Stage One ~ Remembering

Congratulations!  You have made it this far in your commitment to heal!

Now is the time to cinch up your courage and take the important first step on your path to processing your abuse and ultimately making changes in the self-destructive and maladaptive behaviors that have become your coping mechanisms.
As we discussed before, you must establish some level of calm in your life before embarking on this journey.  If you find you move from one disaster to another in your life, please revisit the Crisis Mode Stabilization post on this blog and the corresponding sections of the Survivor to Thriver Manual.

In Stage One recovery, your main task will be to acknowledge one of the reasons your life may be unsatisfying or even harmful to you your childhood abuse and then begin to regain some self-control and stability by identifying the trauma symptoms that may be left over from your past. Out of this new awareness of the long-term impact of the abuse is born a commitment to recovery. The steps in Stage One will help you begin to heal the wounds inside and thus pave the way for changes to be made later on in Stage Two and Stage Three.

How long will this take?  Each Stage can take anywhere from one to three years to complete.  This depends on the severity of your abuse, how much of your abuse you remember, and the extent of emotional wounding that occurred.  This may seem like forever and it may feel overwhelming to think of it in those terms.  Please remember, each individual survivor's journey is unique to that person.  That person alone is the only one who can determine the pace of their recovery.  Please do not compare your recovery to that of any other survivor.  We are all different.  We have all experienced different levels and severity of abuse.  We all have our own way of coping with our wounds.  Most importantly, we alone are the ones who can determine that it is time to move on to the next step.

How do I know I'm ready to move on to the next step?  Listen to the voice of your newly developing self that fair, honest and objective sense inside you that is growing stronger day by day. Listen to this voice and cultivate its developing wisdom. This voice will signal when you have resolved the task or issue presented by each step. The step is accomplished if you can demonstrate the task in action with another person your therapist, partner or ASCA members and thus begin to integrate it into your new self. If you move forward to another step prematurely, simply admit it to yourself and return to the earlier step until you resolve it. Remember, too, that the 21 Steps are flexible and that you do not have to work them in a linear progression.

Your recovery may not be flawless and that is perfectly fine!  Follow your journey of recovery YOUR way, in YOUR time, at YOUR comfort level.  This is not a race.  You do not have to heal at anyone else's pace or according to anyone else's concepts.  You are in control of how your journey progresses.  The most important thing is to consistently re-enforce and integrate the new standards and values you are creating for yourself.  These will form the foundation on which you will continue to build in Stage Two and Stage Three.

Take time to calm and center and we will begin Step One in the next post.  You can do this!

Understanding the Types of Child Abuse

As a survivor, you may be thinking, “I think I know what abuse is, I lived it.” We all “think” we understand what abuse really is, but we need to look at some concrete definitions and statistics. Why? So we can compare what we have experienced to what is generally known about child abuse. It is important that we learn to distinguish what really happened to us and whether it constitutes child abuse.

The Survivor to Thriver Manual discusses these issues in Chapter Three (pg. 35). As a note of caution, these things may be painful for you to read. You may want to wait until you feel you are prepared to handle the feelings that may come up. You may want to read this section with a friend and discuss your reactions with members of your support network or your therapist. Remember that while you are an adult now, the feelings that surface may be those of a child.

Here we will briefly touch on the definitions and information outlined in Chapter Three of The Survivor to Thriver Manual. Please see the manual for complete review of this vitally important information.

Child abuse is defined as an act of omission or commission that endangers or impairs a child’s physical or emotional health and development and is usually broken down into three categories: physical, sexual and emotional.

Physical abuse is defined as any physical act committed against a child, which results in a non-accidental injury. Examples of physical abuse include hitting, kicking, biting, slapping, and burning. The bodily signs that may indicate physical abuse can include bruises, burns, bites, welts, broken bones and many others. Most, if not all, of these physical signs may also be the result of natural causes not related to child abuse. It is extremely important that you keep this in mind while assessing what happened to you, and in any instance in which you observe such signs on another person – child or adult. Please take the time to read the rest of this section in the Manual and answer the journal questions.

