Hi Moey

One good perspective you already have is obvious when you say 'that was very lucky compared to what it could have been'.

The other thing I do is take your sentence and 'I seem to fight it constantly and I am always mad at myself for not being the same as I was' and changed it to being mad at the people that caused it, then to realising life sometimes throws things at us we weren't expecting beyond our wildest expectations. It's life, it follows no specific plans, however hard we try to impose them.

'It seems to be very hard for me to believe it is real and that it can really do this much damage' I think of as can have been doing, is still doing but to a lesser extent and is getting better.

I try and think what I can do, what could have been worse (I am still here after all to live another day).

The main thing is to get rid of anger directed at yourself and ask yourself would most others have reacted in a similar or possibly even worse way. I find that they often would, and often hear peoples problems that are weighing them down and really have to pinch myself to think that that is all they have to think about and that they find it a problem in the first place.

It sounds crass, but the fact that I am writing on my PC, drinking a cup of tea in my apartment puts me streets ahead of what many have. I am still lucky. I find it frustrating that my memory loss is always attributed to depression and my lack of organisation ditto, but am sure it is also related to the assault. Regardless I am still here. I cannot change that and I do my best to improve all the time.

My latest frustration is how to get myself back into work after being out of work for so long, with the other factors personal to me which would take too long to go into. Life can be a bummer, and the one thing I have picked up is compassion and understanding of others to a greater degree at times, but at others admittedly without the patience I used to have when it sounds trivial because they are not actually explaining the real root of the problem, just a minor tribulation weighing them down.

Read, use your brain as much as you comfortably can, push yourself slowly towards new things and forgive yourself when they are not done in the time you wanted them done in. It is when I start beating myself up about it that I start to come down. If I accept where I am and the limitations I have compared to before, I am still better off than many. It will be OK and I believe that I will beat this, as I have beaten every other obstacle thrown at me so far. It will take time and effort, but as long as I keep pushing myself slowly to go forward forgiving myself of my lack of accomplishment, I will get there, but am not sure still where 'there' is going to be.

Good luck, stick around and read a lot on PTSD and CBT/positive thinking. You are half way there already. The other thing to remember is that we cannot change anything that has happened already, only where we are going. The patience during that process is hard to maintain, sometimes excruciatingly so. But I will get there, so will you.