…and finding the light
You begin to realize that disagreements aren’t attacks, lacking boundaries isn’t empathy, and not amount of external validation can replace self-love.
Trauma bonding isn’t healing, ignoring your needs isn’t strength, people-pleasing isn’t kindness, staying in toxic situations isn’t loyalty, numbing your emotions isn’t coping, and suppressing emotions or staying silent doesn’t bring peace.
–mindtendencies2, via Facebook
“If you’re spending time with family during the holiday, remember this: it’s not everyone else’s holiday, it’s yours too.” – Nedra Tawwab
What is love?
Boundaries
Managing Holiday Triggers
Relationships
Defining your own experience
If you are stressed, overwhelmed, angry, or scared over the holiday, you can call a crisis help line/suicide hotline for someone to talk to. They will listen. They won’t judge. They will be there.
Abusive family dynamics often hinge on appearing like a ‘normal, happy’ family, and so the pressure is very high for a victim/scapegoat/blacksheep to ‘play their part’ for the holidays. This typically requires that the victim completely ignore the actions of the abusive family members, their own pain, and the soul-anguish emptiness they feel in realizing that they don’t have family.
See also:
People like to think that being polite and respectful to people who treat them like shit means they’re being the bigger person, when in reality it means they’re being a doormat and are encouraging the other person to treat more people like shit.
Don’t be civil towards uncivil people…
–u/Recent-Stretch4123, excerpted
Forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause.
Amends can speed healing.
“Forgiveness” has become a kind of polluted concept. It used to be something you sought and earned. Now, in many cases, it’s expected of you, as something the person who has wronged you is entitled to, by virtue of having wronged you in the first place. Them committing a crime against you obligates you to them.
There is a mystique that has sprung up around forgiveness. That somehow it will heal the wounds caused by the person who has inflicted them, even if they do not change, and that if you forgive someone enough, it can even magically redeem them. That the sooner and faster you forgive someone, the sooner you can bask in this healing boon.
There is no magical healing power of forgiveness. It is a natural part of the road to healing, yes, but it comes after our wounds are healed, and we are entitled to all the rage and anger and sorrow that comes before. Forgiveness is not absolution. Forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause.
Amends can speed the healing. Amends can have this almost magical effect society ascribes to forgiveness. If someone who has wronged you acknowledges what they have done, expresses regret, and makes real efforts to change their ways, it can soothe even the worst wounds, mend broken families. This is something on those who wrong us can do, and true amends are rare.
But, it’s gotten all turned around somehow. They put the burden on the victim, to somehow forgive the crime away, to redeem their abuser, and they are looked down on when they can’t or won’t.
We’re often trapped by our virtues, not our vices.
“…if you’re stuck and trying to figure out what’s keeping you in, remember that people rarely get stuck because of their vices. They’re usually caught by their virtues.”
–from Qualities That Keep You in a Sick System
Missing-Missing Reasons
Posts in estranged parents’ forums are vague. Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don’t recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, give entire text exchanges; they paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage. Nor do the other members press them for more information.
Compare this with the forums for adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut-and-paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text conversations. They recreate scenes in detail, and if the details don’t add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member’s paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence, or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history.
The difference isn’t a matter of style, it’s a split between two ways of perceiving the world. In one worldview, emotion is king. Details exist to support emotion. If a member gives one set of details to describe how angry she is about a past event, and a few days later gives a contradictory set of details to describe how sad she is about the same event, both versions are legitimate because both emotions are legitimate.
Context is malleable because the full picture may not support the member’s emotion. If a member adds details that undermine her emotion, the other members considerately ignore them.
Emotion creates reality.
In the second worldview, reality creates emotion. Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster’s emotions are justified. Small details can change the entire tenor of a forum’s response; members see a distinction between “She said I’m worthless” and “She said something that made me feel worthless.” Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn’t be acted on. They show posters different ways to view the situation and give advice on how to handle the emotions. In short, they believe that external events create emotional responses, that only some responses are justified, that people’s initial perceptions of events are often flawed, and that understanding external events can help people understand and manage emotions.
