Caring For Yourself Whilst Living Through Abuse

Small, intentional acts that protect your mind and spirit.

We hear it everywhere. Self-care has become a hot topic, and rightly so.

For a long time, putting yourself first was considered an incredibly selfish act, but the more we begin to understand mental health, the more the world has realised that without self-care, being mentally healthy and able to deal with the most basic of things is almost impossible.

The reality is, self-care is the single most important thing you can do not just for yourself, but for the people around you. To be what they need, you need to be in the right place not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually and mentally.

The thing is, it can be hard during daily life to find that time, so how on earth do you do it when you are trying to navigate the ups and downs of an abusive relationship?

Living within an abusive relationship isn't just hard - its traumatic.

Day after day it breaks down your sense of safety, mental wellbeing and your sense of self. From feeling constantly anxious and walking on egg shells to being on high alert and looking out for even the slightest change of mood that could indicate an outburst, you experience physical and emotional exhaustion the like of which you have never experienced before.

Navigating that environment will almost always begin to disconnect you from yourself just so you are able to manage. Its important to recognise that disconnection is not weakness, but instead a way of your body and mind trying to do its best to help you survive something deeply harmful.

Just getting to the end of every day becomes a mammoth task, and when you can't leave straight away, knowing how to protect yourself and allow yourself to just breathe becomes one of the most important and necessary things that you can do.

Abuse can affect your mental health in a myriad of different ways, but every single one of them is a survival response put in place to get you through the day.

• Anxiety and Hypervigilance

  It becomes impossible to relax in an abusive environment. You find yourself watching every little movement, listening for every change in tone and being terrified that even the slightest step out of line will trigger another attack.

  This continuous state of fear puts your nervous system on constant alert, leaving you jumpy, restless and unable to just relax.

  
  

• Depression and Numbness

  Abuse leaves you feeling hopeless, exhausted, and almost like you are watching your life pass by from behind a screen.

  Being able to actively take part in your day to day existence becomes almost impossible, and you become a spectator living on the periphery with little to no control.

• Low Self-Worth

  From the minute someone begins to emotionally abuse you, your self-worth begins to decrease, slowly re-writing the way you see yourself.

  To have someone who is supposed to love you use the very things that you struggle with daily against you as a weapon is devastating. It becomes incredibly hard to recognise the person you actually are against the person that they are telling you are leaving you feel damaged, broken, guilty and ashamed.

  
  

• Isolation and Loneliness

  Although the process can be slow and not immediately obvious, it is common for abusers to slowly cut off the people around you, especially those who would speak out against them. From family members to friends, to work colleagues, they will reduce your outside connections completely, leaving you fully in their control and cut off from the very people that you need around you.

  Not only does this make leaving even harder, but without that support, you find yourself becoming more depressed and more hopeless than you had before.

• Dissociation or Memory Gaps

  Its common to lose small amounts of time, especially during or after abuse has occurred.

  'Checking out' stops you from having to deal with the psychological element of what has happened. Although this is your minds way of protecting you at the time, not being able to deal with or remember something can develop into PTSD over time which can be become incredibly debilitating.

When you aren't able to leave immediately, these are things that self-care can help with. It won't fix it, but what it will do is help to quietly re-anchor you until you can move toward safety.

It starts with creating internal moments of safety.

When you cannot control the threat in your external world, your inner world becomes sacred. Simple grounding techniques can help to remind you that your body and your mind belong to you, nobody else, and you are worth so much more than what you are experiencing.

These tiny rituals will help remind you that you still belong to yourself.

Self care can also be keeping a truth journal. This should be hidden to ensure your safety though. Abuse has a tendancy to completely distort reality - especially emotional abuse.

Its important that you have a way of remembering who you actually are and not who your abuser makes out that you are.

This will help towards rebuilding your self-trust, combatting gaslighting and providing clarity and the why when you are finally in a position to leave.

Constant trauma is not just physically exhausting but also mentally, and having somewhere that you can allow your mind to go to rest and refocus even briefly is vital.

Finding a mental escape helps you to do that if you are unable to get out alone for a walk.

An abuser's greatest weapon is their ability to destroy you. You quickly find yourself questioning everything that you thought you knew about yourself, everything you thought you were and everything you believed.

The insidious way in which they work their way into your psyche is destructive and debilitating. Without something to hold onto that reminds you of who you were beforehand, its very easy to lose yourself.

Holding on tight to small fragments of your identity are vital in not losing yourself completely.

It may not feel like it, but you are still in there. This type of self-care is a way of saying, "I am here and I know who I am. I remember."

It is important to remember that even though leaving may not be possible right now, you can still plan for the day when it is.

Preparing for that time will help to remind you that you are worth so much more, and there will be a way out.

Just thinking about a plan will help to reduce anxiety and trauma symptoms, boost your sense of control over your environment and give you something to work towards.

Self care is how you start to take your power back.

In an abusive home, it is very easy to spiral and begin to lose all hope, but the reality is this...

You don't have to wait until you are free to begin healing.

You don't have to wait until you are free to feel some peace.

You are not broken. You are surviving.

One day, when you are ready, you will do more than survive - you'll rebuild.

Every act of self-care, no matter how small is an act of defiance, of resiliance and of hope.

if you need immediate help, there are numbers on our contacts page https://rebeccareecephotgo.wixsite.com/shatter-the-silence/uk-contacts-and-charities and we are here as well to help you in whatever way we can.

If you aren't ready, keep those contacts safe until you are and remember -

Protect your mind.

Protect your spark.

You are not alone.

Shatter the Silence.