© 2009 by Daniel Carter. All rights reserved. Copying or reproducing any portion of this article without permission is illegal and will be prosecuted.

This is a painful and difficult subject to write about if you've gone through it. And I have. But because I've gone through it, and because of an incredible amount of work (I didn't want abuse to determine my life and my life's story) I'm writing for the first time about this subject. Most days at this point in my life, I don't have perpetrators to blame. I don't have axes to grind or fingers to point. I don't claim entitlement to being the Ultimate Victim. But some days that all goes to hell in a handbasket, and I blame the perpetrators, shake my fist at God and scream "WHY ME!?" and I cry myself into a black oblivion that's something like sleep. But as I say, most days I don't have to do any of these things. I'm sane and calm and rational. But it always surprises me when these residual feelings bubble up and boil over. As time goes on, thankfully, they occur less and less.

This isn't about my life's story. Anyone who has been abused has a story. I'm not here to wave the banner of my tragedy. I'm here to wave the banner of what it takes to heal and find hope. My writing this is about how I reclaimed sanity, found inner peace, and learned to feel safe again. And these things are not easy to come by when your mind is obssessed with past images of trauma. But it can be a liberating experience to face those demons head on and reclaim the life you were denied.

In actual fact, none of us escapes some type of abuse in our life-time. And there is no contest about who suffered the most, despite that in our own mind, we believe we suffered more than most anyone we know. Every person, every soul has been abused, and that abuse is real, undeserved, and unnecessary. And here's a shocker: almost none of us are innocent. Statistically, most all perpetrators were abused long before they were perpetrators of abuse. Statistically most victims of abuse also abuse others. The degrees of abuse in each case vary widely. The point I make is not about undermining the feelings, trauma or abuse of the victim. Those are excruciatingly real. I wouldn't try to minimize such feelings, after all, I've felt them full force. Why would I supposedly heap more pain on abuse victims to write that almost none of us are innocent when we as abuse victims have suffered so much? Because it's just fact. It's emotionless fact. Because in the end, finger-pointing and blame shot back and forth like bullets never solved the problem of how to overcome the effects of abuse. Blame only fed the hate that abuse instilled. Where does the insanity end? It ends with me. It ends with you, when you are ready to end it. It ends when we want to leave the battle field badly enough. It ends when all you can think about is having some peace.

This may only be my opinion, but in my experience, I find that abuse is a real form of mental illness. The mind games, threats, torture—all of it—could only come from a very ill mind. And sadly, abuse victims develop their own forms of mental illness. Depression, distorted and skewed self image, facial tics, obssessive behaviors, unreal voices, multiple personalities, and so much more. It seems like a very hopeless situation. But it isn't. There are lots of people besides me who write and speak on this subject. They are most often voices of hope. They are the proverbial light we are looking for. They give us a reason to believe that there is hope to leave the effects of abuse behind.

I don't want to write about what to do if you are still in an abusive situation. If you are, the answer is to stop the insanity, regardless of the threats and leave if you can. Tell someone if you can. Do something to get yourself out of that abuse. it doesn't mean harming anyone to make it stop. It just means you have to get out of there. 

What I do want to write about is now that you are out of the abuse, now that you are out of the battle field, how do you reclaim your life?

I certainly needed it long before I got it. But evenso, there are those of us who have the ability to heal themselves, and for them, counseling will seem foreign and unhelpful. However, there are a lot of us who really can't make sense of what happened, and finding a good counselor can be like flipping on a light switch.

The effects of abuse are usually way beyond your family and friends' ability to get you through it. Most often they are just too uncomfortable to even be questioned about events, let alone try to help you work through them. And you probably already know that you can't keep this locked away in some secret compartment in your mind. You can try, but eventually it all comes up like a backed up toilet. It's wretched. The thing you must come to terms with is it's supposed to come up. It's toxin and your body needs to get rid of it. Your friends and family are rarely equipped with mental hazmat suits to deal with the ugliness of what you've gone through. Most of the time, it's not worth trying to put them through it. But know that there is help for all of us who need it. Here is a website that has a lot useful information and phone numbers: athealth.com

There are resources and helps that range from local school and church programs, to outpatient helps through doctors' offices and hospitals. All you have to do is start making phone calls and asking questions. It's nobody's business if you are or aren't in counseling, so hopefully that will ease any feelings of the social stigmas associated with it. You'll know who you can trust with this information. Most people just don't need to know. Everybody has appointments for something, and no one is really obligated to say what it's about. If pressed, you can simply call it a "medical" appointment.

