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A Way to Take Growth and Survival From the Experience of Abuse How to Survive And Thrive After Being Abused This is about being practical and wise. This is about a path and a perspective - not the path, not the perspective, just a path and a perspective. I can't take this. It's too much. I can't live through what happened. 1. Notice it's done and you're still here to tell. Whatever happened, whatever you did, it is done. Yes, there may be feelings and memories to deal with. But what happened has happened and now it is done. I hate having to worry about danger - I never had to before. 2. Yes, you now know life is dangerous and people get hurt. And yes, a lot of people seem to get to go through their lives without having to find this out. Some of them never will find out and some have a big surprise coming. But life is not ruined because your eyes are open to its dangers. Life can still be fun - danger or not. I can't get safe! I have to get myself safe! 3. Yes, it is true - you can't keep yourself safe. But that's the deal for us all, no matter what. There is only more safe or less safe but nobody is completely safe. If you could build a shelter as big as a planet, even the planets are not safe as they hurdle through space. You're not able to be safe but you know you survive. That is more than many can say. I feel an overwhelming feeling of being guilty. 4. Okay, so you feel guilty about stuff. Just because you feel guilty doesn't mean it means much. Guilt is just a feeling - enough is enough. Guilt is a primitive mechanism that helps memorize things we want to avoid in the future. The only positive purpose of guilt is to set up a little warning alarm that goes off before you make a particular move again in the future (one that has worked out badly in the past). For most people, after being abused they go over and over in their heads about all that happened. Mostly that's just the guilt machinery trying to work in a situation where it won't. Dealing with the mindless automatic workings of the brain is dealing with a glitch - UNLESS you think you should feel guilt. The glitch is one thing and will be dealt with in other places in this article and on this website. But is you believe you should be feeling guilty, get past it. That's crap. (The worst of the crap in this category of guilt is when a person feels guilty that their body responded with pleasure at some point during rape. This is not one's body or libido betraying them. This is their body working as wired - as meant to by their DNA. It's just a mind-bending thing that happens lots of the time. Be assured that if this happened to you, it was better than the alternative - an experience so completely awful and sadistic that there was no possible moment that an accidental touch might feel good.) I feel nauseously guilty about things I did. 5. If you've done stuff you wished that perhaps you had not - (you wore the wrong clothes, you went the wrong place, you didn't say "no", you should have stayed home, whatever) - just remember the advice that Jesus gave the woman that nobody would stone ("Go and sin no more"). Do better in future - that's the best you can do. Making yourself a worse person because you feel you screwed up is just screwing up on top of screwing up. Two wrongs don't make a right. I am the only one who has to feel like this. 6. So, okay, now you see and feel different about life compared to others you see walking around. First of all, that doesn't mean that you do. Sometimes people learn not to openly display how they feel. But even if you do feel differently than others around, being different is not bad. Diamonds and roses are expensive because they are rare. See yourself as a leper and you feel quite diseased. See yourself as like an alien, crash landed on Earth, needing to keep hidden, with special knowledge that others don't know - then you can feel a bit special and not feel like you're crud. I am damaged goods now. 7. Okay, you are now much more complicated - especially about trust and intimacy. This is a common complaint. I have even seen teens complain that they were uncomfortable having casual sex like their friends. This is completely dumb - though quite normal - to put yourself through. In most of our fairy tales when a princess wants to wed, she sets a bunch of strange, twisted quests that her suitors must accomplish before they can have her hand. This is all that you need to think of when dealing with this - being a prince or a princess who must find a great love that is willing to go through all sorts of complications to marry and partner. Having experienced traumas that hurt the ability to freely be sexual, intimate or trusting is not bad. It makes one more complex. This is like the difference between a $3 padlock and a $300 padlock. One is much easier to pick but that doesn't make it a better lock. It's better to be complicated, complex and to have all sorts of warning signals and make you think things through. I want to be NORMAL! 