[Butterfly_Faerie]

<font color=red>All the info I've been posting is from phamplets I've picked up from my doctors office.

I will post them in parts...

Some of you who read these posts may already know most of this... but I hope some people will learn from it as well

The highlighted parts are things I can personally relate or been through...</font color=red>

Recognizing the Effects of Abuse-Related Trauma

Recurring nightmares, intentionally hurting yourself, ongoing depression, and gaps in childhood memories, are just a few of the common effects of psychological trauma.

Other common effects of trauma include:

- chronic trouble sleeping
- having panic attacks and anxiety
- drinking or taking drugs to cope with your feelings
- binge-eating, purging food or starving yourself
- feelings like you don't want to live or you an't go on with your life
- repeated experiences of sexual or physical violence
- feelings of self-hate and low self-esteem
- fearing people and relationships

Some women have only one or two these effects. If so, the effects may not be related to childhood trauma but to other causes. Yet other women have some or all of these effects. For them, early experiences of sexual, physical and emotiona abuse, or neglect in childhood, most commonly cause the trauma.

Many women do not connect thses psychological and physical effects of trauma to early childhood abuse they might have expierenced. Research has shown that one in five women have had an exerience of sexual abuse in childhood, and that one in two have an experience of sexual assault, as adults.

Psychological trauma may develop from many kinds of life-threatening of emotionally over-whelming events. These can include car accidents, natural disasters, war, early loss of a family member, or sexual or physical assault.

What Is Abuse-Related Trauma?

Abuse-related trauma is marked by over-whelming feelings of distress, fear, and helplessness. These feelings come from being hurt and/or neglected in childhood.

Women most typically develop the effects of trauma if, as children, they felt helpless and trapped by abuse. Very often, the abuser was an older family member or a close family friend or relative.

What Does A Person Develop The Effects Of Trauma?

Psychological trauma is a normal response to being abused and violated once or many times. Many children survive this mistreatment by developing complex psychological ways to protect themseleves. The self-protective coping patterns survive even though the actual abuse has ended.

Abused children may not have the words or the knowledge to understand that what is happening to them is wrong. Yet their bodies may register the danger. And as adults their bodies still holds the memories of abuse.

May times, women do not recoginize the effects of abuse-related trauma in themselves. They may not understand how these effects in adulthood are linked to childhood experiences of abuse.

The long term effects of child abuse are often held in the body. They can appear later in life as bodily responses. These bodily resonses and behaviours can include:

-Spacing out, or disconnecting from your body
-Staying alert or constantly looking out for danger
-Freezing or becoming paralyzed when afraid or overwhelmed
-Feeling panicky when someone touches you unexpectedly
-feeling emotionally numb or shut down
-hurting yourself on purpose (for example, cutting, burning yourself), so that you feel in control of what happens to your body
-difficulty connecting with feelings of anger and/or fear
-using alcohol and drugs to avoid feeling emotional pain
-developing eating disorders

The long term effects of abuse-related trauma are not only physical but also psychological and emotional. The emotional responses below are common ways of trying to cope with trauma:

-not trusting anyone and becoming withdrawn or isolated from others because it feels safer to be alone
-trying to please people so they do not get angry or disappointed and hurt you
-feeling empty or unable to name how you feel
-feeling shame and wothlessness
-not feeling entitled to your own feeligs, opinons or wishes

<font color=red>~Sundance~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>