Home Archive by category 'Sexual Abuse'

Sexual Abuse

  • Recovery, Relationships, Self Confidence, Self Empowerment, Self Love, Sexual Abuse, Spirituality

    What I have learnt about love this month – a Valentine’s special

    • Comments Off on What I have learnt about love this month – a Valentine’s special
    • by

    ❤️Happy Valentine’s Day My Loves🥰😘

    And I couldn’t be happier. I used to dread this day as a single lady, never feeling more alone or unloved. But everything is so different now I have truly found the love that resides within me. The love that can be accessed and lived in all the time by all people. Our only job is to seek it until we find it, then nourish it and cultivate it until it is pouring out of us, lighting up anyone and everyone around us.

    This has been a huge moon cycle for me – I’ve come into my bleed 4 days early my body was so ready for this shift – in healing more layers (signed up for infinite layers apparently…🙋‍♀️) of my core wounds around my relationships with men, sexual abuse and pretty much every single way I made myself smaller or gave away parts of myself – sex, time, money, intellect, personality, humour… – to any man in return for ‘love’.

    Years into this journey, it surprises and excites me every single day how much there is to still discover about ourselves – these past few weeks have been eye-opening and HARD work – no one said this healing life was easy 😉

    But with this work comes Truth – and this month I have received one of the greatest gifts of all – the redeliverance of my most sacred feminine energy.

    Calling back in this part of myself to experience at new depths has been a wild inner journey this month (friends who have held me – I love you 😘)

    But now I have a new depth of Truth – I have felt and seen and know how I truly want to be loved. I have a new understanding of what it means to be in equanimous relationship with my own power and that of someone else’s.

    My boundaries feel stronger and more alive than ever even though I have experienced new depths of openness. I am not afraid to live in that part of myself and I know I am supported there. I know my own medicine – I delight in it and nourish myself with it every single day.

    When you feel your own depth, there is no way you can settle for less than that from another. If you are able to be more present to yourself in love than who you’re with can be, then what’s the point?

    For me a relationship is about love.

    I am deeply romantic, idealistic, dreamy, sensitive and get completely carried away in love. Why not ask to feel more love than you’ve ever felt before?🤷‍♀️ Why can’t it be like your wildest dreams?! Or better?

    All the things we’re NOT supposed to want, feel and protect ourselves against in this so-called harsh world. All the things I stopped myself from being.

    But I was closed off to my truth (perhaps The Truth) And despite (or because of) the layers of protection still got my heart smashed to pieces 🙋‍♀️…and it was largely down to me…I was always wanting more, something deeper, more real but I hadn’t truly learnt to embody it for myself so was constantly placing responsibility for that on others to provide it for me (and all the rest of it that comes with painfully codependent relationships🤦‍♀️) Then of course in the end everyone ends up hurt and there’s no real love at all.

    Now I don’t care if I live in a dreamy, impractical world when it comes to love (I can be practical in other ways 😋) I know how to live it authentically without seeking it from others and it feels intensely real to me and completely freaking epic. It is my truth and I own it for me 🥰

    The love you want exists. It exists because you exist. So ask for it and don’t accept anything less from yourself or anyone else❤️

    Happy Valentine’s Day – loving you from the deepest depths of my heart 😘❤️

    CONTINUE...

  • Body Image, Emotional Abuse, Recovery, Sexual Abuse

    Healing Is Not Linear – Crucial Advice For Moving Through Tough Times

    In my earlier blogs I talk about the impact of sexual abuse, see here and here. This childhood trauma had a huge impact on my relationship with my body and was the main underlying cause for my disordered and emotionally driven eating.

    Healing my relationship with food and my body was the most important thing I did for healing my relationship with myself and recovering from this childhood trauma.

    I don’t spend much time these days thinking about what happened or working specifically on deep healing around it. But that doesn’t mean triggers and stories don’t arise and it doesn’t mean I can say I am ‘fully healed’. These kinds of scars run deep.

    While they don’t now impact my everyday life they are still part of the fabric of who I am and from time to time things get highlighted or called up to be seen and to be dealt with.

