Heal The Abuse - Recover Your Life Read Free

at my
relationships. I let people walk all over me. I keep going out with
people who disrespect me and abuse me. I feel so terrible about
myself. I feel so damaged. I don’t believe I can ever heal.”
    Yet sexual abuse is simply a wound. A very
deep, very painful wound. When we try to self-medicate our pain
with 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. It
is a wound that needs great care if it is ever to heal.
    Chances are you are like me. You spent the
majority of your life trying to run from this problem. You tried to
cover it up or ignore it, hoping beyond hope that it would somehow
just go away. But the truth is that sexual abuse issues do not
“just go away.”
    We may have felt confused in the past. Even
if we wanted to heal our pain, we may have been unsure of where to
turn. There are few good books on the subject, and few counselors
who deal effectively with the issues of sexual abuse. In today’s
society, there is a great deal of stigma attached to having been
abused. Instead of healing, we try to ignore the way we feel, or
attempt to numb our feelings with addictions and other compulsive
behaviors.
    Some of us reached the place where we
believed it was hopeless. The deck was stacked against us. We were
sexually abused. Tainted. We would never heal these issues because
it was impossible. We were doomed to repeating the same awful
relationships and the same self-destructive behaviors for the
remainder of our lives.
    There is something you need to know. You can
heal the pain of sexual abuse. You can heal your life. It is
possible. I promise that if you truly do some soul-searching, some
crying, and some letting go, you will make progress. What you gain
from this experience will depend on how hard you are willing to
work. Personally, I held nothing back. I chose to keep learning and
keep growing.
    Many of the ideas presented in this book may
seem strange to you at first. Some of the exercises may seem too
difficult.
    But within these pages are the seeds of
change. 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 our
heart needs to be tilled. We need to nurture ourselves with the
fertilizer of self-love and the sunshine of self-care. We must give
our garden the water of knowledge and begin to pull the weeds of
shame.
    A beautiful garden does not blossom
overnight, but throughout the springtime of our healing process.
Health and growth are cultivated over time.
    When we feel hopeless, we should ask
ourselves, “How did I get to this hopeless place? Have I felt a
great deal of anger, sadness, pain, or fear in the past? Have I
felt guilty or ashamed because of what happened to me? Have I felt
that I was somehow to blame for the abuse?”
    Hopelessness is a question of despair, not a
product of reality. In truth, our lives are never hopeless. We can
always grow. We can experience our feelings and change our
behaviors. When we tell ourselves that life is hopeless, it is
because we feel like giving up, not because life is ever, truly
hopeless.
    So what can make us feel like giving up? Is
it easier to try and avoid our pain? Is it easier to act out our
addictions than to work through our issues? Have we been told by a
family member, friend, or perpetrator that we should just, “Get
over it?” Have we been told that the abuse was our fault, or that
we were acting or dressing too provocatively?
    Perhaps we feel hopeless about a behavior we
can’t seem to change. We keep getting into abusive relationships or
doing drugs. We keep engaging in addictive sex, spending money
compulsively, or overeating. Maybe the negative patterns in our
lives seem to repeat themselves endlessly.
    Hopelessness builds up in our lives when we
fail to address the real issue. If we do not change our negative
patterns, they will