Healing From Abuse

Hey everyone!  I just wanted to get on and type a bit more about abuse, but thought I should dive into the healing process.  Of course healing is different for everyone so I just wanted to share my own experience and what worked for me.

Trusting Person

The first part of healing was to find someone that I should be able to trust.  Someone who never let me down before, who was honest and for me it was my best friend Jeff.  We were friends in High School and he had left an abusive marriage and so did I and we became best friends.  We could vent about everything and we actually understood each other.  I needed a friend to start to practice overcoming my triggers.

Triggers

I am not going to lie, triggers can be so overwhelming and scary.  Each one brought back fear, insecurity, frustration and sadness.  For example, if I am ever a passenger in a car and I don't know where the driver is going, I become afraid and frustrated.  My abuser would always do that, and even though it is a whole new driver with no intention of hurting me, I become afraid anyways.  It is as if I can't control my emotions.  

Overcoming Triggers

 To over come a trigger it took a lot of work and effort.  How I was able to overcome nearly all of them was to work through them.  I would carry a notebook and whenever a trigger came up, I would write down what the situation was, what my emotions were, and then keep writing until I figured out what the source was.  It could take pages and pages of writing.  Once I knew the source I would then write what is different now from then.   It has helped me through so many.  But 9 years later and I still have 3 that I struggle with to over come.  But I am patient and still working on them.

Practice

Lastly was to practice.  I had my best friend and I practiced all the time on him.  I started this on long bike rides where I would be on the brink of tears and overcome with fear, but I would ask if we could stop to take some pictures of plants and stuff.  I didn't really care about the pictures I just cared that I got him to stop and he didn't get upset or yell at me or anything.  I did this over and over until I proved that this situation was safe and I was no longer afraid.  Then I went onto the next trigger and so on and so on until I had overcame as many as I could.