Mariska Hargitay Opens Up About Finding 'Extraordinary Therapists' Who 'Gave Me My Life Back' After Surviving Trauma

Despite the intense nature of her role at Law and order: SVUMariska Hargitay is nothing but funny and full of joy.

And so the actress began her address at the Hope in Depression Research Foundation’s 18th annual seminar by cracking a joke.

“Thank God I got an honorary doctorate from John Jay University because otherwise I would be very insecure now with all the doctors [in this room]”, she joked while receiving the Hope Award for Depression Advocacy.

The luncheon, which was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York on November 12, brought together top scientists and psychiatrists to discuss the latest research on trauma and depression while examining “how the brain heals.”

Mariska Hargitay (right) accepts the Hope Depression Advocacy Award from founder Audrey Gruss at the 18th annual HOPE Luncheon at The Plaza on November 12, 2024 in New York City.

Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

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Hargitay, who advocates for survivors of sexual violence with her Joyful Heart Foundation, is all too familiar with discussing complex trauma—and the necessary healing that comes afterward.

“A joyful heart was my response to reading the letters I received from survivors when I started ALL 852 years ago,” she said, nodding to the show’s record-breaking run on TV (it’s currently in its 26th season).

“A joyful heart is my response to learning the statistics about sexual violence and being rocked on my heels and being just slack-jawed that not everyone is talking about these statistics and talking about these problems because they are so widespread and it is an epidemic here in our world “, she added. “And now I know that Joyful Heart was also the answer to my own inner need for healing.”

Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson in ‘SVU’.

Virginia Sherwood/NBC

When Hargitay was just three years old, she and her two older brothers were involved in a car accident that killed their mother, Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield.

“Personally, I’ve also gone through my own journey of learning how to respond to the various traumas I’ve experienced in my life. I lost my mother when I was three years old and I grew up in a house of people who dealt with tragedy in their own way, and since there was so much grief, there was no room for prioritization,” Hargitay said in her speech.

“We didn’t have the tools that we have now to metabolize and understand trauma, understand all the levels, understand that it goes on a cellular level,” she explained. “So I wasn’t able to do that for myself until much later in life.”

(L) Mickey Hargitay and Jayne Mansfield, (R) Mariska Hargitay at the 33rd Annual Colleagues Spring Luncheon and Oscar De La Renta Fashion Show on April 25, 2023.

Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty ; Rodin Eckenroth/Getty

In January, Hargitay wrote a first-person essay for PEOPLE in which she shared that she, too, is a survivor of sexual trauma she experienced in her thirties.

“It wasn’t until much later that I found the language to acknowledge it for what it was,” Hargitay said. “And as I said at the beginning, Joyful Heart was part of my response to my own experience where I built a whole foundation that responded to trauma and survivors the way I wanted to be responded to.”

Hargitay was also touched by the way the Depression Hope Research Foundation is merging with her own foundation, now 20 years old.

Mariska Hargitay at the ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit FYC’ event on May 18, 2024.

Todd Williamson/NBC/Getty

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“I was fortunate to find amazing therapists who introduced me to many different healing modalities, somatic processing, somatic experience, which is a way of treating the way trauma lives in the body,” she said. “EMDR, Structured Trauma Reprocessing Therapy. And Internal Family Systems, people call it IFS or Partial Work. These modalities have given me back my life, reorganized my nervous system and given me back a lot of space, which I’ve learned is synonymous with healing .”

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“I don’t know if I will ever find the words to express my gratitude to those who accompanied me on my journey, to those who mapped my trauma for me, who helped me integrate different parts of myself and metabolize my trauma, the complex trauma that we all carry,” she said.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit airs Thursdays at 9pm ET on NBC.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.

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Source: HIS Education