Forgive Yourself…. Grieve Gently
Living with abuse is lonely and isolating. The steps you take to move from victim to survivor is even more isolated and more painful. You are going back in time to relive the abuse, to experience the pain and terror now, just as you felt it then. Accessing all the torment, you have been avoiding. Facing all that you feared. Look yourself right in the face and acknowledge your reality. No more difficult thing you can ever do, and also the best thing that could happen in terms of recovery.
Never knowing why your world never felt right. You will now have cause and effect. You can now connect the dots of what happened, how it affects you now, and what you need to do to get yourself out of the victim role.
Abuse is a loss, a loss of trust, love, self-respect, identity, and healthy shame. All loss needs to be grieved to heal. Without grieving you stay stuck in the victim role, you do not heal because you can’t grieve.
You don’t know why you feel the way you do. You think there is something wrong with you. What’s wrong is that you don’t know what you need to grieve. Without grieving, you stay stuck in eternal mourning. You are trapped in grief with nowhere for it to go. So you avoid them, drink them, drug them, work them, sex them, gamble them, everything but feel them.
Facing all the abuse again as an adult, you are better equipped to feel them, understand them, process them, and fear them less. The less you fear them, the less you need to avoid them, the more you face them, the more power you gain over them. This is the place where healing starts. You lost something inside of you, only you didn’t know it, you felt it. You needed to grieve the loss, to move on. It’s not until you know what the loss is that you be able to face it, to start the grieving process
Grieving is the art of forgiving yourself emotionally.
Grieve Gently
Soon you will be building boundaries 😉
