We often try to push through a freeze response with numbing or mood-altering activities. But trying to push through is one of the worst things we can do with unresolved trauma. Pushing through a freeze response risks retraumatizing us and it just makes things worse.

I crowdfunded and created the Rape Crisis Counseling app, with partners from women's human rights groups around the world. It needed to be an app because I wanted every single person to be able to find out how to support a friend, family member or colleague in the aftermath of sexual assault.

Trauma happens when the body's systems are overwhelmed and get stuck digesting the traumatic experience, so the impact of it stays in the system rather than being processed and discharged. This can be experienced many ways, particularly as fear, which is often described in self-help programs as "false evidence appearing real."