Mariska Hargitay Says Therapy Helped Her Cope With Trauma

For 25 years, Mariska Hargitay has played the tough but empathetic Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, helping survivors of sex-related crimes confront their trauma (while solving their cases, of course). But Hargitay has also been open about her own personal trauma, from the death of her mother when Hargitay was just 3 years old to the rape that the actress suffered at the hands of someone she considered a friend. Sharing these stories while being honored by the Hope for Depression Research Foundation, the Golden Globe winner also revealed how she worked to heal from those traumatic experiences.

Hargitay “grew up in a house of people dealing with tragedy in their own way,” she said while accepting the Hope Award for Depression Advocacy at the HDRF’s 18th Annual HOPE Luncheon Seminar on Tuesday. Hargitay’s mother, the iconic actress Jayne Mansfield, died in a car accident at age 34, with Hargitay and her two brothers in the backseat. The shocking tragedy suffused the family with “so much grief, there wasn’t room to prioritize anyone,” Hargitay recalled. “We didn’t have the tools that we have now to metabolize and understand trauma, understand all the levels, understand that goes on on a cellular level. So it wasn’t until much later in my life when I was able to do that for myself.”

Hargitay also mentioned the sexual trauma she suffered in her 30s, which she wrote about in an essay in People earlier this year, writing that she “went into freeze mode, a common trauma response when there is no option to escape.” The actress was unable to process the experience for years until she went through a period of “reckoning” what was done to her. “It wasn’t until much later,” Hargitay said at the seminar, “that I found the language to acknowledge it for what it was.”

At the HDRF event, Hargitay also praised the “extraordinary therapists who introduced me to many different healing modalities.” Specifically, the star said she tried somatic therapy, “a way of treating the way trauma lives in the body” — think The Body Keeps the Score, cultivating “an awareness of bodily sensations” through heightened physical awareness, per Harvard Health.

Hargitay said she also tried techniques like EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy and relies on specific eye movements to help patients access traumatic memories and repair the mental damage done by them, per Cleveland Clinic. Internal family systems (IFS or parts therapy), another one of the techniques Hargitay used, focuses on separating the core, invulnerable Self from the wounded inner “parts” and helping patients connect to both aspects in order to heal.

“These modalities gave me my life back,” Hargitay said. “They reorganized my nervous system and gave me back a whole lot of space, which is, I learned, sort of synonymous for healing.”

Hargitay said she founded the Joyful Heart Foundation, which works to end domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse, in part to address “my own internal need for healing” as well as a way to respond to “the letters I received from survivors… disclosing their traumatic stories of abuse for the first time, shame and isolation and loneliness and trauma.” Essentially, she wanted to create a foundation that “responded to trauma and survivors the way I wanted to be responded to.”

As far as Hargitay’s own therapy journey, she gave profound thanks to the experts who helped her find her way. “I don’t know if I’ll ever find the words to express my gratitude for those who have accompanied me in my journey, for those who mirrored my trauma back to me, who helped me integrate different parts of myself and metabolize my own trauma, complex trauma that so many of us carry,” she said. “We all have a story. We all are carrying so much internally that other people can’t see.”