Sexual abuse

You found yourself in a place where the pain of sexual abuse and what has happened to you as a child or young person has become so overwhelming that you don’t know how to continue forward with it. You may have managed to live your life, achieve great things and cope with life, but then perhaps something has happened and triggered the memories. Perhaps you have never spoken to anyone about your experiences or may have spoken to someone but you feel very alone and confused. You are no longer alone.

Your boundaries may have been violated by a family member or someone else you trusted. You feel scared to trust and let people support you.

It takes so much courage to start looking for support and therapy for your pain and to start the process of healing internal wounds caused by sexual abuse. You may feel like there is an internal void, live with fear and anxiety, feel confused about relationships and struggle in intimate relationships. Perhaps you are very self-critical and you may have self-medicated to numb the pain by food or substances.

Childhood sexual abuse violates a young person’s boundaries, deeply hurts them and often make them feel like someone else is in power and there is nothing they can do about it. As an adult, you are in charge, the memories can’t hurt you anymore even if they may unsettle you, now you can start healing internal wounds with support. You can have the life you deserve and wish to have.

If you are experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or complex PTSD-related symptoms, you can see these in his blog post here.

• develop coping strategies for flashbacks
• understand how your brain and body process and react to trauma
• learn ways to start activating the self-soothing systems of the brain (Mindfulness, visualisation exercises, somatic experiencing)
• increase self-compassion and reduce shame
• make sense and understand how your experiences have impacted your life and relationships
• start moving towards a secure attachment in your relationships

Is therapy worth it?

You may ask yourself whether it is really worth addressing something that happened so many years ago and whether you should just get over it. The pain of sexual abuse eats you up internally, you struggle with anxiety and depression in your everyday life and you may get stuck in shame. Deep down you know that unless the internal wound like a physical wound is cleaned up and given air to breathe first, the wound cannot heal.

Therapy is  not a walk in a park and there are times when may feel worse as you are reminded of your experiences. However, slowly the experiences have less and less of power over you. We will go with your pace and a lot of the work is not directly focused on your abuse experiences.   You deserve a chance to be freed of the pain and shame.

If you haven’t already read my post on “Steps to reducing the shame of childhood trauma”.

Download now a FREE workbook, Building Shame Resilience, which is located in the Resource Library.

When you feel ready to start addressing the pain, I would love to hear from you and support you on your journey of healing. You can read more about me here.

Organise your FREE 15min phone consultation to talk about how therapy could help You.

Let yourself FREE from the pain of your past and start living wholeheartedly!