My Story of Hope and Healing (And A Video Interview!)

 

A couple of months ago, I was asked to contribute to a new training on child sexual abuse prevention by being interview for a training video, to help adults understand why prevention is important and to also share some hope from my own healing journey. This video was made to further spread awareness about the work of Restore Hope, an Oregon based nonprofit that is dedicated to keeping children and teens safe from sexual abuse and helping survivors heal through education, prevention training, and survivor support. (You can learn more about Restore Hope here.)

As a survivor of child sexual abuse, I found my voice as a child sexual abuse prevention educator 10 years into my healing journey, when I realized if I had been given the tools to ask for help, that chances are I would not have suffered as long as I did. I thought that it was hard to speak about this topic because I was a survivor and it carried so much shame for me. But when I saw professionals in my training, highly...

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The Only Way to Get Rid of Shame

This past week in the online group we have been talking about shame. It is always a challenging topic but it is crucial for victims of abuse to understand in order to feel free from shame. 
 
The feeling most people avoid feeling is shame. I love Brené Brown's work around shame and her research, books, and Ted talks shed a light onto what she calls the master feeling because when we have internalized shame, it becomes the lens for how we view the world and ourselves in it. And it isn't until we understand how it impacts us, that we can consider the possibility that there is another way to see and feel about ourselves. 
 
Survivors of child abuse develop toxic shame because of the lack of support they get from caregivers and family to process what was done to them. Trauma becomes internalized without support soon after the abuse happened. The child feels and experiences abandonment and extreme confusion when they are hurt by someone they know and love,...
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