Today we’re gonna talk about five things to do at the start of your healing from abuse journey. So whether you are in it and trying to claw your way out, or you are kind of on the other side and starting to heal, or you’ve been on the outside for a little bit, but still feeling like you just have a lot of work to do. These are some of the things, some tips that I myself did at the beginning of my journey and wanna share with you all.
Related Links:
Recommended Episodes
- Episode 2 (about gaslighting and more):https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-2-5-signs-of-toxic-people-and-how-to-get-rid/id1662241353?i=1000592070178
- Episode 5 (Grey Rock Method): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-5-how-to-handle-narcissistic-abusers-the-grey-rock/id1662241353?i=1000594909977
5 Things I Did to Start My Healing From Narcissistic Abuse
Hey friends, welcome to the, but still She Thrives podcast. I’m Christy Jade, adoring wife, adoptive mama, empowerment coach and queen of helping women who have gone through abuse, turn their lives around and start thriving. I know you are sick of feeling not good enough, questioning your decisions, not knowing how to say no, and the stress is still in your body and in your life. You’re looking for more joy and just some freaking peace. You wanna feel confident, take your power back and run your life your way. So if you’re ready to go from surviving to thriving, grab that venti mocha and let’s dig in. Do you need help leaving or help healing from an abusive situation? I gotcha. I wanna help you. That is what I am here for. It is my specialty and I am giving $20 off your first call for a limited time.
Speaker 1: (01:31)
Um, it’s empowerment coaching call 60 minutes and then we can go from there and you can sign up over at bit.ly/firstcoachingcall. I would love to help you. So we’re touching on some basic tips today. Sometimes when we’re in abusive situations or even after leaving them, we don’t really see just how abusive they were or are and just what a huge effect they can have on us. We’re so used to having the finger pointed at us, can I get a amen? Can I get a what, what ? That? We sometimes do the same thing to ourselves so we can blame ourselves. Think we aren’t worthy, feel hopeless in the end, right? But I have good news. It’s not your fault. You’re not crazy. You are valuable, you’re worthy, you’re loved, and there is hope. So when I was still in my abusive situation, it, I just didn’t realize it was actually even abuse.
Speaker 1: (02:29)
Like I wouldn’t even say that word. I was kind of in denial about it. Uh, it was kind of all I knew and I thought it was just how life was. It actually took a friend of mine who saw it with her own eyes. It took her letting me know that this was like not normal at all. Her reaction finally shook me into being like, oh, this ain’t right, . So it still took years for me to get brave enough to remove this person from my life and a while after that, just to see how deep the damage was. And during the abuse, I felt crazy, right? You’re questioning yourself and I’m sure a lot of you can relate to that. And afterwards, I continued to question myself. That is something that I didn’t expect. I kind of, once I got out of the situation, felt relief.
Speaker 1: (03:22)
But something I realized that could happen was questioning myself, getting guilt and harassed by the abuser, which I eventually totally cut off and then guilted by other people. Okay? And that was tough, and I hope you cannot relate to that, but I know many of you will be able to, and I’m going to do an entire episode on this because this was heart wrenching and like blew my world up when it happened because it felt just so isolating and just I finally felt relief and then immediately was getting guilt from family members, uh, multiple, multiple family members, aka a his enablers, um, told me I was ruining the family. I needed to fix things. And that basically I, I was the problem, right? I had to fix this problem and it was on me. Not that he was abusive, right? That was just him. That’s still, that’s just him, right?
Speaker 1: (04:21)
Very dismissive. So again, we’re getting into the whole dismissive part we talked about in this last episode, and it can run in families. These traits can run in family members and you might see those patterns. So we won’t get too far into that, but I wanted to mention that to you just because that is part of the healing journey you may have to deal with as well. I remember, I mean, ugly crying, like nobody needs to see that face, that mascara running, that just the ugly cry, ugly crying on the bathroom floor. One day after I told one family member that I was going to get a restraining order on the abuser and they said I could not do that to him. That’s where we need a whole episode, because that is so backwards and messed up. And we are the ones, the victims who should be protected.
