It’s the thirteenth of February today and that means tomorrow will be…….either your favorite day of the year, the day you celebrate love and all things loving, or the worst day of your year, the day you are acutely aware of the absence of love and all things loving in your life. Valentines Day may have a history steeped in tradition and romanticism but the reality for those of us in the west is that it is simply another money-grab opportunity from those with something vaguely ‘romantic’ to sell, a marketing tool for restaurants, resorts, hotels and anywhere couples might go. You can’t go anywhere around this time of year without spotting the obligatory red hearts everywhere and being confronted at almost every turn with some sign inviting us to buy this or go there to show the one we love how much we care…… And of course the down side to all of this is how confronting that can all be for those with no special person in their lives, or those for whom love has been empty, vacuous or lost. What strikes me as the most significant aspect of all this is how shallow our perception of love is. Or should I say how shallow a sense of love is portrayed and that we then swallow? I have always celebrated Valentines Day — over the years I have done various things — put out some pretty red heart shaped candles I have, made a special meal for my family — something they all love, encouraged the children to make pretty heart shaped cards and send them to each other, buy heart shaped chocolates to share……. The thing is we can make Valentines Day be about ALL aspects of love and not just the romantic notion of love it is narrowly portrayed as (and marketed to us) as being, we can take ownership of how we choose to play the Valentines Day game and instead of allowing it to bring our singleness into sharp focus and receive a message of isolation, loneliness or loss, we can allow our focus to shift to the many other aspects of love that abound around us. If you have ever watched the TV show, Park’s and Recreation, you will be familiar with actor Amy Pohler’s character, Lesley Knope, an upbeat take of a woman in leadership. Lesley Knope doesn’t focus on Valentines Day and all it’s cliche’d marketing, instead she celebrates what she calls ‘Gal-entines Day on the 13th. I responded so warmly to the main characters’ idea of celebrating what she called ‘Galentines Day’ on the 13th February. Her idea on the show, and in fact Amy’s real life practice, is to make the 13th February a day to celebrate the ‘Gals’ in our lives, to focus on the awesome friendships and loving support we know from good and trusted friends. I love that idea. I love it because it broadens our view of love and because it makes us think about what we have instead of focusing our attention on what we don’t have. I love it because it is positive and creative and practical and real. With Valentines Day just one sleep away, are you allowing yourself to succumb to the devices of marketers and salesmen who honestly just want you to buy their products, are you allowing yourself to feel any sense of being ‘less than’ if you do not currently have a special person in your life to buy flowers for, or receive flowers from? Are you allowing yourself to be played or are you prepared to take responsibility for your own life and take charge of how YOU will play the Valentines Day game? If you are ready to take charge, then join me in making today be all about your awesome ‘gal’ friends and make tomorrow be all about showing love — show love to your friends, show love to your family, show love to yourself. Make Valentines Day a day you celebrate the love you DO know!
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1/1/2018 0 Comments Second Stage Self-CareI came across a quote recently that really struck a chord for me. ‘If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in CONSUMER self-care, it's because you are disconnected from ACTUAL self-care, which has very little to do with 'treating yourself' and a whole lot to do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellbeing.’ These words were penned by Brianna Wiest, an American writer and speaker, who has summed up succinctly in them what I have now come to think of as first and second stage self-care. Brianna’s words really helped to bring into focus something about self-care which I could see, but a little hazily. Clarifying and illuminating what had been a somewhat dimly lit understanding. When we are new to the idea of self-care, when it feels as foreign to us as sitting in a crowded room filled with people speaking in a language we have never heard before, when Recovery is a concept we have just discovered, our ideas around self-care are, of necessity, simplistic. They involve things like being willing to spend a few dollars on ourselves. Being willing to take ourselves to a cafe for a coffee. Simplistic things that in many ways speak more to the lack in our lives, the devaluing of self that has occurred around abuse, the I’m-not-important-enough-for-anyone-to-spend-money-on-me feeling that is firmly tied in to the abuse we have experienced. But this first stage self-care is a temporary place for us to visit, a kind of scaffolding that we need to build around our hearts