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Today’s vocab word: ‘revictimization’. A person’s defensive responses to traumatic experiences make them significantly more vulnerable to becoming targets of future abuse. It is not coincidental when many people with say, C-PTSD, are found wrapped up with the same harmful person.
I was sexually and emotionally abused from age 12-18. I'm highly intelligent, passionate about justice, accountability and treating others with kindness. Nonetheless I struggle tremendously, far into adulthood, to recognize good relationships and protect myself from harmful ones.
This thread is a list of resources that have been invaluable in helping me heal my relational trauma and address the heavy fallout of maladaptive behaviors that resulted.
Books I highly suggest reading in addition to or while you work up the nerve to start therapy:
Books I highly suggest reading in addition to or while you work up the nerve to start therapy:
1) All About Love
Source of the most important & challenging sentence I’ve read: “Love and abuse cannot coexist.” It requires you to think of love not as a feeling but the reality of actions taken. Love is what you do, a verb, and it can only be kind. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17607.All_About_Love
Source of the most important & challenging sentence I’ve read: “Love and abuse cannot coexist.” It requires you to think of love not as a feeling but the reality of actions taken. Love is what you do, a verb, and it can only be kind. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17607.All_About_Love
Commonly, we will change our definition of love so that it still includes whatever situation we find ourselves in, because it is simply too difficult to accept the alternative, that we are not loved. Hold to the true standard.
Further, it is not sufficient in love that you do not harm others. As a person of equal importance to any partner with whom you find yourself, (self-)love by definition requires that you remove yourself from the path of harm of someone else, even if you care about them.
2) The Complex PTSD Workbook
This book changed my decade long perception that there was something fundamentally wrong with me that therapy could not address. Highly recommend it for anyone working to process trauma, even if you don't think you have PTSD. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33827765-the-complex-ptsd-workbook
This book changed my decade long perception that there was something fundamentally wrong with me that therapy could not address. Highly recommend it for anyone working to process trauma, even if you don't think you have PTSD. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33827765-the-complex-ptsd-workbook
3) Understanding Trauma and Dissociation
Huge insights here on the phases of trauma treatment. Much focus is on DID which I don't have, but we will all experience some degree of internal splintering and dissociation as a coping mechanism in our lives. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4968866-understanding-trauma-and-dissociation
Huge insights here on the phases of trauma treatment. Much focus is on DID which I don't have, but we will all experience some degree of internal splintering and dissociation as a coping mechanism in our lives. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4968866-understanding-trauma-and-dissociation
4) I Hate You, Don't Leave Me
Guide to BPD and coping with loving someone who has it. Helped me make sense of past relationships. Wish I read it 15 years earlier. Gave me some self-insight too as BPD overlaps with many other disorders (MDD, GAD, ADHD, etc) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9498015-i-hate-you-don-t-leave-me
Guide to BPD and coping with loving someone who has it. Helped me make sense of past relationships. Wish I read it 15 years earlier. Gave me some self-insight too as BPD overlaps with many other disorders (MDD, GAD, ADHD, etc) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9498015-i-hate-you-don-t-leave-me
5) Men Explain Things to Me
Or any other collection by Solnit. Healing when someone sharply, eloquently describes experiences you're familiar with. She writes about the culture that is complicit in sexual violence and silencing victims, particularly women. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528190-men-explain-things-to-me
Or any other collection by Solnit. Healing when someone sharply, eloquently describes experiences you're familiar with. She writes about the culture that is complicit in sexual violence and silencing victims, particularly women. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528190-men-explain-things-to-me
