Therapy For Survivors Of Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse

Mother’s do sexually abuse their children and as a survivor your experience with it is real. Your fears and discomfort around intimacy, getting close to others, are a very real and profound effect of this type of trauma.

You can heal and feel unburdened from the effects of mother child sexual abuse

What we believe about ourselves matters. Your feelings of disgust and shame can very quickly turn into the belief that you are damaged and worthless. This may then cause you to feel incredibly insecure in your relationships and to constantly seek out validation from others. Validation from your partner that you are worthy of their love. From your friends you might go out of your way to be overly accommodating and supportive, setting few boundaries because you don’t want them to leave you. At work you have a hard time advocating for yourself with coworkers or even trying to show off your skills to your boss, because you question whether you are any good. All of this is a heavy load, a burden, which makes you feel heavy, slowed down, or even stuck. 

The heaviness of your childhood trauma and the ways in which it shows up in your life as a constant state of anxiety, where you feel like at any more moment something “bad” is going to happen, is your norm. This anxiety and the way your body interprets all the information coming from the outside world as well as what goes on inside you constantly signals threat. A feeling of being unsafe in this world and in your body. Healing is a process where you start to feel safe in your body, maybe for the first time. 

The feeling of safety is essential in that it allows you to have access to all parts of your brain and your body so you no longer react purely on instinct. That is in your trauma adaptions, where everything little thing around you or inside of you signals threat so you thus feel the need to protect yourself. Once you begin to feel safe in your body you then begin to feel more in control and empowered over yourself and your life. Moreover the feeling of safety will allow you to genuinely experience joy, happiness, pleasure without the anxiety, fear, and dread that your brain and body believe is just around the corner. 

It is a process to begin to feel safe in your body. There are times your body feels safe but your so disconnected because of trauma and become so quickly activated (ready to self protect) that you might not even notice it. So this is why I will slow you down. Interrupt you as you start to get activated so you can notice what happens when you are activated and then shift to a place that feels safe for you. By moving between these two spaces you remain connected to your body. Furthermore as you remain connected you can actually notice when the activation begins to move or to shift or to discharge. What your body was never allowed to do as a child because you were constantly being retraumatized. But now your out of that environment and your body and brain wants to feel that the threat has passed. So we move slow and let the body naturally do what it needs to do to release the pent up energy. 

When the energy is released or discharged you will notice changes in how you see yourself and even the world. You will be able to manage heightened states of arousal without fear that you will fall apart. When you have thoughts about your childhood or when you are sharing your story with others you won’t become flooded. You may still have feelings about what happened, which is completely normal and healthy, but instead you won’t be so overwhelmed and debilitated by them. Thats the power of healing.