while we are emerging from abuse, while we are learning what false beliefs we have accepted and allowed to influence our thinking, while we are recovering, and rebuilding our lives. But it’s not our permanent home. It is when we begin to see how un-nurtured our heart is that we begin to grasp how much deeper self-care is. That it’s not something we tack on at the end of a busy day to balance out all the ways we have pushed ourselves around, done things that injure our souls, spoken harshly to ourselves, shown ourselves complete disdain. No. Resoundingly no. Self-care - the true self-care we are striving for, is not about buying ourselves ‘things’ to make up for our unkindness, our lack of kindness or the failure of our kindness. It’s not a pendulum swing in the other direction to right wrongs - it speaks to the core of rebalancing our lives IN THE RIGHT ORDER. It is about waking up in the morning and considering what we need. More sleep? A healthy breakfast? Some time alone? Some time with trusted friends? To go to the shops to buy supplements or medications that keep us well? To read or research an issue that we are thinking about? It is about all through the day making choices, big and small, that honour our own souls, that address our own needs as people of worth and significance, listening to and accepting feedback and focusing on learning and growing, speaking to ourselves not just with kindness but with an understanding that we are growing beings. In short, being loving, wise and kind parents to ourselves. First stage self-care is not wrong or bad - but alone it is not enough to rebuild our lives. We need it to learn, but we need to see it for what it is and then grow past the need to just get ourselves stuff to feel good after we’ve been neglectful. In second stage self-care we hold ourselves differently. We have brought into harmony our needs and the needs of others around us. We cease compensating ourselves for our earlier mistakes and instead act from a place of accepting our boundaries and respecting our own needs. Second stage self-care is being the parent to ourselves and showing ourselves the deep and unconditional love our souls have always craved. And then doing it again tomorrow. ♥ ~ Sue "This post is part of the Empowering the Goddess Within Blog Tour hosted by www.BraveHealer.com! To read more entries and potentially win a fun prize, visit the tour page HERE, between September 9th and September 19th!" Ah the healing journey – we are all on it and I think, if you are like me, you will likely think, yada-yada-yada! - we go on and on about it to the extent that it can sometimes feel like it’s all just a bunch of words, when what we really want is to feel better…… How long have YOU been on this healing journey? Are you feeling frustrated at how slow it sometimes feels? Do you sometimes just wish you could find the magic ladder and skip forward a few steps instead of keeping on landing on the snakes and sliding backwards all the time? Stop. Take a deep breath. Today I want to talk about the three aspects of our healing journey that will be our very best friends – the three things that, if we can just get our heads around them and make them welcome, will allow us to relax and embrace our healing journey in a profound way. Acceptance, surrendering and time, will, as we embrace them become our very best friends as we continue to walk forward into our healing. Acceptance The biggest thing we have to deal with in our recovery journey is coming to terms with the simple fact that we have known loss. We have known trauma and grief and pain and things have happened that we're far from ideal in our early lives. Many of us have suffered terribly and for most of us there has been no apology, no attempt to put things right, no move to identify wrong doing – we have had to deal with the past entirely on our own, making our own way into a future that has then had to be of our own creation. That's a tough call and it leads us on a tough journey. Coming to terms with our past, finding a way to accept what happened and that the only thing we can really do is move forwards, has been a huge challenge. But to find acceptance, to reach that place of making peace with our past, is critical to finding true healing in our lives. And there can be no short cuts in that journey. No one can do it for us. There is no magic formula – we simple have to give ourselves the opportunity to process and deal with what has come our way and part of that processing involves finding a way to accept the past, painful as it might have been. Surrendering We find the most incredible freedom in surrender – in letting go of the pain, hurt and trauma of the past and surrendering to what is. A freedom that we never knew existed before – a deep soul sighing as we realise that we have been let off the hook – that the burden has been lifted from our shoulders. Sure, there is work for us to do, but it is only in surrendering those things that we can’t change, that we allow for the real work of healing to happen in us. And what we can’t change is the past. What happened, happened. That’s all. There can be no real healing until we are ready to say that that is all there is to it. It happened. So many times