Learning to love yourself after abuse isn’t always easy, straight forward or a liner process. Abuse affects us in so many different ways, and there are many different types of abuse. There is Physical Abuse, Emotional Abuse, psychological Abuse, the list goes on. And no matter which one you have suffered from, it will leave you needing to heal parts of yourself. The main thing we are often left with is a lack of love for ourselves and that is why I want to address the question of How Do You Love Yourself After Abuse?
Leaving an abusive relationship, or finally getting away from any abusive situation can leave us feeling worthless, confused, scared and like nothing will ever be ok again. This is why Learning to love yourself can feel difficult and maybe even impossible. This is even more true as a single mum as we often have very little time to actually pour into ourselves and heal, but it is so necessary. If we don’t love ourselves, we wont take care of ourselves, and if we don’t take care of ourselves, how do we take care of others?
You know the saying…
You can’t Pour From An Empty Cup!
As I have spoke about before, not taking care of our selves, not honouring our needs, boundaries and values can all lead to us not being able to take care of ourselves and our children how we would like to and to living a life we do not love or even like.
But…
How Do You Love Yourself after Abuse?
If you have suffered from abuse of any kind, yourself and likely your children have already been through enough, now you deserve to start living a life full of happiness, abundance and love!
And the first place to start is on reagining your self worth and loving yourself again so you can start living the life you deserve!
Recognise That Abuse Is Never Your Fault
None of us are perfect, lets not pretend we are. But when it comes to abuse, the perpetrator is ALWAYS the one at fault. It does not matter who you are, what you look like, how you behave, abuse is not ok and it is not your fault.
Yet we often come away feeling as though it is. Often with abuse we are actually told it is our fault by the person who is abusing us. Also if like me, you have had more than one abusive relationship, then most likely others will have made you feel as though it is your fault too!
But it never was and it never is. Abuse is not ok and if like me and you seem to fall for very abusive people, then yes you may have some extra work on yourself to do, to figure out why you attract or allow these poeple in, but it was still not your fault! Their abusive behaviour is 100% on them!
So just keep that in mind on your healing journey.
Realise That You Are Worthy Of Love Regardless Of Others
People will tell you that you must be fully healed in order to move on. But I do not agree. Yes we need to learn to love ourselves again, but a part of learning to love yourself is realising that you are still worthy of love when you are not fully healed.
We see a lot of advise and quotes that tell us that if we cannot move on until we have healed.
But is this misleading?
Yes we should work on ourselves and never jump straight into a new relationship. But Occasionally there will be times when the effects of Abuse may resurface. This happened to me recently. I wrote in my post about how victim shaming abuse victims needs to stop and how even after knowing the signs of an abuser, I was still almost duped by another…
A great lesson in learning to love yourself first!
Even though I knew the red flags, I knew the signs, I still almost fell into the same trap. This is because whilst I had done a lot of work on healing myself and recognising why I am a target for abusive men, my healing journey had slipped a little as it will do from time to time- But that does not mean that I am unworthy of love!
Yes, this man came around at a slightly low point in my life where I was feeling alone and unloved, this was my unhealed self popping back to the surface for a minute. And I was able to get rid of him before he did too much damage.
But because I have previously done so much inner work and healing, I could bring myself back quickly and realise that he is the problem not me! And that yes, even though my healing had slipped, I did still deserve to be loved and be treated with love and kindness. I agree that if we have done the healing work then we will be able to deal with these situations in a better way. But they can still have an effect on us and our healing journey.
Whilst I definitely do not think you should rush in to a relationship straight after an abusive one as you do need to do some work on loving yourself first. I do not think you have to be fully healed before accepting love into your life. Just make sure you are doing it for the right reasons so you can spot the red flags easier and you will not accept poor treatment for the sake of feeling seen or loved!
Date Yourself
I wrote a whole post on dating yourself. Solo dates are a fantastic way to learn what you love and how to love yourself. As I said above learning to love yourself can be hard when it feels like no one else loves you. So you need to take away that power from that kind of thinking and begin to show yourself some love in the form of dates.
