Advice for women dealing with trauma

If you find yourself struggling with the trauma you endured, say that you were raped like I was, the best thing

that I could tell you to do is ask yourself, “What have you decided about you in your life since that

happened?”

I repressed my trauma and I lived a different life for all those years because I ultimately, at the time it

happened, told myself I could no longer have the life that I wanted, and when you are struggling there’s

something in you that you have decided must change. It might be the idea that you have about yourself in

general. It might be what you think you can have in a relationship. It might be what you think you can have

just in your life.

So what you should do is ask yourself, “What did I use to think about my life and about myself and what do I

think about it today?” And you’ll be able to pinpoint some of those changes and be able to see where you

are lying to yourself because that’s what happens. We get scared and then we create new rules to live by

but those rules are not authentic to who we are and it feels terrible when you can’t really be who you are.

So find out what they are and then take them on full force, just face those fears, face it what it is and

recognize that a lot of those things that are holding you back and making you feel stuck, they are just not

true and when you actually open them up like that monster in the closet that as a kid you don’t want to open

and it just keeps getting bigger, lots of times when you finally open that door you will realize how much

easier they actually are to take care of than you’re imagining that they are.