It takes a long time to read books about Childhood Sexual Abuse, even longer to recover between those readings. Each one has a emotional cost. Some I have read are not so great, leaving me worse off than when I started reading, others have been pretty good. Even rarer has been a great book and this is one of them.
Written by Christina Enevoldsen and named The Rescued Soul: A writing journey for the Healing of Incest and Family Betrayal.
As you know, we aren’t born with a sense of who and what we are to be. Psychologist call this a sense of self. Ideally, we grow up and develop it through our interactions with others. Our warm and loving families help us to become a person who has physical, emotional, mental and spiritual maturity. But when we grow up in a family where childhood sexual abuse is going one, we don’t have good boundaries. (I didn’t even know what boundaries were until a kind therapist told me.) We are considered sexual objects with little value outside our roles as sexual victims. This book is about recognizing how we can recreate a person who can be mature in all those ways mentioned earlier with a sense of strength and clarity. We, through examining our past and present, gain freedom from the lies we were told. She writes about a way to focus on developing a clear sense of ones self. Writing prompts included in the book help us to move through the muddy waters of unexamined feelings and emotional wounding that childhood sexual abuse has brought into our lives.
I can’t recommend it enough as a starting place for gathering information in how you can proceed to reclaim what was taken from you or if you were very young when the abuse happened, what never developed in the first place. Replacing the blanket of misconceptions, lies and shame with clear boundaries is a worthy starting point in healing our lives. Make you way through the book at your pace and have a voice of someone who is making her way through it too. Discover how you can find out what you want and choose to live now.
If you would like to know more you can find her work at overcomingsexualabuse.com
Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse 