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Hi Warriors, welcome to One in Three.
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I'm your host, Ingrid.
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Today, Dr Anisha joins me in detailing the various layers involved in a domestic violence victim's wounding and healing.
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Drawing from her personal and professional experience, she also explains different techniques and modalities available to assist in healing from domestic violence.
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Here is Dr Anisha.
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Hi, Dr Anisha.
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Thank you so much for joining me today.
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Welcome.
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Thank you, Ingrid.
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I'm really excited to be here on your podcast.
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And I'm very excited to have you.
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So, just quick, you had written a book the Power to Break Free, surviving Domestic Violence, and there's a lot of information in there and you have a lot of experience personally and professionally.
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So before we jump into all of the guts of all of that, do you mind just giving us a background of your professional where you came professionally and how you got to where you are now?
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Yes, absolutely so.
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I am an integrative medicine practitioner.
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I've also labeled myself as a trauma specialist, seeing lots of patients over the years coming in with trauma from all sorts of different backgrounds, but with domestic violence survivors as well.
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So professionally I started training first in acupuncture, so I have a doctor of acupuncture degree, doctor of acupuncture degree.
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I'm also an Ayurvedic wellness doctor, so I specialize in diet, lifestyle, you know, educating patients about all the things that they can do to really empower themselves with their health.
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I'm a yoga therapist, so using yoga not just the way people do in classes to help with strength or balance, but really using yoga therapy as a modality to treat specific conditions to nonprofits, corporations, hospital setting, wellness centers, trauma centers and addiction clinics.
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And so for me, integrating all of the different things that I do has made me really an integrative practitioner that believes in no one modality by itself can fix and heal everything, and it's also just the combination of all these different things that we do together, the synergy of them, that can really create a strong therapeutic healing effect.
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And besides the things that I don't do, I refer out to lots of different practitioners in the community as well, because I think the most important goal is healing and getting the best results possible and educating patients on how to do that and to empower them in their journey.
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When you started off, were you looking for finding modalities to help with empowerment, or is that something that you started focusing on as you went along with incorporating all these different practices?
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I think I was just drawn to these individual modalities and studying all of them for my own knowledge and what I thought were really powerful healing tools, and then, after a couple years in practice, it was really about how do I bring all these things together and synthesize them, that I kind of developed my own style of healing.
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I guess bringing it together, Okay, that's interesting.
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So you do talk about.
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Obviously the book has the title Surviving Domestic Violence in there and you talk about a victim's wounding and the concentric circles diagram.
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Do you mind going into a little bit more detail about that?
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Sure.
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So you know, I specifically was working with trauma victims coming from a domestic violence background and also experiencing this myself.
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I realized that there were so many different layers to the healing process when we go through trauma and it wasn't just trying to tackle one thing, because I would tackle one thing and then a different emotion would come up and it's like, okay, we have to shift gears now and focus on that.
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And so over the years of practicing and experiencing this with victim after victim, I became kind of really clear on four very distinct layers of healing.
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And on the surface, a lot of women are suffering with fear and anxiety, and that's kind of the most superficial of emotion, because it's right there at the top.
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It's what we're kind of experiencing on a day-to-day level while we're in an abusive relationship and then when we're trying to come out of the abusive relationship, that fear and anxiety really has to be addressed first before you can get to the deeper layers of healing.
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And then, after working with victims and working on minimizing their fear and anxiety, the next layer of healing that would come up would be starting to access really the grief and the sorrow of being a victim and being trapped in this situation and also a lot of underlying depression, and you can't really get to that layer when you're so consumed with anxiety and fear.
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So it's definitely a deeper layer of healing and it can really vary.
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How long does it take to get to that deeper layer?
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It can take weeks, it can take months, it can take years.
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It just depends on each woman how she's processing her trauma, how quickly she's moving through it, the support system she has, what she's taking advantage of.
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And then, after the grief and depression, what I've noticed is that the third layer of deeper healing is really like an anger and frustration, and for a lot of women it's not safe to be angry around your abuser or while you're in an abusive relationship.
