Adult Survivors of Child Abuse Essential Guide to Recovery: Read This to Find Out How
SUFFERING IN SILENCE DAY BY DAY
As adult survivors of child abuse, we want to feel joy, inner peace, and to be focused on the present. We want to release the discomfort from the past, we want laughter instead of emotional pain. We want to release the pain, and energy trapped inside, maintain joy, and achieve serenity within
THE DARK DAYS OF THE PAST
Adult survivors of child abuse are a silent group. We suffer in silence, full of trapped energy and pain. We maintain toxic family ties from fear of being alone or from guilt. We keep our private lives and find it hard to trust. We are afraid to talk about our experiences for fear we will be judged. We don’t want to appear broken, and we create these stories about our lives that are not authentic. We create these illusory lives and try to live up to perfectionism.
We suppress our feelings. Holidays may be difficult for us if we still have dysfunctional family connections. We have been blamed and shamed, and we have a lot of anger within, fear, self-esteem issues, and failed relationships that mimic the treatment we received from our parent(s). Many are estranged from their toxic families and feel isolated from others.
Statistics show that a report of child abuse is made every ten seconds. Child abuse occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions, and at all levels of education. Over sixty percent of people in drug rehabilitation centers report being abused as a child. About thirty percent of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children in a horrible cycle of abuse.
Survivors feel disempowered and have trouble getting through the day. Adult survivors turn to drugs and other vices to try and cope with their traumatic past.
We all deserve to have inner peace, there is absolutely no reason that you should have to walk around with the weight of the world on your shoulders. You are meant to be free of emotional discomfort so that you can live your best life! You came into this world with a path to make this world a better place for yourself, your loved ones, and your partner.
Trauma is less about the memories and thoughts of the event and more about heartbreak and those gut-wrenching feelings that are stuck sensations within the body that are intolerable. When trauma happens, your body gets frozen into these feelings. Emotions are physical sensations so when you feel hurt emotionally you feel it in your chest and gut. When you feel joy, you feel it in your movement and in your chest. Learn to take your power back and re-own your body, because that terror that keeps you frozen in heartbreak and terror will damage your immune system and it will begin attacking itself.
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ADULT SURVIVORS OF CHILD ABUSE
-
You will abuse or neglect your own children
-
Neglected and abused children will become degenerate adults
-
You cannot recover from trauma and neglect
People who were abused vow to never hurt their children the way they themselves were mistreated. Others vow to be the parent they wish they would have had growing up, and then you have the select few who are stuck in the fight part of the subconscious mind, who are detached from their heart chakra, and have a chakra that needs balancing because it’s too open, therefore it makes them more narcissistic, these parents essentially need to work on balancing the chakras by working with a practitioner who can help them balance this energy center within the body. In addition to getting trauma out of the body and seeking professional psychotherapy.
Adult survivors of child abuse tend to have a heart of gold. They are very nurturing adults who love people more than they love themselves. In fact, the ‘degenerate adults’ may not have been abused at all or may have never seen the inside of a jail, been on drugs, or hung out with the so-called degenerates. These stereotypes are the very reason that people hide their pain in fear that they will be judged as ‘degenerate adults.’
Trauma survivors who are stuck in the freeze or fawn part of trauma may have tried to help themselves to no avail and have decided that this is their lot in life, and they accept being stuck in freeze mode. This is simply not true! You can reclaim and reshape your life. Every one of us on this planet is incarnated for a special purpose and it’s our job to find out what is special within us that needs to be expressed in the world to others.
RECOGNIZING YOUR TRUE VALUE
Do you always make yourself small around others? Are you judgmental? Are you reactive and rooted in negativity, gossip, or love negativity? Do you apologize for all the time for every little thing? Where do you think you learn to be that way? People don’t want any of those behaviors from you. When you behave in these manners you put people in the position to have to take care of you rather than you just being authentically who you are. It’s time to release those things that are not who we truly are and only allow what is genuine to remain. Staying stuck is a choice, every day you make choices, so instead of staying stuck, I want you to say to yourself, “I chose to …. (Release the past, find my authentic self, bring fun and joy to my life) each day you ‘chose not’ to have inner peace, happiness, enjoyment, fun or live a satisfying life, so please choose wisely, and chose you for a change.
GET OUT OF TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS
Make a goal of getting out of a toxic family or relationship because you cannot begin the healing process until you do. Often teens are forced to stay in these family systems, however, please seek out support systems until you are old enough to leave, and try to find online avenues to validate your humanity, like YouTube, Reddit, and other online spaces. If you are stuck in toxic relationships due to financial dependency, make a plan to get out and that should be your main goal.
Our healing journey requires inner child work and if your inner child is seeing you being abused, having your humanity mistreated, or if you are not following through with self-care, working towards healing, doing the small things like making your bed, taking care of your home, losing weight, getting off addictive drugs then, no amount of therapy will be of benefit because your environment is not safe, or you are not following through with your well-meaning promises. The inner child will say, “I knew you wouldn’t” and then your therapeutic treatment plans can actually set you back.
Get yourself into a safe environment that is conducive to healing and getting your adulting in place so you can master your world and see your place in it. When you do this, you will feel better and that is the key to starting the process of releasing the pain. You cannot heal if you have the perpetrators in your life and environment. Long-term independence is the priority especially if you are being sexually or physically abused.
You can talk to a therapist about your family system, your caregivers, what it felt like growing up in your family, and your struggles with fear or intimacy, thus finding the root cause but in my experience with trauma, it seemed best for me personally to leave the past in the past and work on the trapped stuck energy and getting it out of me so that I can leave the dysfunctional family patterns behind. Because it’s less about the past and more about the emotional sensations that come up, and we don’t’ need to rehash any of that, we just need to release what once was pain.
Anything you want to change takes a good thirty days to begin the practice of a new way of being, so consistency is key. Take small steps towards change and get yourself into some kind of program. Take the traditional route or some of the suggestions that I am providing you with. If you go the traditional route goes for therapists who have a niche of trauma, and seek out therapists that don’t just talk the whole time but will help you release what is inside of you. More importantly, get up and move your body in order to get out of your head with negative self-talk.
Start an exercise program, jump rope, walk, dance, do pushups, do yoga, or do anything to work those sensations out because stuck-ness breeds stuck-ness. It’s not your fault but you have the choice to move each day or allow frozen terror to stay trapped inside of you. We will take a closer look at the benefits of doing some of these daily practices.
CHILDHOOD NEGLECT
Our natural parents were not there for us when we needed them emotionally, whether for clothing, food, or nurturing. Emotionally neglectful environments translate to children that their thoughts, needs, and desires don’t matter. We learn to not trust how we feel and may not let people get close to us. And as children, we learned to worry about what others think of us because we were so busy in survival mode trying to please mom and dad or another caregiver.
Emotionally neglectful environments did not provide a secure foundation for us to grow and thrive. Therefore, we struggle to know who we are or what we want in life, nor do these family systems provide the opportunity for us to feel valued. Often children grow up into adults and they don’t even realize these things about themselves.
Symptoms of Neglect:
-
You are a people pleaser, and you must make things perfect for others
-
You are easily upset or concerned about what other people think of you
-
You struggle to know how you feel until the feelings become so overwhelming, and the struggle is so real that you can barely recover from the event
DRUGS AND ADDICTIONS
I will only focus on one popular drug that in and of itself is not harmful at all to the body if you use it in a natural form like eating it in fresh salads or making juices and tonics, but when you smoke it there are serious health risks.
Users of marijuana “may have experienced a violent/emotionally abusive childhood and have a desperate need to feel safe. You look for safety in unhealthy circumstances, as it feels familiar, and you know how to cope in those circumstances. There is a lack of motivation. You often have no desire to become successful and have given up trying. Past success may have come at a big price, so now you feel overburdened. There was not enough encouragement during your childhood making you feel that you do not have what it takes to be successful. Your mistakes were often punished with hostility and humiliation. Heavy use of this drug leads to mental disorders, psychosis, schizophrenia, and panic attacks. Bronchitis is common in heavy smokers.
~Evette Rose, Author of Metaphysical Anatomy: Your Body is Talking, Are You Listening?
Journaling
It’s important to learn to regulate and feel your emotions. Your feelings connect you to humanity and your feelings are connected to your realm of spirituality within your body. Emotions are a great gift to you, so if you deny your gift of emotions, then you’ll be stuck living by default, and feeling like a victim, over and over again. If you feel pain, ask yourself why the pain is there, what purpose the pain serves, and why you are choosing to create pain through your emotions. Why is it that you do not choose to create joy? Every day you have a choice to or a choice not to create joy. Let’s start today…choose joy (start journaling).
-
Notice and track your feelings
-
Find printable charts like the wheel of life or feelings trackers
-
Start with easy feelings until you get the courage to journal bigger emotions
-
Describe the feelings
-
Be patient but consistent and realize you were raised in an emotionally neglectful home so give yourself the opportunity to figure it out, and learn to get to know the real you rather than deny feelings and emotions
ATTENDING TO YOUR NEEDS
-
Take time to acknowledge and honor your needs
-
Do things at your own pace this is not a race
-
When you have a problem, imagine a good friend has that problem, then think about how you would help them and any advice you’d give to them, then apply it to yourself
-
Self-care is key because you are telling your body, spirit, soul, and inner child that they are important
-
Take periodic assessments to see where you are neglecting yourself
-
Set boundaries for yourself and others. If you are not getting enough sleep, overeating, or not speaking up for yourself, then you need to address those lack of boundaries
-
Set a bedtime ritual and stay consistent
-
Make a list of things that make you feel nurtured and cared for
-
Do what soothes you
-
Reparent yourself and do the things for yourself that you wished your parents did for you
-
Accept help from others and allow people to get to know you, start with those that you already know and trust
-
Get to know the real authentic you
-
Build your support system, make friends, keep it light at first, text or call, then let them know when you had a bad day, set healthy boundaries with them, and know that it’s okay to say no. You will find that they are okay with you saying no, you are the only one that is having the issue with saying no
“Intense trauma to the body, psyche, or soul is like an earthquake that shakes your energetic foundations, some of the roads that are necessary for the spirit to be happy have been destroyed. The session would work on mending those roads so you could feel happiness inside of yourself again. But in the mending of them, a lot of rubble that could make you uncomfortable for a while might also be unearthed.”
~Donna Eden, Author of Energy Medicine
AS WE TURN OUR FACES NOW TO THE LIGHT
There are many methods to relieve trauma, you can go to a psychotherapist to talk about what happened in the past but at the core of your being it’s not about what happened that matters, it about how these sensations got stuck inside of your body from the heartbreak and gut wrench.
My aim is to assist you in releasing the trauma and pain that is trapped inside of you and to help you create the life you desire and achieve your highest potential.
It’s important to understand that our parents or caregivers were not able to give what they themselves never received. Love is what you deserved then and now. Your parents were not capable of giving you the love that you sought after. We all were created because our own dynamic personality was desired by the creator, your unique expression, your perspectives, your personality, and ways of being, needed to be expressed in this world.
I will put together a custom treatment plan designed just for you. I will create powerful hypnotic suggestions that we collaborated upon and use various techniques that will help them turn the negatives into positives.
THE SWEET MUSIC BEGINS TO PLAY
I will employ progressive relaxation into hypnosis, use guided imagery, neural linguistic programming, biofeedback, inner child strengthening, and other tools that will build your self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth, self-concept, and self-love. I will do periodic assessments of your progress and use diagnostic tools. I will be with you every step of the way, leading you to your highest potential. This newfound empowerment will put you on the road to your true life path.
We will start the process by having you schedule a free consultation, to discuss your hypnotherapy goals. Followed by your first session, where we will get to know each other, and develop a plan of action together, followed by a series of personality, suggestibility, and diagnostic tests. You will learn about hypnosis and takeaway tools that you can use within your everyday life.
Hypnotherapy is the most significant modality known that will help you remove worn-out family patterns and life scripts, negative self-talk, and other discomforting situations you experience daily. Let me assist you with restoring your inner landscape by booking a free consultation today.
Sign up for my newsletter and read my blog ‘Trinkets’ to help your mind, body, and spirit with the valuable tips that you can add to your wellness toolkit. When you book a free consultation, I will send you tips on how to have a successful Hypnotherapy session. Don’t miss your opportunity to accelerate your recovery process.
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
We release a newsletter every month with information regarding our podcast, blog posts, events, and services. Subscribe below to stay updated!
WHAT YOU WILL GAIN FROM HYPNOTHERAPY
-
Achieve inner peace
-
Attain Joy
-
Ascertain your highest potential by living in the present
-
Acquire empowerment
-
Discover your true purpose
DO NOT PUT OFF FOR TOMORROW WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY!
-
Don’t waste years and years trying to do this alone
-
Avoid passing down dysfunctional patterns to your children
-
Refuse to allow fear to keep you stuck and wounded
-
Reject the notion that you are beyond help
SWINGING AND SWAYING TO THE BEAT!
