The book you never knew you needed to read.
This blog started out as a testing ground. Would people be shocked and disgusted? Would the floor open up and swallow me whole? Luckily, I survived to tell the tale.
Talking about abuse is always hard. How do you balance sharing your sexual abuse without traumatizing your audience or, even worse, titillating them? How do you take responsibility for things you did to survive, yet place the shame on your abuser? Because no survivor or victim ever deserves to have that responsibility.
Shame is a wicked emotion. It will twist you up inside. It will isolate you from the rest of the world, sure they can see right to your rotting core.
How do you talk about shame? This blog is how I did it. Some of the incidents are written here. The puppies and my father’s suicide attempt, for example. But there is so much more. Once I truly committed myself to getting well I had to start building coping mechanisms to deal with the pain. I needed to keep myself from self harming or killing myself.
I explored those tools, and others, in the last section of the book
i read all the stories of horrendous abuse as a child and young adult. It frustrated me to no end that they never told me how they got out. I wanted a road map. This book is my road map.
I can guarantee that no one else’s recovery will be just like mine. But that is the beauty of it. I hope readers adapt my skills to fit their needs.
i hope that someone reading this blog today will make the decision to try it out. Stick with the story. Some of it might be hard, even triggering. Give yourself permission to walk away, to take a breather for an hour, a day, forever.
Once you’ve read about the ways I got whole, please reach out. I’d love to hear your take on it, good or bad. Perhaps you would like to try a workshop built around my skills. Perhaps you know a group interested in hearing me speak. Or, perhaps, I have earned a thank you.
You can buy a signed paperback copy of the book here.
Winning Over Shame 