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We're used to the abuser expressing himself through a lot of anger and so, to try to neutralize the situation, most women suppress that anger and it's really really deep and a lot of women are also scared to touch into it because they equate the anger with the abuser and they don't want to be like him, you know.
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And so the anger just becomes an emotion that's not safe and they don't want to go there.
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And I explain this in the book as well is that there is a differentiation of healthy anger where, if something terrible has happened to us, we are totally justified in having healthy anger and we might not know how to express that in a healthy way because we're in an environment with an abuser where we're always seeing him projecting his anger in an unhealthy way, and so it's a really important part of the healing process and a lot of women are uncomfortable with it and they want to just skip over the anger or just pretend it doesn't exist.
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But once you get to these deeper layers, it's so important to touch into that and to be able to heal it.
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And then the deepest layer, layer four, once we've, you know, passed through these other layers, is shame and betrayal, and those are really heavy emotions that can take a lot of time to process that.
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And working with you know a trained counselor, especially someone who is experienced with domestic violence, is so key to be able to identify these different layers, label them, process them, give space to heal them.
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And I think at that fourth layer of shame and betrayal.
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I think this is where a supportive community can really help a victim process through this faster.
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If she's still really isolated or alienated, then that shame and betrayal can stay with her for a lot longer and can keep a victim, even though she might be free from her abusive situation, she might be trapped in that emotion of shame and betrayal, which is really important for that healing to occur.
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And I don't want it to seem too linear, so it's not that women go through these four layers in this specific sequence.
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You can get rid of fear and anxiety and then be in this layer of shame and betrayal and then have a new wave of fear and anxiety that come, and so it's kind of moving through these different layers in a nonlinear way and knowing that these emotions are going to fluctuate.
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But once there's significant healing with one layer, you're able to access a deeper layer of emotion.
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So you're helping recognize and understand the emotions, not ignore the emotions.
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The emotions are okay.
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It's just a matter of processing through and finding a healthy way to express them.
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Absolutely, because most victims feel like they don't have permission, in an abusive situation or relationship, to express their emotions.
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That's really what the abuser teaches us is it's not okay for you to be angry, it's not okay for you to be sad.
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You know like we're not given permission to access our emotions, and so a lot of women suppress those emotions because of the conditioning that they have from their abuser.
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So the healing process is the opposite of that.
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We need full permission just to experience our emotions, to explore them, to process them, to label them.
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Do your clients typically see you in conjunction with a therapist at the same time?
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Absolutely so.
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Usually when I'm working with victims with severe trauma, I'm not a trained psychologist or psychiatrist, and so I do want my patients to be seeing somebody like that and doing talk therapy at the same time as using integrative modalities.
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That's how we're going to get the best results, and I found from therapists who've maybe worked with a trauma victim for some time and maybe the progress is very slow, but then they see the patient coming to me and starting to do acupuncture and yoga and meditation, and then the therapist will also say that they start progressing much faster because there's a lot more support.
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Okay, so obviously emotional abuse and psychological abuse can affect you physically, even with the absence of the actual physical component of abuse.
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So how do you see that play into effect the mental and physicality of the trauma?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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So, as an integrative medicine practitioner, we believe mind and body are connected.
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We really don't separate them.
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Physical symptoms can lead to mental symptoms and vice versa that there's always this connection between them.
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And for a lot of victims sometimes they're relating to just physical symptoms or they're relating to just emotional symptoms and they kind of compartmentalize and don't always see the connection between them.
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So for myself, one of the symptoms that I really experienced is, after some type of traumatic, abusive incident, I'd have a lot of adrenaline in my system, which is part of that, that um, fight or flight syndrome.
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Right Is that?
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It's a normal response of our body to stress, to increase our heart rate and increase our blood pressure and increase our body temperature and, you know, get us moving, get us in action.
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And so what I found is that for me, when I got clear that I was in an abusive marriage which took me four years to actually really label and recognize that in my seven-year marriage, and the adrenaline was so strong that I knew for myself, I couldn't get the clarity to take the steps I needed to break free because there was so much adrenaline going through me anxiety, palpitations, insomnia, you know, and I knew unless I calmed that down, I couldn't be in a position to do anything to really help myself.
