You will know what these are if you have been through it.

·     Immense sense of guilt
·     Feelings of inferiority to other people, particularly of the same gender as you
·     ‘Damaged goods’ mentality
·     Depression
·     Addictive behaviour
·     Self-destructive behaviour
·     Intimacy issues
·     A profound inability to enjoy life.

There are overlaps in this list, I’m sorry. So many things popped to mind that I had to list them. This is what I’ve experienced – you can add or take away from that list, but I think the guilt, inferiority and damaged goods mentality are pretty much universal. And from this stems everything else. Most importantly, all of these things seriously damage our ability to relate to others in a healthy way.

I, for one, have experienced addictive behaviour in the way of needing a relationship to feel content. Having been starved of the right kind of affection from my father, I’ve tried to regain it from other people and, because I have found it difficult to recognise healthy affection, have gravitated towards relationships in which I can never really be happy or satisfied. I truly understand the mentality behind women (and men!) who stay in abusive relationships (though I have never been in a relationship that I could call ‘abusive’). They stay out of need, because the relationship is like their drug, their fix, without which they would not feel complete. Somewhere along the lines – in childhood – their need for love was not met, so they compromise in their adult relationships, hoping to find someone who will ‘fix’ them, or whom they can fix, in order to validate themselves. I have yet to hear of someone who stays in an abusive relationship, who has come from a healthy and functional upbringing. I think this is because so many subliminal psychological goings-on occur when we meet and are attracted to someone – processes beyond my understanding I’m sure – but what I do know, is that the person we choose to spend our intimate lives with is a reflection of ourselves. That’s why it’s so important that survivors work on their inner sense of identity and confidence: so that we don’t fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to be abused once more, just because it’s what we classified as ‘normal’ when we were growing up, it was what we were used to. We who have been abused have been programmed with so many distorted messages of what life and love are about need to learn to recognise these harmful behaviour patterns in ourselves when they occur, and therefore how to stop acting on them; a mammoth task. We need to take the time to put our own needs first, and recognise that we, too, have limitless potential despite our unfortunate childhoods. When we can learn to accept and love ourselves, we set ourselves up for a lifetime of personal discovery and growth.