Sharing – If Healing After Abuse Was Easy, Everyone Would Do It
Suzanna’s article below is about domestic abuse as an adult, but I think a lot of it also applies to survivors of childhood abuse as well. Not all of it, but nuggets like this seem very familiar to me:
“Looking at the past brings shame, judgment. No one wants to be a victim. It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating. Yet how are we to survive something if we are not first a victim to it? The actual shame and blame belong to our abuser, yet to get to that realization it always seems to pass through us first.”
We see that shame play out in numerous ways, sometimes in severe lack of self-value and self-respect, sometimes in angry outbursts, sometimes in depression, and other times in hypervigilance.
I believe each of those reactions is tied to shame, and a misunderstanding of what happened. That, instead of seeing that we were abused because someone else decided to abuse us, we view the crime as something we either deserved or brought about through own own actions. Bad things like this happen for a reason after all, isn’t that what everyone says?
They’re wrong.