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And so I went to my acupuncturist.
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And because I was knowledgeable about treating trauma in my patients, I couldn't do it for myself.
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I knew I needed to go have someone else be responsible for helping me.
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But I would go to my acupuncturist and I would tell them exactly which acupuncture point I felt like I needed and, based on my trauma protocols, it became a great experiment for me to, in real time, see how do I calm down this flood of adrenaline, get clarity, allow my system to reset.
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And so that's how I started working with other victims, after I was out of my marriage and had taken care of myself.
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And I started a clinic in a local domestic violence center and offered free acupuncture and just allowed these women to come in every week, receive these treatments, get rid of that excess adrenaline, calm down their fear, their anxiety, their palpitations.
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And it also turned into like a weekly support group where women would just share every week with each other, along with me as the medical practitioner, but they would share with each other.
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Yeah, this week I started sleeping for the first time more than six hours, or this is the first week.
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I didn't have palpitations every single day, I just noticed some little periods of relief throughout the day, and so it also became empowering for other women to hear these stories and testimonials of how people were progressing through their healing journeys and seeing symptoms minimized.
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And that's what really allowed these women who some of them were still in relationships with their abusers, but to get the clarity of I feel stronger.
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I think I can actually take some steps to start to break away.
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That's an amazing transformation.
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So we always we do talk about trauma with domestic violence and abusive relationships, but I think one concept for some reason is difficult for those who get out of those relationships to grasp is that there is a degree of PTSD, because it almost seems like PTSD is supposed to be reserved for, you know, people who are in the military or who have seen active combat, and I mean it's a traumatic event.
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Do you mind discussing a little bit about some of the signs and symptoms of PTSD and how that relates to domestic violence victims and survivors?
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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Ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder anybody can experience that.
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Who's gone through a traumatic event.
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For some people it might be a one-time event, like 9-11, for example you know it existed on this one day but the after effect of the trauma, of what you saw, what you witnessed, what you experienced, can stay with you for a long time.
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With domestic violence, it usually does start as something smaller and then progresses to something that becomes more intense.
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For me, my first incident of physical abuse actually started on our honeymoon and it was a simple argument, but he decided to then hug me so tightly that I felt suffocated.
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I couldn't breathe.
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His finger marks were on my arm.
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I was telling him you're hugging me too tight.
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This doesn't feel okay.
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Trying to get him to back off, him not listening to me, and in my head I had never experienced anything like that.
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I never would have thought to label it as abuse, as physical abuse For me.
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I just thought something went wrong in this conversation.
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His reaction was not okay and did not make me feel okay, and I verbalized it, but something in his brain was not listening to my words and understanding what I was saying.
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That was the way I interpreted it, and for a lot of victims, these incidences can be so crazy-making and so confusing because it's not something dramatic right away and there can be a whole range of emotions and experiences.
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And so I think one of the emotions of PTSD that people minimize is the shock factor and something distressing that happens to you, especially if it's happening when you least expect it.
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If it's happening by the person that you love, it's very hard to understand what is happening to me or why is this person behaving this way?
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And that shock is, I think, what keeps a lot of women trapped in the cycle of violence and as an outsider, people say, well, why doesn't she just leave?
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Or that was something terrible that just happened, why doesn't she leave?
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But the truth is she might not have processed what happened, she might still be in this state of shock where she can't understand it, she can't label it, she can't even talk about it yet.
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So there's a whole range of emotions, you know.
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I think anxiety is one of the most common.
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That's easy to identify.
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But there's exhaustion can be a very common symptom of PTSD that women experience.
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I know for myself.
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There were so many incidences that after they happened even though I might have labeled it as physical abuse in my mind.
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I was just too exhausted to do anything or to get help, you know, and that's a really real symptom.
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So anxiety, stress, shock, that constant fight or flight response, a lot of women become numb with certain incidences, especially if there's certain patterns that they're experiencing.