If you have health insurance that will assist in paying for some or all of your counseling, contact your insurer and get as much information as you can regarding things like mental health coverage, counseling, and mental health outpatient services. Talk to doctors, nurses and other health care professionals you may know for references of who the best counselors are in your area. Most of the time your better references are not going to come from family and close friends. (There are exceptions to this, obviously. But be thoughtful and smart about choosing a counselor.) Don't be afraid to shop around. I had to go through three counselors before I found the one that knew how to handle all my trauma and still made me work.

You may think this doesn't have much to do with brain vomit, but it does. Trauma over a long period causes incredible amounts of stress, which in turn rewires your body in the worst possible ways. It takes a while to untangle the wiring and get things running in the right direction again. I'm not just talking about brain function, I'm also talking about body function. If you've been through long-term abuse, you probably have a lot of other physical health problems as well. 

Start with diet. Change and improve your diet with one thing at a time. For example, rather than cut out all sugar, just cut out soft drinks. Then change something else once you've got that under control. Eating nutritiously gives your body the advantage of starting to correct the long-term damage to your system. 

When you feel you're doing pretty well with diet, investigate digestion and assimilation. Chances are that you have some potential problems there. I had horrible problems and didn't even know it. I didn't assimilate a lot of nutrients, which caused brain and body dysfunction. I had intestinal yeast very badly, along with some other problems that prevented me from absorbing nutrients, and therefore, exaggerating depression and many other symptoms. To learn more about assimilation problems and how to correct them, click here.

When you optimize your body's assimilation and nutrient absorption you begin to rewire many of the problems associated with depression and other symptoms. Your physical and mental health begin to improve. But you need to know that one is not without the other. In other words, you need to detox your mind and body in counseling as much as you need to consider dietary improvements. It's all delicately interconnected. However, if you find that you are doing too much too soon, slow down, or just stop the things you can't take on. Just do what you can. Healing is a slow process, and as you heal, you'll naturally know what you need to do because you'll be ready to do it. You'll discover as you heal that there are other things which are also interconnected. They come in progression naturally, which leads me to the next point.

When you've been in counseling long enough to get through the toilet backup and the deep, dark awful stuff, you're going to wonder what to do with your new, lighter feeling and freedom. Find out what's fun for you and do that. Include people who are safe and trusted. Do simple little things before you embark on a big adventure. An afternoon in the park is as fun and wonderful as a seven day cruise to the Bahamas in reality. You're trying to enjoy positive, healthy experiences to deposit in your "fun" mental checking account. At some point you'll need to make a withdrawal, and now you'll have something to draw on. You'll need to make regular deposits. Remember that either an afternoon at the park, or a seven day cruise can turn into a nightmare if you're not prepared to let the past go and enjoy being in the present. Just take it easy, and go gently.

Get back to your hobbies, or find one. Even if you're raising kids or working 60 hours a week (and I was doing both very often at the time I was in intense counseling) a hobby and other interests are crucial to having a healthy, balanced life. If you love sports, you could join a community team. There is a whole world out there with lots of people who are safe and able to help you enjoy being in it. By now, you're gaining the skills you need to develop the sense of which people are not safe that you need to keep at a safe distance.

Spirituality doesn't necessarily mean embracing a religion. But if you have a religion that you love, you can get involved (or reinvolved) to a degree you feel comfortable, or you might just take up some readings that your religion might offer. And if you're not religious, but feel a spiritual connection, let yourself explore the idea of who you are in this vast universe. Meditation, prayer, and readings of spiritual authors can help open your mind and give you a sense of purpose and hope that may not otherwise be evident to you. Some of us are just not interested in this sort of thing, and it's fine. Spirituality can mean being in touch and honest with your own feelings as well as others. It doesn't have to be about anything else if that's not comfortable for you.

