Healing from Childhood Abuse

Child abuse is sadly a more common experience than we would like to believe, with around 15% of girls and 5% of boys experiencing sexual abuse before they turn 16 years of age, and around 1 in 5 children experiencing some form of abuse in their childhood. The impacts and effects of child abuse can be life-long and life-altering, we are robbed of the childhood we should have had, and the safety we deserved.

I specialise in supporting adults who experienced any and all forms of child abuse; physical, verbal, emotional, sexual and neglect.

Effects of child abuse in adulthood

I have a compassionate and empathetic understanding of how this may present in adults including;

• self-harming

• alcohol and drug usage

• panic attacks

• anxiety and depression

• hypervigilance

• loss of self-worth

• lack of internal and external safety.

It can significantly impact on our mental and physical health, resulting in personality disorders, PTSD and Complex PTSD diagnosis as well as auto-immune diseases and chronic pain.

Often experiences of abuse may be kept hidden, you may never have told anyone about what happened to you and the weight and burden of keeping that secret can leave you feeling out of control and completely overwhelmed.

In other cases it can drive us forwards, make us want to prove ourselves, that we are more than what we experienced. This can lead to feelings of overcompensating and never feeling good enough, no matter how much we achieve.

Recovering from child abuse

Having spent many years studying, researching and working with individuals in recovering from historic child abuse, I know that with compassion, understanding, space and time you can find a new way to live.

Child abuse robs us of our basic need to feel safe, loved and cared for, this is even more so when the abuse was carried out by a family member. Before we can begin to recover we have to teach ourselves what safety feels like, this in itself can be uncomfortable because it is a new experience.

Abuse leaves us feeling powerless and out of control, we had no control over what happened to us and therefore we fear it could happen again. Learning how to protect ourselves from these fears gives us the chance to take back control and power over our lives.

We cannot change the past, we cannot undo what has happened but we can find a new way forwards. One where the experiences of our past no longer define us.