I guarantee that the person that you started out being will go from feeling alone and isolated, and hard to trust others, and feeling unlovable, unworthy, judged, stuck, trapped, and doomed to repeat old worn-out family patterns of dysfunction. Stepping into being an empowered individual who can clearly see that, you are lovable, confident, joyful, and full of life, ready to take on the world, explore new possibilities, relationships, and ways of being, moving, and existing in this world with a lightness of heart.
TIPS FOR REMOVING THE ‘OLD’ TRAUMA ENERGY
Make a Plan of Action:
-
Recovery is an inside job; you first need to make the decision that you no longer want to live with the pain. The longer you carry that baggage around the heavier it gets, year after year the load becomes unbearable
-
You can either plan for successfully conquering your pain and life script, or you plan for the pain to keep you captive
-
You are worth it so don’t suffer in silence, you deserve to have a fulfilling joyful life
-
The more you add joy into your life, the more it radiates out to others, especially your loved ones
-
Doing the work alone is not always the best option, you may need life script reprogramming and inner child work done with a skilled professional
-
Journal the process and your progress
“It doesn’t matter how much you drive around; you will never get to where you want to go if you don’t have the right map.”
― Stanley Rosenberg, Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve
TRAUMA YOGA
There are many methods of dealing with trauma. Yoga helps release stuck energy. You acquire a sense of being in the present moment when you are doing a pose, therefore you reestablish a sense of time. Survivors fear feeling their feelings, they don’t want to know what they know and that keeps the emotions stuck in their body. Yoga is a safe space to safely explore your body and experience yourself. When you hold those poses for five minutes with the breaths, it becomes a pleasant way to do things that you wouldn’t have normally done. So don’t be shocked when you are asked to breathe and notice what comes up.
Since trauma is about how your nervous system integrated the experience, you’ll need to work with the vagus nerve to release it through yoga. Yoga resets your nervous system and is one of the fastest ways to release stress and anxiety (which is the root cause of many health conditions). Access the healing power of the vagus nerve through yoga poses that will reset it and deliver less pain, stress, and tension.
Studies show that yoga is more effective in treating PSTD and other trauma-based conditions than medications.
Discussion: Yoga significantly reduced PTSD symptomatology, with effect sizes comparable to well-researched psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacologic approaches. Yoga may improve the functioning of traumatized individuals by helping them to tolerate physical and sensory experiences associated with fear and helplessness and to increase emotional awareness and affect tolerance.
I’m not suggesting that you don’t use medications, I’m just highlighting the powerful effect that yoga has on reducing the emotional sensations that are trapped within the body therefore each session makes you feel better and is more beneficial. This does not mean that you can practice yoga alone and it will alleviate your discomfort, it means that it’s a great tool to add to your wellness journey because it helps you to safely experience those sensations in your body. Vagus nerve exercises also turn off fight or flight in the sympathetic nervous system to release trauma stored in the body. Yoga can be an introduction to how you might safely experience yourself. This vagus nerve reset is designed to relieve stress and anxiety by restoring the social engagement state referenced in Polyvagal Theory developed by Stephen Porges.
BREATHWORK
Breathwork offers you a way to unblock trauma and achieve states of relaxation. Breathwork has been used for thousands of years in Eastern cultures with Tai Chi, Yoga, and other modalities. People who have endured trauma and addictions can experience a transformation mentally, and spiritually, and the physical effects are astonishing. Pain manifests itself in various ways but breathwork can be used as an outlet to release it from the body.
Breathwork supports self-healing, and you will learn self-awareness with this practice through various techniques.
Become a free member of The One Breathwork Institute: Click the link to join this breathwork online group. The best thing about this resource is that you can do it in the comfort and safety of your own home and it’s no cost.
SOLFEGGIO FREQUENCIES
I recommend listening to these frequencies first thing in the morning at 528 Hz for twenty to thirty minutes, and if you can use headphones with your playlist of frequencies, then play 40 Hz at lunchtime for 20 minutes, then prior to bedtime use root chakra frequencies to heal this one first and do this each night for at least thirty days consistently. Stay tuned for the next blog post will be about how to recover from ancestral trauma and you will get a formula to use.