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There can be a lot of hypervigilance.
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I know for myself, flashbacks was something I experienced a lot, where maybe my abuser was gone for the day and I'm physically apart for him for 10 hours, but I would keep replaying what happened in my mind over and over and that wasn't just recent after an incident, it could be months later, where I'm still rewinding in my head because I'm still thinking what happened and trying to make sense of it.
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And you know, a lot of women look at themselves and say what could I have done differently, like, how did I trigger him?
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You know, and that's also one of the abuser's tactics is to make you keep questioning yourself so that you're not looking at him and understanding his actions and his intentions and his motivations.
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And I think it's that gaslighting that can make recognizing the symptoms of PTSD so difficult because, for instance, like the insomnia, one of the ways they can abuse is causing sleep deprivation.
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So then you may think, well, am I just tired because I haven't been getting enough sleep, or is it a form of some of the symptoms of PTSD?
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So I think it is important to understand and recognize that those are symptoms of actual PTSD.
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Absolutely, and it's really hard for the average person to be able to recognize that and label it.
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This is where having somebody on the outside, a third party, a therapist, who would be ideal at recognizing these symptoms.
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But a lot of women are so isolated that they're not getting help for themselves.
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So even just having a trusted friend, they might not be an abuse expert, but just being able to talk about what you're experiencing, most friends would be able to tell you that doesn't sound right, that's not okay.
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What he's doing, that's not a normal response, and so that's why that's one of the abuser's tactics to isolate their victims, because they don't want you to get feedback from the outside.
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They don't want their actions to be labeled and understood as abuse.
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They want to keep you in a place where you're constantly confused.
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And so the more I think we can do to educate women before they even start dating, and then healthy dating practices, and then before you even enter into a marriage, we need to understand and be educated in what are healthy relationships, so we know what to look out for, all the red flags that aren't, and then for us to be educated on PTSD as well if we start to experience any of these range of symptoms.
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That should be kind of an alarm bell where we question ourselves and we try to go and get help at that point.
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I think label is a key word because I think, how you mentioned, it was difficult for you to really comprehend if comprehend not even comprehend, but admit what was happening.
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The same goes for me.
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I knew the symptoms, I knew signs and I knew what it probably was that I was in, but I couldn't put that label of abuse on it because then that wouldn't mean I'd have to admit that I was a victim and I wasn't ready to get to that point yet.
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So I think label is a really key word there.
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Absolutely, and I think that's really the hangup for so many women is that you know there's a stereotype of what a domestic violence victim is, and many of us are aware of that stereotype but none of us want to identify with that.
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You know, and we have such a different range of experiences of how long the relationship's been, how severe it's been, how many different types of abuse are coming into play, and so I think that that label is one of the hardest things to get to that point.
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So I know for myself, even though I was a trauma specialist and had been working with victims of trauma for many, many years, it was still really hard for me to label myself as a trauma victim and understand the symptoms that I was having.
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Oh, I definitely get that.
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So once an individual is able to understand what is happening to them emotionally plus minus physically, what does the healing portion look like?
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That's a great question.
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So I think this is going to be different for everybody in terms of what you're open to, what you have access to.
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A lot of integrative medicine therapies are expensive, unfortunately, so that can be a variable for some women in terms of getting access.
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For myself, I really fell to acupuncture as one of the most powerful ways to affect mind and body.
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Very strong influence on the nervous system.
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It got me out of that adrenaline right away so I could experience.
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You know, an hour after my acupuncture treatment I would just feel so mentally clear and then that's when I would go to the local DV center or call up my attorney or start reaching out to people and I just felt empowered after every session because I felt so much more clear in my mind about the steps I needed to take and it diminished my fear and anxiety enough for me to start to take action.
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Yoga therapy, or just yoga in general, is such a great way for women to start to get in touch with their body, their breath, building that self-awareness, because as we're experiencing more physical violence and we get really numb or go into denial, there's a lot of being out of touch with our bodies, and so yoga massage is a great way to once again receive healing, loving touch.