    This is exactly what happened these last few days. Perhaps it was Valentine’s day and all the love being shared, I am not sure. But for some reason a conversation I had with some male friends triggered a massively disproportionate amount of rage. I got so infuriated and I knew it wasn’t about them personally or the exact things they were saying.

    I know the feeling of being triggered well now. It’s something we learn as we develop our ability to listen to our intuition. As we learn how our body responds and reacts to different events, conversations, environments and people we learn what is ‘normal’ for us and what is out of character or disproportionate.

    This skill is what allowed me to not take my anger out on my friends but instead go inwards and ask myself what was going on for me. Our bodies hold so much wisdom. Our bodies know what we need and how to handle themselves. It is so so crucial to develop our ability to truly listen to ourselves.

    Not only was I able to recognise what was happening and feel my reaction rather than unleashing it unfairly on the world, I was also able to be kind and compassionate to myself in that moment, even though I was angry.

    This is the key. To know that whatever we are feeling, even when triggered is OK. ALL of our feelings are valid. Every. Single. One. We are still lovable when we are mad, we are still lovable when we are hurting, we are still lovable when we are depressed. The way we are feeling is not a determinant of how lovable we are.

    Healing is not linear. There will be days, weeks, months, years when triggers simply won’t come up for you. Where you will wake up everyday feeling energised, hopeful and excited for life, able to handle healthfully anything that comes into your sphere. Then a conversation or event might trigger something and we feel ourselves falling. We try to grasp on to the feeling of peace, of joy. But it slips through our fingers and we find ourselves deep in the anger.

    Know that this doesn’t mean we have failed or that we have gone ‘backwards’ this is all part of the healing journey. In fact it’s an unavoidable part of the journey of life. The important thing is what we bring to the table to support ourselves through these times. We need to bring the awareness, kindness and compassion for ourselves that we have been developing. We need to recognise these feelings for what they are which are feelings. Feelings, no matter how intense move through.

    Knowing how to handle ourselves with love in those moments is crucial however there is one even more important piece of wisdom for supporting ourselves through these times and that is CONNECTION.

    The thing that helped me the most over these past few days is speaking out my feelings to trusted friends and those who triggered me. It sounds easy writing this now. But I know it can feel terrifying. However the energy of those feelings needs to move through and needs to move out of our bodies. Sharing with a trusted person in our lives is THE most healing thing we can do for ourselves.

    There is something profoundly pure and beautiful in sharing our pain with someone who understands. This is something I was totally unaware of until I truly began my healing journey. Telling a friend you feel angry is one thing but being able to express your emotion into the world while someone sits and stays with you with no judgement through that is something very different and incredibly special.

    If you are looking for someone to share your story , someone who is truly able to listen and hold space for you with no judgement then please know you can always reach out to me through the comment section below or email me directly sasha@sashafardell.com. Otherwise use the links below and join me over on instagram or facebook. Hope to hear from you.

    CONTINUE...

  • Anxiety, Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Self Love, Sexual Abuse

    18 – How past trauma is affecting your emotional eating

    • Comments Off on 18 – How past trauma is affecting your emotional eating
    • by

    As I’ve said on this blog and will keep saying until we all hear it – emotional eating is an escape. It is a way of not feeling our feelings.

    One of the most common reasons we turn to emotional eating is because of past trauma. It is not within the scope of this blog to dive super deep here, but just know this is a massive topic with loads of research around it and I want you as readers of this blog to just be aware that trauma and emotional eating are very often interrelated.
    I’m not going to go deep into the science but in order to understand why emotional eating or disordered eating patterns are related to trauma we need to be aware of what happens in the body in a traumatic event.

    When we experience trauma, i.e. when we are in a traumatic event or receive a trauma our body is the first thing to respond in order to protect us. You may have heard before of the ‘lizard brain’, that very ancient part of our brain that controls our fight or flight response, this response is the one which kicks in first when we are experiencing trauma.