we get lost in the healing journey because we let ourselves focus on the wrong. We let ourselves get caught up in the injustice and the angst that came our way and of course we do, it’s only human. It is essential that we allow ourselves to stop and remember, that we allow ourselves to feel the pain we protected ourselves from for so long, that we grieve, process and let that pain come to the surface, even that we tell our stories. This is vitally important if we are to ever move on from there. But if healing is our goal that’s where the letting go, the surrender, comes in. To really heal we must then let go. Let go of the pain, let go of the sadness, let go of the hold the past has over us and allow our authentic self, that person we always had the potential to be, emerge. Time They say that time heals all wounds. And in some ways it is true and in others ways not true at all – because it’s not just the passage of time that matters, but what we are doing during that time. We don’t recover and find peace in our souls overnight. There is no magic formula for healing. There is no one thing that we can to do and then – hey-presto we are healed. The truth is that it takes time for us to heal and there are no short cuts. Time is such a significant factor in our healing and we must never overlook the simple truth that heavy and painful feelings take time to ease off. We do a lot of work in recovery, we have so many issues to address, but it is so important to grasp this pint, that time is itself a factor. Time is itself a healer. So often we get in the way of our own hopes for healing by holding on, by not surrendering and by refusing to come to terms with our loss but if we allow ourselves to move closer towards acceptance and surrender, then we allow time to do its wonder-work. As we focus on the parts we can do, as we focus on surrendering and accepting, then time can be our ally, bringing healing into our lives. Have you met these friends? Have you welcomed them and are you getting to know them well? When we have really struggled in our lives, when we have faced something huge, of course we want it to be over. It is part of the human condition that we would want it to be fixed. But despite the fact that we live in an impatient, instant society where we need fast food, instant coffee and express lanes in the supermarket, it just isn’t the same when it comes to healing. We find what we are looking for when we let it go. We resolve what we must when we surrender and we realise we have found healing when we look back and see what time has changed. We find our authentic selves when we focus on allow time and our work to walk side by side as we journey towards recovery. We find hope in our recovery journey when we welcome these friends in to it with us. 7/31/2017 0 Comments The simplification of self-careHow fortunate are we, who live right now, in this information-rich age. There is so much material available on the internet – the world is literally at our finger tips – but often we have to wade through a lot of muck to get to the really useful bits – the true – the reliable. It applies to news and what we now commonly refer to as fake news – but nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of self-development. Today I want to talk about what we commonly call self-care. It’s a topic often spoken of around recovery - even common place – and yet I feel we need to take a fresh look at it. I’ve seen a lot of things recently about what people are calling ‘serious self-care’ or 'self-care for the not so faint-hearted'. Some of what I have seen is really important – a call to go further, deeper, more meaningfully into caring for ourselves. I have read some really interesting articles and many have made me stop and think but I have noticed that many of the things I have come across, while true to a certain point, also carry a subtle dig, a judgement, at what is considered then to be pathetic attempts at self-care – things like getting a manicure, or buying oneself flowers. The suggestion is that this is a kind of namby-pamby self-care – not deep, not real, not significant. This is where I have a problem. To me, self-care is at its very roots all about being kind to ourselves. And here is what is important - there is no limit, level or scale in how we act with kindness towards ourselves. Many of us have had to learn how to care for ourselves when self-care has been a foreign and quite alien process for us. Many of us are still learning. We have been strangers to the concept and like with all things, we have to start small. We start with the simple and easy things and no one has the right to undermine this starting place. When I first heard about self-care I had no idea where to begin. I made myself a very simple and basic list – and it was truly very basic. In fact, at first, I had no clue where to start and everything felt like a crazy struggle. Trying to come up with things that I liked or wanted felt quite overwhelming. I took myself out for a coffee once in a while. I went for a walk without the children. I bought myself a magazine I liked to read. Some of the things I listed then are the kinds of things named in these articles as pathetic – they were basic – but this is how it should be! That’s what growing up is all about. Self-care, showing ourselves kindness, naturally will grow and evolve along with us – like every aspect of our growing, recovering life. But this one simple fact remains – there is no right or wrong – there is no superficial and deeper – there is no basic and advanced – there is one simple thing – that our practice of self-care is about showing kindness towards ourselves. This so-called advanced level of self-care is just an over-complication of what is a very simple concept. Be kind to yourself. Today. Tomorrow. To the best of your ability. Do whatever you need to do. Are you being kind to yourself? ♥ ~ Sue
