Heal The Abuse - Recover Your Life, Jason Goodwin [ink book reader .txt] 📗

Respect in Relationships

H) Healthy Relationships

-I feel lost:

A) Hope

B) Goals

C) Depression

D) Grieving

-I feel vulnerable:

A) The Inner Child

B) Deserving Love

C) Low Self-Esteem

D) High Self-Esteem

E) Betrayal

F) Trust

-I feel bad about my body:

A) Body Image

B) Beyond Shame & Guilt

-I feel neglected:

A) Deserving Love

B) Low Self-Esteem

C) High Self-Esteem

D) Self-Care

-I feel powerless:

A) Powerlessness

B) Control

-I feel discouraged about relationships:

A) Anger

B) Betrayal

C) Trust

D) Forgiving

E) Unhealthy Relationships

F) Respect in Relationships

G) Healthy Relationships

-I feel ashamed or guilty:

A) Body Image

B) Beyond Shame and Guilt

C) Trust

D) Values

-I feel resentful:

A) Dealing With Pain

B) Self-Sabotage

C) Body Image

D) Beyond Shame & Guilt

E) Depression

F) Grieving

G) The Inner Child

H) Deserving Love

I) Powerlessness

J) Control

K) Anger

L) Betrayal

M) Trust

N) Forgiving

O) Unhealthy Relationships

P) Respect in Relationships

Q) Healthy Relationships

Chapter 1 –Hope

“Hopelessness is a question of despair, not aproduct of reality.”

-Jason Goodwin

Hope, for survivors of sexual abuse, meansbelieving that our lives will improve if we keep working on ourissues. It’s like that old saying. “If life gives you lemons, makelemonade.” But there’s something I want to add to this saying, andI want you to remember it. “If you’re not getting lemonade, it’sbecause you’re not squeezing your lemons hard enough.”

Sexual abuse can feel like a big pile oflemons. There have been times in my life when I felt too tired, toostressed, too discouraged, too hopeless, too angry, or too afraidto work on my issues. And the longer I avoided doing this work, themore painful my life became. Eventually, that pile of lemonsstarted looking pretty good to me, because I wound up with a bigpile of something else.

Hope is the belief that if we keep working onour issues, they will get better, we will feel better, andeventually we will work through whatever issues we struggle withtoday.

To begin this process, we must believe thatwe can heal. Some of us have felt so broken by the sexual abusethat we came to believe we could never heal our pain.

“I’m a screw-up,” we said. “Look at myrelationships. I let people walk all over me. I keep going out withpeople who disrespect me and abuse me. I feel so terrible aboutmyself. I feel so damaged. I don’t believe I can ever heal.”

Yet sexual abuse is simply a wound. A verydeep, very painful wound. When we try to self-medicate our painwith alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sexual addiction, pornography,prostitution, overeating, or a hundred other compulsive behaviors,this wound becomes infected. It is a wound that needs to bleed. Itis a wound that needs great care if it is ever to heal.

Chances are you are like me. You spent themajority of your life trying to run from this problem. You tried tocover it up or ignore it, hoping beyond hope that it would somehowjust go away. But the truth is that sexual abuse issues do not“just go away.”

We may have felt confused in the past. Evenif we wanted to heal our pain, we may have been unsure of where toturn. There are few good books on the subject, and few counselorswho deal effectively with the issues of sexual abuse. In today’ssociety, there is a great deal of stigma attached to having beenabused. Instead of healing, we try to ignore the way we feel, orattempt to numb our feelings with addictions and other compulsivebehaviors.

Some of us reached the place where webelieved it was hopeless. The deck was stacked against us. We weresexually abused. Tainted. We would never heal these issues becauseit was impossible. We were doomed to repeating the same awfulrelationships and the same self-destructive behaviors for theremainder of our lives.

There is something you need to know. You canheal the pain of sexual abuse. You can heal your life. It ispossible. I promise that if you truly do some soul-searching, somecrying, and some letting go, you will make progress. What you gainfrom this experience will depend on how hard you are willing towork. Personally, I held nothing back. I chose to keep learning andkeep growing.

Many of the ideas presented in this book mayseem strange to you at first. Some of the exercises may seem toodifficult.

But within these pages are the seeds ofchange. If your garden is full of rocks and the soil is too hard,it is difficult for those seeds to take root. The garden of ourheart needs to be tilled. We need to nurture ourselves with thefertilizer of self-love and the sunshine of self-care. We must giveour garden the water of knowledge and begin to pull the weeds ofshame.

A beautiful garden does not blossomovernight, but throughout the springtime of our healing process.Health and growth are cultivated over time.

When we feel hopeless, we should askourselves, “How did I get to this hopeless place? Have I felt agreat deal of anger, sadness, pain, or fear in the past? Have Ifelt guilty or ashamed because of what happened to me? Have I feltthat I was somehow to blame for the abuse?”

Hopelessness is a question of despair, not aproduct of reality. In truth, our lives are never hopeless. We canalways grow. We can experience our feelings and change ourbehaviors. When we tell ourselves that life is hopeless, it isbecause we feel like giving up, not because life is ever, trulyhopeless.

So what can make us feel like giving up? Isit easier to try and avoid our pain? Is it easier to act out ouraddictions than to work through our issues? Have we been told by afamily member, friend, or perpetrator that we should just, “Getover it?” Have we been told that the abuse was our fault, or thatwe were acting or dressing too provocatively?

Perhaps we feel hopeless about a behavior wecan’t seem to change. We keep getting into abusive relationships ordoing drugs. We keep engaging in addictive sex, spending moneycompulsively, or overeating. Maybe the negative patterns in ourlives seem to repeat themselves endlessly.

Hopelessness builds up in our lives when wefail to address the real issue. If we do not change our negativepatterns, they will continue to hold us back.

If we choose unhealthy partners, we end up inthe same, unhealthy relationships. If we stuff our feelings insteadof healing our pain, we continue to spiral downwards.

Often the reason people remain trapped intheir problems is because they