Ways of Supporting Yourself
Posted by Survivable - 09/26/08, 04:48 pm1. Acknowledge your strengths: Your desire to overcome what happened, your willpower, your initiative, your intelligence, your capacity to care about others, and you wish to grow as a person.
2. Build your sense of hope about your recovery: become more aware of the process of treatment, read about the experiences of other survivors, talk with other survivors, and identify goals for yourself beyond your survival of trauma.
3. Develop your support system: Reach out and build new relationships with persons that have something to offer to you. Move old relationships to a deeper, more meaningful level. And set boundaries on unhealthy relationships.
4. Adopt an attitude of openness about facing the process of your treatment, what it might or might not involve, and the concerns you may have.
5. Respect the pacing of your own recovery.
6. Move towards an attitude of self-respect for your own dignity: with an understanding and compassion for the wounds you have endured, and a valuing of yourself for just being yourself with all your own unique strengths and weaknesses.
7. Begin to listen to yourself, observe your actions, and experience your feelings. Do not be judgmental.
8. Develop a list of gentle words of encouragement to tell yourself when your treatment seems difficult or frightening. Use positive self-statements and self-affirmations.
9. Create healing imagery for yourself such as safe place scenes and practice your safe place scenes daily.
10. Create imagery for containing poisonous memories, thoughts, and images.
11. Develop the ability to calm and soothe yourself: One way to begin this is to imagine the experience of someone who has gone through similar traumatic events. Ask yourself how is what happened to you any different from what happened to this person. Ask yourself how you might counsel or comfort this other person. Imagine yourself treating yourself in a similar compassionate way.
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