7/31/2017 0 Comments The Simplification of self-careHow fortunate are we, who live right now, in this information-rich age. There is so much material available on the internet – the world is literally at our finger tips – but often we have to wade through a lot of muck to get to the really useful bits – the true – the reliable. It applies to news and what we now commonly refer to as fake news – but nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of self-development. Today I want to talk about what we commonly call self-care. It’s a topic often spoken of around recovery - even common place – and yet I feel we need to take a fresh look at it. I’ve seen a lot of things recently about what people are calling ‘serious self-care’ or 'self-care for the not so faint-hearted'. Some of what I have seen is really important – a call to go further, deeper, more meaningfully into caring for ourselves. I have read some really interesting articles and many have made me stop and think but I have noticed that many of the things I have come across, while true to a certain point, also carry a subtle dig, a judgement, at what is considered then to be pathetic attempts at self-care – things like getting a manicure, or buying oneself flowers. The suggestion is that this is a kind of namby-pamby self-care – not deep, not real, not significant. This is where I have a problem. To me, self-care is at its very roots all about being kind to ourselves. And here is what is important - there is no limit, level or scale in how we act with kindness towards ourselves. Many of us have had to learn how to care for ourselves when self-care has been a foreign and quite alien process for us. Many of us are still learning. We have been strangers to the concept and like with all things, we have to start small. We start with the simple and easy things and no one has the right to undermine this starting place. When I first heard about self-care I had no idea where to begin. I made myself a very simple and basic list – and it was truly very basic. In fact, at first, I had no clue where to start and everything felt like a crazy struggle. Trying to come up with things that I liked or wanted felt quite overwhelming. I took myself out for a coffee once in a while. I went for a walk without the children. I bought myself a magazine I liked to read. Some of the things I listed then are the kinds of things named in these articles as pathetic – they were basic – but this is how it should be! That’s what growing up is all about. Self-care, showing ourselves kindness, naturally will grow and evolve along with us – like every aspect of our growing, recovering life. But this one simple fact remains – there is no right or wrong – there is no superficial and deeper – there is no basic and advanced – there is one simple thing – that our practice of self-care is about showing kindness towards ourselves. This so-called advanced level of self-care is just an over-complication of what is a very simple concept. Be kind to yourself. Today. Tomorrow. To the best of your ability. Do whatever you need to do. Are you being kind to yourself?
If you could go back and speak to yourself when you were 5, 10 or 15 what would you say? If you were able in some way to go and be there with yourself as you were struggling to come to terms with abuse in your early life, as you were actually facing it, what would you say to your younger self? I was in my 40’s when I began recovery. Up until then I would have said I was doing okay – but that was only because I had buried most of how I felt so I wouldn’t have to worry about it – I thought it was all well hidden away and that I had been able to build a life for myself despite the abuse. But when my 18 year marriage imploded and my husband told me he didn’t love me or the kids and just wanted to be free and single and able to travel and just live his own life, I realised that my past was not buried but like a stinking corpse I was dragging along behind me – I was chained and shackled to it and it was going to impact on my everyday life until I took some action to really deal with it. In recovery I learned that I needed to grieve over what I had lost in the past but that before I could even grieve over it I needed to let myself feel how it had felt. Because at the time I couldn’t let myself feel any of it – that’s how I survived – but the time had come for me to stop hiding the pain of it from myself – it was time to let myself actually feel the pain of what I had gone through. I learned that we need to release our pain. It needs to go