You never have to forgive your abuser. You never have to forget or deny what you went through. If you want to share your story publicly, go ahead. If you want to hate the people who hurt you, you have every right. Don’t listen to the people who say “forgive and forget.” This advice usually comes with good intentions, but it’s hard to properly deliver it to a survivor of abuse. Since, well, it’s usually people...
Your past lives in you—you don’t live in the past. Trauma and abuse memories, like anything significant in life, sticks with us. There’s no shame in feeling like your past follows you around, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to handle either. Many of us survivors feel hopeless at the idea that our brains have literally changed as a result of abuse. Are we doomed to struggle with it forever? It’s true that trauma has changed us,...
Emotional vulnerability is a beautiful and empowering thing. It can lead to authentic and healthy relationships, increase our own self compassion, and bring us to greater places in healing. After abuse, though, it can be challenging to face the raw emotions that come with recovery. Meaning that vulnerability can feel overwhelming and hard to handle, unless you know how to safely experience it. That’s what this video is for. I’ll show you how to make...
Trauma creates emotional pain. It’s an unfortunate part of being a survivor of abuse, but it is a reality we face and something that’s healthy to acknowledge. When we reject emotional pain, we deepen its hold on us. It stops being processed and healed—which means we will never feel liberated from it. The pain grows in intensity beneath the surface, trying to get our attention. Naturally, working through that pain is the best path towards recovery....
Abuse strips us of the ability to feel safe in this world. We were shown the darkest sides of humanity, often at the hands of someone that we trusted. They told us, through their actions, that the world is not often a kind place. This is the toughest part of surviving abuse. To have our view of the world be marked with the constant thought of “I’m not safe here.” And, when we’re constantly on...
Letting go of someone means no longer feeling like they control your life. It means not spending every day wishing you could go back to them or believing what they did to you will limit your future forevermore. Letting go of someone, especially an abuser, is about more than just walking away. You have to start to separate from their lingering control of your life. This makes it easier to handle them no longer being...
“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....
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...
When you are going through a tough time, you have less energy. The healthy habits you’ve spent weeks, months, maybe even years forming sometimes fall apart in front of you. And this can cause despair and guilt and shame. But, this is normal. It’s okay to break new and good habits during tough times. Healthy habits aren’t a once and done thing. Trauma recovery is exhausting—and sometimes we go back to our defaults. Healing from abuse...
How do you embrace life after abuse? How can you feel joyous, living with the after effects of such horrible trauma? Embracing life isn’t about having a perfect life. It’s about finding joy and happiness and love even in the midst of hardship—something that us survivors of abuse have faced plenty of. Despite the unique struggles we have all faced, there are some key things that create a foundation from which joy can grow. The first...