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For some women, the massage might be too big of a jump because they're not ready yet to be touched by someone.
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So it's really important to just recognize where you are, what you're comfortable with.
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We never really want to push someone to go past their comfort zone, and so it's really about being able to listen to yourself, honor yourself, figure out what is it that I need that's going to help me.
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Meditation you know there's lots of free apps that people can access now, and so just being able to do a five-minute, 10-minute meditation practice a day to help you get centered, feel balanced, feel calm, feel grounded, can be really helpful to start to break that pattern.
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There's lots of other modalities out there besides just the ones that I practice or the ones that I've named, that I practice or the ones that I've named.
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Aromatherapy using essential oils is also a lovely way to just instantly smell something that's pleasing, calms the nervous system down.
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Lavender, for example, is great for anxiety, but there's many other essential oils out there to experiment with.
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There's herbal medicine that can also help with a lot of the PTSD symptoms, but this is something you don't want to self-prescribe.
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You want to really go to a practitioner that understands herbs whether it's an acupuncturist with Chinese herbs, an Ayurvedic doctor with Ayurvedic herbs, a naturopath that can work with Western herbs someone who's really specialized with that who can help you with the right prescription and combination is going to be important.
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Craniosacral is a wonderful modality.
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That's not exactly massage or acupressure, but it really can help with head, neck, spinal trauma.
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So any of my patients that have chronic headaches and migraines which a lot of trauma victims do, I'll recommend that they do craniosacral.
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And then also just looking at things like even martial arts for women to take a self-defense class, take a martial arts class.
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It's just a way of physically once again developing that body awareness but starting to feel more empowered in your body after years of neglect or abuse where you become so disassociated from your physical self.
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You mention in the book the five layers of the healing process.
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What does that look like?
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So that journey of healing and recovery, once again it's so different for everybody in terms of when are they open to it, the support system, the modalities that they choose.
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But what I have found is that, specifically for domestic violence victims of trauma, that these five layers to the healing process are once again what I experienced myself and what I've seen in all the victims that I've worked with.
00:28:16.324 --> 00:28:22.364
And so the first step in the healing process, I think, is to really face our heartbreak.
00:28:22.364 --> 00:28:25.553
You know, for a lot women it could be the ending of a marriage.
00:28:25.553 --> 00:28:28.503
Divorce can be traumatizing.
00:28:28.503 --> 00:28:34.663
For people who don't have abuse in their marriage as well, it's a big chapter of your life ending.
00:28:34.663 --> 00:28:46.757
It's a big life commitment that you maybe had expectations and ideals for, and the disillusion of any marriage relationship can be a huge heartbreak.
00:28:46.757 --> 00:28:51.406
And so a lot of victims loved their abusers, loved their partners.
00:28:51.406 --> 00:29:07.441
That emotion was real and it's important to acknowledge that it's okay to still feel this love for someone but also recognize I am not safe around that person and that heartbreak can take a long time to grieve and to process.
00:29:07.441 --> 00:29:21.223
But a lot of women kind of skip over that step and so I have to coach them about going back to that first step, that layer of healing, and just recognizing their heartbreak and being honest about that.
00:29:21.223 --> 00:29:28.445
And then I think the second step in this layer to healing is really accepting and processing the victimization.
00:29:28.445 --> 00:29:45.048
So we talked about before how it was hard for both of us to label what we were going through and label ourselves as a victim because of the stigma, the stereotype of that and, I think, being really clear about what does it mean to be a victim?
00:29:45.048 --> 00:29:50.256
But then also understanding, once you label yourself as a victim, you don't have to stay stuck there.
00:29:50.256 --> 00:30:02.272
The pathway of healing is to go from victim to survivor, and all of us have that possibility of going through that transformation.
00:30:02.272 --> 00:30:09.744
But it really does take accepting that you are a victim and then processing what that means.
00:30:10.046 --> 00:30:37.448
And so for myself, when I wrote this book, the Power to Break Free, I had a lot of content that didn't fit into the book, and so I created a companion trauma workbook that goes through all these different exercises for women to process their trauma, and you know it's literally lists and uh things such as unhealthy relationships, where you go through and you checkmark all the things that apply to you.
00:30:37.448 --> 00:30:44.656
And as I was going through these exercises, even though I had reached the step of labeling myself as a victim.
00:30:44.656 --> 00:31:16.028
I would go through these exercises in the trauma workbook and it would just make me realize deeper and deeper how far I had fallen as a victim and all of his tactics and his master strategy, and that everything was very well calculated on his part and very systematic to make me weaker, to make me question myself, to make me not want to reach out to people, to make me ashamed.
00:31:16.028 --> 00:31:23.481
And so the trauma workbook was essentially realizing that labeling yourself as a victim is not enough.
00:31:23.481 --> 00:31:38.326
Going through these exercises to process how you were a victim and to make you see your abuser for really who he is is someone who has systematically broken you down, weakened you.
00:31:38.326 --> 00:31:46.816
You know that was really important for me to see with more clarity everything that I had gone through.
00:31:46.816 --> 00:31:54.369
The next third layer is now that you have started to process your victimization.
00:31:54.369 --> 00:31:58.618
You have to start coping with all the different layers of your wounding.
00:31:58.618 --> 00:32:10.518
You know all the emotional trauma that you've gone through, and we mentioned this before the four layers of fear and anxiety, grief and depression, anger and frustration, shame and betrayal.
00:32:10.518 --> 00:32:23.788
And so this is where you're really getting into the thick of it and going through that whole range of emotions and starting to come up with your own coping mechanisms, your own processing, your own understanding.
00:32:23.788 --> 00:32:32.088
And after you've done that is, I think, layer four in this healing journey is practicing forgiveness.
00:32:33.155 --> 00:32:49.844
And I want to take a moment to just clarify what I mean about this, because I think there's a lot of pressure that's put on people to forgive the abuser, whether it's through friends and family, whether it's through religious figures in your life.
00:32:49.844 --> 00:33:09.944
But the real forgiveness here that I'm talking about is for a victim to forgive herself that she got herself into the situation and for her to not blame herself for not being able to anticipate that this partner was going to be abusive, especially when he might not have shown any of those signs.
00:33:09.944 --> 00:33:25.146
When you were dating, you know he might've been the stereotypical, charming person that won you over, won your family and friends over, and so it's really that forgiveness for yourself that's the most important.
00:33:25.146 --> 00:33:45.037
Whether someone chooses to forgive their abuser or not, I think that really depends on whether you think they deserve to be forgiven for all the things that they've done, and for some victims, they might decide he doesn't deserve to be forgiven for all the things that they've done and for some victims, they might decide he doesn't deserve to be forgiven for what he did, and they shouldn't be shamed into thinking that's not okay.
00:33:45.037 --> 00:33:50.626
That's their call, and only their call, whether they can do that.
00:33:51.708 --> 00:33:58.075
And then the fifth layer in the healing process is really embracing your transformation and empowerment.
00:33:58.075 --> 00:34:10.387
And so this is something for myself that I couldn't start to embrace, that while I was having anxiety and flashbacks, and it's definitely something that comes later.
00:34:10.387 --> 00:34:14.177
A lot of people think, okay, you've left your abuser.
00:34:14.177 --> 00:34:19.909
Now you've gotten your divorce, you should instantly be a happier person and transformed.
00:34:19.909 --> 00:34:21.713
And it's like, no, that takes time.
00:34:21.713 --> 00:34:33.103
It is a healing journey and that's going to really vary for each victim in terms or each survivor, I should say, at this point, of what they're doing to take care of themselves.
00:34:33.503 --> 00:34:46.302
And I remember my therapist, you know, when I was going through this divorce process and I'm like, okay, I'm done with the divorce, now I just want to be over this chapter of my life and I want to feel great in like a month.
00:34:46.402 --> 00:34:49.617
And she's like Anisha, it's going to take some time, you know.
00:34:49.617 --> 00:34:55.981
And she said you're going to feel better each month, you're going to feel there's transformation.
00:34:55.981 --> 00:34:57.452
And she said each year you're going to feel there's transformation.
00:34:57.452 --> 00:34:59.840
And she said each year you're going to feel that there's transformation.
00:34:59.840 --> 00:35:03.639
I'm like I don't want to take a whole year to heal and feel better.
00:35:03.639 --> 00:35:05.304
And she's like you can't rush this.
00:35:05.304 --> 00:35:12.009
It is something that's going to take time, and now I realize that it did take.
00:35:12.009 --> 00:35:24.157
Like each year, after my divorce, I felt more clear, I felt more grounded, I felt more confident, but it definitely was a process that took time and the first couple of months are the most intense.
00:35:24.157 --> 00:35:37.318
But then after that, I still do think it takes a couple years, even being super vigilant about your healing, to really understand what you have come out of, to really understand what you have come out of.
00:35:37.378 --> 00:35:38.541
I can identify with that.
00:35:38.541 --> 00:35:41.826
So much I will say for me personally.
00:35:41.826 --> 00:35:48.773
I thought you know, definitely celebrate all the steps that like, every step that you have towards your healing.
00:35:48.773 --> 00:35:49.313
That's great.
00:35:49.313 --> 00:35:54.987
But it was like I'd have a little tiny baby step and I'm like I'm good, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm now, I'm empowered.
00:35:56.215 --> 00:36:01.817
I took a lot of intensive therapy for me to get back to the heartbreak part.
00:36:01.817 --> 00:36:14.704
So I was trying to jump ahead to everything else and it didn't take me until one of the last sessions of I did EMDR to realize that I loved my abuser.
00:36:14.704 --> 00:36:17.626
And it was in my head.
00:36:17.626 --> 00:36:24.621
I had convinced myself that I was too smart of an individual to end up in a relationship like that.
00:36:24.621 --> 00:36:27.847
So I must have faked that I loved him.
00:36:27.847 --> 00:36:42.956
I didn't truly I was, for whatever reason decided I used him to pretend I was in love or something, him for to pretend I was in love or something.
00:36:42.956 --> 00:36:45.623
And so I hit the heartbreak part a long time after the relationship had ended and I was out of it.
00:36:45.623 --> 00:36:48.496
So that is interesting how you you mentioned all of that.
00:36:48.496 --> 00:36:51.766
Uh, there was the other um, forgiveness.
00:36:51.766 --> 00:37:01.481
That was a tough one and self-forgiveness is very difficult because I found it easier to blame myself for a lot of what happened than to blame him.
00:37:03.465 --> 00:37:09.844
Absolutely, and I think that's where most victims get stuck, honestly, is there is so much self-blame.
00:37:11.226 --> 00:37:20.782
But that's also part of the abuser's conditioning, you know, and so it takes time to recognize those tactics and then to see am I just beating myself up?
00:37:20.782 --> 00:37:31.184
The same way my abuser is, you know, and it took for myself the help of a very skilled therapist to help me see those patterns.
00:37:31.184 --> 00:37:32.166
What am I doing?
00:37:32.166 --> 00:37:41.141
You know that is blocking my healing because I'm kind of mimicking my abuser, blaming myself or shaming myself.
00:37:41.141 --> 00:38:08.677
And so it's really important to give yourself that permission of time to process all of these things, to go at your own pace, to continue to get support from healers on the outside, from developing your community of support, friends and family, but understanding that this is a really difficult, challenging but can also be a really beautiful journey.
00:38:08.677 --> 00:38:24.963
So, over the years of just working with trauma victims, I will say, as a practitioner, what has been most fulfilling for me is to see the transformation that is always possible if we open up to the healing that that's really there for us.
00:38:24.983 --> 00:38:27.907
And it's important in every stage.
00:38:27.907 --> 00:38:45.045
Do you want to just talk a little bit more about just general self-care and what to do and how important it is and what effects it has, what positive effects it can have?
00:38:45.746 --> 00:38:46.534
Absolutely so.
