Take Your Power Back

The Journey to Emotional Healing

No matter where we are in our personal journey, we struggle for the same reasons: We suffered immeasurable trauma when we were ill-equipped to deal with it. We were betrayed by people we intimately loved and trusted in our childhood, and those patterns continued into our adulthood.

Abuse in any form—including neglect, abandonment, and invalidation of our emotions—is betrayal. We learned in childhood to abandon our own selves. Our self-esteem and self-worth plummeted. We became emotionally wounded by and bonded to our abusers. We suffered chronic emotional pain. We become addicted to pain.

Our wounds are the same. Our stories are the same—different town, different city, different country, same pain. Adult survivors of childhood abuse suffer into adulthood because our protective pain and fear emotions went haywire when our brains were still developing. Pain became a chronic addiction. We continue to suffer through adolescence and into adulthood with exaggerated pain and fear. We believe falsely that we are the source of this pain—and that we not only deserve it but are also defenseless against it.

However, abuse and suffering are not a life sentence. We can survive and thrive after abuse. Our brains can heal, and we can heal—and through us, so can our children. We can learn to stop thinking like victims and protect ourselves from those who prey and attack and betray us, including our own selves. In healing, we return to our original condition, our authentic selves. Just as it took time for the negative impact to affect us, so it will take time to restore our health, achieve emotional sobriety, and gain emotional freedom from our pain addiction.

Healing is the kind of noble effort we are not accustomed to making. We are used to routinely sacrificing and giving too much of our time, energy, money, compassion, love, and effort to others—many of whom are unworthy, and abuse and manipulate us. So how are we to heal and stop being victims if we only know how to think like and be victims? How do we, after a lifetime of abuse, find a way to heal if we do not know what emotional sobriety looks like and feels like? How do we embrace it if we do not believe we are worthy? How are we to heal if we do not know why these things happened to us and continue to blame ourselves and feel ashamed? How do we heal if we are dependent on others to define our power and self-worth? How do we get off the emotional roller-coaster of pain and break this cycle?

We cannot heal our psychological wounds and end compulsive self-destructive behaviors at the same level of thinking that caused our pain. Healing requires major shifts in our thinking to address our authentic needs. It calls for commitment, compassion, tolerance, hard work, and dedication. This will vary from person to person; the degree of pain is different for each of us, and we all learn and process information differently. Get ready to work the hardest you ever have and to challenge who you are and what you feel, think, and believe. Now is the time to focus your compassion on yourself.

Healing requires self-focus. We must challenge thought processes and beliefs that we are not accustomed to questioning—that in previous relationships, we were punished for questioning. Healing involves a leap of faith. It invites us to detach from what we are comfortable being, believing, thinking, and doing. It calls us to face and challenge the familiar sources of pain and fear, and to embrace new beliefs with which we are not so familiar.

In restoring our emotional health after abuse, we are challenged to break addictions to our own pain and replace our faulty thinking patterns with healthy ones so we can take care of our emotional needs. Sherwood puts it this way in “Emotional Sobriety: The Golden Key to Addiction Recovery”:

People who engage in addictive behaviors are often out of touch with—and therefore at a loss about—how to care for their emotional needs … When emotions are associated with crisis or pain, people can become “emotion-phobic,” and want to escape or avoid feelings through “self-medicating” addictive behavior. They may turn to alcohol, drugs, food, relationships, or the Internet to try and achieve a sense of gratification and calm. The solution becomes the problem, however, as legitimate psychological needs continue to go unmet, and difficulties escalate into the crisis of addiction.

So I will caution you that healing will most likely feel very uncomfortable and even painful at first. In time, it will get easier and easier as you achieve each healing milestone and regain your personal strength, confidence in your abilities, and coping ability. Be gentle with yourself. Be trusting and accepting of yourself without judgment. Turn your compassion and empathy and patience inward and treat yourself as you would a small child who is learning to crawl or walk for the first time.

Healing calls us to acknowledge our powerlessness over pain and to access (and release) the sources of pain that can bring us to a state of utter despair. This allows us to rely on ourselves—for some, this may be the first time—and commit to using our strength for our own personal benefit. This is how we change negative thought patterns to positive ones and reprogram our victim-thinking to the mind-set of winners and thrivers. This is how all folks with addictions (and pain for abuse victims is an addiction) recover.

As you discover and come into your own truth, you will gain the following:

• emotional strength as your self-confidence and self-assurance build
• an awareness of what triggers your painful emotions and moods, and an improved ability to cope with them before the pain escalates
• more responsiveness to outside influences as you become less reactive
• a feeling of safety in your own body
• confidence in your ability to consciously choose your response to situations that are in your best interest with due consideration for others, rather than emotionally gambling by unconsciously reacting in unhealthy ways to gain others’ approval and avoid pain

Mentors, coaches, and therapists can be instrumental in guiding you through the process, but the answers to truth-based healing reside in us. We must seek them out and apply them by reaching into the core of our being for the answers. The point is this:

You must uncover and discover to recover:

This is how we break addictions to our pain and achieve emotional sobriety. This is how we heal. This is how we take our power back. This is how we become who we really are.