somewhere and for me it went as I wrote down my story – every detail as well as I could – first just the barest facts and then, as part of a healing process, how I actually felt in those terrifyingly dark moments when I was being abused. You may find other ways to do this – telling a therapist – using art – but you must find a way to get what you have been holding onto for so long out into the open somewhere other than in your head. In recovery I learned that words have a great power to heal and I began to use positive affirmation to start to replace all those memories with new ideas – things like You are Beautiful - Despite what you went through, you are okay. I began to allow myself to believe those words. I had children then – amongst them, three little girls and one morning, as I watched my youngest girl sleep I pictured what it would have been like for her if she had been abused in the way I had at her age. It began a profound process where I spent some time imagining how it would have been for each of them, at their varying ages, if they had been abused as I was. I imagined what I would say to them, how I would comfort them, how I would work to rebuild their sense of self and worth afterwards. It was a deep and intense process but I began to realise what I had always longed to hear but never had. I‘m sorry that happened to you. It’s not your fault. You didn’t make any of it happen. It was not about you You are not bad. It was about him. You are beautiful You are going to be okay What words would you whisper to yourself? How would you encourage your child self, knowing what you do now? Now, imagine how you would feel now if those words had been said to you back then. Take a moment to allow them to seep in to who you were as a child and imagine how you would feel if you had grown up with those words instead of the memory of a secret you were too afraid to tell and a nightmare you had to walk alone. In recovery we can tap into a transformation that allows us to heal as if it had never happened. We can literally begin today to whisper those words to our child heart that has waited too long to be told what it is so desperate to hear and we can say it over and over and over again. We can release what we have held on to and allow this new image of our self to become who we are. ♥ ~ Sue 7/6/2017 0 Comments Using AffirmationThe use of affirmations to help us make positive changes in our lives is such a huge thing right now. Everywhere you look these days you see positive statements about things – it’s often very uplifting, but some ‘affirmations’ can also be very cheesy and banal and sometimes downright false! Affirmation, the actual word, comes from two Latin words ‘ad’ meaning ‘to’, and firmare meaning to ‘make firm’. Essentially then, affirmation is about making things clear. At its core, based on its aetiology, it is a declaration, a firm statement about what we believe and hold true and rely on in our lives. But is every positive statement you see something you want to hold as a firm and reliable truth for your life? The thing is, there are affirmations and then there are affirmations! For an affirmation to be really effective it is essential that it is believable. Here is why. When we try and repeat something in our conscious minds that sounds good but is a bit of a stretch, if we don’t actually find it to be credible and reasonable, our self-talk will constantly sabotage its capacity to sink in. It’s hard enough work persuading our self-talk to remain in tune with us about things we believe. We haven’t a hope of convince ourselves of wildly unbelievable things – we are rational human beings and for the most part if it is a big stretch from what we really think, we won’t be able to hoodwink ourselves. And nor should we even try! I believe in the power of affirmation to bring about significant changes in our lives. I believe in it as much as I believe in the sun’s capacity to rise each day. I know it is a powerful tool for changing deeply entrenched false thinking and negative ideas. But I believe with all my heart that to really harness the power of affirmation we need to make our affirmations grounded in reality and to do this they must be reasonable, reachable and believable. The affirmations I have personally found the most beneficial, and continue to use the most frequently on Recovering Your Life and promote, are worded in terms of Just For Today. You may have seen these on the Facebook page or the iPhone App. On the Facebook page I post one each day that relates to the theme or topic for the day. I have always found this style of affirmation more helpful personally and I know that for many of us change can be very daunting, even if we really want it, and to make the things we are working on a little more manageable, then thinking in terms of doing them just this day is more of a possibility. For all of us. I believe we can try a new way of doing things just for today. We can think a different way just for today. We can try harder just for today……Focusing on change just for today then is reasonable and at the same time reachable. As well as these, I do find other affirmations useful too, especially ones we might write for ourselves. This is an amazing way of