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Recovering from Difficult Childhoods
Over the past 25 years I have treated men and women in my practice who has had childhood histories of phsyical and sexual abuse. In that time the professional has learned much about the numbers of individuals who struggle with the residual effects of surviving such histories.
We know that it is a far common occurance then was once estimated. We have learned that female parents MAY BE the perpetrator in the case of sexual abuse and that boys too may be victimized. We have learned that the impact upon the survivor depends upon a number of variables. We have learned that in a majority of cases good therapeutic support can help a person reclaim their lives and, in certain cases end a family cycle of mistreatment of it's children.
Therapy for the adult survivors of abuse follows certain patterns. in this article I hope to describe some of the significant therapeutic landmarks that I have noticed in my many years of practice. My hope is to answer some of the most basic questions, and in doing so help individuals understand that what they are experiencing is not only not "crazy" but indeed, he normal process of healing from our histories.
I tell my clients that healing generally follows a two part process:
1)The DISCOVERY-in this stage we begin to have memories or question whether what we do remember might really be described as ABUSE. It can be the result of sudden flashbacks, something we read or even the experience of watching our own childern reach the age at which the abuse occurred. It can be a time of powerful emotions including fear, anger and confusion. There is a feeling of "just wanting those feelings to be gone" and when handled in the appropraiate therapeutic way, it is the shorter of the two stages.
2) The RECOVERY- this is the part of the therapeutic process where we begin to learn that we are NOT the one's responsible for the harm that was done to us. This of course require that we begin to understand that OTHERS were respnsible for
their actin in our childhod. It requires that we no longer keep their secrets or protect them by denying our own reality. It does NOT necessarily require that we confront them. Rather it is process of trusting our own perceptions and intuitions and relizing that we were