Sexual abuse is defined as any sexual act directed at a child involving sexual contact, assault or exploitation. Sexual abuse is divided into two categories: contact and non-contact. Acts of contact sexual abuse include fondling, incest and intercourse. Examples of non-contact sexual abuse include exhibitionism, presentation of pornographic material, and sexual story telling. Physical signs of sexual abuse include sexually transmitted diseases, pain when urinating or defecating, and stomachaches or headaches. Remember some of these signs may also be the result of natural causes not related to child abuse. Please keep this in mind when you evaluate your own history. Please take the time to read the rest of this section in the Manual and answer the journal questions.

Emotional abuse is defined as a pattern of psychologically destructive interaction with a child that is characterized by five types of behaviors: rejecting, isolating, terrorizing, ignoring, and corrupting. Emotional abuse involves the use of "words as weapons." The scars left may be more psychological than physical, which makes emotional abuse harder to identify. Physical signs of emotional abuse may include malnourishment, small physical stature, poor grooming and inappropriate attire for the season or circumstances. Because these signs can result from other social and environmental causes, we again encourage you to take care in assessing your own personal experiences. Please take the time to read the rest of this section in the Manual and answer the journal questions.

Now you can use this knowledge as a standard to determine what actually happened to you. If you have some memories that you determine were abusive, write them down in your journal. If you have no or few memories from the past, you may still need more time to remember. Or, you may not have been abused. If you weren't in fact abused, you don't want to get caught up in the feeling that you must have been.

Learning Self Comforting Techniques

Once I stepped on to the healing path, it was important for me to learn how to soothe myself. Self comforting is learned when we are children through healthy bonding relationships with our caregivers. Examples of healthy bonding behaviors include cuddling, holding, mutual gazing with love and adoration, and protection from abusive or violent experiences. These are things caregivers do when a child is upset. As an abuse survivor, we have been groomed by our abusers to not trust ourselves or those around us who love us. We may have been told that our parents will hate us if we tell. This leads to a lack of trust and a distancing of our childhood selves from those we thought should protect us. This interruption in healthy bonding with our caregivers leads us to not understand how to comfort ourselves. It may also be that if our parents or caregivers were abused, they don’t understand how to soothe themselves which leads to not being able to help their child comfort themselves.

When we grow into adults without the ability to comfort ourselves, we tend to try to fill that empty space that should have been filled with our comforting skills with other things. We tend to run toward tension-reducing behaviors such as smoking, drinking, drug abuse, self-harm, compulsive gambling, overeating, purging, self-starvation, and sexually risky behavior. Once you begin your journey to recovery, you will experience a wide range of thoughts and emotions. Some of these things may send you into a panic attack or make you feel out of control. For these reasons, it is very important for you to develop your self-comforting abilities. At the beginning, it is a good idea to have a list of self-soothing activities written down and available to you. In this way, when you begin to experience anxiety and tension in your journey, you can look at your list and find something to help take you out of the anxiety and refocus on the present. For more on self comforting, please see the Survivor to Thriver Manual, pg. 32.

Each survivor is unique as is their journey to healing. Please take the time to find the self comforting techniques that work for you. If you are finding that you are having a difficult time with self soothing, please reach out to a person on your support list. If you do not feel that you can do that, please contact your therapist or an emergency hotline in your area. The Resources page on this blog lists some local Pennsylvania resources as well as some national resources. Please know that you are not alone. There are many survivors out there. The journey may be bumpy now, but you are making progress. You can do this! I believe in you!

Crisis Mode Stabilization

Prior to starting my own journey from Survivor to Thriver, I did not have much semblance of calm in my day to day life.  Each day began with dread and a sense of impending doom.  How would today turn out? Could I get through today without breaking down and dissolving into tears?  If I did break down, how long would it take me to get it under control and regain some measure of functionality?  It was terrifying!  More than that, it was a constant reminder that I was still not in control.  As Survivors know, control is a huge issue for us.  We had no control during our abuse and were not taught how to be in control.  So we have grown into these out of control adults who don’t know how to take care of ourselves. 

The Survivor to Thriver Manual by The Morris Center discusses “crisis mode (p. 28),” “Many survivors find themselves functioning in "crisis mode," responding with stopgap measures that do nothing to resolve the underlying issues. As a result, each new crisis consumes precious energy and attention, and the task of resolving the underlying issues is ignored. Living life in "crisis mode" is truly exhausting and dispiriting. After years, it can lead to discouragement, helplessness and hopelessness.”  Recovery really is possible.  However, to give yourself the best chance at recovery, you should settle as many of the crises in your life as possible before beginning this journey.  By taking this step, you can reduce the frequency of the crises in your life and take the energy and attention that would have been taken up by yet another stopgap measure and focus that on your recovery.

 

Chapter Two of The Survivor to Thriver Manual discusses Safety First.  You should ALWAYS feel safe in your recovery.  If you do not feel safe, physically, mentally and emotionally, it will be very difficult for you to make the changes needed to progress with your recovery.  Please take the time to read Chapter Two (p. 17) in the Survivor to Thriver Manual and work the assessments and checklists honestly.  Only you can honestly answer these questions.  If you are less than honest with your answers, you may not feel as safe as you could when starting this process. 

Deciding that it is time to become not just a survivor but a thriver is not an easy one.  Fear seems to rear its head whenever we try to take back the parts of us that were taken by our abusers.  In times of fear or uncertainty during my journey, I would frequently think of the quote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger. -Friedrich Nietzsche”   I survived my abuse.  If I can survive that, then I can survive my recovery.  More recently I have found another quote about fear which speaks volumes.  Are you going to run or are you going to rise?  

Renewing Self Trust

Self trust is something we learn pretty early to not rely on.  Children are more open to seeing spirits, yet these things are explained away by parents or care givers who can't see them or don't believe in them.  So as a child, you learn to not trust what you see.  Similarly, a child who is in an abusive situation be it mentally, emotionally, physically or sexually, is taught that their innate sense of self worth is not important.  Abusers tear down the self trust and self worth of their victims whereby they are taught to not trust what they think or feel to serve the abuser's agenda. They also employ fear tactics to keep their abuse secret.

As an adult, who has learned to not trust their own instincts and intuition, many of us find it very difficult to navigate life.  We may find we make many "incorrect" decisions, then in the pattern of our abuse, we blame ourselves and beat ourselves up.  Sometimes, we don't even understand that we are perpetuating these patterns until someone else points them out to us.  I was in that pattern until the man who would be my husband pointed them out to me.  It was a terrifying realization to come to, that I had no idea I was repeating these patterns, let alone figuring out how to go about healing that part of me.

By the grace of God, I found a therapist who was safe and helped me regain my self trust and the belief that I "could" heal.  However, during one of our first sessions, he said to me, "the best way to find a good, reputable therapist is not by picking a name out of a phone book," which is precisely what I did.  Yet on some level, I trusted that I would find what I needed.

At one point during my healing process, I was advised to try out support groups because some survivors find them a helpful tool.  This time, I researched the support groups in my area and settled on one to give a try.  My first and only meeting did not go well.  I felt attacked and judged and the mediator did nothing.  I did not try any other support groups since I did not have confidence that I could find one that I would fit into.  One key for me was actually listening to myself about not going back.  I did have an internal battle about intellectually being told that it would help, but on my gut, intuitive, self trust level, I knew it wasn't for me.  That was my first step in trusting myself again.  Taking the time to actually listen to myself and allow myself to trust that the churning feeling I got every time I thought about going back to that support group meant that I shouldn't go.  

As each survivor knows, healing is not an easy process.  Sometimes, it's down right scary.  One of the most important things you can do for yourself, no matter where you are in your process, is to begin to trust your inner voice.  Your gut feelings will never lead you astray.  In the beginning, you may experience some conflict between what you have been told and what your gut tells you.  It is important that you discern whether your thoughts are echos of things you have been told in the past, especially when they conflict with what your gut feelings are telling you.

This article gives some practical advice on how to develop self trust 3 Ways to Develop Self Trust.