keeping our affirmations grounded and believable. When I write affirmations, I always use the personal pronoun….. it is always about what I can do. But I especially find the use of I will very powerful and influential as it connects us to our choice centre – it reminds us that to make new choices we must use our will. Do avoid the use of words like should, could, ought to……these imply judgement, and expectations and these do not help us to make changes. I will, I can, I am….these are much more powerful forms. If the idea of positive affirmation seems a bit ‘out there’ for you, but you are willing to give them a bit of a try, start with listing your positive qualities. Think of an element of your strengths rather than your weaknesses. For example, when feeling like you can’t keep going through a hard situation, try this: I am a strong person, I have endured much harder things before and because I have, I know I can again. Focusing on things that seem incredible to us will not achieve the results we might hope for. But if instead we focus on believable, reachable and reasonable - grounded-in-reality things, we will likely have much more success. Many people these days really struggle with accepting their bodies - women in particular. Accepting our different shapes and sizes, accepting the aging process, accepting our mummy-tummies, accepting our hair, skin, features can all be a challenge in a world where media portrayals of people tend to focus on the young, slim and 'perfect'. But for those of us who have survived child sexual abuse there is a greater challenge to deal with - a deep layer of self-loathing that has come about because of the particular issues that arise with early sexual abuse. Like many others, I was very young when the abuse first started. I didn’t really understand what was going on and I was repeatedly told it was a game, a secret game. And so that was the context in which I tried to deal with the feelings it evoked. But later, as a young teenager, when the abuse continued, everything changed. I understood that this was sex. My friends at school were talking about their experimentation with their boyfriends and the context of the abuse was suddenly completely different. I was no longer a child trying to find a way to avoid a game. I was an adolescent trying to process the changes taking place in my body against the backdrop of relentless abuse. In recovery one of the things I struggled the most with was working out where my self-loathing began. Why did I hate my body so much? It was coming to grips with this that I believe allowed me to finally deal with not just my self-hate but also my inability (up until then) to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship. The thing is, as a young girl the abuse was just something that he did to me. It hurt and was uncomfortable and weird and confusing and I didn’t like it but that was all. When my body started to change in puberty everything went haywire. My body started to respond to his touch in a way that repulsed me. I would be frustrated that he had cornered me and I was unable to escape his groping fingers one minute and the next feeling a pulse of enjoyment that horrified me. I felt betrayed by my own body and so utterly wretched. I grew up hating what he did to me and hating myself for those moments when what he did felt nice. Fast forward to a few years later when I was finally free and able to actually begin my life and what I felt was so very very hateful towards my own body for ever finding even the smallest pleasure amidst the abuse and hating my sexuality with a passion. I was so ashamed and so unable to deal with any of it. And then I got married! Oh gosh – to say we had the honeymoon from hell would be the huge-est understatement! It took that marriage and then some years in recovery for me to begin to work through the struggles I had avoided for so long and find the answers to my issues. What we have to understand is that we were children. We were children abused by adults. We didn’t know what was happening to us at first and then later when our bodies began to change we were still children. We had no power. We were not equals in a consensual relationship. We were not partners. We did not have choices or freedom. Even as adolescents when our bodies started to respond differently. Even then, we were still children and still had no power. This is a difficult issue to talk about, I know, and it is certainly one that is mired in shame and pain but how important it is to bring this out from the shadows and let it be seen in the light. Many of us can trace our self-loathing to this experience. We came to hate our bodies because we felt betrayed by them. But it was not their fault. I came to understand that our bodies respond because they are wired that way. It was simply a fact. It was not my body turning against me and suddenly liking to be abused. It was not my fault and it was not my shame. Coming to understand this has been the single most significant factor in turning myself from a self-loather into a self-lover. I have come to see that my sexuality is a gift that was manipulated and abused as much as my body was. What a travesty. And now, instead of feeling angry with my flesh, with