bodily responses, encouraging reintegration of fragmented disturbing thoughts and emotions. “It’s important to build a container, a safe place for people in therapy to do the trauma processing,” says Giuffra. “Trauma is fragmented experience, which is jarring and upsetting, so people need a safe place to integrate it.”
Connecting mind and body is paramount in trauma-focused work. The goal is to first identify where in the body a patient feels fear or anxiety, say, a racing heart or an experience of nausea or dizziness, and then help them understand these as symptoms that have a relationship to what’s going on now, as well as to the disturbing events of the past.
EMDR is one tool in this work. It uses bilateral stimulation—often visually following a therapist’s fingers or a moving light from side to side, though alternating taps or sounds are also used—while the patient attends to the disturbing target memory until it is tolerated. Once fragmented and traumatic experiences are labelled and held in the body, they become less threatening and overwhelming. This integration of past terrors and trauma, along with associated thoughts and affects, allows patients to tolerate and contain memories and events, as well as associated emotions and thoughts, that were previously destabilizing.
During the process, the therapist periodically asks the patient to scan the body for stress points and rate their level of distress. The goal is to arrive at a state where the traumatic experience has been reduced to a less overwhelming level (e.g., what was a 9 based on self-report goes down to 1 or 0 as treatment progresses). A patient might think “It’s OK, I can trust myself to do the work now,” or “I feel better. I can get past this.”
In Ask a Psychoanalyst, Stephanie Newman, PhD, responds to reader questions about therapy, relationships, and the psychopathology of everyday life. You can submit a question by emailing advice@tapmag.org.
This column is for general educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Reading or submitting a question does not create a therapist–client relationship. Submitting a question implies acceptance of our submission terms.
Published October 2026