How to Reach Your Healing Goals
Summer is almost here and we are already on month 6 of the year, I can’t believe it. Now is the perfect time to review your healing progress, to check in with yourself and the tools you’ve been using and what’s working for you and what isn’t.
But first, I want to celebrate you for your commitment to your healing. I know it can feel like two steps forward, one step back sometimes. Remember to not focus on what you didn't accomplish. Because that's not important. The only thing that matters is what you did accomplish. I know you had several victories so far (even the smallest changes can be HUGE victories in the healing journey) and I hope you celebrated them. If you haven’t, do that now. You deserve it!
What healing goal did you set for 2019? It’s easy for abuse survivors to forget change is a growth process and that part of healing is to learn to trust the process. The journey is the healing, not just the destination.
Survivors often ask me if...
The Dangers of Running on Autopilot
Even though I have been on my healing journey for years and have come a long way, I can still fall into old patterns of resistance, old habits that reflect who I was, not who I am now. Even after all this time, I sometimes need gentle reminders that I have taken up these old habits. Sometimes that gentle reminder comes from someone else, sometimes it comes from my compassionate adult self. The thing that helps me stay compassionate and not immediately turn to shaming and judging myself is my awareness of automatic patterns and habits, also known as running on “autopilot,” and I hope that by sharing this information with you, it can help you move forward with compassion for yourself, once you understand that it isn’t always your fault when you resist change and revert to old habits. Because until we become aware of our automatic patterns and habits, change is very difficult, sometimes impossible.
Most of our day to day behaviors and actions are done on an automatic...
How to Give Your Kids What You Never Had
As child abuse survivors, we work really hard to do the best we can with our children. We want them to have what we didn’t. So we try to create a healthy, nourishing environment to help our kids grow and thrive in the best way possible.
But after working all day, sometimes there isn’t much left of us for our children. That used to bother me a lot. I felt like I wasn’t giving my kids 100% of what they needed from me.
Finally, I realized I was trying to give them what “I” felt they needed, not what “they” feel they needed. They didn’t need a mother who ran herself ragged every day, trying to be a supermom. All they wanted was what I needed when I was a child: to be seen, heard, understood, and validated.
How do you make this happen for your children?
You simply do less and listen more. In fact, the less you say the better. Instead, listen intently to whatever your kids want to tell you. Ask questions when appropriate and make...