Survivor to Thriver: Starting, Reconnecting and Moving Forward
Recovering from a traumatic life experience could be tough. If you are bullied, bed-bound for illness, maltreated, abused, or neglected, you may feel fragmented, confused, suspicious about your work environment, and somewhat disorderly inside. You might have trouble with trust and intimacy in your relationships. Your feelings might seem unstable – and unforeseeable – even to you. You might have a generalized feeling that you are “bad” or “not worthy.” For that reason, you might love yourself. You might feel guilty as though you triggered the maltreatment or abuse.
There IS hope.
An integrated therapeutic can lead to a long-term healing process. This involves reconnecting with the parts of yourself that seem detached and alienated. It involves learning how to take charge of your behavior and to make great choices and transforming your relationship to yourself and others. It may be helpful to think about the recovery procedure as taking place in three main stages: 1) Getting Started; 2) Reconnecting with Yourself, and 3) Moving on.
Getting Started is mainly focused on assisting you to understand what you are experiencing, what you can expect from the treatment, and how you can assist yourself through the therapy process. During this time you discover brand-new ways of thinking about the unfortunate life experience and its impacts. Perhaps most importantly, you start to develop psychological self-care abilities that will enable you to support, soothe, and calm yourself as you move through your healing journey.
Reconnecting with Yourself is the heart of the recovery process. It takes commitment, courage, and a desire for wholeness. During this phase, you can identify the ways you have safeguarded yourself against this experience. As you slowly exchange these defenses for much healthier coping skills, you are “freer: to be in touch with what is inside you. You learn to experience a wider range of feelings and precisely name them. Your relationship with yourself alters as you are able to have empathy on your own, grieve your losses, and honor the fact of your experience. The fragmentation you developed as a method of staying safe becomes less compulsory and you can begin developing a more cohesive sense of yourself as a grownup. While this is a tough time in the procedure, it is also one that is full of hope, improvement, and significance.
Moving Forward occurs as you are significantly able to incorporate your new awareness and experience of yourself on every level. How you think of yourself and the unfortunate experience is shifting. Now you are open to new ways of seeing the world, others, and yourself. Your new skills and capability to handle your sensations and preserve healthy boundaries bring with it the possibility for meaningful relationships. You end up less likely to identify yourself in terms of this past experience, as you move from being a survivor to being a thriver. You might experience increased levels of energy to give to items in your life in the “here and now” that is essential to you, as less of your energy is accessible to protect yourself from the impact of the abuse, neglect, maltreatment, or traumatizing experiences. As a survivor, you discovered how to utilize your “smarts” and imagination to get through an extremely uncomfortable experience. As a thriver, these internal tools that served you so well will be transformed into strengths for living fully in the present.
Moving from a survivor to a thriver is a challenging yet hopeful process. You find out new ways of handling the tough experience and its impact. Understanding the way that your experience has impacted your feelings about yourself is an essential component part of the healing procedure. Most notably, you will be able to separate your identity from the maltreatment, failure, or the tough experience. You will have the vigor to attend to the “here and now” tasks essential for your success, as less of your energy is offered to securing yourself from the impact of the past experience as you move from being a survivor to becoming a thriver.
