With the pain of childhood sexual abuse, no instant fixes exist, that I know of. You and your inner children are worth every bit of time and effort that it takes to heal. Just like you went from victim to survivor, you can now go from survivor to thriver and experience joy, peace and happiness in your life. These emotions take time to find as they have been buried under the pain and memories of your sexual abuse. As you heal, they will return to your life. I know this is possible because over the past few years, I have moved from survivor to thriver.
Becoming a thriver doesn't mean that I will never again feel the pain of my childhood of abuse in the form of incest and my dad's alcholism. I do still have issues come up, sometimes suddenly and without warning. I still hurt and sometimes feel anger and sadness. The difference is that those feelings don't weigh me down and take me into depression like they once did. They visit for shorter lengths of time and the intensity isn't as strong. I recognise them as issues and work on healing and releasing them. I didn't used to recognise my own feelings for what they were. I just knew I was always tired and always carried a deep sadness within my heart and mind. Today I don't.
As a thriver, I really do love myself. Those aren't just meaningless, wishful words. They are true. I know that you can transition from survivor to thriver too. I am not the only one capable of doing this work. It is work. I don't know of any instant fixes. If the fixes were instant, the value of the whole healing experience would not be the same. Through the experince of healing, I learned to love and value myself and you can do the same. Healing from childhood sexual abuse is a process that you are worth starting and continuing with in your life. I am just one example of how this process does work. I know many more survivors that have done the work of healing.
Life is for more than just surviving. We are not meant to be victims of life and mean spirited abusers. We are meant to be thrivers. I wish for you a glorious day and many blessings. You deserve both.
Patricia
Becoming a thriver doesn't mean that I will never again feel the pain of my childhood of abuse in the form of incest and my dad's alcholism. I do still have issues come up, sometimes suddenly and without warning. I still hurt and sometimes feel anger and sadness. The difference is that those feelings don't weigh me down and take me into depression like they once did. They visit for shorter lengths of time and the intensity isn't as strong. I recognise them as issues and work on healing and releasing them. I didn't used to recognise my own feelings for what they were. I just knew I was always tired and always carried a deep sadness within my heart and mind. Today I don't.
As a thriver, I really do love myself. Those aren't just meaningless, wishful words. They are true. I know that you can transition from survivor to thriver too. I am not the only one capable of doing this work. It is work. I don't know of any instant fixes. If the fixes were instant, the value of the whole healing experience would not be the same. Through the experince of healing, I learned to love and value myself and you can do the same. Healing from childhood sexual abuse is a process that you are worth starting and continuing with in your life. I am just one example of how this process does work. I know many more survivors that have done the work of healing.
Life is for more than just surviving. We are not meant to be victims of life and mean spirited abusers. We are meant to be thrivers. I wish for you a glorious day and many blessings. You deserve both.
Patricia
13 comments:
Couldn't agree more, I frequently say very similar things. It's not a race, the important thing is to keep moving forward
Mike, thank you.
Hi Patricia,
I agree with you that with a legacy of childhood abuse there are o instant fixes and that even things we thought were resolved can suddenly be triggered and hurt again a reveal a new aspect of pain we had not been fully aware of so far.
It has been my experience however that good quality energy work can remove whole pockets of pain in a few minutes. Or desensitize us to some triggers so we never feel that same jab of pain again. As a survivor of multiple shades of childhood abuse, I spent my adult life using energy work to recover for myself. I have also learned everything I could about it to share with others as a healer and as an energy healing teacher. With great success, I have to say.
I am not saying that energy work is necessary to recover. I am just saying that it can help and HAS helped many survivors become trivers. It's one of the options.
Sophie, thank you for coming to Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker and leaving your comment. I didn't know that energy work existed until after I had done my early work of healing.
If I had known about energy work back then, I am not sure if I would have trusted someone else to help me heal. If I knew what I know now, I would have but back then I was learning to trust myself. I wasn't very trusting back then.
I appreciate the fact that your comment has given the option of energy work to my readers. One of the reasons that I used 12-Step meetings to talk out my pain of incest and family alcoholism was that it only cost me $1.00 which was a donation to buy coffee and pay the utilities of the group. A few times I didn't even have a dollar to give.
When I was ready for counseling, I went to a counseling organization that was partially government funded and got a greatly reduced rate that I could afford. That was back in 1990. A few years later when I needed help through a bad period of my life, I went back to them and their government funded had been greatly reduced. I cried because I couldn't afford their fees.
I continued to go to the 12-Step meetings and talked my way through that hurt too. I thank God that my dad was an alcoholic or I might not would have ever had the courage to talk about the incest the first time. Somehow talking to that room full of strangers was easier than telling my husband and sister. Strangers didn't have the power to hurt me like my husband and sister did if they had rejected me or my story.
Today I would use energy work to help me heal. I do use my Reiki when I feel the need to do some more work. Massage and EFT have both helped as well over the past few years. I feel that the work that you, Sophie, do would also be an avenue that I would check out for future use if I need to. Thank you for your very helpful comment.
For anyone that is curious as to what kind of energy work that Sophie Lhoste does, just click on her name in the comment that she left here and it should take you to her blog where she talks about the energy work that she does. Thank you again, Sophie, for your comment.
Hi Patricia
Great post! It hit me like a little shot of happy inspiration! A shot of hope! There is no quick fix but there are solutions! I spent a lot of time finding ways to avoid actually doing the work and when I finally faced doing the work the real healing began. I avoided doing the work because of my fear of the pain and also I didn't really believe that I would ever be okay again and didn't want to be disapointed. But I made it! I went from surviving to thriving and today, like you, I share my process and discoveries with others!
Hugs, Darlene
Patricia, this is a great post for understanding what it means to move from survivor to thriver. Abuse may lead to a "diminished capacity for joy." We are healing when we are able to measure moments, minutes, milestones in experiencing the joy that we were meant to have. Thank you.
Darlene, thank you. Yes, you are a great example that there are solutions if you will just decide to do the work of healing. Yes, it does hurt when you first begin to face everything that you have avoided, stuffed or denied in your life. But you can get beyond the pain to the freedom that comes from healing. For me, just facing my fears, both real and mostly imagined, released such a burden from my mind, shoulders and heart. You are worthy of being free of the abuse and its effects on your life.
Thanks for stopping by, Darlene and for coming back when the comment didn't go through the first time. I appreciate you and your blog Emerging From Broken.
Lynn, thank you for adding your comment to the post. After reading your book which I will be writing a review of soon, I admire your courage to heal even more. Your story helped me to see areas of domestic violence that I hadn't recognised in my own childhood of living with a raging alcoholic.
Yes, feeling joy and peace in my life are wonderful byproducts of healing from incest. When you stuff bad memories and unpleasant feelings, you also stuff joy, love, happiness. Healing helps to bring all of those back into your life. Have a glorious weekend.
Thank you for this encouragement. The journey of healing can seem a long and fruitless one at times in that you can feel stuck and not able to move forward even if you want to. Knowing that there are no instant fixes but it is still possible to move to a life where you can be a thriver is such a comfort and as I said encouraging. Blessings.
Behind the Smile, you are very welcome. Blessings coming back your way too.
Your words are always so inspiring Patricia. Thanks. I have shared these with members of my Facebook page OUT FROM UNDER and with our private Facebook group, SPEAK OUT FROM UNDER I know your words speak volumes to all us victim/survivors
Cruiseroo, thank you for your kind words and for sharing my blog post. Always feel free to share any of my posts with other survivors.
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