Some child abuse survivors are so used to believing certain things about themselves that, although they want to heal, they also don’t want to try new strategies to heal. To quote Dr. Phil,
If you keep doing the same things that you have always done, you will keep getting the same results that you have always gotten. ~ Dr. Phil McGraw
If you want to change the course of your life, you have to make changes. You cannot choose to keep thinking the same thoughts and doing the same things but still expect to change the course of your life. To change the direction of a ship, you need to turn the steering wheel. It might take a long time to see that your course is changing, but it isn’t going to change at all until you choose to do some changing yourself.
The big picture view of how to heal from child abuse is pretty simple – You need to love and accept every part of yourself (your memories, experiences, emotions, feelings, etc.). It really is that simple. Unfortunately, simple is not the same thing as easy.
If you are on a course that keeps you moving away from this goal, then you are not going to achieve the healing you are hoping for. You have to find a way to change direction and move toward this goal. What that means in the details is going to be different from person to person. For me, this means carving time out of each day to do yoga and meditation. I am setting aside daily time to do something loving and healing for myself.
For someone else, doing yoga might be the worst possible idea, but perhaps taking time to do expressive art is the way to go. For another, it might be committing to therapy, talking about what happened, or going for a trip to an amusement park. It might be something big like fulfilling a lifelong dream to climb a mountain, or it might be something as simple as allowing yourself to enjoy an ice cream cone without telling yourself that you are a terrible person who is going to get fat by eating the ice cream.
You might have to try different strategies to find the one (or, more likely, a combination of several) that work for you. You might come up with something for yourself that nobody else has even thought of. For example, I knew one child abuse survivor whose need to be rocked as a baby was never met. She bought herself a hammock and experienced a huge leap in healing by rocking herself in it.
The important thing is that you risk trying something new. If you keep doing the same things you always have, you are not going to see much progress in healing from child abuse.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 
I took up dance class
Lilo,
I missed this response. Good Effort!
thx!
For us it was we all need and needed to express. In one way what could not expressed as the memories were stored in our in our reptilian brain in another it was expressed as PTSD. Perhaps the reptilian brain expressing danger.
The mental health field typically does the same thing over and over again and accepts the results as positive. In my opinion observing a person at their worst and using that as a baseline to measure improvement and therefore success or relegating self to how the person functions in society. Never daring to think the person can be “happy”, that they need to be resigned to coping.
Self soothing for me leads to memories coming into my consciousness so the end result is not self soothing. For a long time I blamed myself for self soothing not working when in fact it was I just had trauma that I needed to remember and then process and it was actually working.
I was in a cycle of practicing self soothing and then having the memories start to come into my consciousness not knowing how to process them and then wondering why I stopped my practice of self soothing. Had I listened I would have heard from others that I was self sabotaging when in fact I was trying to learn to heal and failing.
Although far from liner I now self sooth knowing that this will allow memories to come into my consciousness (Doing better so I can do worse.)and the result will be the hard and confusing work of therapy. This is caused by choices I did not make.
I then self sooth to recover from the work of therapy then the work of therapy starts again. Repeat until done.
Art is soothing and exciting to me. Expressive therapy is anything but. Expressive therapy is not about expressing the now, I do that by living my life now. Expressive therapy is about expressing what happened that caused my body to develop and grow into PTSD.
I wonder if a person is a child and they are soothed it is different for them and they are projecting that on those that were not.
“Something New” is very key for me. For if I try anything that resembles my past in any way, even if it was something fun, it has the opposite effect, even to the point of making me feel like life is not worth living. When I find something completed detached from anything I have known before, then it can become exciting and a happy and challenging experience. Basically, it has to be void of the presence of triggers. Yoga and jogging are both new things that I had never done before and go a long way to help enhance my mood and take me out of the past and fully into the presence.
I have definitely found it hard to love and accept myself at times through this process. Especially in the beginning of remembering, trying to treat myself kindly just made me feel worse- it felt false somehow. I always think about as the child withing needing to be cared for by me, the adult. The child withing didn’t need hot baths and nice words, she needed to be able to trust that I would protect her, and make her needs a priority. I found the thing that I needed the most was to be willing to set boundaries with people. Every time I did something out of a sense of obligation to other people I was hurting myself (and that girl). When I became willing to say no, and to spend my time and energy in the way I needed to, I built up a level of trust with myself. It was hard to do at first- e.g. telling my family I wasn’t going ‘home’ for Christmas when I didn’t appear to have a ‘good’ reason not to (I’ve always been way too concerned with other people’s feelings). It’s an ongoing practice but gets easier all the time. And I notice that other people treat me with more respect and consideration than they did when I was a nice door mat. I think this has been an incredibly important step in my healing.
