Brick by Brick: Rebuilding a Relationship with Your Body After Sexual Abuse.
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Sexual abuse is like coming home at night to your house completely destroyed from an intruder.
Rocks the size of boulders thrown in, breaking all of the windows and walls so nothing protects you from the outside anymore, all of your clothes ripped to shreds, photos and memories gone and messed up, a big X over your face in the pictures, red paint thrown over everything.
Then you are supposed to live kindly and sweetly in this house, and act as if nothing happened (so says our culture). Sleeping on shards of glass while pretending like you don’t feel a thing.
Spending days, nights, and days again picking up all of the pieces trying to fit them back together. They don’t quite fit anymore, and when they do, you can feel and see all the cracks deep down into your bones.
You’re sure that nothing can go back.
The effects of sexual abuse:
It is coming home to a house destroyed. This time all the things you own have been thrown out of the house from the inside, breaking all the windows and tearing down most of the walls. Neighbors think you’re strange to be swearing that you were robbed as you grip your things in your hands with incredible fury.
You destroy yourself from the inside out.
It feels safer chasing, searching for a place you thought was home, feeling for your things around in the dark, believing what you need is just always right outside of what you can reach.
You live that truth as if it is yours and wasn’t given to you by a broken world.
We can get stuck in the loop of either being victimized by someone else or victimizing ourselves, over and over and over again.
Someone is always the bad guy, and it is either us or them.
The way to repair the home (the body) after sexual abuse is to stay. Don’t get a new house. Don’t throw it all out and away and try to outrun the past, for it is is always there. Don’t destroy the only things left because it’s so hard to feel anything at all.
Look at the mess and what it has done, and decide to have it just the way it is, not change it, fix it, make it better, but make space for what happened. Decide that you’re going to stop moving around the furniture pretending it hides the crumbling foundation.
The way you rebuild your relationship to your body (your home), after sexual abuse, is brick by brick.
Ask for help (one brick), cook yourself a healthy meal (another brick), read a book about trauma (another brick), don’t read anything, especially what is on social media, and dance naked in your bedroom (another brick), see God in your own reflection in the middle of the night (another brick), pursue what you love as if it’s calling you back to life, because it is (another brick).
And that is how you get your soul back baby: just brick by brick.
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Maria Palumbo’s ‘soul mission’ is to awaken women to their innate power. Beginning in community mental health, Maria served as a psychotherapist with a specialization in healing trauma wounds. Recently she burst through the box of psychotherapy to create her own model of self-discovery, which stokes the holy fire within women worldwide. Maria integrates holistic therapies of Yoga, meditation, and dance therapy with her own model of healing that creates breakthroughs quickly. Acutely aware of the innate genius in all, Maria works with women to help them remember their joy. She is the creator and dream-maker of BodyLove Goddess Photo Shoot, an event that is the impetus for a body-love revolution. She is also a mentor for brilliant women all around the world through her Awaken To Your Magic mentorship program. You can contact her via email.
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