Speaker 1: (05:13)
And when the abuser is protected, it really is heart-wrenching. And unless you experience it, you don’t know. But if you know, you know, and you’re with me and you’re feeling it, and it, it’s not a good feeling, but we’re gonna touch all that. So after that, I, I went straight to therapy. I was like laying on the couch, hand me the tissues because I’ve gotta be strong and I need support. So I got some help and started, you know, going in the right direction, being strong. And here’s just some of the things that, the tools that I got from my therapist and just kind of doing my own research and my own coping mechanisms, if you will, . But there were five things, there were a lot of things, but the five things that I wanted to share today that I, I did in the beginning of my healing journey was first recognizing the bigness of it because it was way bigger than I realized.
Speaker 1: (06:06)
Not just the the actual abuse, but the actual healing and the damage that had been done. So you might need to take a minute to really recognize like this is a big deal and validate yourself. Get validation from someone you trust close to you. Like with my husband, I had to talk to him about it, um, and my best friend and I had a good support system. And I also, like I said, I got a therapist, um, because not even my husband or my best friend had been through what I had and my therapist did go through abuse herself. So I felt like she could really get it. And giving yourself grace, knowing this is huge and this, it might take me some time and, and I might take a step back or I might have really hard days, but you’re going to keep moving forward.
Speaker 1: (06:54)
You just keep strong. Number two, journaling the out of my experience, basically, which was tough. This is not fun. This is not for the fan of heart, but actually pen to paper, I take it back, no pen to paper. I put it in my computer where I could lock it up and nobody could see it, where I just journaled my experience and what happened. And that was truly therapeutic for me. I did shed some tears. It was hard to write it out, to say it out loud to even though it was to myself saying things out loud that I never really reflected on, I didn’t wanna think about. Um, and that’s something you can do in therapy if you feel like you need more support. I did a lot of it on my own, but I also talked to my therapist about some of it.
Speaker 1: (07:41)
But with her, I focused on, I like to go forward and, and, you know, start from now. So I did a lot of the other work that digging work myself, but it’s up to you how you handle and what you can deal with. Everybody’s totally different. So journaling though is very therapeutic, so I highly suggest that. Number three, yoga. Funny story. I did hip hop dance my whole life. Yep. I’m gangsta. Me and Snoop doing it up. Um, I hated anything slow. I I quit ballet. It was too slow. I did yoga little I tried in my twenties and was just like, this is slow. I’m bored. But I knew that I had to kind of reset my nervous system. Your nervous system after abuse gets shook. I’m telling you, if you give yoga a chance, and part of it is I think we’re just not used to that much calm and it’s freaky give yoga a chance.
Speaker 1: (08:42)
They do have hot yoga and faster yoga. I was like, I’m going for the slowest yoga I can do. I did yin yoga, I still danced, so it’s not like I gave that up. I did dance, but I also knew I need something really calming. Asa did meditation. So the yoga was called yin yoga. Now I loved it so much. I teach it and it is amazing. It takes some getting used to, to slow down that much if you’re not used to it, but it truly calms your nervous system. So give it a chance. Let, don’t just try it once or twice. Really try to do it for a month and you’ll, you’ll see the benefits and you’ll wanna continue. And like I said, meditation as well. Something calming. Alright, surrounding yourself, sorry. Number four, surrounding yourself with healthy, positive people. Okay, this one’s huge.
Speaker 1: (09:37)
A lot of us who have dramatic upbringings or just, you know, kind of chaotic environments or we used to fast paced this and that and, you know, some abusive chaos, whatever you wanna call it, also tend to attract people that are dramatic or are in similar situations. Um, we can attract each other. I found that I had chosen some friends that I had to walk on eggshells around or were controlling, right? So I had to really evaluate who I was hanging out with, surrounding myself with and adjust accordingly. Basically, I did remove a couple of friends from my life after realizing that I wasn’t being treated as well as I would like. I’m not saying you gotta go hack off all your friendships. Um, I had specific situations where it became prominent that it just wasn’t a good fit for friendship anymore and good luck.
