(Please take care of yourself as you click through)
This is a brave account of some who have shared seconds, minutes, segments, seasons of their stories of sexual abuse and violence within all sorts of different kind of relationships.
What happens in you as you read? What do you notice? What were your assumptions? What were you surprised by? What did you want to keep close or far away?
This brings up what the question of what the process of restoring safety within oneself includes after experiences like these...
Within Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery, (public library) she writes:
The fundamental stages of recovery are:
“1. Establishing safety
2. Reconstructing the traumatic story
3. Restoring the connection between the survivor and his/her community.”
Keeping in mind that all of our ways of doing the three things above might look differently to each of us, some of the groundwork of safety in relationships (within ourselves and others) always includes availability (accessible vulnerability & presence) and consistency.
How have you restored safety within yourself after you have experienced harm?
