3 Insights I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Healing Journey

If I knew these 3 insights before starting my journey to heal as a survivor of child sexual abuse, it would've broken down common unrealistic expectations and empowered me to lean into the healing process much quicker. I've discovered these life changing realizations from over 7 years of trial and error, and now I want to share them with you to make your healing journey come with greater ease.

Healing requires energy, vulnerability, and hard work. It’s a lifelong journey and it's never linear. Whatever season you're in on your healing journey, hold on to hope. <3

I hope you have a lovely rest of your day!
Love,
MacKenzie Mae


For help NOW!
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-HOPE

For boys and men specifically: 1-800-656-4673

More resources here! https://linktr.ee/traumachatspodcast

Transcript

In this week’s episode of Trauma Chats, I will be chatting about 3 things I wish I knew before starting my healing journey as a child sexual abuse survivor. I was abused over a decade ago and started my healing journey about 7 years ago, and let me tell you, the insights I’m about to chat about have made the world of a difference in my journey to heal. I’m going to share with you what I’ve discovered and learned from over 7 years of healing that if internalized, might just catapult your healing journey forward. If you’re a fellow survivor, whether you’ve started your healing journey or not, hopefully you can learn something, be empowered or inspired to start your healing journey, or relate to me if you’re well into your journey to heal. If you’re an ally, this could be super insightful to get a glimpse into the reality of healing from child sexual abuse versus what you may think it entails.  

Trigger warning, body image struggles and eating disorders are mentioned in this episode. 

To start, let’s define what a healing journey is. In my eyes, it’s a complex, nonlinear journey taking you from one place or mindset to another that entails healing inner trauma wounds through discovering who you are, turning shame into self-compassion, coming to terms with the experiences you have endured, treating mental illnesses and other impacts that have arose from your trauma, breaking down thought patterns and behaviors that don’t serve you, meeting yourself with respect, honesty, and compassion, and overall becoming the best version of yourself you can be given all the experiences and trauma you’ve been through. Many survivors who embark on their healing journeys after experiencing trauma have certain expectations of how this journey will unfold in terms of how long it will take, what work they will have to do, how much money they will have to spend, and how it will affect them. I sure had my own expectations when I started my healing journey and have over time broken the expectations down to truly heal. A healing journey isn’t about getting over the trauma or magically letting it all go. In my opinion and experience, that’s not even possible. Healing from sexual abuse is learning how to healthily cope with those triggers or flashbacks, create new, self-compassionate thought patterns, and move forward with the trauma. So, with that being said, I want to share with you what I wish I knew before starting my healing journey. 

When I was starting my healing journey, I knew it would take time to heal, but I didn’t realize how much time it would take. I think many survivors expect themselves to go to therapy, read some books, listen to some podcasts or videos, journal a bit, and then be healed and able to move on completely. Unfortunately, some survivors never attempt to heal because they may think they will never be able to, that it’s unattainable. Many people who haven’t experienced sexual trauma think survivors can either just let it go or have a few therapy sessions to work through it, then it’ll barely or never affect the survivor again. It’s not as simple as saying, “well, they were only abused once,” or “their abuse ended years ago, so it shouldn’t affect them anymore.” Ohhhh, how false that is. In reality, and what I wish I knew before starting my healing journey is that healing journeys for sexual abuse survivors are literally lifelong. The truth is, sexual trauma wounds a survivor’s brain, which affects every aspect of their life. What we think about turns into our mindset which shows in our actions and beliefs, creating our reality. So even after the abuse ends, the impacts of it last a lifetime. These impacts could be mental illnesses, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, PTSD, and more. The trauma causes survivors to enter survival mode, instinctually responding to the trauma in four different ways, Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn, in order to survive. This response carries over even after the trauma ends leading to survivors responding to any perceived threat the same way they did during their abuse even if there is no real threat of danger. The abuse impacts how survivors view the world, their relationships with others and themselves. It causes many to feel shameful, guilty, self-conscious. In episode 3 on rewiring your brain with self-compassion, I chatted a bit about how neural pathways are created in the brain by repeated thoughts or behaviors. These neural pathways are strengthened each time a thought or behavior is repeated. The survival responses and the way survivor’s cope with the abuse can contribute to unhealthy thought patterns, relationship struggles, trust issues, and further set those unhealthy neural pathways in stone. For child sexual abuse survivors, our brains were still forming when we were being abused and for the years after as we were growing up into adulthood. This means the development of child sexual abuse survivors was stunted by the abuse they endured, the impacts from the abuse, and the ways they coped during and for years after in order to survive. 

