After we receive your referral, from either yourself, the NHS, or another service, you will receive a one-to-one assessment with a therapist, usually over the phone. They will ask you:

• Some basic questions such as, who is your GP?
• If you are you in a legal process?
• If you are experiencing any current issues
• About your mental health background
• Without going into detail, can you tell us why you’re coming to Survive?
• What are your current coping mechanisms?
• Where is your current level of emotional distress?
• Do you have any support, professional or otherwise?
• What do you hope to gain from these sessions?

Are you ready for counselling? 

Please be aware that there is up to a one month wait for an initial assessment, after which there could be a wait of up to 12 months for counselling to start. This wait could be shorter the more flexible that you can be about your availability for Counselling appointments. Following your initial assessment consideration will be given to the possibility of you being able to access support work in preparation for your counselling.

Our Support Service offers emotional support ongoing through your journey with Survive.

Your Support Worker will:

• Talk to you about what Support Work at Survive can offer you and will agree what the focus of your appointments should be
• Focus on the ‘here and now’, rather than the past and try to keep conversations focused this way
• Provide a safe place for you to talk about how you are coping and feeling
• Listen to you and support you emotionally
• Help you understand your options for reporting, not reporting, or reporting anonymously
• Help you make sense of your experience by helping you understand the brain and body’s response to sexualised trauma and the consequences of sexualised trauma
• Explore strategies to help you cope with what you are experiencing
• Signpost you to local or national agencies and help you find other resources
• Discuss myths and facts around sexual violence
• Discuss safety and crisis planning
• Consider what you want to achieve from Support Work and/or counselling
• Provide reading suggestions for self-help resources.

Your Support Worker cannot offer trauma or memory work and will never ask for details or require you to share your story. They cannot provide regular, unscheduled contact outside of meeting times.

Our helpline is open Monday – Thursday (excluding public holidays) from 10am to 12pm on freephone 0808 145 1887, if you need additional support.

Survive’s counsellors are trained to understand the complexities of sexual trauma. They have experience working with depression, anxiety, complex trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociative conditions. They understand how difficult it can be to tell your story, perhaps for the first time.

Counselling sessions will:

• Work on emotional stabilisation and containment.
• Provide psycho-education – learning about how trauma affects us.
• Focus on the consequences and complexities of sexual trauma.
• Help you develop skills around coping.

However, your counsellor will work with you to tailor your sessions to meet your specific needs.

We offer a block of counselling sessions – face-to-face or online – based on individual needs. These sessions take place at the same time, on the same day, every week, usually without interruption.

Some clients wish to leave the journey here as they now feel they can cope with their trauma. As they feel more equipped to manage the consequences of their trauma experiences.

Sexual violence and abuse can cause PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). If a client is traumatized, they may wish to continue to Trauma Therapy. In this instance, ‘traumatized’ means that their present is taken over by flashbacks and they face regular consequences of the traumatic event.

Trauma therapy may include:

• Working through a timeline of events
• Working on specific traumatic memories
• Learning how and why the abuse has impacted your life and relationships
• Inner child work
• Challenging your beliefs surrounding yourself, since the traumatic event occurred

Your counsellor will work with you in a safe and controlled environment. You will only be offered trauma therapy if you are assessed as stable enough to benefit from it. Your counsellor will work with you to tailor the sessions to help you reach your personal goals.

Trauma Therapy can be undertaken without giving descriptions of the actual traumatic event. A client may choose to focus the work on the consequences of the traumatic event. For example, understanding how the experience has shaped them as a person.

We hope Trauma Therapy leads to:

• Minimised trauma symptoms, such as flashbacks and nightmares
• Emotional development
• Moving on – Survive recognises how sexual trauma can sometimes ‘freeze’ people in that moment. While it’s important to acknowledge the event, we do not need to be ‘there’ anymore.
• Letting go and making peace – not meaning that we forget, but we can now ‘file away’ the traumatic memories and prevent them from impacting our everyday life.

We offer a block of Trauma Therapy sessions – face-to-face or online – based on individual needs. These sessions take place at the same time, on the same day, every week, usually without interruption.

It is usual for Trauma Therapy to cause some destabilisation – in which case your counsellor will refocus on stabilisation techniques before resuming.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a tool Survive may use in Trauma Therapy. EMDR can help survivors work on their memories in a safe and controlled environment and address the root cause of their trauma.

The EMDR counsellor will tailor the sessions with the survivor, to help them reach their specific goals.
If you are going through the EMDR programme you may find that not every session will use EMDR.  It is usual for EMDR to cause some destabilisation – in which case your counsellor will refocus on stabilisation techniques before resuming EMDR.

At the end of sessions, your counsellor will use the final session to review the work/learning carried out.

A scale (Impact of Event or Core 10) will be completed and discussed.

Next steps are discussed with the client – which may include: an ending of support; return at a later date, if there is still work to do; internal or external referrals.

You will be asked to complete a questionnaire, and you may wish to submit your story to help others.

Counsellors at Survive are either on the accredited voluntary register of BACP (or an equivalent body) and are suitably qualified, or appropriately supervised trainees on placement. Our counsellors work to the BACP Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions.

Anything you tell Survive is kept entirely confidential within Survive. Your counsellor/support worker will only breach this confidentiality if they think you, or someone else, is at risk of serious harm.

If you move house and no longer live in York, North Yorkshire, or the East Riding of Yorkshire, we will no longer be able to support you. We can signpost you to similar services nearer to your new address.

Survive wants to prevent sexual harm and works towards a society where there is no more sexual violence. This includes facilitating support for anyone who has experienced sexual violence and perpetrated sexual offences. While Survive is not equipped to respond to the needs of this discrete group, it has received limited funding from the York and North Yorkshire Office of Policing, Fire, Crime and Commissioning to facilitate access to a specialist StopSo registered therapist. Click here for more information about this pilot programme.

Please visit our FAQs page for further information on what to expect.