What If I Was Drinking or Using Drugs When I Was Sexually Assaulted?
Maybe this is the part you keep getting stuck on:
But I was drinking.
Or:
I took the drug willingly.
I was partying.
I was flirting.
I went home with them.
I remember wanting some of what happened.
I don't remember the rest.
And somewhere along the way, those facts became an argument against yourself:
Maybe this was my fault.
For survivors whose experiences involved alcohol or drugs, self-blame can become extraordinarily complicated.
The substance use can feel like the thing that explains everything.
But choosing to drink or use a drug and choosing what another person does sexually are not the same decision.
“But I chose to drink.”
You may have.
That fact does not disappear because something harmful happened afterward.
You can say:
I chose to drink.
And also:
I did not choose everything that happened after I drank.
Those statements can both be true.
RAINN distinguishes drug-facilitated sexual assault involving substances given without someone's knowledge from assaults in which another person takes advantage of someone who voluntarily used alcohol or drugs. Alcohol is the substance most commonly involved in drug-facilitated sexual assault.
Voluntary intoxication can create enormous self-blame
This is one reason these experiences can be so difficult to process.
If someone secretly put something in your drink, you may be more easily able to identify:
Someone did something to me.
But if you poured the drink yourself, accepted it willingly, or decided to use a substance, the mind may say:
Then I created the situation.
That conclusion gives you far more responsibility than the original choice actually contained.
You made a decision to consume something.
You did not thereby make every subsequent sexual decision in advance.
Risk and responsibility are different concepts
Alcohol and drugs can increase vulnerability.
They may affect:
judgment,
coordination,
awareness,
memory,
communication,
and the ability to respond to a situation.
That is clinically and practically important.
But increased vulnerability is not the same as responsibility for another person's conduct.
RAINN puts the distinction succinctly: intoxication can increase risk, but it does not transfer responsibility for an assault to the person who was intoxicated.
“But I put myself in that situation.”
This is one of the most common forms of hindsight self-blame.
Maybe you think:
I shouldn't have gone to the party.
I shouldn't have taken that drink.
I shouldn't have gone upstairs.
I shouldn't have gone home with them.
You can always rewrite the past around the outcome.
If you had stayed home, perhaps the event would not have occurred.
But that does not mean staying home was your responsibility in order to prevent someone else from violating a boundary.
The important distinction is between:
a decision that created an opportunity for something to happen
and
responsibility for the person who chose what happened next.
Those are not interchangeable.
Consent is not granted by drinking
Being willing to drink with someone does not mean being willing to have sex with them.
Going to a party does not mean consenting to sex.
Going to someone's room does not mean consenting to sex.
Having sexual contact earlier does not determine what you want later.
And consenting to one sexual act does not automatically mean consenting to another.
That can sound obvious when stated abstractly.
It can be much harder to apply to yourself.
“But I was flirting.”
Flirting communicates interest.
It does not create an unlimited agreement about what happens next.
You may have wanted:
attention,
kissing,
sexual contact,
or even sex at one point
and later wanted something to stop or change.
Sexual interactions involve ongoing decisions.
Earlier interest does not erase later boundaries.
“But I went home with them.”
Again:
that tells us where you went.
It does not tell us everything you agreed to once you arrived.
One of the reasons survivors blame themselves is that they work backward from the outcome.
If I went home with them, I must have implicitly agreed.
But going somewhere with another person can mean exactly that:
you agreed to go somewhere with them.
The rest still matters.
“But we'd already had sex before.”
Previous sexual contact does not permanently establish consent.
You can want sex with the same person:
one night
and not another.
You can want one activity and not another.
You can begin willingly and later want to stop.
Relationships, dating, marriage, and previous sexual history do not eliminate the need for ongoing consent.
Alcohol complicates communication—but it does not solve the question automatically
This is an area where oversimplification is not helpful.
Alcohol can affect both:
the communication of sexual interest
and
the perception of another person's behavior.
A 2024 review of research on alcohol, sexual consent, and memory emphasized that intoxication has important cognitive, behavioral, and memory effects that can complicate how sexual encounters are later reconstructed and evaluated.
That does not mean every sexual experience involving intoxication is assault.
And it does not mean every confusing encounter has a simple answer.
It means context matters.
Legal capacity and your emotional experience are also not identical questions
People often ask:
Was I legally too intoxicated to consent?
That may be an important question.
But it is a legal question whose answer can depend on:
jurisdiction,
degree of impairment,
specific circumstances,
and applicable law.
Therapy should not pretend to make that determination.
