This week on 51%, we bring you part two of our series on rape and sexual abuse. Last week we visited the Crime Victim Services Unit of a hospital to learn about what’s involved in a forensic rape exam. And a counselor told us what recovery looks like after an abuse. This week we speak to that counselor’s client about her healing journey.

A warning that today’s program contains details and subject matter than may not be appropriate for all listeners. We’re going to be discussing sexual assault for the next half hour.

31-year-old Jennifer McDade grew up in Averill Park, New York. She loves gardening, meditation, and music.

“One of the artists that I really like is India.Arie,” McDade said. “And a lot of her music has inspirational affirmations in it. And that in itself, especially over the last year or so has helped me with my self-confidence and believing in myself just saying, in one of the songs it says, ‘I'm ready for love.’”

These affirmations she has practiced, like, “I’m a worthwhile woman, I’m worthy of love,” McDade says she needs them because of the abuse she has endured her entire life. McDade says her father started sexually molesting her when she was young.

“The youngest I have flashbacks of… I was 2 or 3,” McDade said.

Aside from the graphic flashbacks she endures, McDade says the abuse has left her with a wide range of trust issues to work through.

“I was molested by someone that I should have been able to trust,” McDade said.

McDade says memories of being molested come back to her in bits and pieces, but trauma later in life brought back even more memories.

McDade’s counselor at the Crime Victim Services Unit at St. Peter’s Health Partners, Emilia Alsen, says early childhood trauma and abuse is often repressed, until an event triggers flashbacks and the memories come flooding back.

“So if you think how hard it must be for a child to work on repressing something over and over, not thinking about it, pretending it didn't happen, repress, repress, repress, to the point where now there's like, your brain is taken over psychologically, now it's suppressed, so you don't have to work at it. And now it's just automatically put down, adding drugs and alcohol on top of that, like, keeps it down,” Alsen said. “But it's kind of like a spring, you know, it's like resting on a spring so that when you take the alcohol and the drugs away, it pops off.”

Alsen says people in recovery from alcohol and substances, the majority of her clients, experience this spring-loaded memory flood the most.

“Folks who have been in active addiction for a long time, and they trace it back to when they were experiencing abuse, whether it was in childhood, teenage years, adulthood, but mostly childhood,” Alsen said. These are folks who have coped with their childhood abuse, neglect, and victimization via drinking, partying. And then typically what that does is it gets progressive, because that's the nature of addiction. So then you have this poor, traumatized person that has two very significant issues, a chemical addiction, and then trauma. And because they work in concert, in order to keep the trauma down, you drink more, you use more. But what happens when you drink more, you use more, you make yourself more vulnerable, to being hurt by people that you might not know. So then increase in trauma. And so when you finally arrest the addiction, and you stop, and you try to seek recovery, the first few things that happen while your brain is detoxing and clearing up, is that it comes back -- boom, the spring, the weight on the spring has been removed and pop.”

McDade says when she was raped, the memories hit her like an avalanche.

“It looked like he wanted to kill me.”

“It was actually somebody that I had met while I was out drinking, and I didn't really know them and they had drugs that I wanted. And at first it was consensual. And then it got to a point where I started to feel scared. Like there was a s