A few words about healing.....
The healing process
from childhood sexual abuse can be long and arduous. In fact I tell my
clients they will have to walk through the fire to get to the other
side. This, of course, is terrifying. "But remember, " I tell them,
"you experienced this stuff first when you were smaller and much more
vulnerable. You can certainly survive remembering it". That isn't to
say I think all abuse survivors need to recover their memories. For
most, the memories simply need to be taken out of the box they've been
stored in for so long and experienced, or felt about, mourned, raged
for, etc.
One thing that concerns me is that abuse survivors
might take from the press, or from the many documentaries about child
abuse, that recovery is illusive at best, and rarely achieved. I
wouldn't do the work I do if that were true. Recovery, or "healing" can
certainly happen. And this is what it looks like: It is when the
abuse becomes part of the fabric of a person's history. It no longer
has the fire or the urgency it had when you were trying to suppress
it, or minimize it's effects. It no longer has the power to bring you
to your knees weeping as it did during the intense "working
through" phase of therapy. Just like the scar that won't tan, or the
arthritis in a long ago broken bone, it will be there, leaving you with
some left over reminders, but you will be whole in spite of it. I often
think of my recovered self as being three dimensional, where I formerly
was two dimensional. Yes, I still get anxious at certain times of the
year, and prefer to sit with my back to the wall in a restaurant, but I
can live with these residual reminders. The more serious effects of the
abuse have resided. I've watched others move on too. They are taking
the time to enjoy life, or are marveling at their new found emotional
repertoires (when they used to experience only one or two emotions).
So my message to survivors beginning the healing journey is to
take the documentaries and news stories for what they are. They are
promoting a message that doesn't present the whole picture. And
"whole" can be pretty good.