A different therapeutic question is:
What did I actually want, what was I able to choose, and how has the experience affected me?
You can explore that without turning therapy into a courtroom.
What if I was drunk but not unconscious?
This is one of the areas survivors can find especially confusing.
They may think:
I could walk.
I could talk.
I remember pieces.
Therefore I must have been capable of making every decision normally.
Human impairment is not an on/off switch.
Alcohol can affect different abilities to different degrees, and impairment can change over the course of an evening.
The existence of some memory or functioning does not, by itself, answer every question about the encounter.
What if I remember agreeing at first?
Then that may be part of the factual story.
Therapy does not need to rewrite it.
You may have wanted something initially.
The relevant question may be:
What happened afterward?
Did you want it to continue?
Did the activity change?
Were you able to communicate?
Did you become more impaired?
Did the other person respond to your behavior or condition?
Real sexual experiences can contain both consensual and nonconsensual elements.
Recognizing one does not erase the other.
What if I don't know whether I said no?
You may never know.
That uncertainty can be extremely difficult.
Especially if you believe:
If I cannot prove that I said no, I am not allowed to be upset.
Therapy does not have to manufacture an answer.
You can remain uncertain about a detail and still work with:
what you remember,
what happened to your body,
how you felt afterward,
and what is affecting you now.
Memory gaps after alcohol are real
Alcohol can interfere with the formation of new memories.
Someone may remain:
awake,
talking,
walking,
or interacting
while later having partial or complete gaps in recall.
This is one reason alcohol-related sexual experiences can be particularly difficult to reconstruct after the fact.
A person may remember:
before,
pieces during,
and after
without having a continuous memory of the event.
Research examining sexual assault, intoxication, and memory emphasizes exactly these complexities.
A blackout does not mean you were unconscious
This is an important distinction.
An alcohol-related blackout is a memory phenomenon.
Someone can appear awake and interact while failing to form memories that will later be retrievable.
That differs from losing consciousness.
For survivors, this can be especially disturbing because other people may remember behavior that the survivor cannot remember at all.
“Someone told me what I did.”
That can create a strange loss of ownership over your own story.
You may know parts of the night only because:
a friend told you,
someone sent you a message,
a photograph exists,
or the other person described what happened.
Now you have two kinds of information:
what you actually remember
and
what other people say happened.
Those should remain distinguishable.
Therapy should not fill in the blank spaces
This is especially important with ART, EMDR, hypnosis-adjacent misconceptions, or any imagery-based therapy.
If you do not remember something, a therapist should not use therapy to determine:
what “must” have happened.
A body sensation is not proof.
An image that comes to mind is not necessarily historical memory.
A dream is not evidence.
Therapy can help with uncertainty without inventing certainty.
You do not need a complete timeline in order to heal
This can be difficult to accept because the mind often wants the entire story.
Maybe if you knew every minute, you could finally answer:
Was I assaulted?
Why did I do that?
What did they do?
Could I have stopped it?
But complete reconstruction may never be possible.
Healing may need to occur even while some information remains unknown.
What if I voluntarily used drugs?
The same self-blame can appear.
You may think:
I chose to take something.
Therefore whatever happened afterward is on me.
Again, these are separate decisions.
RAINN recognizes drug-facilitated sexual assault as including situations in which a perpetrator exploits someone who voluntarily consumed alcohol or drugs—not only situations involving secretly administered substances.
The fact that you voluntarily altered your state does not grant someone else unlimited access to your body.
What if I think someone put something in my drink?
If the event was recent, medical evaluation can matter because some substances leave the body relatively quickly.
RAINN notes that suspected drug-facilitated assault may warrant prompt medical attention and toxicology testing, although detection windows vary by substance.
If the event occurred months or years ago, therapy cannot retrospectively determine whether a substance was present.
That uncertainty may itself become something you need help carrying.
What if I can't remember whether I wanted it?
That may be one of the hardest questions.
You may have fragments:
I remember kissing them.
I remember feeling strange.
I remember wanting to leave.
I remember nothing after that.
You do not have to convert incomplete information into a definitive story simply to begin therapy.
You can say:
There are things I don't know. What I do know is that this experience continues to bother me.
That is clinically meaningful.
Why survivors often blame themselves instead of the other person
Self-blame can create a strange sense of control.
If the answer is:
I drank too much,
then the future solution seems simple:
Never drink that much again.
If the answer is:
I trusted the wrong person,
the solution becomes:
Never trust anyone again.
Those conclusions can feel safer than accepting that another person made choices you could not fully control.
But safety rules formed after trauma can become extremely restrictive.