Throughout a survivor’s healing journey, they will relearn what real danger is and what it isn’t to teach their mind and body when survival instincts are necessary and when they’re not. They will learn that they hold none of the guilt and have no reason to feel ashamed, learn how to treat their mental illnesses to function more seamlessly in society, and learn what healthy relationships entail. They will learn how to embody self-compassion, respect for themselves, and confidence to decipher how they should be treated, who they can trust, and how they can feel safe again in their bodies. Rewiring our brains, or creating new neural pathways, to recalibrate danger signals, destruct shameful thought patterns, and foster new mindsets is similar to growing a muscle. When someone goes to the gym and wants to grow their bicep muscles, they can’t just go once and expect their bicep to be twice the size it was before doing that one workout. They have to consistently go to the gym and repeat the bicep workouts. Over time, the bicep workouts build muscle fibers in the bicep that compound and lead to greater and greater muscle memory. When enough muscle fibers are built, they will sustain over time, and even if the muscle isn’t exercised for a while, once it is again, the fibers built beforehand will help the muscle get back to where it was quicker and more efficiently. The more the muscle is exercised, the more fibers are created, and the stronger the muscle becomes. So if we relate that back to exercising our minds to build new neural pathways, it suggests that the more we exercise our minds, the stronger those neural pathways, and the easier it is for our brains to take those pathways. When we can get our brains to take those new neural pathways the majority of the time, we are left with new mindsets, compassionate thought patterns, recalibrated danger signals. 

How do we exercise our brain to create new neural pathways?? There are several ways, and everyone will go about it differently. We all learn best in different ways whether it be through audible, visual, or hands-on learning. Therapy, coping mechanisms, creative outlets, researching in books, podcasts, or videos, physical exercise, human connection are all ways to exercise our minds and create new neural pathways. If you’re interested in learning about my top 4 coping mechanisms and ways I create new neural pathways, check out episode 3 on rewiring your brain with self-compassion. What works for me, might not work for you though. And vice versa. The key is to experiment, discover what does work for you, then repeat over and over. Over time, you will learn, grow, and heal yourself. That is why healing takes a lifetime. It takes time and repetition to rewire our brains by creating and strengthening new neural pathways in order to formulate new mindsets to thrive after we have survived for so long. 