Speaker 1: (10:41)
No bad feelings, but I just had to distance myself hopefully. And I also had some great friends that I had and I still have, and hopefully you have some great people to surround yourself with, but let’s go through what healthy positive people look like. And this did leave more room in my life for those people. So people that are not gossipers, that are not always talking about other people, that’s, that’s healthy, right? Talking about growth and happy things. And I mean, it could be a surface level of just talking about, you know, fun things like what movies you’re watching are going shopping together. And then there are the people that you can lean on each other, but it’s not always so heavy or gossipy, right? So it needs to be a good balanced person that you have in your life. Multiple people and people that really lift you up, right?
Speaker 1: (11:35)
The cheerleader types. I have a couple people in my life that I mean are, are really like cheerleaders for me. And it felt really weird at first because I wasn’t used to that. I was used to being criticized a lot and it was so refreshing but also felt almost uncomfortable because I wasn’t used to it. Definitely surround yourself with uplifting cheerleader type people that are going to make you feel good about yourself. Cuz it, we deserve it. this last one. Super simple, but that’s okay. Like we need simple guys. We need simple. After all the we’ve been through, we deserve simple, positive affirmations. You’ve probably heard it, maybe it sounds hokey. I don’t care. It’s simple and it actually works. This is something I did right away on my journey. I actually recorded my own voice saying, I mean I probably had 25 positive affirmations going on in the beginning of all this.
Speaker 1: (12:39)
Um, and if you need help setting up some affirmations or you want some of mine, I have some I can send to you. So write me at fierce mama. See gmail.com. Fierce mama see gmail.com. This is all in the show notes, always, um, all my information. So positive affirmations, it really does help you rewire your brain. Yes, you, you know, doing the other work and the therapy and all the things helps, but I found they really, really did help me every morning and every night I would play on, it was just on my iPhone, on my memo notes there, whatever you call ’em, the little voice recording. And I would listen to it right when I woke up and then right before I went to sleep every night, sometimes I’d fall asleep. I’d put it like on a loop and it really did have an impact because the first thing you do when you wake up, you can start going into negative thoughts, right?
Speaker 1: (13:34)
So replacing that with positive thoughts. And then same thing, your mind could be spinning at night, right? You have all these swirling to-do lists on top of this negative self-talk you may have from the abuse. And replacing that, being forced to listen to positive affirmations really help me and I know it’ll help you too. Another thing, if you’re a God person, which I am, praise him, go jc. prayer really helped, it’s helped me on this journey. It’s helped me in everything in my life. I always say like the, the closer I am to God, I’ve had phases or I’ve always been close and pray. And, but when I’m like really talking to God here and there throughout the day, having my little side note prayers and morning and night maybe, um, doing devotionals. When I’m in those like really heavy God seasons of my life, which should be always, I get it, but you know, I’m human.
Speaker 1: (14:32)
That is when I feel the best and I thrive even more in my life. So big props to the big g o d. If you’re a God person, if you’re a universe person, whatever, I don’t, I don’t care what it is. Your higher power that you believe in, lean on, lean on that it is there for that reason. And I, I couldn’t have gotten through that journey without not just God, but also having faith. Just having faith that yes, I’ve been through this, but I’m strong enough to get through this and I’m going to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and walk this path and believe that this is where I’m supposed to be, like it or not. And I’m gonna be in a better place soon. So those are my little tips for you that I, as you know, some of the things like I said that I did to help myself and got me through.
Speaker 1: (15:31)
And if you have questions or comments, like I said, you can email me fiercemamac@gmail.com And I will see you in the next episode. Smooches and dueces. Girl, if you are over the lack of peace, the lack of setting boundaries, not feeling confident, questioning yourself, it is time to get some coaching. This is what I do, this is my specialty, it’s what I love. And I can help you more quickly than you think. If you wanna grab a call with me, I am offering $20 off of the first call and there are only 10 spots a week and they fill up quickly. So definitely act now if you’re interested and you can find me over at bit.ly/firstcoachingcall to set that up. I look forward to helping you go from surviving the thriving cuz you deserve to be the queen you have always been. Let’s chat.