A York woman believes innovative treatment helped her overcome the trauma of rape. Helen Chn tells ROSSLYN BRENNAN why other victims must also try to reclaim their lives.

FOR seven years Helen Chn lived two separate lives. In public she was successful, attractive, intelligent and focused. But in private she felt defiled, ashamed, and afraid. Helen had been raped by a man she had known for years - in her own bedroom. After he had finished with her he told her that it hadn't been rape and that if she told the police he would come back. Then, at her lowest moment ever, a moment when all her beliefs and sense of self had been viciously ripped from her, she believed him.

"I felt I was a strong woman with a strong character, and if I had been in a situation where I was raped I would prosecute, no question," says Helen, now 33.

"But when it happened to me the whole world was pulled away from me. I didn't have any strength and I was left with a level of judgement that meant. I didn't judge anything right.

"It was someone that I had known for years. To have judged that person wrongly, it made me wonder how had I judged anything?

"When it happened and the man left me he basically said: 'Don't you go telling anyone this is rape because it isn't and don't you dare tell the police because I'll come and get you'.

"When you are at your absolute lowest and someone tells you such a defining statement you take it all in."

Helen's ordeal was particularly horrific. When her screams became too loud she was smothered with a pillow. At one point she thought she was just seconds from death.

Helen says: "Physically I hurt, everything about me hurt, my neck, my throat from screaming, from trying to protect myself.

"Mentally I was completely drained. What I found very frightening was how you can go from being slightly okay in life to a moment where you are protecting your life.

"Afterwards I thought: 'There's no point any more'. I just felt putrid, it wasn't so much dirty, inside I felt that I had been contaminated."

Despite all the advice to go straight to the police, to retain the physical evidence, to ensure that the attacker can be prosecuted, Helen did none of those things. She endured a sleepless, anxiety-ridden night and then went to work the next morning.

It didn't occur to her, she said, to phone anyone and say she

wasn't going in to the office.

Hours after the attack she had telephoned a rape help line but was asked for her attacker's name and address so the police could arrest him - a question that jolted her and she hung up.

She says: "I definitely thought he would come back for me, and because I knew the person there was also this absurd level of guilt.

"If they had arrested him and it went forward it could ruin his life. There I was worrying that I could destroy his life whereas there was never any of that concern for me on his part."

From that day on she decided to create a "layer of Helen" which would act as a buffer to the outside world.

She reinvented herself with a new look, a new demanding job and a new house. She headed south from Leeds to London and ended up directing the BBC's Six O'Clock News.

There she met news presenter Harry Gration and their relationship developed. And when he was asked to return to Yorkshire to front BBC's Look North more than two years ago she decided to take the brave step with him.

It was returning to this part of the country, living just miles from where the attack took place, that shook Helen's calm exterior to the core and she realised that she had to face her past.

In a bold move, all the more astounding because many of Helen's friends and work colleagues had no idea about the trauma that lay in her past, she invited a film crew along on her journey of healing. By committing herself to the programme, Close Up North, which is being aired tonight on BBC2 at 7.30pm, it meant she would be less inclined to back out.

The film makes harrowing viewing but it is also an uplifting story. It explores EMDR (Eye Movement De-sensitisation and Reprocessing), the pioneering treatment that Helen underwent in order to process her horrific memories and put them to rest.

Conducted by Leeds-based chartered psychologist Dr Doug Duckwork, an experienced EMDR practitioner, the psychological therapy involves moving your eyes rhythmically from side to side while thinking of the worst moments of the rape.

Somehow it allows the brain to heal itself. Helen recalled some aspects of the attack for the first time during the sessions, occasionally suffering the same physical pain.

The most difficult memory was the way she had been restrained during the attack, which she recalled in her final EMDR session.

She says: "The way my attacker had been leaning across my chest, I think I was a couple of seconds away from dying.

"With Doug I went through the whole thing in the session, I couldn't breathe, but I could hear Doug saying to me 'you are not going to die Helen'.

"My brain had saved the very worst of the memories until the very end, where my confidence in Doug was at its height.

"Once that had happened I had the most amazing feeling of being free."

Since that final session Helen has not suffered a single nightmare or a single panic attack and she urges other victims of sexual assault to seek the help that they need, in whatever form.

Helen has been so inspired by her treatment that she is starting an Open University psychology degree and hopes to have a novel, written a year after the attack, published.

She says: "It's given me energy, it's given me my life back. I want people to know that you don't have to live with the nightmares and the panic attacks, all that can go.

"The way I resolved it was through EMDR, but for some women a successful prosecution may be enough, or other forms of counselling. Either way, you don't have to live with this awful grey area in your head.

"There is a way of living life - I've done it."

Close Up North, tonight, BBC2 7.30pm.

Helpline numbers

STAR (Surviving Trauma After Rape) 01924 292361

EMDR Association 0208 4466842

Updated: 11:27 Thursday, November 15, 2001