8. Get past wanting "normal". It's an awful goal. Normal isn't happy or functional or cool. In all likelihood, where you are now is normal. A better goal is being abnormal - better, more complex, more thinking, more cool. God hates me. I am being punished. 9. see life as a challenge not a punishment or hate. See life as a challenge - a training - and pencil in the idea that whatever you deal with is your personal program for betterment. There is as much evidence of that as any other of the ten thousands of theories. And, as a theory of life is about, it feel a lot better than feeling it's erratic and dangerous. Deciding you are being punished is a lousy perspective on life - but even if you go with that, remember to accept that if you do your time you get rehabilitation. Deciding God hates you is also a crappy thing to decide. Why? Because you have a bad time? It makes no sense to think that all the children and other innocents that are hurt deserve what they get or that God is just angry and wants them to hurt. It can make sense, on the other hand, that some people have terrible challenges because on the scale of eternity this has some positive consequence. (Imagine, for example, how cool it would be to eat dinners through eternity if you died from starvation. Imagine how you would appreciate loved ones if all of them were taken from you in this life. Imagine how you would enjoy just sitting doing nothing if you died building a pyramid or an unfeeling pharaoh.) Nobody knows how all this works but there is no reason to assume you have screwed cosmically up. I hate being so screwed up and having to think so much. 10. Being mental is good and can make you smarter overall. Being forced to think a lot about life and your self - about feelings and reactions and actions and such - is a positive outcome. "The things that don't kill us make us strong," it is said. I don't actually believe that, but I do believe that the things that don't kill us push us to deal more intensely with life and we either get stronger and smarter or weaker and dumb. And usually we can be rehabilitated if we go for strategies that result in being weaker and dumb. The nightmares are awful, the flashbacks are hell. 11. Nightmares and flashbacks are terrible to deal with - try to limit them lots (shows and stories). Nightmares are a nightmare and flashbacks are worse and they happen for the rest of your life. But they happen less and less if you let yourself watch and be careful about what you might put in your brain. The flashbacks and nightmares are consequences of your brain thinking things through and there will be less and less as time helps you heal. But what happens to many is they become fascinated with shows and with stories like theirs and each time you watch a movie or read a book that reminds you of your trauma, you will have nightmares and flashbacks for awhile afterwards. The nightmares are awful, the flashbacks are hell. 12. Nightmares and flashbacks are terrible to deal with - try to limit them lots (people and predators). Nightmares are a nightmare and flashbacks are too. And they represent your brain thinking - trying to think some things through. If you meet a new person and he triggers these off, pay attention and think carefully and be certain he's not triggering the warnings set up in your brain. If you find that a person wears the same kind of shoe and this triggers a flashback and some nightmares, that is probably just a glitch and once you find that there is no abuse coming, the nightmares and flashbacks will settle. On the other hand, if you meet a person that acts in the same insensitive ways that someone who hurt you used to act, then pay attention and thank your flashbacks and nightmares and get some distance from that person. He says he doesn't want to pay for my former boyfriend's mistakes. 13. If a person tells you that he wants not to have to deal with your past, dump him. We are all who we have been and what we've been through. Any guy who tells a woman, for example, that he doesn't want to have to deal with her sensitivities because she has been abused is essentially saying a)I want you as dumb as your former abusive boyfriend found you and b)I only want part of you, not all of you. This is like a guy saying to a gal that he really likes her but not her right shoulder. We all come as package deals. You cannot delete part of you. All the way or the hi way. I hate needing counseling. 14. It isn't the worst thing in the world to see a therapist. Come on. Give me a break. Why does it have to be such a trauma that you need to see a counselor. We're not so bad. What kind of stigma-perpetuating crap is that? This attitude is almost as bad as being embarrassed about being assaulted. Contribution made possible by Dr. Glenn Johnson PhD @ http://www.head-cleaners.com More articles, Hypnosis CD's, MP3's, and Tapes are available through Dr. J's Website.

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