Healing From Sexual Violence
Meditating is an action, something you do. It’s not about practicing a particular religion or spiritual system. Whether you are a religious person or non-religious, I can guarantee you’ve meditated and called it something else. Most religious people call it prayer. Most non-religious people call it staring off into space …
If we choose to work on forgiving the people who harm us, many survivors find themselves trying to understand why the perpetrator did what they did. So we go through mental gymnastics trying to understand, explain, rationalize the irrational actions of another person. First we blame ourselves: We …
Here’s what happens when you practice intentional grounding. You become as mighty as an oak tree. Oaks start out as tiny acorns, the fruit of the tree. In early spring (May here in Minnesota), the breeze helps pollinate the oaks’ flowers and the acorns grow through gentle rains and wild …
Trauma survivors can uniquely identify with the pain of the world. We have felt helpless and victimized, so when we see pain in the media or in our everyday lives, we instantly recognize the physical sensations and spiritual hopelessness others are experiencing. We want to rescue others from that darkness. …
Sometimes, it seems like nobody understands, nobody listens, nobody is around when we need them. We get overwhelmed by grief and tears. If we did have someone there, we wouldn’t be able to talk anyway because the sadness is so big. So we cry until we stop crying and don’t …
I believe that self-kindness leads to self-compassion, which leads to self-acceptance. For people who’ve experienced the deeply personal trauma of sexual violence, it can be very, very hard to be kind to yourself, let alone being compassionate or accepting. Survivors often fall into traps of self-blame, self-pity and self-harming. We …
One day I was talking with a client who should have been doing so much better. She was six months sober, had a safe place to live, had found a new church home, and was generally upbeat about where life was going. Yet that day she was drowning in the …
When we talk about how harm affects us in violence survivor communities, it’s almost always about how other people’s harmful actions have affected victims. The many symptoms of PTSD. The lingering anxiety and depression. Unregulated emotions. There is definitely a cause-and-effect between traumatic experiences and the continued and often uncontrollable …
Sometimes trauma survivors write letters to the people who harmed them, and it can be very healing. Sending the letters is another matter; it may be re-traumatizing to send a letter and deal with the aftermath if the letter isn’t received like you want it to be. So, stick to …
More thoughts on emotional bad habits, and how those bad habits are actually trauma reactions that get stuck. Emotional bad habits are harmful and sometimes compulsive overreactions to life circumstances and relationships. Your kid leaves the cap off the toothpaste AGAIN even though you’ve told him 50,000 times, so your …