The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people. Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless. It’s seductive. It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong. For people whose self-image is so battered and fragile that they can’t bear anything but validation, often it feels like the only way they can face the world.
–excerpted from Missing-Missing Reasons
Assistance v. Enabling
“Assistance is what you give someone when they’re ready to get help. Enabling is what you give someone to keep them from hitting rock bottom.” –comment
Definition of Respect
“Respect is when you treat something that matters like it matters, and disrespect is when you treat something that matters like it doesn’t matter.”
(updating)
…versus social support (help from others), self-esteem (learned belief that you can ‘help’ yourself and effectively act on your own behalf), and coping strategies (direct ways to help yourself)
Feeling helpless can magnify the impact of trauma.
See: Which Factors Mitigate the Effects of Childhood Trauma? to contrast helplessness as a “trauma multiplier” and social support (help from others), self-esteem (learned belief that you can ‘help’ yourself and effectively act on your own behalf), and coping strategies (direct ways to help yourself)
How the phrase “take responsibility” makes you feel.
When you are in the early stages of your healing process, that’s going to feel horribly invalidating. It feels like someone is ‘blaming’ you for the abuse you experienced, which is unfair.
ESPECIALLY SINCE WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S ABUSE OF US.
A lot of the self-help stuff at this point, in general, is just going to be hugely triggering:
Like hot damn, NO, guys. No.
We say this shit to people who are just figuring out what’s happening to them, are in emotional crisis, and (it can feel to them) like we are telling them that they are responsible for their own pain.
Meanwhile, they are struggling with all the pain and hurt they have endured, all the confusion they’ve been dealing with, and often reconstructing their sense of reality and what happened.
This is the wrong tool for this stage of healing.
What someone in this early stage of the process needs is emotional support and validation. We really need to honor that this is a process, and that we all go through it at one point or another. Now, it is completely fair to not be able to support someone at this stage of the process. Truly this is what a good therapist is for, to support someone as they go through their emotions and thoughts and triggers, and exhaustively discusses the minutia of everything that happened.
Recognizing where we are at is so important.
ESPECIALLY since there’s a point where all of this becomes empowering. THAT’S when you know that you are farther along in your healing process. When stuff like this no longer makes you feel pain but power:
Like, YES, I get to define my own self-worth! I get to be the person whose opinions matter most to me! I get to choose and create my own reality! Often starting with who else I allow in with me. I get to decide I don’t want to live this way anymore, that I am over it, and I get to walk away! I can shift my emotional state by focusing on awesome stuff! I don’t have to be sad anymore!
Suddenly it’s response-ability instead of responsibility.
It doesn’t feel fault-oriented!
I totally get why we respond to in-crisis victims with this.
Because we’ve reached this place after going through so much pain and hurt, and we so empathize with someone else who is going through it. But we have to respect that healing and recovery is a process. We go through the experience so we can make our own internal shifts. Our growth happens in stages.
Being goal-oriented doesn’t respect the process.
There is so much value in experiencing the validation of our pain experience. That, yes, we were victimized and it was not okay. And maybe we begin to allow ourselves to experience anger on our own behalf, which maybe we haven’t done until now. That’s so, so important. We need our anger. It lets us know something is wrong. And for many of us finally begins to allow us to center ourselves in our own experience.
Which is so important, because a lot of abuse is about centering the abuser at the expense of ourselves.
And then someone blithely comes along with “being angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”. Knock. it. off. self-help. people. It’s well-intentioned but comes from a lack of understanding of the healing process.
Can someone get ‘stuck’ in being a victim? Absolutely. Is that necessarily our business? Probably not. And will they ever be able to grow past that stage if their experience isn’t validated? It’s more unlikely.
Some people do use the ‘victim’ phase to meet their emotional need for attention and caregiving from others.
And they get stuck in that stage. And it’s perfectly okay to recognize that and not want to be coerced into providing that. That’s good boundaries! Recognizing where we are at and what we want to consent to participate in!
