A few years ago, Peter Levine was on his way to a friend's 60th birthday party. It was a clear winter's day in southern California. As he stood on the side of the road, he was hit at high speed by a teenaged driver.

He held his breath and waited for help. Somehow, he was wrenched out of the rubble and into an ambulance. The paramedics tried to sedate him.

No, he whispered firmly.

Levine lay on the stretcher and felt his body shake uncontrollably, as if from the inside out. His mind replayed the moments before the accident, again and again, as if it were still happening. He let his legs and arms swing violently until the panic started to fade. Until his muscles finally registered that it was over.

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After a short while, his body became still again.

Levine has been a psychotherapist his entire career and has specialised in trauma studies for 30 years. Because of his own research he knew that if he stayed conscious, he could treat his trauma symptoms immediately.

He knew exactly what to do to discharge all the fight-or-flight energy that had built up in his muscles. He let himself relive it, let his body lurch, again and again, until the panic left him. He did not develop any symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after the accident.

Levine's ground-breaking research about trauma recovery — a life's work encapsulated in a series of books including Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma — has been used in hospitals across the world.

Thanks to him, it is now widely understood that if the first moments, or perhaps hours, after a traumatic event are managed well, if you allow yourself to process the memory of the event in all its horror, it's possible to prevent the majority of long-term symptoms.

By locking away my trauma, I calcified it

When I was 15 years old, I was raped by a stranger who held a knife to my throat in a dusty toilet stall. The man plucked me off the street outside a McDonalds store one Saturday night, took me into the cubicle, locked the door and assaulted me. I thought he was going to kill me.

Some days, I wish he had.

I didn't know then what I know now. I didn't know that you cannot erase trauma. I didn't know you cannot hide forever, that you cannot run from the worst thing that has happened to you. Still, I tried.

I did not whisper a word of my rape for more than 10 years. I didn't tell my parents. I didn't tell my friends. I didn't tell the police.

I felt I could never let anyone find out I was the kind of girl this happened to.

It would be almost a decade before I'd encounter Levine's research and realise what a grave, life-altering opportunity I had missed. What Levine's research shows, and what I now know to be true, is that by locking this trauma away inside me, I calcified it.

When we are confronted with acute danger or violence, the body gives us three options: fight, flight or freeze. If we are overpowered and cannot escape — if fight and flight do not work — we enter a state that trauma specialists call "collapse".

This state of collapse — when the brain dissociates and the body cuts off signals from major nerve endings — is activated at the point of total helplessness. It is usually accompanied by a thought, or a sense, that the fight is over.

Entering the state of collapse is useful in moments of real danger, but after we've lived through it once, the brain can rewire itself to be on high-alert in subsequent moments of helplessness, no matter how benign or life-threatening they are.

We might find ourselves freezing at the passing of a loud car, a door slammed too heavily, a sudden burst of laughter from a nearby table at a restaurant.

When the body keeps the score

Being thrown into a state of collapse in everyday life is what we now refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder.

But here's the thing: the symptoms of PTSD are a result of the fact that when our attempts at escape in a moment of helplessness are thwarted, the energy and adrenaline that builds up in our bodies gets trapped, and can throw us back into fight-or-flight mode at any time.

This can have profoundly damaging effects on the body, especially when allowed to continue for weeks, months or years.

In traumatised people, the body's primary organs — the stomach, the liver, the kidneys, the bowel — may freeze up whenever the autonomic nervous system is triggered by a memory or a flash of fear.

The illness and pain I live with as a result of my sexual assault will probably always be a part of my life and my identity, says Lucia Osborne-Crowley. ( Supplied )

But what Levine and his colleagues discovered is that this utterly exhausting process can be avoided. If we create a safe environment in which to discharge the fight-or-flight energy that can become trapped in our bodies in traumatic moments, many of the symptoms of PTSD never develop.

That was the theory — which he later developed into a treatment called Somatic Experiencing — that Levine was testing when he had his car accident, and it worked.

This discovery is hugely important for sexual assault survivors, because it shows us that the most dangerous, damaging part of trauma is not the event itself, but the way we become its prisoner — its ghost — if we cannot ask for help.

And because we attach so much shame to sexual violence, this particular type of trauma casts the longest shadow. Sexual assault survivors are taught to be ashamed of what has happened to us, and that shame can silence us.

The assault becomes trapped in our throats, our mouths, our bodies, with no chance of being discharged or processed.

Hope for survivors in the age of #MeToo

After I disclosed my assault, I started a treatment with my therapist called Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing.

It's a technique developed by Francine Shapiro in the 1990s which involves the therapist directing the patient to focus all of their attention on a visual pattern — usually the therapist moving a finger from side to side — while recalling distressing or traumatic memories.

The idea is that the repetitive process can blunt the intensity of a distressing thought or image, and slowly the patient can recall the whole memory, previously too painful to properly process, from start to finish.

Once the memory has been reprocessed, it can be stored away as something in the patient's past — something that does not have to be lived through each time a fragment of it leaks out — allowing them, hopefully, to move on.

It's not perfect. Nothing will allow me to live the life I would have if I had received treatment immediately after the rape; if I, like Levine in the moments after his car crash, had been able to process the trauma in real time so it didn't stay alive in my body, coursing through me each day like breath.

Though EMDR has worked wonders for me, sometimes I think it's too late to ever fully heal — it's been too long since that night outside McDonalds, and I'm still struggling with the symptoms of Crohn's disease and endometriosis, both of which cause chronic abdominal pain, fatigue, often-debilitating brain fog and all sorts of aches and pains.

This pain is still, and probably always will be, a part of my life and my identity.

But the idea that other women and girls can seek help while recovery is easier gives me hope, particularly in this era of #MeToo, when we're more prepared, more empowered, to speak openly about sexual assault.

We may not ever be able to stop sexual violence completely, but we have a real chance at creating a world where victims have the knowledge — and can feel safe enough — to do what I wish I had done all those years ago.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a journalist and writer. Her first book, I Choose Elena, is published by Allen & Unwin. She tweets at @LuciaOC_.