“Love after abuse.” It’s something every survivor wants and yet it also feels the farthest out of reach. How will someone come to love us with this ‘baggage?’ How do we build a relationship with someone who is actually good for us? These question are painful because, truthfully, these are blocking our way towards love. There will be people who will discard us as survivors. (As immoral and icky as that is.) Others may treat...
Do you wish there was a way to look back on your past with love? To have a perspective on life where you could acknowledge the trauma you faced, but also see your strength? It would allow you to no longer feel burdened by your trauma, without overlooking the real impact it had too. You’d be able to feel empowered in your potential to create a better future—rising from the ashes of your past like...
Are you tired of hating yourself every time you make a mistake? It’s exhausting to feel worthless and hear self-deprecating thoughts. You don’t deserve it—you deserve to be forgiving yourself always and forever. Mistakes happen to every single human being. You’re trying your best, but sometimes you don’t have the insights or energy to do something perfectly. And that sometimes leads to a slip up. It’s rational to feel a bit bad about this. Guilt, honestly,...
“Switch to a growth mindset.” That’s a popular thing you hear in the personal development field, isn’t it? At it’s core, the concept is beautiful. It challenges us to keep improving ourselves and our lives, in turn transforming the world around us. But for us survivors of abuse, it’s a more nuanced idea. Most “growth mindsets” are about no longer feeling emotional pain, or deciding to feel abundant and in love with life. And that’s super invalidating....
We can’t just choose happiness, especially after surviving abuse and living with PTSD. But this can be disheartening. If you can’t choose happiness, how do you start to love life? How do you begin to feel good? A love for life is still something you can experience. You can still have wonderful days and great relationships. There are so many ways you can find joy. All without needing the ability to choose happiness. Let’s first...
How do you improve yourself after going through so much hardship? What does it even mean to be a better person, especially after surviving abuse? Trauma impacts us. It causes us to place judgements on others. We’ve become slow to trust. And when we think of being the best person we can be—it’s often nonjudgemental and believing everyone has pure intentions. That’s not how we came to see the world, though. After abuse, we saw the...
Are you ruled by self-hatred immediately after noticing some flaw? It’s natural for us survivors of abuse to notice our imperfections the most—since our abusers trained us to do this. But, I’ve gotta say, this is not fun (and that’s an understatement). I’m here to remind you that you are so much more than your imperfections. In fact, I don’t even think these traits are flaws. There were times in your trauma where your abuser has...
Feel like your world is shrouded in a grey filter? Like you’re detached from both the good and bad—not connected to life at all? Emotional numbness is common for us survivors of abuse, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. It makes us feel like we’re not really living. We can’t embrace happiness. Sometimes we can’t even feel pain. For many of us, we’d rather feel something—anything—other than numbness. Emotional numbness has played an important...
Distress tolerance is the most valuable skill you can learn. There’s nothing more capable of helping you survive the painful parts of abuse recovery. It will stabilize you like nothing else. It will transform your life. I had a major crisis happen a couple weeks ago where a huge amount of insights into childhood trauma came up. If this happened a few years ago, I would have felt suicidal. But I was fine while facing it. It...
Always finding yourself in toxic relationships? Almost like you’re a magnet for abusers? It’s never your fault that ill-intentioned people come into your life, but there are ways you can empower yourself to get out of and prevent these relationships. You just have to understand why your mind keeps making you trust those not-so-nice people. And why, when you do stumble upon someone truly loving, you feel terrified to get close. You’re not alone in...