365 Days of Hope

Introduction I'd like to introduce myself to you and tell you why I have written this book. I was sexually abused as a child. It began when I was four and it continued until I was almost 18. It was relentless. A game of cat and mouse that I rarely won. I didn’t spend much of my childhood playing like other kids, instead all I could do was try to keep myself safe and when I failed, work out how I could possibly survive. My abuser was my dad and nowhere was ever safe. Abuse defined my life. It was all I knew. And then just after I was 18 I was able to leave. I turned my back on my past and tried with all my strength to walk forwards into my future. I was a student then. I found a flat to live in and left. Free and finally safe. But I had no skills with which to deal with the past, so I just kept moving forwards, hoping that the further away from it I got, the less it would affect me. I finished University. Got a job. Got a boyfriend. Got married. Had a family. But I didn't ever go back and deal with anything. I kept hoping that I would eventually be far enough away from the past that it couldn't hurt me anymore. In 1997 it all came to a crashing halt when my husband walked out on me. He left me with seven children, one of them just a few months old. I hadn't worked in 15 years, had no income and no capacity to support myself. I had seven children and a huge mortgage. All I could think about was how to get him to come back. I just wanted us to fix what was broken and get on with our lives. He did return but sadly nothing was fixed. We had another baby but my husband didn't want to be there and made that clear every day. That's when I stumbled into recovery. I hoped I would find answers for why I couldn’t fix my marriage. I hoped it would help make everything okay again. What stumbling into that meeting brought me was something far more significant. It helped me to grasp that the abuse in my past didn't stay in my past. It was insidious. It was like an octopus whose tendrils were wrapped around every aspect of my life. It wasn't possible to walk away and be free of it as I had hoped at 18. I had to extricate myself. And that took work. Recovery didn't give me back my old life. It didn't restore what was broken. It wasn't a repair job at all. Recovery gave me something completely different. A life made over. I arrived at that first meeting in desperation. I left it in hope. And my hope grew with every meeting I attended. So often in our lives we feel we are at the end. What we don't realise is that the end is so often the beginning of something far better. It may be hard to let go of the old, but if we only knew what was waiting for us when we did, it would be so much easier. If I had known back then where I would be 20 years later I wouldn't have stumbled into that recovery meeting I would have run! I hope that as you read this book you will find encouragement and hope and maybe some new ideas that will be useful for your life. I hope that you will learn as I did that recovery is the beginning of the best part of our lives. How to use this book This book is going to involve some thinking and some action. There will be a day, once each week, when the focus will be more on doing – there will be questions for you to answer and think about. You will get more out of the book if you do this work and so, before you read another page, get yourself a pretty notebook or journal and a pen and get ready to begin what I anticipate will be 365 days of hope……. Love and hugs ~ Sue 1 Finding Support Making changes in our lives can be very hard, but you have made the decision to start to think about change or you wouldn’t be reading this! Congratulations! Many of us find that it is easier to make changes when we are not doing it alone. We find we can move forwards in our lives more easily when we have support. We are going to begin by thinking about whether we have enough support in our lives and then think about how to increase our support levels. What does support look like to you? How can people around you show you support? As you begin to think about making some important changes, think about the people surrounding you in your life right now. List the people you think of as supportive – friends, family, support workers, church leaders, professionals etc. For each person, list: 1. What sort of support they can offer - practical, phone calls, get togethers; 2. How much support they can offer, and 3. How effective you find their support – ie, how do they make you feel? Can you tell each person what specific things you are working on right now? Can you enlist their specific support? Do you have enough support or do you need more support than you currently have? Where can you go to gain more help – organisations/church/support group We will be coming back to this issue frequently, making sure you have some good support for your healing journey, because nothing is more important in your life. This is your opportunity to heal. 2 What do you think of when you hear the word support? Support can mean a lot of different things. It can mean: To provide the necessities of life; To give practical or emotional help; To take an active interest in or be loyal to something - like a sporting team; To establish the truthfulness or accuracy of something; To perform earlier than the main attraction (like at a concert); To act in a lesser role than the star (in a movie); To carry the weight of a person or thing. Sometimes when we are looking for support all we want is a reminder that someone knows what we are going through. Someone knows that we are struggling. We may not want answers, we may just need to know that someone is on our team. Sometimes we just want an opportunity to talk without judgement. A supportive friend with a cup of tea can mean so much to us. Sometimes we need more - we need some practical help and sometimes, when life is overwhelming we might need someone else's help to keep going - like when we are in the throes of grief and appreciate the kindness of a meal being brought over or someone shouting us to take-out. That kind of practical help is a great support many of us have known. The kind of support that means the most to me when I am really going through it is like the last point in the dictionary list - to carry the weight of a person or thing. Knowing that someone knows what I am going through and having them stand beside me helping me to carry that weight. This is a priceless support. Something I truly treasure. What we need varies and what is important for us to figure out is how to identify what we need at any given point and to have the courage to seek it out and ask for it. We need to learn how to tell those who are on our 'team' how they can best support us. Sometimes we may need to remind them that all we need them to do is to sit with us and not say anything - take us for coffee and remind us that we are not alone. Sometimes it is going to be a more active thing - we may need to ask them to give us a hand with something - like taking care of the children so we can get to a counselling session. Do you have people in your life that you consider to be supportive? People you can count on to give practical or emotional help. People who can help you carry the weight of your burdens? Sometimes what we most need is someone to help us find some support. Enlist a friend who cares to help you find other supports. Many community organisations can also help with this – it’s a starting point and from there you may find other people and places that offer more of what you need. Be active - go hunting - work out what you need and have the courage to go looking for it.