SOMATIC WORK/EMOTIONAL FREEDOM TECHNIQUE (EFT/TAPPING)
EMDR is a structured therapy that encourages the patient to briefly focus on the trauma memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements), which is associated with a reduction in the vividness and emotion associated with the trauma memories. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an extensively researched, effective psychotherapy method proven to help people recover from trauma and PTSD symptoms. Ongoing research supports positive clinical outcomes showing EMDR therapy as a helpful treatment for disorders such as anxiety, depression, OCD, chronic pain, addictions, and other distressing life experiences.
EFT helps a person to use affirmative words to change the thought patterns about their trauma. EFT also helps in releasing the trauma by using positive words and acceptance to help retrain the brain. They can make their negative situation into one of acceptance, tenderness, and compassion. An example of this is: “Even though I was assaulted, I completely love and accept myself.” By practicing acknowledging the trauma it is possible for a person to begin the healing process.
HEMI SYNC EXERCISES & FREQUENCY
With Hemi-Sync you train your brain and mind, to achieve the mental states you desire. You learn to either focus your brain to peak performance and concentration or to relax your mind and body into a deep calm and meditative state.
You can use it to help you sleep, alleviate pain, and accelerate the restorative process. You can even use binaural beats to induce deep meditation states, enhance Lucid Dreaming or Remote Viewing, and many other benefits.
Hemi-Sync stands for Hemispheric Synchronization and that is one of the technology’s immediate effects, which you can experience by watching and listening to the frequencies while completely Hemi-Sync exercises or using the frequency in your downtime. Brain synchronization is beneficial as it creates a whole brain state for:
-
Balancing emotions
-
Learning to overcome anxiety
-
Stress, irritability
-
Builds self-confidence
-
Opens up your feelings
-
Reduces self-sabotage and more
“Focus on the dance of yourself, to what tune will you dance? What magic will you perform? And to what heights will you be willing to push consciousness to give it a new definition of possibilities?”
~Barbara Manciniak—Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadeans
HYPNOTHERAPY
Trauma recovery has been an important element of hypnosis and trancework throughout human history. Lodge and Shamanic rites help bridge the visible and invisible world to restore the lost or broken parts of a person. The most noted of these methods are ‘soul retrieval’ (restoring a part of a person that has become lost in time-space.
Hypnosis in the west has undergone many changes and revisions from its ancient roots in Kamit (modern-day Egypt) nevertheless this work continued to influence such investigators as Bernheim Leibealt, and Janet, who recognized dissociation as a factor in both hypnosis and trauma. Through the case history of Anna O., Bruer and Freud found that by systematically taking the patient back through time to the first occurrence of symptoms from a traumatic event, a cure could be affected.
In addition to its continued use in both medical and psychological trauma recovery, hypnotherapy has been employed since the first world war to help desensitize and restore individuals who have been injured psychologically by war. Known as Shell Shock, Battle Fatigue, and currently, Combat Stress or Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) hypnosis remains exceptional in cognitive or mind-body interventions.
QUANTUM HEALING
This is an ancient practice once taught in ancient Egypt (formally called KMT or Kamit) The cultures that held onto this sacred practice are Buddhist, Hindu, and Vedic, and are standard practices in the East.
Meet a long lost loved one and visit in your session, go to the Temple of Knowledge, the Akashic Records, meet your Spirit Guide, Your Council, resolve issues from this lifetime and clear karma and ancestral trauma, get unstuck and back on your true life path.
You may have inexplicable fears or phobias that you have no history of in this lifetime, there may be no rational reason for you to have fear. Let’s say you have a deathly fear of spiders, and you have an inflated overreaction to a tiny spider no bigger than a dot on a written page, but you feel as though you will die. There may be nothing that has ever happened to you that can explain this reaction. This is called an ‘imprint’ from a previous lifetime.
INNER CHILD WORK
The Child Aspect is that little part of the self that often adults resonate with through their emotions. This aspect shows up positively in the adult through creativity, discovery, play, intimacy, enthusiasm, love, passion, intuition, belief, and curiosity, among others. The Child Aspect may also hurt. Some clients may be carrying the pain of their childhood due to early dysfunction within their family system. This pain has become a subconsciously known association. Since the subconscious does not have a concept of time, a client of fifty may feel the pain of a hurt Child Aspect of age five, just like it happened to them yesterday, instead of forty-five years ago. As an adult then, their Hurt Child Aspect as an adult. A large part of this work with clients is about healing the Hurt Child Aspect.
