Surviving Rape: A Family Perspective
Our guest author, Blanche G, shares how one family [...]
Healing the Wounds of Sexual Abuse
How do you begin to heal the wounds from [...]
Understanding the Impact of Sexual Abuse
Do you believe the world’s culture is desensitized to [...]
When the Holiday Season Is Difficult: Secrets and Seasons of the Journey
Holiday Seasons can be difficult. When you hear, “Secrets [...]
Tackling the Shame Game
Shame is like a squatter in your mind. It enters unexpectedly and requires tremendous effort to evict it from the premises. Shame creeps up when you experience pain and feel life has not lived up to your expectations. It quickly established a presence in your psyche and creates a vicious cycle of limiting and toxic thinking.
There are steps you can take to rewrite the shame script. First, understand what the shame is trying to tell you. Although the noise has become distortive, shame is a signal that you have unresolved issues that require more attention for you to more fully heal and engaged with your life. As sexual abuse survivors, we might carry the unnecessary burden of shame for thoughts, behaviors, and actions that don’t belong to us. These thoughts are a transference of pain from being subjected to intense and personal manipulative violations. The good news is that you have the powerful ability to rewrite your story into something filled with more self-compassion and fulfillment. To help expel the shame from your psyche, try one or more the following exercises.
Surviving Shame
You might not be aware, but April is Sexual Abuse Awareness Month. To honor all survivors, we want to take a step back to help you look at your journey out of the dark and into wholeness. Here at Survivors to Thrivers, we seek to bring awareness and shine a light onto the shame, silence, and darkness of sexual abuse.
Shame is often one of the hallmarks of facing sexual abuse. A dark feeling of doubt centered around the nagging thought “if only, then…” If only we hadn’t entered that room. If only we hadn’t listened to that manipulation. If only we spoke up. If only we were stronger. The list goes on and drags us deeper into a shame spiral.
Begin by understanding what your limiting beliefs are trying to teach you. Even the harshest critic has insight embedded in the noise. It’s up to you to find the time to create a pause in your life to better hear and understand the engrained script in your head. In the pause, nonjudgmentally observe the themes and narratives, realizing you have the ability to rewrite your narrative if you are kind and patient with yourself. It is unfair to your spirit to blame yourself for being in a particular location or the actions of another person. Instead, focus on the aspects that directly were and are within your control.
