SwanWaters

My father’s dislike of Harry Potter got me thinking about how my father must have felt: trapped in an unhappy marriage with an abuser.

For the longest time, I thought there was something inherently wrong with me. Something that made me doomed to fail and completely…

3 Reasons You “Miss” the Abuser

One fateful year, my mother decided she wanted to put on a high tea for her birthday. She invited about 60 of her closest “friends and…

For shame to survive, Brene Brown taught me that it requires silence, secrecy, and judgment. I will no longer provide it nourishment.

My father was a HUGE ice cream fan! I mean HUGE! Here is a little story about our family dynamic.

Being at the mercy of an abuser creates feelings of desperation, of worthlessness and shame, of just being… crazy.

It’s so easy to fall into that trap, where all you do is complain about all the horrible things that happened. So, how do we move on?

Something does not have to be true, it just has to be repeated. It’s almost impossible to defend against a lie.

The idea that boundaries are selfish may be so deeply ingrained, we tend to feel that by setting limits we hurt other people.

Let’s just call this whole abuse recovery experience exactly what it is: massive suckage. So, what can you do to stay positive?

Abuse, and the many varied effects it has on you, is incredibly difficult to understand for people who have not experienced it themselves.

Aubrey shares four ways to learn to love yourself after abuse.

Sometimes we get so used to the abuse, that it becomes our normal. We don’t even realise what’s going on, because we assume that’s just life

I based my strategies for coping with my PTSD triggers on the work I did in The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

My mother was never tired of commenting on how I didn’t do laundry right. It’s ironic that I had to be the one who aired her dirty laundr

Aubrey explores how misunderstanding No Contact and victim blaming can become proxy abuse.

Sometimes I get frustrated about all the suffocating emphasis on positivity. Don’t get me wrong: I am actually a massive believer in the…

Healing from abuse of any kind is best accomplished by understanding and allowing your emotions — without getting stuck in a cycle of…

Sometimes we have a bit of a meltdown. It can be something ordinary that just sends us over the edge. I vividly remember a time where I…

I suffered from a variety of illnesses while under the control of my ex-husband and always berating myself for feeling bad.

Jealing doesn’t just happen. It’s something you DO! If you’re going to sit around waiting to “be healed”, you’ll wait a long time!

I’m going to give you a primer on how to begin using these skills to help with your symptoms. Even if you don’t have full-blown PTSD

How can I make my x/y/z see that they are being abused? If I had the answer to this question, I would tell you, but here are 5 ways to help!