In the Hypnotherapy setting, using this process may vary from client to client. Some form of it could be used somewhere between the fifth and tenth sessions. When a Hypnotherapist is considering therapy for a client with issues around weight, addictions, hoarding, early trauma, abuse, divorce in the family, anger issues, grief, and loss, will all benefit by experiencing connections with the Hurt Child Aspect, to heal the wounds of the past. A few additional negative emotions that the Hurt Child Aspect may be attached to and carrying around are shame, rejection, abandonment, and guilt. Your Hypnotherapist will invite you to connect to the Hurt Child Aspect, so believe in the process, we are here to help you.
Not everyone needs to revisit the past. Connecting with the Child Aspect may be perceived as ‘going back,’ For some clients, it is just not the right approach. This is perfectly fine because the Hypnotherapist has many tools to release the trapped stuck energy out of your body and reprogram your negative associations from the past. Keep in mind that some issues are out of scope for Hypnotherapists, such as sexual abuse issues, however, Hypnotherapy can be used as an adjunct to psychotherapy regarding sexual abuse issues with a psychological referral.
Here are the symptoms of the Hurt Child Aspect:
-
Unexplained anger outbursts or feelings of aggression
-
Wanting to control the behavior of the ones closest to them
-
Feeling like people do not like them
-
Fear of abandonment and rejection
-
Fear of authority figures or hostility toward authority
-
Problems with intimacy
-
Feeling unworthy, not good enough
-
Not comfortable with challenges
-
Intimidated by sex or love partners’ past and current
-
Always has a need to be perfect, compulsively goes for getting it right
-
Not able to hold lasting relationships
-
Addictions of all kinds
-
Afraid to express needs
-
Uncomfortable with love and affection
-
‘Acting out’ sexually or lack of sexual involvement
-
Afraid for others to see the true self because it could be flawed
-
Hidden shame of self
-
Guilt over not living up to expectations from self or others
-
Chooses partners who are abusive or absent emotionally
BUILD A SUPPORT SYSTEM
Find your community because loneliness and isolation are dangerous. We all need a support system so take an inventory of your friends. Are they wholesome, and reciprocal in your relationship, are they kind, do they listen to you, and are they unconditional? Take an assessment of whether they are dependable, authentic, or a good person that brings out the best in you. I encourage you to start building your support system a little at a time. There are several things you can do to build your tribe online, but I encourage you to build your social support system offline and in person.
Ways to build your tribe:
-
Volunteer to meet caring people who are like-minded
-
Find the local meetup groups on the events page of your city. There is lunch, coffee, business, walking, jogging, and hiking meetups
-
Take classes: Art, yoga, dance classes
-
Take small steps by texting, then walks, and lunch
When you start meeting people, get to know them, their strengths, their weaknesses, and whether they are dependable or not. Do they listen to you and let you express your interests or concerns? Be open and allow for weaknesses, but rather than get offended and cut them off, try asking for clarification. Remember to be the friend you want to have yourself. Get to know whether you can build a trusting relationship. When you are around your friend are you uplifted and refreshed or do you feel drained because your relationship is not reciprocal, does the individual allow you to be yourself and share your good and bad times? Everyone wants acceptance so give acceptance, and don’t make assumptions or judgments. It takes two people to build a relationship.
Make a contact list of the people within your circle, put their names, contact information, and how they support you. It’s important to have this list because when you are feeling disconnected, you can call someone on the list to go out for coffee, or to just talk. And try to call to check on them regularly and be sure that you talk about your interests or if you’ve built enough trust between you then you can talk about feeling a little sad or whatever your concern is. Social health is just as important as mental, physical, and spiritual health. Make the effort to connect in person.
Over the next month, go out and make a new connection. When that friendship becomes solid go out and make a new connection because you need at least three connections to make a good support system. Ideally, you will want the following friendships:
-
Be the friend that you want yourself
-
Someone that you go out and get into good trouble and have fun with
-
A connection where you have a common interest: Working out, hiking, book club etc.
-
Workplace friends
-
That one friend that will be a sounding board who is not afraid to challenge you and put you in your place when you are wrong
-
A friend that shares your spiritual beliefs
-
Your LGBTQ+ tribe
-
The guru friend that knows a lot about business
-
Your volunteer connections
If you are interested in my creating a group that is a safe space for support with similar people on their healing journey. Please leave a comment on my contact page or on this blog post. Karen Dolva CEO and co-founder of No Isolation discusses why we need to build connections. Please watch the video here.