I wont go too deep into that here because I have a whole other post on it here. But the point is, take yourself out or even find an activity to do at home that lights you up! Invite fun into your life. Find what it is that you love and you will start feeling worthy of love and realising that you really are worth it.
Journaling For Self Love
I go on about journaling a lot! But I promise it is so helpful in working through your thoughts and feelings to get to the bottom of or to the root cause of what is causing you to feel a lack of love for your self!
I find journaling so theraputic. I prefer to do it in the morning, sometimes I will combine it with meditation, sometimes I will light a candle or insense and really tune into my inner thoughts and feelings.
Check out these fantastic Self love Journaling prompts to get you started on your self love journey!
Manage How You Speak To And About Yourself
I can tell you thhat I have been the worst for telling myself and other people how rubbish I am. How fat I am. How Unworthy I am. I now realise that the way I spoke to and about myself is a huge part of why I didn’t love my self… and how others thought of me.
These realisation came from journaling through these thoughts as I said above. I realsied that the things I was saying werent really my own thoughts, but those of other people and societies thoughts.
I realised that when I saw other women who were the same size as me, or had the same hair as me, I never told her or even thought of her as fat, disgusting or ugly. In general I would recognise and appreciate her beauty. So why was I being so harsh on myself?
I slowly started adding in some affirmations to my morning. And eventually throughout the day when i would catch myself thinking or saying something negative about myself, I would quickly try to change that thought around and eventually I began to believe it.
Don’t forget…
The same goes for how I spoke about myself. I would often catch myself telling people how rubbish I looked and felt in what I was wearing. And if anyone dared give me a compliment I would shut them down immediately.
So I had to work on stopping myself saying bad things and also accepting compliments. If someone compliments my hair or my outfit, in stead of saying… ‘oh its just primark… the only thing that still fits me…’ I now just say ‘Thank you!’ Yeah that is uncomfortable. It doesnt feel right when you haven’t yet mastered self love, but these little steps really helped me to eventually get to a point where I do love myself.
Set Healthy Boundaries With Others
As I said above, you need to realise that you are worthy of love and care to be able to love yourself. A huge part of this is setting boundaries with yourself and with others!
A lot of us a single mums especially those of us who have been through abuse, will become people pleasers. This needs to stop! We need to learn how to take care of ourselves (because we are important too), before we can take care of others!
This is hard as single parents as we often have to take care of our kids first too… but making sure that we have time for ourselves too will lead to you feeling so much better about yourself and help you to start seeing yourself as worthy and then loveable!
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And these boundaries count for ourselves too! Do you have boundaries with yourself? We also need to put boundaries in place for ourselves so we don’t keep sabotaging ourselves! For example… Do you want to get healthy and really start taking care of yourself? And yet you still find yourself sitting on the sofa, eating chocolate every evening, instead of moving your body in a way that feels good to you? Then you need to start putting boundaries in place. Now I am not for a second saying that you shouldn’t sit and eat chocolate if that is what you enjoy, but do you need to do that everyday if you want to be healthy? No!
Maybe you want to start a business, but you keep refusing to actually sit down, plan, stick to your plan, or do anything that will actually get that business started! You need to put a boundary there.
You may be wondering what this has to do with loving yourself, but if you can end your day, your week, or even your month having achieved something that you are proud of or maybe even didn’t think you could achieve, then you can begin to celebrate yourself! Because you are frigging amazing!
Which leads me straight on to my next point…
Celebrate Yourself
You may not think you have anything to celebrate, but I bet you do! Did you keep you and the kids alive today? CELEBRATE! Did you leave an abusive relationship? CELEBRATE! Did you make progress on one of your goals this month? No matter how small… CELEBRATE IT!
Single parents are Amazing! It really can feel like we are failing a lot of the time and we can be so hard on ourselves, but I am telling you that you have so much to celebrate! And if you start Celebrating your little wins, not only will you begin to see for yourself how amazing you are, but you will begin to see and Manifest even bigger celebrations!