Throughout my healing journey, I’ve had times when I have felt incredibly overwhelmed. It seemed like everything was messed up, that I was completely broken, unable to be fixed. It felt like there was no way I was going to ever heal or move forward, like the mountain of issues I had would take several lifetimes to solve. Healing felt completely unattainable. I think many survivors feel this way at some point in their healing journeys. Like I said before, abuse impacts every aspect of a survivor’s life. How we feel about ourselves, others, society. Trauma responses inhibiting our ability to gauge what situations are dangerous or not and how to appropriately respond. Our ability to trust or feel safe around others. Our willingness to be vulnerable, feel confident, or mentally stable. Our mental illnesses caused by our trauma makes us move through the world differently. We miss out on opportunities or connections from avoiding certain situations we think we’ll be triggered by or might cause us to have a panic attack. Some days, we’re unable to get out of bed because we had vivid nightmares all night about our abuse or we dread the thought of acting okay when we’re not. We become perfectionists to ensure others like and accept us and won’t abuse us more, develop eating disorders to control just one aspect of ourselves, our reality. And guess what, none of that is our fault. We have done what we needed to do and became who we needed to become to survive. But healing isn’t about surviving anymore, it’s about flourishing, thriving, blossoming to live in a reality where we feel safe and secure again. How are we supposed to heal the insurmountable impacts we have incurred from our trauma so we can reach that fulfilling, peaceful reality? Like striving towards any goal in life, you just have to take it one day at a time. What I wish before starting my healing journey is you don’t need to try to heal everything all at once. It’s impossible actually! Healing could consume your whole life if you let it, but what’s the point in that either? Each present moment is a gift. You don’t want to put your whole life on hold to heal from your trauma, because then other aspects of your life will start to collapse. Healing can be heavy. Survivors need to balance that heavy work with simple human connection, entertainment, and other light moments. Those lighter moments or taking breaks from healing complement the heavier work. Even elite athletes take rest days, so their bodies and minds can rejuvenate and come back even stronger. Survivors must balance healing with rest to refresh and energize for the next healing moment. Don’t expect yourself to be able to juggle trying to treat your anxiety disorder while challenging shameful thought patterns while journaling and exercising everyday while working on your perfectionism while treating your PTSD while trying to live your life. I think you get the point. You can’t do it all at once. Believe me, I’ve tried and failed. I bet if you have perfectionist tendencies like I do, you also expect yourself to be able to handle it all and maybe even shame yourself when you can’t. Humans can only do so much at one time though, so there is no shame in not being able to work on every little thing you want to all at once. You have a whole lifetime to heal, so you can take your time. A huge lesson I’ve learned since starting my healing journey is to try and prioritize 1 or 2 things to work on and heal at a time. It’s much more effective and sustainable to make significant progress in 1 or 2 areas than mediocre or no progress in 10 areas. As you work on breaking down old thought patterns or beliefs and begin rewiring your brain on those 1 or 2 areas, overtime those new neural pathways will solidify and leave you with more energy to work on your next 1 or 2 areas. I worked for years and years on challenging my body dysmorphia and shameful thought patterns around my body image along with treating my disordered eating. I focused hard on those areas, while still struggling with so many other areas like shame around my mental illnesses, negative self-talk, poor relationships, etc. By prioritizing improvements on my body image and eating disorder, I have been able to create new neural pathways that have sustained. Of course, I still have occasional negative thoughts around my body, but since I’ve exercised my mind repeatedly and created those pathways, the negative thoughts pass quickly and don’t take much energy or effort to overcome anymore. Now, I have room in my mind to focus and prioritize the next areas of healing, which for me at the moment are compassionate self-talk and healthy human connection. It’s the same as creating a new habit. Initially, the behavior you’re trying to make into a habit takes a lot of focus and energy, but as it’s repeated, it gets easier to do that behavior, not as much thought goes into it, and it eventually becomes automatic or habitual. Then you can add on to that habit or sustain it and create another new habit. Say you want to create a new habit of doing yoga every morning. Initially, it takes a lot of thought and energy to wake up, put on yoga clothes, take out your yoga mat, turn on some soothing music or a yoga video, and start. But if you keep doing it every morning, the effort it takes to get started will gradually decrease, and eventually it will become an automatic behavior. It’ll just be what you do every morning. When I was working on my internal thoughts around my body, I made it a habit to challenge any negative thought patterns that arose. So if at any point I started thinking any hateful thoughts around my body, the habit I began to incorporate was acknowledging the hateful thought then reframing it into a self-compassionate thought. For example, if I thought, “my stomach is so bloated and isn’t flat enough.” I would immediately reframe that thought to something like, “I just ate food to nourish my body, so of course my stomach is going to be a little bit bloated. The food has to go somewhere!” or “I’m on my period, of course I’m bloated. This is healthy though, and I’m grateful my body is functioning the way it needs to.” The more I did this, I noticed the less hateful thoughts would arise, and when they did, I had practiced reframing the thoughts so much that I could stop my hateful thoughts in its tracks and immediately reframe it. Reframing hateful body thoughts was a new automatic behavior or habit for me. Not only did the amount of those thoughts decrease, but when they did, it took almost no energy to reframe the thought. That’s when I knew I could move forward with improving or healing another area. Hopefully, you can grasp the point I’m trying to make that by prioritizing one or two areas at a time, you can truly solidify the healing in those areas and sustain the work you’ve put in to move on to the next areas you strive to work on. 

