Mariska Hargitay credits therapy for having given her her "life back"

Speaking at the Hope For Depression Research Foundation seminar at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, where she was honoured with the Hope Award for Depression Advocacy, People magazine reports she said: "On a personal note, I've gone through my own journey of learning how to respond to the various traumas that 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 dealing with the tragedy in their own way. And because there was so much grief, there wasn't room to prioritise anyone.

"We didn't have the tools that we have now to metabolize and understand trauma, understand all the levels, understand that it goes in on the cellular level.

"So it wasn't until much later in my life when I was able to do that for myself.

"It wasn't until much later that I found the language to acknowledge it for what it was."

Mariska - who revealed in January she had experienced sexual trauma in her 30s - feels lucky to have worked with "extraordinary therapists" to help process her "complex trauma".

She continued: "I had the good fortune to find extraordinary therapists who introduced me to many different healing modalities, to somatic reprocessing, somatic experiencing, which is a way of treating the way trauma lives in the body.

"EMDR, structured therapy for reprocessing trauma. And internal family systems, people call it IFS or parts work. These modalities gave me my life back, and they re-organised my nervous system and they gave me back a whole lot of space, which I learned is sort of synonymous for healing. It's getting space back.

"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 metabolise my own trauma, complex trauma that so many of us carry. We all have a story."

The 60-year-old star also spoke about her own Joyful Heart Foundation, which supports survivors of sexual violence.

She said: "Joyful Heart was my response to reading the letters that I received from survivors when I started on 'SVU' 852 years ago.

"Joyful Heart is my response to learning the statistics of sexual violence and having them rock me back on my heels and just being slack-jawed that everybody wasn't talking about these statistics and talking about these issues because they're so pervasive and it is an epidemic in our country in our world.

"And I now know that Joyful Heart was also a response to my own internal need for healing."