The core to healing is like fire.
Step 4
Share experiences. One of the most helpful steps to recovery from abuse is to find a support group with other victims of abuse. This shared common experience allows a person to realize that they are not alone in their abusive encounters. Abuse is very isolating, personal, degrading, humiliating, and shameful. Knowing that other intelligent, beautiful, talented, and kind people have been abused is both saddening and relieving. Nancy’s support group gave her additional people that she could lean on who understood from their own experience what she was going through.
“Recent research shows that traumatic memories are stored in the right back region of the brain, which is associated with non-verbal memories (sights, sounds, and smells associated with a past event), rather than the left front area of the brain, which is associated with verbal memories. This means that commonly recommended self-care activities like journaling, talking to a friend, or even traditional talk therapy might not be the most effective strategies for working through those memories and the emotional and physical reactions attached to them.
Art expression (in all its forms) activates the right brain because it incorporates your senses by providing tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, and/or visual information. This means that arts activities can tap into traumatic memories the way that other, less sensory activities cannot. There is evidence that engagement with artistic activities, either as an observer or as an initiator, can enhance your mood, emotions, and other psychological states, while reducing symptoms like stress and depression.”