If this gap feeling describes where you are in your healing, turn your gaze around from looking at the goal and how far it may be to how much further along you are on that path than you were 1, 3, or 5 years ago.
You might be surprised by how far you’ve come in that time. You might even take a moment to feel proud of yourself.
You have to see what happened for what it is. That includes seeing that it was a decision made by someone else and not something you deserved or attracted to yourself in any way. You were a child. Your abuser made a decision to abuse you sexually. That’s the truth of it.
That is the start of healing.
Maybe, instead of blaming people for overreacting, we should consider for a moment why they do not feel safe. And instead of beating ourselves up for overreacting, we consider how to ground ourselves and remind ourselves of our safety when the need arises.
As survivors, our healing depends on our ability to create a life where we feel safe. That means both being in a safe place and learning to recognize that safety to get out of this constant survival mode. That mode is not sustainable. It was never meant to be a constant state of being.
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As children in an abusive situation, we may have learned a lot of things that helped us survive that situation. Outside of that situation, as adults, however, it may be time to unlearn some of those things.
For example, we can’t learn to trust a person as an adult until we first unlearn that “fact” we took from childhood that no one was to be trusted. We can’t learn to love ourselves until we unlearn the blame and shame we took upon ourselves due to the abuse.
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