You can learn from what happened without taking responsibility for it
This distinction matters.
You may decide:
I do not want to become that intoxicated again.
I want friends to know where I am.
I want to be more direct about sexual boundaries.
Those choices may help you feel safer.
You can make them without saying:
Therefore the assault was my fault.
Learning from an experience and assigning responsibility are separate processes.
What if other people blamed me because I was drinking?
That can become a second trauma.
You disclose what happened.
Someone asks:
How much did you drink?
Why were you there?
Why did you go with them?
Instead of receiving support, you receive an interrogation.
That response may become as emotionally charged as the original experience.
Sometimes that is the memory that needs processing.
Public conversations about intoxication can reopen that wound
This is particularly relevant when a high-profile sexual assault case dominates the news.
People begin debating:
how much someone drank,
what substances were involved,
what they remember,
whether their behavior “looked” impaired,
and what they should have done.
For survivors whose own experiences involved intoxication, those discussions can feel less like abstract debate and more like hearing their own self-blaming thoughts broadcast publicly.
“Would people believe me?”
Sometimes this is the question underneath everything.
If I admit I was drinking, will they think I caused it?
If I do not remember everything, will they think I am lying?
If I was flirting earlier, will they think I changed the story?
Those fears may have prevented disclosure for years.
Therapy can provide a place to work through the experience without requiring you to persuade an audience.
Sexual assault treatment is not a credibility test
You are not entering therapy to prove a case.
A therapist can help with:
fear,
shame,
memories,
body responses,
intimacy,
self-blame,
and confusion
without acting as:
judge,
jury,
detective,
or forensic memory expert.
That distinction can make treatment feel much safer.
Can ART help when alcohol or drugs were involved?
Potentially.
ART does not require a perfectly complete chronological memory.
There may still be very clear targets.
For example:
the last thing you remember,
waking up,
realizing something happened,
seeing the person later,
receiving a message,
a medical examination,
telling a friend,
or being blamed afterward.
Any one of those might carry substantial emotional charge.
The target can be what you know—not what you don't know
This is how I would approach an incomplete memory.
We do not need to process:
“What happened during the part I cannot remember?”
We can work with:
“This is the moment I do remember, and this is what happens inside me when I think about it.”
That keeps the work grounded.
ART may help with a distressing image
Perhaps one image remains vivid:
the room,
the person's face,
a doorway,
a bathroom mirror,
the morning afterward.
ART combines visually guided eye movements with memory processing and structured imagery work.
The factual memory does not need to disappear.
The goal is reducing the emotional intensity attached to it.
ART may also help with shame
Sometimes the most distressing image is actually an image of yourself.
You see yourself:
drunk,
out of control,
vulnerable,
or behaving in a way that embarrasses you.
The shame becomes:
Look at what kind of person I was.
That may be an important treatment target even when you cannot reconstruct every detail of what occurred.
CPT can be particularly valuable for intoxication-related self-blame
Cognitive Processing Therapy is very useful for examining conclusions such as:
“I caused it because I was drinking.”
“I should have known better.”
“I was irresponsible.”
“I cannot trust myself.”
These beliefs can be examined carefully rather than countered with generic reassurance.
The relevant questions include:
What were you actually responsible for?
What information did you have at the time?
What choices belonged to you?
And what choices belonged to somebody else?
EMDR may be useful when the experience connects to other memories
Perhaps the current sexual experience connects with:
earlier boundary violations,
another assault,
medical trauma,
or earlier experiences of not being believed.
EMDR may be useful when multiple experiences form a larger associative network.
IFS can help with conflicting parts
One part may say:
I know it was not my fault.
Another says:
You should never have been that drunk.
Another wants to know exactly what happened.
Another never wants to think about it again.
Another wants to tell everyone.
Another feels ashamed.
Those responses can coexist.
IFS can help understand what each part is trying to protect without forcing immediate agreement.
What if I still don't know whether I would call it assault?
You do not have to decide today.
Maybe you ultimately do.
Maybe the experience remains more ambiguous in your mind.
Therapy can still help you with:
what you remember,
how you feel about it,
the boundaries you believe were crossed,
and what continues to affect you.
Treatment should not depend on winning a terminology debate.
What if I want legal information?
Then legal or advocacy resources are more appropriate for answering legal questions.
Consent laws involving intoxication differ across jurisdictions, and some states make distinctions involving voluntary versus involuntary intoxication. RAINN notes that these differences can materially affect how cases are treated legally.
A sexual-assault advocate or attorney familiar with the relevant jurisdiction can explain options more accurately than psychotherapy can.