    In order to protect us, to keep us alive, our body reacts much faster than our mind and it produces a load of hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, and others, that tell our body to either fight, flight or freeze. There is also some literature around a fourth response, fawning, this is in relation to when you receive trauma from a primary caregiver or in a co-dependent relationship. Fawning essentially means that in response to receiving trauma from someone you deem as being vital to survival, rather than fight, flight or freeze you instead move towards them and try to placate them, try to make them happy and essentially get them to stop traumatising you. This happens a lot of the time between children and abusive parental figures or vice versa.

    If in the moment of the trauma our bodies are unable to respond with either fight, flight or freeze in order to protect ourselves, then the trauma gets stuck in our body. In essence the trauma is received by the body and it is unable to process it in the way it wants to therefore the traumatic experience gets trapped.

    If you want to read more on this I highly recommend Bessel van der Kolk’s book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. Buy it here*

    When we have traumas stuck in our bodies our lizard brain is constantly on high alert telling us to process the trauma (this is where PTSD comes in) and therefore our bodies are swimming in high levels of these hormones being pumped out trying to get us to react and move the trauma through our bodies.

    These hormones are the reason we emotionally eat or adopt erratic eating patterns.

    The hormones mess with our natural bodily functions and signals and therefore we are not getting the normal hunger and fullness signals we should be getting. Instead we are listening to the signals of our body in a heightened state. Cycles of high adrenaline will mean we don’t feel hungry for hours despite being active and not eating. Then as it crashes we will suddenly become starving and start craving a lot of calorie dense food to stop the crash.

    Not dealing with trauma, releasing it and allowing it to pass through our bodies means it is stored and constantly triggered. This upsets our body’s natural rhythms and therefore constantly sends out signals that are very confusing for us to react to.  This gives us the feeling of being totally out of control and of having an unpredictable appetite and relationship with food.

    If you have done a lot of work on feeling your feelings and listening to your body and your relationship with food still feels out of control or completely unpredictable then find someone who you can explore potential past traumas with. Once these are healed your body will naturally come back into balance and it will be so much easier to manage your relationship with food.

    If this blog resonated you might also like to explore this one

    It is not in the scope of this blog to get deep down into the science behind how trauma affects your body, just please be aware that it can have a really big impact on how you eat. If you think past trauma could be affecting your relationship with food please reach out, you don’t need to go through this alone, drop me an email sasha@sashafardell.com

    *This is just an amazon link for convenience, I have absolutely no affiliation with amazon and get nothing if you purchase the book through this link

    CONTINUE...

  • Body Image, Emotional Abuse, Sexual Abuse

    Your Body as your Home

    • Comments Off on Your Body as your Home
    • by

    When you have been sexually abused your body is no longer a safe place. Most people take for granted that they live in their bodies, that your life expands outside the confines of your body. But imagine for a second this Home of yours, your private space, the physical manifestation of you has been robbed, broken into, attacked, ripped apart from the inside. Where can you live? This is a question that terrifies you and that you simply cannot answer. So you retreat, you try to take up as little space as possible, you become less than. Your life shrinks within the confines of your skin, you can’t imagine being able to trust your body in this world, it is no longer yours.

    You copy other people, you ‘act as if’, you mimic what others do, when they hop, skip, jump and laugh, you hop, skip, jump and laugh in the hopes one day you will once again feel whole. This is not living. You are not yourself, you are a puppet, entirely defined by those you spend your time around. So your life becomes complete potluck. Entirely based on your postcode, class at school, who’s in your dance class. You have not chosen any of it, you don’t know how to choose. And here lives the fear. The space between you and your body. This deep pervasive existential fear that you may never find a way to close this gap. You will be destined to a life of puppetry, hoping you will find a show and a puppet master that suit some facet of yourself well enough so that the show can go on.

    But there is hope. Any single tiny step that you take. Where you, the real you, make a choice and face the fear all on your own. You have planted a seed of hope. A seed that will root yourself in your body. That connects the you inside with the you outside. You take enough steps, you plant enough seeds and there is a garden, a jungle of shared experiences you and your body have been through together. You lay the foundations brick by brick of a glorious bridge back to yourself. And that’s how you come back to yourself, come back to your body. You take the step, you plant the seed, you build the bridge, you wave goodbye to the puppet master, the curtain comes down and you step off the stage into the life you were always supposed to live.

    CONTINUE...