Sharing – Ten Ways Boundaries Can Change Your Life for the Better
Healthy relationships have boundaries that are respected by everyone. Even if we didn’t see that growing up we can still learn to develop boundaries.
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Sharing – Generosity and Happiness
As the post below goes on to explain, it’s not just being generous financially that has this effect on us, it can also be giving time by volunteering, or helping out someone who can use it, cooking a meal for them, helping them clean, etc. All of these ways of giving to another human being helps that person, and it helps us. It’s good for us.
The other thing I’d like for many survivors to consider is finding a way to be generous during the holidays especially when you are struggling with the holidays to start with. Yes, I’ve seen many, many folks already starting to dread the holidays. They are estranged from their families, expect to spend the holidays alone, etc. It sucks, I won’t lie about that. But, consider finding a way to be generous, as a way to make the holidays a bit less lonely. Volunteer at a soup kitchen, or another place that may be serving holiday meals. Hop online and offer to chat with other folks in a similar situation over the holidays, make plans to get outside of your own situation, and find a way to give to someone else, even if it’s nothing more than time.
That might be the better option for the holidays compared to just waiting for them to be over if you can find a way to do it.
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Sharing – Other People Don’t Think You’re a Mess
The key is to have some compassion for yourself, similar to the compassion you might have for someone else in a vulnerable situation. When you can do that, suddenly what the other person does isn’t as important, you’ve given yourself grace, and acceptance.
As childhood abuse survivors, of course, this is tricky. Self-compassion is not generally one of our strengths. How could it be? All our lives we’ve been told that bad things happen either to bad people, or for a reason, and we’ve had something horrible happen to us, so we must be broken in some way to have had that experience. Didn’t we all think that way at one point or another? How could we not?
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Sharing – Validation Is Important in Supporting Trauma Survivors
It’s true, there are people all around you right now who have experienced horrific traumas in their lives, and the reason you don’t know is that they don’t feel safe talking about it. They’ve lived years, even decades, with this truth, only to be met with invalidating remarks like “Why can’t you just let it go?” or “you should be over that by now”, “it wasn’t that bad”, etc.
When your trauma, the thing you are struggling to overcome, is met with that kind of response you aren’t going to rush out to talk about it, which is a shame because talking about it to people who can be validating to us is one of the best ways to actually heal from it and have it no longer dominate our daily lives.
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Sharing – 5 Powerful Self-Care Tips for Abuse and Trauma Survivors
How often do I see survivors talking about being healed as if there’s some end where they are done and never have to think about the trauma again, and berating themselves for not having yet reached this state when it doesn’t really work that way. Self-care and learning never stop. We never reach a point where we know everything and live happily ever after. Real-life does not have a happily ever after, it has ups, downs, twists, and turns, and healing will not be any different.