Survivors commonly carry a LOT of shame with them. I have certainly struggled with overwhelming shame. Perpetrators, complicit enablers and bystanders, and society at large heavily contribute to survivors feeling ashamed of being abused, making them feel like it’s their fault, making them think they could’ve stopped it somehow, or making them question whether what they experienced really was abuse or if they were misunderstanding what happened to them and making a big deal out of it. They make survivors feel ashamed of existing in this world as someone who has experienced abuse. As a survivor myself, I have carried a lot of that shame with me throughout my life, but not only that type of shame, but for every impact being abused had on me. I have battled with feeling ashamed of my mind, anxiety disorder, PTSD, intimacy struggles, triggers, extreme sensitivities, perfectionism, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and the list goes on. Many survivors struggle with similar feelings of shame, and this shame can cause us to have low self-esteem, hateful self-talk, insecurities, anger, frustration, jealousy, co-dependency, depression, more anxiety, and overall feel ashamed of our whole existence. How do we heal when we feel like everyone around us is shaming us, and most of all feeling incredibly ashamed of ourselves? What I wish I knew before starting my healing journey is the absolute importance of cultivating a support system and finding a safe, compassionate place within yourself to rely on when these feelings of shame, as well as all the heaviness that comes with a healing journey, overwhelm you and feel life shattering, when healing feels hopeless. 

Survivors must realize that the abuse they endured and the impacts the abuse caused is not their fault. Survivors must take the blame off themselves for their abuse and how it impacted them. They hold none of the blame, so they shouldn’t be the ones feeling ashamed; the perpetrators, complicit enablers and bystanders, and people in society who shame survivors should feel ashamed. Survivors must show themselves love, kindness, and compassion. I know from experience that’s much easier said than done. That’s why a support system is critically important. When you can’t show yourself love, you need people in your life who can. You need people that understand you, make you feel safe and secure, listen to you, and support you in whatever way you need. We as survivors have been through the unthinkable, the experiences that no one should have to go through, and we have prevailed. We have survived and continue to survive. We have done that all by ourselves. We should be proud of ourselves and grateful for the strength and resiliency inside of us that has brought us to this point. But humans are meant to lean on one another, rely on one another. We as survivors have put in so much effort to survive, and at some point, we need to accept love and support from others around us to truly thrive, to help us conquer our shame, put us back on track when we’re feeling lost, alone, or hopeless, to complement the work we’re putting in and keep pushing us forward. Your support system doesn’t have to be big. It could just start as one person, maybe a close friend or a therapist. Having a least one person to rely on, who can show you love and compassion when you need it, is vital for healing. Something I’ve discovered more recently is how impactful having a community of other survivors is. I have been a part of multiple therapy groups specifically for survivors of sexual abuse, and it has been monumental for my healing journey. Talking to other survivors or just being around them makes me feel so much less alone; it almost feels like they are the only people who can truly understand me. So, I think other survivors are incredible additions to a support system. Over time, the energy you receive from your support system, whether they are other survivors or not, will propel your healing journey forward, and you will learn how to give yourself that loving, compassionate energy as well. I talked a lot about this in episode 3, but becoming your own best friend and embodying self-compassion will make every part of the healing process come with greater ease. When you’re able to meet yourself with compassion, the shame will gradually dissipate because you will internalize how strong you truly are and how the abuse and its impacts are, in fact, not your fault. A self-compassionate mindset will equip you with emotional resiliency to be able to handle your healing journey with a gentleness and cope more effectively and healthily. Instead of perceiving the way you responded to your trauma whether it be your hypervigilance, your unwillingness to trust others, your perfectionism, or your trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn as weaknesses or being shameful of how your body and mind have responded, you will be able to show gratitude toward yourself, your trauma response and survival instincts, and how you coped because they are what helped you survive. Self-compassion challenges negative self-talk and enables you to evolve your mind to create new compassionate, neural pathways and thought patterns. It can help you see your body as a beautiful, strong vessel you experience life in, instead of something that needs to fit into a certain mold or needs to be controlled because it’s the only thing you have control over. Self-compassion empowers survivors because it allows us to finally feel a sense of control over our minds, what’s happened to us, and how we’ve coped. It doesn’t negate the abuse or impacts; it just gives us a gentle, kind, more productive point of view of it all. Striving to embody self-compassion, finding that safe space within yourself, as well as having a strong support system are incredibly beneficial to a healing journey. 

