Finding Comfort After Betrayal and Rejection
Betrayal and rejection cut deep, but healing is possible. By pouring your heart out to God and embracing His truth, you can find comfort, freedom, and restoration. Discover practical, psychologically sound ways to navigate the pain and reclaim your worth in this heartfelt blog.
What are safe relationships
Healing from abuse requires more than time—it requires safe relationships. Learn how to recognize the difference between healthy and unhealthy connections, and discover five key traits of safe people who support your growth, dignity, and emotional well-being.
Recovering Your Identity After Escaping Codependency and Abuse
We cannot get through life unscathed by trauma. Yet, we often let trauma dominate our lives through denial, avoidance, fear, or naivete. Undealt with, trauma isolates us and leads to self-protection, manifesting as codependence or narcissism. Both extremes involve hiding oneself to manage the world around them. As natural nurturers, most women tend to lean toward codependency.
Healing and Wholeness after Escaping Abuse
You cannot live (or love) well if you are not well. Your journey to healing begins with finding your own footing to think, speak, act, and live authentically no matter who agrees.
Trauma-informed Living
o one gets through life unscathed by harm and trauma. We live in a world that is marred and broken. Nothing is truly as it has been written upon our hearts to be. At every step, we have learned. Something that distinguishes us from the rest of creation is the ability to project our learning to determine our next steps, to create, plan, and build our future. As we mature, what we’ve learned through extrinsic memory (those things we had to pay attention to and concentrate on to learn) tends to become aligned with our interests, curiosities, and passions. We pay attention to what is relevant, those things we believe will be useful and helpful and successful for us.
His New Nickname
We get stuck in loops trying to figure out why our spouse (or any other significant other) does what they do to us. It’s as if we understood the intent, it could excuse the pain or angst we feel toward them. Or, we turn it all inward and ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with ME?”
Maybe if we could figure out why he does what he does, we could also figure out how to better avoid it. Or fix it. Or be able to get him to change because we could explain it and connect all the dots to make sense for him why it would be so easy to change and do differently.
Rightfully Angry
For both men and women, anger is a key building block in their wall of self-protection. It supports defense mechanisms and fuels the façades we wear. Anger can make it very difficult to be authentic and connect to your spouse. The only connection that can happen is to whatever is in front of your shield of self-protection, which is often a very shallow, non-vulnerable self. In being self-protective, you disable the very thing your heart craves: authentic connection.
Please Just Make it Stop
One of the biggest issues creating stumbling blocks for breaking free and healing from emotional abuse is a well-meaning response that does not take into account the deviant thinking of someone who resorts to emotional powering-over to manage their environment.
Staring Abuse in the Face
One of the devastating effects of prolonged narcissistic abuse is gaslighting, leading victims to doubt their own sanity. She may ask herself if she is the narcissist because she has begun to internalize the abuser’s accusations.
It’s a Lonely Road Alone
Having been mentored through some bottom-of-the-pit seasons of my own life, I’ve realized how powerful it is to have someone in my corner, encouraging, stretching, pushing, and holding me accountable to follow through with the hard steps I knew I needed to take.