What if I never want to report?
You can still seek therapy.
You do not need to:
report,
confront the person,
contact a university,
tell your family,
or pursue a legal case
to work on the effect the experience had on you.
Those decisions belong to you.
What would healing look like?
Maybe you still wish you had made different choices that night.
But you stop turning those choices into responsibility for everything another person did.
Maybe you never recover every missing memory.
But the uncertainty stops dominating you.
Maybe you can remember being intoxicated without feeling:
disgust,
shame,
or self-hatred.
Maybe you can say:
I can take responsibility for my choices without taking responsibility for someone else's.
That is a significant difference.
Working with Laura Geftman, LCSW
I have worked with trauma-related concerns for more than twenty years and use Accelerated Resolution Therapy, EMDR, IFS, Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, CBT, psychodynamic, interpersonal, attachment, and schema therapies depending on the person and clinical question.
When alcohol or drugs were involved in a sexual experience, I am especially careful about separating:
what the person remembers,
what they know,
what they were told,
what they imagine,
and what remains genuinely uncertain.
Trauma therapy does not require us to fill in the missing pieces.
We can work with what is actually available:
one memory,
one body reaction,
one area of shame,
one self-blaming belief,
or the aftermath that remains emotionally present.
I offer focused trauma therapy and therapy intensives for adults in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Florida.
In-person therapy intensives are available in Ardmore, PA, on the Main Line near Philadelphia.
Virtual therapy may also be available when clinically appropriate.
If You Are Still Blaming Yourself Because You Were Drinking or Using Drugs
You are allowed to look carefully at the choices you made.
You are allowed to wish some of them had been different.
And you are also allowed to distinguish those choices from the choices somebody else made.
If that distinction makes sense intellectually but still does not feel true, focused trauma therapy may help.
Immediate and Confidential Sexual-Assault Support
If you would rather speak confidentially with a sexual-assault support specialist, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7.
Call 800-656-HOPE (4673), text HOPE to 64673, or use RAINN's confidential online chat.
Suggested Reading
If alcohol, memory, consent, or self-blame are complicating how you understand a sexual experience, these related articles may be helpful:
I Never Called What Happened to Me Sexual Assault. Why Am I Questioning It Now?
The Cornell Sexual Assault Allegations Are Bringing Up My Own Trauma. What Do I Do?
Can Trauma Therapy Help With a Memory I Can’t Stop Replaying?
FAQ
Is it my fault if I was drinking when I was sexually assaulted?
Choosing to drink does not make you responsible for another person's sexual behavior. Alcohol can increase vulnerability and affect judgment, communication, and memory, but vulnerability and responsibility are different things.
What if I voluntarily took drugs before the assault?
Voluntary substance use does not automatically mean consenting to sexual activity. Drug-facilitated sexual assault can include situations in which someone exploits a person who voluntarily consumed alcohol or drugs.
What if I was flirting or went home with the person?
Those choices do not automatically establish consent to everything that happens afterward. Sexual interactions involve ongoing decisions and boundaries.
What if I consented at the beginning?
Wanting one part of a sexual interaction does not necessarily mean wanting everything that follows. A person can change their mind, want one activity but not another, or become increasingly impaired as time passes.
Why can't I remember everything that happened?
Alcohol can impair the formation of new memories, including creating partial or complete gaps even while someone remained awake and interacting. Research on alcohol-related sexual encounters emphasizes that intoxication can complicate later recall.
Is an alcohol blackout the same as being unconscious?
No. During an alcohol-related blackout, a person may remain conscious and interact while failing to form memories that can later be retrieved. Loss of consciousness is different.
Can therapy help me recover the missing memories?
Therapy should not be used to reconstruct uncertain events or create certainty about missing information. Treatment can work with what you actually remember and how the experience affects you now.
Can ART help if my memory of the assault is incomplete?
Potentially. ART can focus on a memory you do have, a distressing image, body response, shame reaction, or the aftermath without requiring a complete reconstruction of the event.
Can CPT help if I blame myself for drinking?
Yes. CPT can be particularly useful for examining beliefs about responsibility, hindsight, blame, and what you believe you “should” have done differently.
Do I have to decide whether it legally counts as sexual assault before starting therapy?
No. Legal definitions and psychological treatment serve different purposes. You can seek therapy for a distressing sexual experience without first reaching a legal conclusion about what occurred.
What if I suspect I was drugged?
If the event was recent, prompt medical care may be useful because some drugs have relatively short detection windows. RAINN provides information and access to local sexual-assault services through its hotline.