Hi all!

I'm relatively new to the "seeking mental health" community, so I apologize if i'm wasting your time with this! I'm not entirely sure if I should get therapy or not, so I figured posting on a forum would be the best option for me until I decide.

If I were to get therapy, it would all be out of pocket. Call me petty, but my mother has been really cracking down on me to get a therapist, but I don't want or need her help, because she just tends to make however i'm feeling worse. So, before exploring options that are 100s of dollars a month, i thought this would be a good idea.

I thought this would be a good place to post all of this. I have been sexually assaulted twice. I ended up in a relationship with the person who did it the first time, and though I have mentally blocked most of it out, I know that it has messed with my body image in more ways then I could count. I have also bounced form one toxic friend group to another for most of my teen years. However, I am now in college and in an amazing group of people. I have a loving, supportive boyfriend, and it would seem like I have my life together.

However, my internal struggle could not be more turbulent. Over this last year, I find that my mental has started to affect relationships that i had before this all started, and the new relationships i've just formed. It's straining all of them, and I don't know how much more of me my friends and boyfriend can take. I know that in order to love them, I need to love myself. But my self esteem has never been lower...Help? Quarantine isn't helping my mental state, but then again, it hasn't really changed all that much from October.

Of course there's more I could talk about, but i feel like this is a good intro? i don't really know what I'm doing and I refuse to ask my family for help, so I'm asking random people on the internet.