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Most Sexual Assault Survivors have said these words & know this feeling.

Most Sexual Assault Survivors have said these words & know this feeling.

by | Jan 19, 2020 | Relational Spaces - Family, Relational Spaces - Friends, The Bookworm Therapist

This post contains affiliate links and is going to reference the experience of sexual assault.

It includes a reference to an article discussing surviving and attempting to hold a person accountable for sexual assault.

“I just kind of froze like a deer in headlights, just frozen. I knew it was happening. I could feel it,” she added. “I remember trying to fix my eyes on a spot on the wall and just trying to avoid seeing his face as he was assaulting me, just waiting for it to be over.”

In my experiences, both personally & professionally, this quote embodies the most common psychoemotional experience of assault.

So many people permit or perform sexual activity in order to survive sexual assault.

So many people permit or perform sexual activity in order to survive sexual assault. This is why we cannot blame victims for surviving assault because of the fact that sex happened. Once we understand that sex is sometimes the only way to survive assault, we can stop blaming people for doing what was necessary to survive the moments.

Why didn’t s/he/they fight back? Fighting back is a response you grow into over time. It is rarely the first response in each situation where assault happens.

It’s called “fight, flight or freeze” for a reason. Many freeze. Many flee psychologically (ie disassociate). Few of us fight the first time. If only the first time was the only time. Usually it is not and so we start learning to fight.

Once people start fighting, we then see victim blaming by focusing on the fighting back/self defense and not the assault necessitating self defense.

Believe victims.
Understand that sex can be a survival tactic.
Fighting isn’t always the first available response.
Support survivors.
Hold abusers accountable.

If you want to start to understand the reasons why it is best to address abuse with abusers – read Lundy Bancroft’s book. It’s a game changer!

 

 

 

 

Nobody’s Ready for Marriage

Nobody’s Ready for Marriage

by | Dec 6, 2019 | Identity Growth and Change, Relational Spaces, Relational Spaces - Family, The Bookworm Therapist, The Divorced Therapist

Nobody’s Ready for Marriage

One of my favorite relationship books is “Passionate Marriage” by Dr David Schnarch because of this quote: “Nobody’s ready for marriage. Marriage is what makes you ready for marriage.” It’s in the introduction of the book.

I started reading it a little before I got divorced because I didn’t want to get divorced.

I started reading it a little before I got divorced because I didn’t want to get divorced.

As a therapist, we tend to think we have the skills to avoid marital calamities like divorce.

In my relationship, we had survived unemployment, underemployment & grad school, we could survive infidelity, right?

We could have, if we’d gotten help,  if we really wanted to change ourselves and change our relationship to meet both of our needs.

That discussion is a post for another day.

Passionate Marriage was a beginning of more awareness building for me. It was a text that did a lot to me and for me. (Books are why I affectionately call myself the Bookworm Therapist. I believe that I can’t be the only person to go through what I’m going through and someone somewhere else has probably gone through it and ideally writte a book, article, song or poem about it. At least I hope for it with crossed fingers and toes, because the alternative is unsettling to say the least!) 

Primarily, it was one of the important first steps I really needed in the continued development of my self and identity as a person. It made me become the wife in my relationship instead of the therapist I’d been operating as for the past 12 years in being connected to the kid’s dad (TKD).

It’s a book primarily about differentiation of self and within relationships. It’s become one of the books I reference in couples work & recommend when working in the family relational space generally.

I’ll share some of my favorite phrases, pages & takeaways in future posts.

SAVERS & the Miracle Morning

SAVERS & the Miracle Morning

by | Mar 25, 2019 | Identity Growth and Change, Relational Spaces, The Bookworm Therapist

I’m not one to jump on a bandwagon of latest fads, but let me tell you how I found the SAVERS acronym and why I think it’s helpful. 

But first, the backstory: In the last quarter of 2018, my good friend introduced me to bullet journaling and in the process of trying different layouts and surfing the learning curve of all things #bujo I ran across this goal setting layout called “Level 10 Life.” (Another blog for another day) While trying to get more background information on what the Level 10 life was, I ran into the same name (Hal Elrod) and three words: The Miracle Morning. 