In terms of self-soothing, when I was feeling my worst I used to get into bed and watch my favorite tv shows on dvd- sometimes for hours at a time. At first I felt like I shouldn’t be doing this… was afraid I’d spend the rest of my life watching tv. But it felt good. Once I accepted it as totally okay (my therapist assured me I would not do this forever!) the soothing effect was huge and it felt like a real treat. Just had to squelch that voice that was telling me to stop being lazy, get it together, etc. That voice is not nice and is no longer allowed. 🙂
Hi Christine,
Wow, I can absolutely totally relate to your post. It wasn’t until about 12 months ago I realized I needed to finally trust myself. Once my inner child knew she could trust me to protect her, stand up for her, set boundaries for her, nurture her, etc…did I feel a profound sense of healing. And guess what helped me….setting healthy boundaries with EVERYONE in my life. Until then, I didn’t realize how important boundaries are for healthy relationships. Even setting boundaries with myself is healthy. I mean it is KEY! The two things I finally did differently that made a difference:
1) TRUST myself to make the best decisions for ME.
2) Setting healthy boundaries.
These made a huge, huge difference in my healing process.
Christine
I understand things in the way you have put it here, when you say:
“The child withing didn’t need hot baths and nice words, she needed to be able to trust that I would protect her, and make her needs a priority.”
The self-soothing ‘industry’ can be distracting from healing, and many of its tools are not of much use to people on very limited money as many survivors are (not that we shouldn’t be proud of the things we are able to buy for ourselves and cherish them as deserved, but not all can afford gym membership or yoga classes etc…) I think healing can be simpler than this and it is as you say just focusing on what the child within needs, all the time. This is always new because every situation is new, it just feels repeated if sticking in old ways I think (and I am only just back into this but having this insight a lot lately). This newness feels abit like having free will for the first time!
At the moment I am having protracted problems with my employer but at every step, rather than trying to be ‘good enough’ or to heal them when they seem to be being unfair or to become paranoid and spend loads of energy worrying about outcomes I can’t control, all the time I am trying to say to myself: okay, as an adult I am doing my best to keep my job but have some time ‘off sick’ for healing but what does my inner child need? I thought being off for months I would have lots of time for walks in the park, yoga etc but it’s far from the truth – actually these check-ins with my inner child, often with support of counsellor or good friends, take nearly all my ‘free’ time. But I learn a lot about myself.
Trying new things has been central to our healing so far, we tried several different types of therapy until we found something that worked for us, and tried (and keep trying) loads of different self- and adjunct-therapies, most of which didn’t help, but some did and we keep going with them. Even journaling has taken a lot of experimenting before we actually found it useful.
Also relate to what Christine says about keeping the inner child safe, a big turning point recently for us was stopping listening to people (especially therapists) telling us we needed more friends and closer ones. Sure, it’d be nice, but what we really needed (and have finally started doing) is to stop bending over backwards to please everyone else, regardless of how they treat us, just so they’ll be our “friends”. Yep, boundaries, so that’s what they are! So, ok we lost a few “friends” and don’t have so many now, no one ever calls (but it’s ok cos we don’t expect them to) but at least we feel safe and don’t feel taken advantage of. And maybe, just maybe, some of the people we are friendly with will become real friends in the future.
I’ve read a lot of your posts and a lot of the comments and it feels relieving to find somebody else that’s like me. I have felt so alone in all this. Thank you so much for writing and sharing!
Hi, Fairy.
I am glad you found my blog! :0)
– Faith
[…] my blog entry entitled Being Willing to Try New Strategies after Child Abuse, some readers got into a discussion in the comments about the importance of setting boundaries. […]
I think I am in a bit of a panic! My therapist said he wondered if I could talk about my stuff & perhaps I wasn’t ready! I think he is going to end my therapy. Everything feels like it is on the surface but when I try to talk I just freeze. I need to move forward in therapy & don’t know how 😦