myself, with my body for betraying me, I direct that anger towards my abuser for taking that innocence and that God-given gift from me during those tender years. Were you sexually abused? Do you struggle with self-loathing? Right now, make it your goal to put this matter to rest. Once and for all. Find some time and a space where you can let yourself remember those years and what you went though. Are you holding yourself responsible for someone else’s choices? Have you come to hate your body because you felt it betrayed you? It’s time to look at this afresh and re-examine what you have always told yourself about it. This is the truth - you were a child. Full stop. End of subject. Do not keep holding on to a hatred of your body because of someone else’s bad choices. ♥ ~ Sue Many people these days really struggle with accepting their bodies - women in particular. Accepting our different shapes and sizes, accepting the aging process, accepting our mummy-tummies, accepting our hair, skin, features can all be a challenge in a world where media portrayals of people tend to focus on the young, slim and 'perfect'. But for those of us who have survived child sexual abuse there is a greater challenge to deal with - a deep layer of self-loathing that has come about because of the particular issues that arise with early sexual abuse. Like many others, I was very young when the abuse first started. I didn’t really understand what was going on and I was repeatedly told it was a game, a secret game. And so that was the context in which I tried to deal with the feelings it evoked. But later, as a young teenager, when the abuse continued, everything changed. I understood that this was sex. My friends at school were talking about their experimentation with their boyfriends and the context of the abuse was suddenly completely different. I was no longer a child trying to find a way to avoid a game. I was an adolescent trying to process the changes taking place in my body against the backdrop of relentless abuse. In recovery one of the things I struggled the most with was working out where my self-loathing began. Why did I hate my body so much? It was coming to grips with this that I believe allowed me to finally deal with not just my self-hate but also my inability (up until then) to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship. The thing is, as a young girl the abuse was just something that he did to me. It hurt and was uncomfortable and weird and confusing and I didn’t like it but that was all. When my body started to change in puberty everything went haywire. My body started to respond to his touch in a way that repulsed me. I would be frustrated that he had cornered me and I was unable to escape his groping fingers one minute and the next feeling a pulse of enjoyment that horrified me. I felt betrayed by my own body and so utterly wretched. I grew up hating what he did to me and hating myself for those moments when what he did felt nice. Fast forward to a few years later when I was finally free and able to actually begin my life and what I felt was so very very hateful towards my own body for ever finding even the smallest pleasure amidst the abuse and hating my sexuality with a passion. I was so ashamed and so unable to deal with any of it. And then I got married! Oh gosh – to say we had the honeymoon from hell would be the huge-est understatement! It took that marriage and then some years in recovery for me to begin to work through the struggles I had avoided for so long and find the answers to my issues. What we have to understand is that we were children. We were children abused by adults. We didn’t know what was happening to us at first and then later when our bodies began to change we were still children. We had no power. We were not equals in a consensual relationship. We were not partners. We did not have choices or freedom. Even as adolescents when our bodies started to respond differently. Even then, we were still children and still had no power. This is a difficult issue to talk about, I know, and it is certainly one that is mired in shame and pain but how important it is to bring this out from the shadows and let it be seen in the light. Many of us can trace our self-loathing to this experience. We came to hate our bodies because we felt betrayed by them. But it was not their fault. I came to understand that our bodies respond because they are wired that way. It was simply a fact. It was not my body turning against me and suddenly liking to be abused. It was not my fault and it was not my shame. Coming to understand this has been the single most significant factor in turning myself from a self-loather into a self-lover. I have come to see that my sexuality is a gift that was manipulated and abused as much as my body was. What a travesty. And now, instead of feeling angry with my flesh, with myself, with my body for betraying me, I direct that anger towards my abuser for taking that innocence and that God-given gift from me during those tender years. Were you sexually abused? Do you struggle with self-loathing? Right now, make it your goal to put this matter to rest. Once and for all. Find some time and a space where you can let yourself remember those years and