[Butterfly_Faerie]

Reslience and Strength

If you have experienced childhood sexual abuse, it can be overwhelming and discouraging to learn about the many ways it has shaped and affected your life. You need to remember and to continually remind yourself that you are a survivor. Now matter how hard your life has been or is, you have found the strength to go on.

It is also important to respect the self-protective coping that has allowed you to survive emotionally and physically. You need to reconginize that this same strength can be used in your work toward healing from abuse.

For woman who have been abused and traumatized, silence is the biggest barrier to healing. Many women have never felt safe enough to tell anyone about their childhood sexual abuse. And often they have lived with the effects of trauma for so long that they have accepted them as permanent.

Healing starts with learning to identify and understand what has happened to you, and how it is affecting your life today. That way, you can find the kind of help you need to recover.

Why Is It Important To Heal From Trauma?

Healing allows women to feel more in control of their lives. They are better able to choose to respond emotionally. They can also feel more entitled to their own thoughts and feelings.

Healing allows women to develop closer relationships with others.

Healing helps women to free themselves from the traumatic past. They no longer relive it in nightmares or in their daily lives whenever they feel frightened or powerless.

Healing can help take woman out of pain and depression. Or it can help them experience their bodies and their feelings again.
Women learn to feel safe within themselves by learning how to deal with:

*Nightmares
*Intrusive, or unwanted thoughts
*Flashbacks
*Insomnia, or sleeplessness
*Depression
*Addiction

Women can also learn to cope with and manage understandable feelings that come from experiencing abuse. These feelings include:

*Rage
*Grief
*Anxiety
*Shame
*Guilt
*Despair

Seeking Help For Abuse-Related Trauma

Many women who have been traumatized have developed complex ways of coping to protect themselves from painful feelings. These include such behaviours as substance abuse, self-harm, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.

The first stages of therapy for women with abuse-related trauma have specific goals. The therapy aims to help women develop more effective strategies to deal with the overwhelming pain they feel. The therapy is also designed to help women cope with effects such as flashbacks, panic and self-harm.

What to Consider When Looking for Help

You should question the mental health professionals whom you are asking for help. Aks the therapist about his or her:

-education and professional training
-years of experience working in the field
-specific training in working with trauma
-number of sessions provided
-approach to working with trauma

Ask yourself:

*Are you comfortable with this therapist?
*Does this therapist set the goals and pae of therapy with you (not for you)?
*Has the therapists told you that you can change therapists if the match doesn't feel good?
*Has the therapist suggested that, in the even that you need medication, she or he will refer you to a psychiatrist with expertise in trauma?
*Is the therapist a member of professtional organization to which she or he is accountable?

What should you exepect from Therapy?

Knowing what to expect from therapy may help you feel safer and more confident about your treatment. It will also enable you to decide if you need to change therapists if you are not getting the kind of help you need.

A therapist will need to learn alot about your life to understand how best to help you. You will be asked about how long you remember feeling the way you do, what you do when you feel this way, and what kind of therapies or medicines you have already tried.

Therapy for abuse-related trauma is a usually long-term commintment. The first abuse you suffered was most likely in childhood. This means that you have spent many years trying to cope with the pain of that experience.

Therapy does help you connect to the feeligs you have blocked out for years. This means that you will connect with painful and good feelings. To heal, you may at times need to feel worse before you begin to feel better.

You therapist will not start by exploring your early experiences of abuse. Instead, expect your therapist to spend a lot of time helping you develop more effective ways to cope with your feelings and troubles. Before you can weather the storm of working through abouse, you need to strengthen your lifeboat.
Your therapist should pace the work by asking you about how you are expierencing the therapy. Your therapist should also ask about how you are managing between sessions.

<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>