You’re reading 7 Nuggets to Help You Take Control of Your Life After Abuse, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
If you have been abused, it is very likely that you will feel the effects of that abuse in all your future relationships. It could be with your spouse, your friends, your family, and your children. Imagine what it would be like if you could be free from the memories of that abuse – if you could see the world the same as someone who had a normal childhood.
1. Love and Trust
Abuse teaches children that the abusive behavior is normal. When children are abused by people who say they love them, they come to connect love with pain, fear, domination, and secrecy. As those children grow up, they encounter others who say they love them and want to comfort them. The very feeling of being loved is connected to the emotions of fear and dread.
Children are not able to distinguish between the behavior of one trusted adult and another. If one adult is able to do hurtful things, it seems that all adults can do hurtful things. The abuse survivor learn to be suspicious of platonic adult relationships.
When people are abused, they often don’t even realize how the abuse affects their interactions with other people. They think that people are only nice to them when they want something from them, but they think that this is true of everyone and that people who trust others are simply naive.
Abuse survivors often become self-destructive and isolationist, and many times they truly cannot understand why other people are not equally suspicious of others. The memories become so deeply ingrained that the abuse survivors do not even realize that those memories are affecting their current beliefs and habits.
If you are an abuse survivor, you might think that these habits and traits cannot be erased. The good news is, it is possible to take back control and to learn to trust the people who love you.
2. Family Interactions
Psychologists have compared childhood abuse with the trauma soldiers experience in war. Just like soldiers, too, abused children develop survival skills such as resilience, courage, and inner strength. However, these skills come at a terrible price.
Abuse survivors see the family as a single unit, and they see suffering as the price that has to be paid for being part of the family unit. They often see adults as compassion less tyrants, and they feel powerless against adults, even once they themselves become adults.
As abuse survivors grow up, they may develop problems with authority, or they may find it difficult to gain the confidence and self-respect they need as adults to be able to function in the real world.
3. A Mother’s Love
Children depend on their mothers to make everything better, but this idea does not ring true to survivors of abuse. Even when the mother did not know anything about the abuse, the child often interprets the abuse as a failure on the part of the mother to protect the child. This may grow into resentment as the child grows up.
Frequently, abuse survivors avoid being dependent on others in their adult lives. When they do have to depend on others, they often feel helplessness and anger, or they may even become depressed or develop panic attacks. Abuse survivors are likely to try to get out of any situation that starts to seem stressful or dangerous.
4. Hyper-awareness
You may often believe that it is your fault that you got abused. You internalize the concept of punishment and think that you are suffering because you are a bad person. This belief causes enormous harm as abused children become adults.
Because of the experience, abuse survivors tend to become hyper-aware of other people’s moods. They connect heightened emotions in other people with the threat of punishment. They become distressed at even the smallest conflict or confrontation, and they want to remove themselves as soon as possible from such situations.
5. Psychological Barriers
One of the most common coping mechanisms for survivors of physical abuse is the building up of psychological barriers. This process is known as dissociation, and it happens when people create a barrier (dissociation) between their “true selves” and their bodies. So someone else might be abusing their bodies, but their “true selves” are somewhere else.
Dissociation is a serious psychological problem, though it is completely understandable why it develops in abuse survivors. In adulthood, survivors are likely to have a psychological barrier between themselves and other people. This causes intimacy problems, can cause panic reactions at being touched, and ultimately can cause major problems in relationships.
If you are aware of having barriers like this in your relationships, you can take comfort in the knowledge that you can make choices now to remove those barriers and enjoy a better life starting today!
6. Healthy Boundaries
Many abuse survivors fear all people and avoid all relationships. Many others, though, find that the abuse makes it harder for them to set healthy boundaries.
They are more likely to let other people treat them badly because they do not know what is normal and healthy in relationships. They are thus more likely to enter into abusive relationships as an adult, thus perpetuating the cycle.
7. Changing Your Outlook
If you are an abuse survivor, you are not doomed to repeat the same patterns that your previous abuse caused! You can change your outlook by changing the effects that your memories have on you.
The first step is to understand that not everyone sees relationships and other people in the same way. This realization can help you begin to develop non-destructive feelings toward yourself and others, and can help you start to change your outlook.
You already have the persistence and courage to have gotten this far. These positive qualities can work for you and help you learn to respond to situations and people in new ways. This is a skill you can learn and it will help you free up from the trap of your own memories of abuse.
8. The Mind Resonance Process
About a decade ago, scientists discovered that it is actually possible to clear away bad memories. This means you can restore your mind to the way it was before the damage was done. Through this process, you can become free from feelings of shame and guilt. Any emotional scarring you have from your past will no longer affect how you feel and act in the present.
You can completely eliminate the self-doubt and self-hatred that is so common among abuse survivors. You can learn to judge yourself by a different, healthier set of criteria. When you talk to others, you will no longer respond based on your negative assumptions and your bad memories.
As a child, you depend on adults to help you learn right from wrong and true from false. An adult is no longer bound by the barriers created from that experience. You can learn the truth for yourself and take control of your own life. You can get rid of those negative memories that are holding you back, and you can give yourself a better future with the Mind Resonance Process.
Adoga Godwin is a inspirational writer and art educator who loves to help other improve on themselves.
You’ve read 7 Nuggets to Help You Take Control of Your Life After Abuse, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Sig Nordal 