But we also don’t get to dictate to them their healing journey.
It’s hard and there are a lot of factors and nuances, definitely. But the core piece of healthy behaviors and choices and actions is recognizing that we all are living our own lives and on our own journey.
I really do feel like the process is the point.
I want to preface this by saying that this isn’t something I have seen anywhere in the literature nor have I pulled from any resource. It’s just, over time, I realized that the model of healing people have didn’t seem to line up with what I saw or experienced.
And there was also a HUGE difference in how specific resources impacted victims depending on where they are in their healing.
I have literally never seen resources identifying that they are appropriate or inappropriate for certain stages of healing.
Here is a pretty solid example of what I mean: How to gauge how far along you are in your healing: How the phrase “take responsibility” makes you feel
A lot of what we see in terms of healing is prescriptive (forgive! let go! move on!) tends to actually be descriptive.
Meaning that people generally recommend the results of healing as the cause of healing, and it is horribly invalidating to a victim and also doesn’t actually work. I mean, I have literally never seen someone ‘decide to forgive’ a person and then they’re healed; literally never.
There are certain things that, in my opinion, tend to facilitate healing, the main thing being time and space from the person that has harmed you.
Which makes sense – your body, for example, wouldn’t be able to heal from a knife wound if you keep stabbing the knife back in.
But in reality, not even doctors or therapists can ‘heal’ anyone.
The best a medical doctor is able to do is to remove what is impeding healing/causing harm and then facilitate the body in being able to repair itself.
A therapist is generally working with a client to help them make the choices that are best for themselves and supporting them in that.
Honestly, I wonder how many of medical or psychological issues are basically professionals trying to encourage us to do whatever we already know to do. It’s easy for a medical doctor to conduct emergency surgery from an automobile accident, but it is a whole other situation for our primary care physician to talk to us about overeating or smoking or drugs.
This doesn’t apply to children or adults in extreme abuse situations, but a lot of abuse support is helping a victim realize they need to leave a situation and that they can leave a situation.
Victims stay because they love the abuser and believe wholeheartedly that they can change or stop. So it is a sort of gentle re-programming and it almost has to be self-incepted. It’s one thing for your friend to tell you you are in an abuse dynamic, it’s another to realize it for yourself.
So if I had to distill the healing process into a ‘prescription’, it would be to:
stop the harm, validate your experience and sense of reality, start to process what happened and anything else from your history or past, work on boundaries, learn about healthy relationships and communication, and support oneself in living a life for yourself so that you can live a healthy life with others.
Crisis Phase
Processing Phase
Transition/Moving Forward Phase
Integration Phase
The Sun Rises
You are the light at the end of the tunnel.
Additionally, I sort of stumbled into another stage of healing, which is to have relationships with people that are ‘repairable’. From another comment:
So we’ve been learning that having boundaries is important and keeps us safe, but also we’re probably not always going to be perfect about it or we have those bad days or whatever, and so having a safe relationship with someone who extends you the benefit of the doubt means functionally having a relationship that is repairable, and one where even if we do a dumb thing that might hurt a person we care about, we aren’t really harming them.
It’s the first time in my life I’ve really ever experienced this type of dynamic in multiple relationships – where there is the safety, goodwill, trust, and space to allow repair attempts – that it’s kind of blowing my mind.
It just reminds me that we can focus so much on ourselves or the other person, but if we focus on the dynamic (and whether it is a safe, supporting, fun one) that might matter most?
I’m still formulating my thoughts around it, but it’s been -mind blown- level of living. Like in the best way. It’s not a binary safe/unsafe paradigm but a ‘safe to be repairable’ paradigm.
Hopefully this makes sense. Again, I want to emphasize that I am not a mental health professional and I have never read this in any resource, so it is important to take it with a boulder of salt and work with a therapist. I cannot recommend therapeutic support enough.
Recovery after [violence] is rarely a linear process.