If you have believed in God, and your long-term suffering of abuse has left you very angry at him, asking why he allowed this to happen to you, maybe these next thoughts will help: He's not concerned about your hate for him. So hate away. If God really is all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, and knows the end from the beginning, and he created you, he knew long before you did that you would some day hate him. If he's perfect in every way, he can't have an ego. Only an ego would make him mad at you for being mad at him. So if you need to hate God, then hate him and stop putting all the useless guilt on yourself for feeling that way. This is all part of the healing process, and it usually passes as we continue to heal. So that would mean that even God knows you're healing, and that your feelings for him are temporary. And I don't know about you, but if my kid hated my guts, and I knew it was temporary, there isn't a thing in this world I wouldn't do to make sure he or she is going to be okay and find their happiness. So how much more unconditional than me do you suppose God might be?

But let me warn you, if you don't want lectures from family, friends and clergy, hate God privately more than publicly.

Having a spiritual connection has done a great deal to help me heal and feel good about my skewed self image. People with a spiritual connection are usually fairly healthy and happy. And, for what it's worth, it helped me realize that God, or the universe, or whatever that incredible power is out there, didn't put me through the abuse, but pulled me through it.

If you still have battle wounds that can't heal, letting go of the past and forgiving is not an option. There is a time and a place for letting go and forgiving, and it's not when your backed up toilet is spilling over. You're in survival mode at that point, not in "let's-all-get-along" mode. Letting go of the past occurs when you have your past trauma no longer traumatizes you. For some, that examining process happens with a counselor. For others, it may be a different process. But at this point you've looked through that horrible toilet, and you've discovered the problems and are correcting them so it doesn't have to back up again. Things feel cleaned up at this point. You don't feel stuck in the bathroom still cleaning up this awful stuff. You feel like you can walk away from it, and forget it.

This is the point where you can begin to realize the past no longer exists. This is when you can let go of the past instead of obviously protecting it like bloody wound that won't heal. When you let the past go, you are awarded the purple heart. The award of valor and courage. You got wounded, but you made it through enemy lines by facing courageously the your oppressors. And oddly, now those oppressors matter less and less. And you realize you don't hurt any more when you think about them. They don't obsessively occupy your thoughts as they once did. You don't have malice toward them because they no longer matter. This is forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not being naive enough to believe oppressors don't exist or that they won't ever attempt to hurt you again. Forgiveness means they matter so little because you now know how to defend yourself from their tactics and you feel calm and assured about that. Forgiveness means that your bitterness, which kept them chained to you, is gone enough that you are free of them.

There are no more hostages. There is no more blame. There are no more victims. You are responsible for your life, and you know how to be safe. You surround yourself with safe people and you know how to deal with people who are not. As I said above, some can heal and get to this point on their own. But for many of us, we need help in examining the damage. This is what professional counseling is about. That's why you may need to consider it. Our family and friends rarely know how to teach us how to prevent the circumstances of abuse that happened to us, or how to deal with past abuse, or we would have learned from them how to avoid the abuse we received.

You need to know this:

"I'm okay the way I am."

However you were created, you were created being okay the way you are. Underneath your suffering, pain and hurt, underneath the depression and everything else is where you are. Stripping away those layers is tough work, but it can be done. I didn't want to do it, but I wanted to get better more than not do it.

You are okay the way you are, because there is no experience in this life that can't be turned around to be a positive one. We can't comprehend light without dark. We can't undertand joy without sorrow. We have to have the opposites to comprehend either. And so abuse can teach a positive lesson about how to take care of ourselves and be well. To be free. To be okay the way we are now.

There is hope beyond surviving abuse. Although my Plan A got shot to pieces a long time ago, I learned Plan B can be wonderful. I'm living it. I'm on a journey that's becoming wonderful and rich with discovery and happiness. Life isn't always happy, and the journey isn't always pleasant or easy, but there can be joy in it. And, I've even found a meadow. One that is real as well as symbolic. I hope you find it too.