what you went though. Are you holding yourself responsible for someone else’s choices? Have you come to hate your body because you felt it betrayed you? It’s time to look at this afresh and re-examine what you have always told yourself about it. This is the truth - you were a child. Full stop. End of subject. Do not keep holding on to a hatred of your body because of someone else’s bad choices. ♥ ~ Sue 6/19/2017 5 Comments A 'post-recovery' life?A little over a year ago I broke my leg really badly. For most of the year that followed, my leg has been the focus of my life. First because it had me hospitalised for two weeks, then because it kept me immobile for three months and then because I had to recover from it for another six months. It was a big process - a very significant part of my life. I gave myself over to the process, accepted that it was indeed significant and had to simply accept that for a while it would dominate my life. For most of the year that followed the number one ‘story’ that surrounded my life was in some way to do with the accident and subsequent recovery. I was off to see the physio, doing my exercises at home, choosing the stairs at the shopping centre on purpose to give me that extra stretching, sitting with my leg stretched out in the evening, using a heat pack when it was painful……compensating, accommodating, managing. And I was always ready to explain….yes, I do this because I am recovering from a broken leg. But a little while ago it occurred to me that this particular story was fading into the background. I wasn’t needing to compensate as much any more. It wasn’t as present an issue. I will always have broken my leg on the fifth of May 2016 – that detail will never change, and I did spend most of the rest of that year recovering, that also will never change but it was beginning to be a less current story in my life. Can you imagine living as a survivor of child abuse as if the abuse and even the recovery from it are matters of the past? As if these aspects of your life are less current stories? It is almost 18 years now since I began recovery from the seventeen years of sexual abuse I had experienced during my childhood. I worked a recovery program, read a lot, had counselling, and got my life together. I recovered. And then I began writing about recovery. It was my life. It dominated and flavoured my every day for so long but like with the recovery I experienced over the last year following my broken limb, I reached a point where I felt .... dare I say it......normal. The thing is, life is all about growing. For everyone. Whether they have experienced abuse in their lives or grown up in healthy, functional homes. Developing, maturing, progressing, ‘wiseing-up’..... call it what you will. We are never done growing - until the day we stop breathing, but there can come a time when we are living a post-recovery life - where our growing and maturing is on a par with others, and not the catch-up game we have had to play in order to overcome the deficits our early abuse left us to face. This post-recovery life is much like the life I lead following my broken leg. My injury is still there, the scars still visible though healed, and now and then it will give me a little trouble and I will be reminded that yes, a year ago I suffered a major break, but it will not be the focus of my daily life, it will cease to be a dominating feature - still there - still part of my story but not my story in entirety. I used to say that first we survive and then we recover but these days I feel we need to add another step in this journey - first we survive, then we recover and finally we lead a post-recovery life. And what that life looks like is akin to every other human being’s life. We have ups and downs. We suffer losses and griefs. We have good days and bad. We age, we experience changes. We notice the joys, we feel the happiness of being alive and being human. We experience gratitude and we experience down days. We live, we laugh, we cry, we smile. We are human. Everything we experience in this post-recovered life is not directly linked to the abuse we experienced. Every time something goes wrong it is not linked directly back to the years we suffered or the years we struggled. We are simply normal human beings. Grappling at times with our humanity, but no longer tied so tightly to either the abuse we experienced or the recovery we worked to liberate ourselves from the abuse. Happy, sometimes sad; healthy, sometimes not so healthy, people who are living a normal human life. A post recovery life. |
AuthorSue Parry-Jones is a trained counsellor, a social worker and survivor of abuse. The content of the blog is both personal and sound. The words are relate-able and widely appealing to those struggling with survival from abuse in their own lives. More and more we are appreciating in our society that abuse affects a number of people’s lives and as more people are beginning to openly discuss what they have endured, so there is a huge need for encouragement and hope in the form of texts that deliver clear and concise yet real input. THe words shared here are honest, real and heart-felt. Archives
February 2018
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