Survivors use various methods to deal with the consequences of the trauma related to these experiences, often including diminished functioning, negative self-view, and lower quality of life. The consequences of [violence] challenge survivors’ recovery long after the abusive relationship ended in many different life domains. Specifically, the ‘lived experience’ can impact victims physically, emotionally, and spiritually and change how victims perceive themselves.
Changes in survivors’ self-view can influence their behavior and help-seeking actions, consequently impacting revictimization experiences or successful integration of the traumatic experience within their lives.
Harvey criticized research assessing trauma recovery, noting that it has relied on poorly defined and seldom specified criteria. Since then, progress has been made in defining the domains that can characterize successful recovery after traumatic events.
This paper defines recovery as regularly using skills, characteristics, or strengths that enhance health, security, and wellbeing.
These skills or strengths include intentionality for the survivor to take action and attempt to “go on with normal life”, as well as seeking support from others to combat isolation and fulfill emotional needs. Scientific literature also highlights the role of the informal support of family and friends in successful recovery from [violence]. For example, one survey indicated that decision-making about selecting sources of support is a vital recovery skill.
Supportive networks encourage survivors to increase their positive ties and set boundaries on toxic relationships to promote mental health and support recovery.
A qualitative meta-synthesis of survivors’ perspectives of [violence] recovery found that trauma recovery domains are multidimensional, requiring courage, active engagement, and patience.
The five primary domains of the healing process are (1) trauma processing and reexamination, (2) managing negative states, (3) rebuilding the self, (4) connecting with others, and (5) regaining hope and power.
They discovered three interconnecting recovery objectives: reconnection with the self, others, and the world. Reconnection with the self involves reclaiming one’s identity and making decisions autonomously. Reconnection with others involves feeling a sense of belonging in the community. Reconnection with the world involves developing a positive view of the world and finding fulfillment and personal growth.
In addition to these recovery criteria, a 2020 review of recovery after intimate partner violence, described developmental aspects of recovery, which included disentangling from the past, coping with the present, and moving toward the future.
Most trauma recovery measurement literature has used the absence of psychological symptoms such as depression, PTSD, and other clinical distress to indicate trauma recovery. However, research is beginning to move away from measuring symptoms, service use, or clinician-based recovery assessment because they are based on medical models of mental illness, which may conflict with the survivor’s definition.
This research conceptualizes trauma recovery as a process representing a movement toward integrating a healthy and thriving self.
For example, one survivor-oriented definition of psychological recovery is “establishing a fulfilling, meaningful life and a positive sense of identity founded on hopefulness and self-determination”.
Within this vein, Harvey describes eight recovery domains, including:
Yet, more recently, there has been a trend toward a more holistic approach incorporating positive recovery outcomes.
For example, one study found that successful trauma recovery involves the experience of “breaking free”. Another study categorizes successful trauma recovery as “an upward trajectory” and labels those who have recovered as “thrivers”.
From this, Wanner et al. developed a 43-item trauma-specific quality of life measure that evaluates the five successful outcomes
…including:
In addition, Tedeschi Blevins and Riffle have operationalized the concept of posttraumatic growth with domains of: new possibilities, relating to others, personal strength, spiritual change, and appreciation of life.
For survivors of GBV specifically, Sinko, Schaitkin, and Saint Arnault have introduced a Healing After Gender-based Violence instrument, which attempts to holistically capture healing as an outcome. However, these instruments do not capture the recovery pathways or explain relationships with other healing variables.
This study defines recovery domains and criteria by looking at the range of recovery, examining recovery not as an endpoint by pathways or phases, leading to desired recovery outcomes.
Research that examines trauma recovery from a process (rather than outcome) point of view tends to reference “pathways” of trauma recovery. [Judith] Herman wrote:
“Recovery unfolds in three stages…the first stage is the establishment of safety…the second stage is remembrance and mourning, and the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. Treatment must be appropriate to the patient’s stage of recovery” (p. 99).
