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Maintaining Safety on a Daily Basis
(excerpt from Creating New Possibilities Workshop 1)
A framework of physical, emotional and psychological safety is important to enable you to progress in your recovery, because child abuse at its core is about being and feeling unsafe. Most people who have been abused need to regain their sense of safety (Briere & Scott, 2006). If you find it hard to maintain your sense of feeling safe, you might find it hard to progress in your recovery. Safety is an important consideration no matter where you are: at home, with friends and lovers, at work or play and at ASCA workshops.
Enjoying safe relationships is often difficult for survivors of child abuse (Henderson, 2006). Spousal or partner abuse is often linked to childhood abuse (Henderson, 2006; Krause, Kaltman, Goodman, & Dutton, 2008; Ullman, Filipas, Townsend, & Starzynski, 2007). Many of you grew up with abuse in your families and this may have become a familiar background to your lives. You may find yourselves in abusive relationships as adults. The psychological or emotional impact of partner abuse on a survivor can be every bit as devastating as physical harm because it reinforces the sense of fear, threat and personal devaluation that the childhood abuse originally created. Such abuse may come in many forms: yelling, put-downs, swearing, hitting, forced sex (rape), being kept moneyless, not being allowed to be with friends, always being dominated and controlled by the other person (van Loon & Kralik, 2005c). If you are being subjected to any of these behaviours, we recommend that you seek professional help to enable you to deal with difficulties in your relationship and your current situation.
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