Thoughts Over Coffee ☕️
I have been deep in my own personal reflections of the 1:1s I have been doing recently with survivors and I have noticed a theme that continues to come up as we walk through the healing process together.
That theme is the dynamic change among blood relatives once we as survivors find the strength to speak up and stand in our truth. Many of us come face to face with gaslighting, verbal attacks, threats, and ostracization from the family we grew up in.
Even when No Contact is something we might want, we may implement ourselves, or that we recognize is needed – when we begin healing and our family of origin turns on us – it is a loss. And we have all lost so much already.
I don’t have many blood relatives left on that side. My sexual abuser killed himself during the trial when I was 15, my father died when I was 25, and his mother soon after.
It was another 12 years before I began my healing journey.
The remaining members of that side have also done nothing to keep in consistent contact with me through the years. It has been strained, and full of judgement. That changed this year when they found my work online and had a tizzy about the way they are portrayed in my story.
Ironic how I have had more interaction with my family of origin in the last year that in the many prior. It has been an amazing display of the dysfunction that I grew up in and in many ways exactly what I needed to continue putting my childhood experiences into perspective.
Any doubts I had that I may have gotten it “wrong” were laid to rest when I saw how they thought they could treat me. I didn’t imagine anything as child. I really did grow up in that abusive and damaging environment.
The Mirror
When I share my story about the adults in my life as a child who either abused me or looked the other way while it happened, I hold up a mirror and show them the kind of people they were to me as a child. Their inability to accept accountability or responsibility demonstrates no change has taken place within this family.
I deserve much better than that. Breaking generational cycles of trauma is super hero work.
I am standing up to a lineage that is over 100 years old and it is chock-full of pain, abuse, and selfish and destructive behavioral patterns.
This work doesn’t just change me and my life as I heal, it changes the trajectory of my entire family line.
I have chosen to walk through the fire so that my children and their children, and so on don’t have to. That is what breaking generational cycles of trauma is about.
This is why it is so difficult.
I applaud you warrior 👏🏻🔥
If you need a peer to walk through this fire with you, visit my calendar and schedule a 1:1 peer session. If you think you need more than one session, save money when you purchase a package.
You don’t have to do this alone ✨
On goes the journey💪🏻❤️🩹
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