So now I’m searching Hal and the miracle morning to see what this is all about. This led me to Barnes and Noble (because it was out of stock at my public library and I was #5 on the waiting list) on a Saturday night where I found the book and sat down to flip through it and see if I wanted to purchase it. 

an oversized brown patterned chair holds a blue book entitled "The Miracle Morning"

Where read The Miracle Morning

I finished the book in about 2 hours and took notes of what mattered most and made sense to me.

Enter the S.A.V.E.R.S. acronym.

SILENCE * AFFIRMATIONS * VISUALIZATION * EXERCISE * READ * SCRIBE

It’s actually called the LIFE SAVERS for multiple reasons, but it’s shortened to “savers” and if you check pinterest for SAVERS and bullet journal layouts, you’ll see example upon example of ways that folks are creating their miracle mornings. I was intrigued and skeptical about its effectiveness because of how popular it was. However, I couldn’t stop thinking about it once I got home. Was I ready to try it?

I knew a few things for certain, however, I wasn’t waking up an hour earlier to do it. I’m a single parent of 3 kids under 12 and sleep is a precious commodity. I was open to considering restructuring my present wake-up-and-wrangle-kids-and-go routine to see if or how i could fit this “miracle” into it. 

Want to know what sold me on the technique? Two major points/takeaways from the book: 

First, the SAVERS are suggested to be done an hour earlier than when everyone else in your home gets up (again, huge NOPE for me). People get so excited about their success that they start waking up 2 hours earlier (2 hours of NOPE). This wasn’t going to be me BUT one sentence gave me enough hope that it could work and it was this – “If you can’t do 60 minutes, then just do 1.”

The way SAVERS is set up is that it’s 10 minutes per letter: 10 minutes of silences, 10 minutes of affirmations, 10 minutes of Visualization, 10 minutes of exercise, 10 minutes of Reading and 10 minutes of Scribing (Writing). The goal is to carve out an hour of time to invest in yourself and start your morning off positively and productively. As a busy as my family is, I knew I could try for 1 minute if I wasn’t able to do 60. I set a goal to do 4 out of 6 letters as consistently as possible. I regularly read and write, so I just focused on SAVE, especially the E, because exercise is not my super power.

That weekend I started and I logged about 45 days of consistent SAVE-ing in my bullet journal. What made it work? It was simple to do and there was always at least one thing to do so that I could check it off of my list.

The piece that sealed the deal for me was a paradigm shift on consistency. 

We’ve all heard the adage that “it takes 21 days to form a new habit.” Elrod discusses this in his book and says that it actually takes 21 days to form a new habit but 30 to cement it into your routine. I have to agree with him here because of how he broke down the 30 days. To be brief, he says that Days 1-10 are unbearable and it takes about everything in you just to get to day 10. Once you hit Days 11-20 it’s uncomfortable but no longer impossible. Day 21 is where most of us think we’re cured, so we stop and then wonder why we don’t have the new habit solidly in our lives? It’s because we have to go from day 21 to 30 to do so. He calls it the “unstoppable” part of your process. 

I held onto that 10-days-at-a-time mindset for the first 45 days that I was using the SAVERS acronym and, of course, like all good habits, I got excited and proud of myself so I stopped doing them all each day but it’s different this time. It’s easier to start again, even with just 1 minute. 10 seconds of silence, 10 seconds of affirmations, 10 seconds of visualization, 10 seconds of exercise, 10 seconds of reading and 10 seconds of scribing. 

It’s truly amazing what you can do in one minute and the sense of accomplishment of “just doing something” that you promised yourself you’d do. So, that’s my very brief opinion on why the SAVERS have become my game changer and I share them with people I know. It’s an easy way to start doing something different that is beneficial to your self and your health.

As always, be gentle with yourself, trust the process, and keep trying. You’re worth it!