Other research on mental illness recovery has taken the same approach, describing stages of mental illness recovery as a time of moratorium or withdrawal, awareness, preparation, rebuilding, and growth (characterized as living a full and meaningful life, self-management of the illness, resilience, and a positive sense of self).
Another frequently used metaphor for trauma recovery stages includes stages of “integration” or “self-integration”.
This recovery model refers to the self-integration stage in which the survivor has regained possession or control of something stolen or lost. This integration includes regaining the self and integrating the impact of the trauma as a part of that new self.
This ultimate stage of recovery as self-integration echoes other stages of recovery, such as empowerment, becoming resolute, and reconnection with the self.
While these stages have been theorized about, there is limited knowledge about holistically assessing the pathway of recovery. In addition, some stages mentioned, such as reconnecting with ordinary life in Judith Herman’s model, are complex processes that may require additional exploration to articulate variations and benchmarks within this pathway. These gaps in understanding call for building hypothesized stage or pathway models that can be used for assessment.
The purpose of this study was to develop a Trauma Recovery Rubric (TRR) to quantify trauma recovery domains and pathways for a sample of GBV survivors and to examine the relationship between the TRR scores against quantitative measures of trauma recovery challenge indicators (PTSD and depression symptoms) and trauma recovery indicators (posttraumatic growth and sense of coherence).
Each recovery phase has criteria that characterize the six domains of trauma recovery:
While our quantitative analyses revealed no country-level differences in trauma integration scores, we found differences when comparing survivors with clinically relevant depression with those who did not. We also found that depression and an individual’s sense of coherence significantly predicted one’s TRR score, but PTSD, in contrast, did not. This finding suggests that depression and PTSD have differential impacts on trauma recovery and warrants additional study. This rubric can be used to further understand recovery pathways cross-culturally. It can also allow researchers to examine differing recovery trajectories and other risk or protective variables.
The need for an instrument to capture trauma recovery pathways arose through the collaboration and discussion among the twelve countries within the larger international research consortium of MiStory (see https://mistory-traumarecovery.org/home, accessed on 14 May 2021). The TRR was created to analyze and quantify survivor narrative data using a rubric based on these discussions. To date, rubric scoring tools have mainly been used in the education sector to implement and evaluate specific assignments or tasks. This study is the first to use the rubric for quantifying qualitative data in assessing trauma recovery. As such, this research could constitute a model for analyzing other similar research efforts.
–Kleio Koutra, Courtney Burns, Laura Sinko, Sachinko Kita, Hülya Bilgin, Denise Saint Arnault; excerpted and adapted from Trauma Recovery Rubric: A Mixed-Method Analysis of Trauma Recovery Pathways in Four Countries (content note: study; gender-based violence approach)
And that’s something that victims of abuse in the early stages of their journey are drowning for from the person who abused them.
When you see advice along the lines of “only you can give yourself closure”, it can evoke a rage response. Because it feels so deeply unfair and because when we are on the early stage of our healing journey, it feels like that if only the abuser would apologize and take responsibility for what they’ve done and make amends, then we would be healed.
And it isn’t true.
In over a decade I have never seen, not once, an abuser apologize to a victim in a way that healed them. The response tends to be “How could you do this to me?? How could you do this??”
It doesn’t provide closure, it actually opens things up more.
And there is nothing the other person can really say or do, because the victim is still in the healing stage. Theoretically speaking, the abuser could try over and over to make amends and show up and ‘prove themselves’ but I’ve never seen that work because it tends to make the unhealed victim angrier.
“Where was this before? This means that you could have been better but you weren’t.”
Honestly, it is only a in healed state that the actions of a perpetrator won’t continue to harm the victim…which leads me back to the concept that an abuser can’t provide an unhealed victim closure, there is nothing the abuser can really do to ‘heal’ the victim; it’s an internal process.
And there’s a part of me that used to hate that this was true
…and I know a lot of victims of abuse who rail against it and hold on to that idea: that if the abuser apologizes and accepts responsibility for the harm they perpetrated against us, then we would be healed.
