Take Care of Yourself

In addressing the abuse in your life, you have already taken a giant step toward taking care of yourself by obtaining this information.  Recovery means focusing on yourself and caring for yourself.  It also means beginning to trust your own thoughts and feelings.  One of the jobs for a victim of a relationship of abuse is learning how to be selfish.  As women, we have been raised to believe that selfishness is bad.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  If you aren’t taking care of yourself, you can’t take care of business, your children, your job, or anything else.  You have to be first.  In your abusive relationship, you are never able to concentrate on your needs because you have to be so focused on your partner’s.  It’s time to start valuing your most precious resource:  yourself.

Most battered women report low self-esteem.  Self-esteem is the value you place on yourself.  It consists of attitudes and beliefs about yourself and how you interact with others.  Your abuser may tell you that you’re worthless, a rotten lover, a terrible mother, a loser, too fat, too thin, a whore, frigid, stupid, crazy, etc.  After a while, you begin to believe the abuser.  As you work on your recovery, you need to replace those hurtful lies with the truth as you know it.  Self-esteem is an inside job.  Tell yourself the truth:  you are facing something very difficult and doing the best you can do.  You are not perfect.  No one is.  You have strengths as well as weaknesses.  Concentrate on your strengths.  Write them down.  Say them out loud.

When you are being abused, you learn to ignore your needs.  You learn to be quiet.  You get smaller and smaller until you almost don’t exist.  As you remove the abuse in your life, you need to take “take up space.”  This means being assertive, getting what you need, and not feeling guilty.  Instead of being reactive (waiting for things to happen and then reacting to them) you can learn to be proactive (taking action on your own).  When you are proactive, you have more power.

Be sure that you are eating properly and getting enough rest.  Exercise and deep breathing help you to get centered and relax.  They are also useful tools to combat feeling “down.”  Spoil yourself once in a while.  Do something you really enjoy that you haven’t done recently.  Spend time with friends.  Laugh!

Battered women learn how to keep everything inside.  Now you can begin to get you feelings and thoughts our where you can examine them.  Join Tu Casa’s support group.  There you will know that you are not alone, you are not crazy, and you are not responsible for the abuse.  You will break the isolation imposed by the abuser.  You have a lot to learn from other women, and you probably have a lot to teach.

A journal is another good way to begin.  If you are still with your abuser, keep the journal in a safe place, i.e., a friend, counselor, etc.  Write in it every day for at least five minutes.  You may not write in sentences.  Your thoughts may come out in lists, single words, doodles, drawings, or single sentences.  By making time for yourself and your journal every day, you are strengthening the message that you are worthwhile and that you deserve time just for you.

*From the Longmont Coalition