Like I’ve mentioned before, repetition is crucial to creating new neural pathways, evolving your mind, and fostering new mindsets. So I want to reiterate the 3 main points I chatted about in this episode that I wish I knew before starting my healing journey. The first is healing is a lifelong journey; one cannot expect to heal overnight or even shortly after abuse ends. With all the ways the abuse impacts survivors, and many other variables like how long the abuse occurred, how a survivor’s mind and body responded and coped, whether or not they received the support they needed, there are so many thought patterns to recreate, shame that needs debunking, rediscovering who one’s true being is. It will take time, energy, and repetition to heal and live a peaceful, fulfilling life. The second thing I wish I knew before starting my healing journey is you can’t heal everything all at once. Just like creating new habits, you are creating new neural pathways and mindsets, making life changing realizations. It’s a lot and it also falls back on requiring repetition to truly heal and be sustained. Prioritizing a couple areas to work on at a time will be much more beneficial and sustainable than trying to work on 10 areas at once. Humans can only handle so much at one time, plus it’s not like healing is the only thing survivors are doing. We’re also trying to live our life. Balancing a healing journey with enjoying life’s moments are crucial to sustain your energy and allow you to keep making progress and moving forward. The third thing I wish I knew before starting my healing journey is the importance of a strong support system, including the support system within yourself. Survivors need others to lean on when the healing process becomes overwhelming and when they feel hopeless. It’s critical that survivors have at least one person who shows them love and compassion to keep them on track and let them know they are not alone. Having a community of other survivors has proven to have an immense positive impact on my journey to heal. In addition to a support system, if survivors become their own best friend and meet themselves with compassion, their healing journey will come with greater ease, a sweet gentleness within themselves to carry them through the heavy moments. 

These three insights I’ve chatted about in today’s episode have been crucial realizations and learnings that I’ve gathered throughout my 7 years of healing so far. If you’re a fellow survivor, I hope you learned something from this episode that maybe helped you feel more inspired to begin your healing journey, empowered to keep pushing forward in your healing journey, or made you feel seen, heard, or less alone. If you are on your own healing journey and have insights you wish you knew before you started, I would absolutely love to hear about them. If any fellow survivors have any questions for me or just want to chat, please reach out! You can DM me on Instagram at trauma chats podcast. I wholeheartedly believe having a community of other survivors is worthwhile and so valuable to heal. I’m beyond grateful for the other survivors in my life, and a big intention of creating this podcast was to create a safe space and community for other survivors and myself because it has been such an impactful addition to my personal healing and growth. If you’re an ally, you are just as crucial in this community. By listening to these podcasts and learning more about sexual trauma, you are becoming better equipped to understand survivors. You are crucial to survivors’ support systems and to help bring awareness to others who may not understand sexual trauma and its impacts. If anyone has learned something from this episode, has questions, or wants to add on to what I chatted about, please please pleasssee reach out! If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you downloaded it and left a review so the platform will see that its valuable and push it to more podcast listeners to make this community even bigger to spread awareness of sexual trauma. I truly appreciate each and every one of you, and  I will chat with you next week!!