Personal Growth and Gratitude: Reflecting on your Healing Progress from CSA

Have you ever taken a moment to celebrate your own personal growth? Did you know that every small stride you take on your healing journey from childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a victory worth applauding? In this episode, we reveal five examples of personal growth. We acknowledge that healing is a process and it requires time, patience, and a lot of self-love.

As the holiday season approaches, it can bring unique stressors, especially for CSA survivors. Let's face it, holidays can be a challenging time for many of us. This episode serves as a gentle reminder to show yourself compassion and care during this potentially difficult period. Finally, we wrap up with a guide to maintaining a gratitude journal, full of prompts designed to help you reflect on your personal growth journey. So grab a cup of tea, find a comfortable spot, and join us as we celebrate each step forward on the path to healing. Life can get better, and every step you take is worth celebrating!

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Transcript

Michelle Hall: 0:01

Have you ever taken the time to consider the personal growth that you are making on your CSA healing journey? Perhaps you've made small steps or small progress but didn't realize that it was considered personal growth. But hey, every growth step is worth celebrating and worth recording. So take a listen to hear some examples of personal growth and how you can keep track of them by expressing gratitude and recording it in your journal. This is Broken to Blessed, a podcast for women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I am your host, michelle Hall. I am a certified Christian life coach and I am also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and for many years I felt broken because of that experience. But thank God for his blessings. He pulled me out of brokenness and into blessings Hence the name of the podcast and I want the same for you. Healing is possible if you're willing to do the work. Let's get started. Hello, esteemed ones, and welcome to today's episode of Broken to Blessed. Today I want to talk about celebrating your personal growth, but before I get into that, I want to say that, as we approach the holiday season and the business thereof, I just want to remind you to show yourself some love, compassion and care.

Michelle Hall: 1:52

The holidays can be very stressful and triggering for some survivors of CSA. For some, it reminds them of families they lost because of boldly telling their experience of CSA at the hands of a family member. Others may have had the unpleasant experience of attending a holiday gathering where their perpetrator was in attendance and about stressful. Others may be depressed because their lives are just not what they expected it to be. There are a variety of reasons why the holidays can be difficult for survivors, and these are just a few. So be sure to pay attention to yourself and to treat yourself well during this upcoming holiday season. And, by the way, I just want to say also that if you are attending a holiday or any event where your perpetrator is present, that is something that you do not have to do. You get to choose. You get to choose who you spend your time with and how you interact with them. Okay, so for personal growth, I want to encourage you to celebrate yourself for any personal growth that you have done related to your healing journey from CSA. It doesn't matter how large or how small the growth has been, as long as growth has been made and you are feeling better in the midst of your recovery.

Michelle Hall: 3:34

Here are a few examples of personal growth. Let's say that you have set a much needed boundary in your life. As I was mentioning prior about the holiday event, perhaps you set a boundary and said I'm not going to attend this year because I don't wanna be around or in the presence of this person, and then you hold tight to that and don't go. Now. That's a powerful step to take and a powerful step towards your personal growth. Or let's say, over the last year or so you have sought out professional help so that you could work through some of the trauma that you still carry and that you believe is holding you back or affecting your life in an adverse way. That is also a huge step towards personal growth and you should celebrate yourself for making that move.

Michelle Hall: 4:29

Or perhaps you have incorporated some routine self-care into your life because you recognize that you deserve it. You know, oftentimes we as women put ourselves at the bottom of our list and we do for everyone else and we rarely do for ourselves, because by the time we get to us at the bottom of our list, we're exhausted. So if you have put yourself at the top of your list and incorporated some much needed and well-deserved self-care in your life, kudos to you. Maybe you have discovered that forgiveness does not mean or make the trespass against you okay, but it eases your mind and brings you peace. I'm sure you've probably heard that forgiveness is not for the other person, it's for you. It is for you to release the burden, the guilt, the shame and all that comes with holding on to a situation. Maybe you have made the effort to open up and be more vulnerable with a trusted friend or a significant other, because you yearn for a deeper connection with someone. Oftentimes, as a survivor of CSA, we tend to stay closed off. We don't open ourselves up and share what's deep inside, and that does not facilitate a close and intimate relationship. And you know you just get tired of surface-level relationships and you want someone to understand you for who you are, at your core. So if you have someone that you trust and have opened yourself up to, maybe you've discovered that it's not such a scary place when it's with the right person. It can be quite rewarding to have a deep relationship based on trust and mutual respect.

Michelle Hall: 6:34

As you move forward with personal growth, record your gratitude daily for the good things in your life and the progress that you've made, and you can do that in a journal. In a minute I'm going to list some journaling prompts that could help you record your gratitude regularly. You know, gratitude is all about expressing what we are thankful for, and any small steps toward healing and personal growth are definitely something to be thankful for and something that is worth recording. You can look back at your journal later in life, say in a year or two, and clearly see the progress that you've made on your healing journey because it's recorded. So get yourself a journal or a notebook and a nice pen and try using some or all of the following prompts to record what you are grateful for, so that you can have a record of your progress and personal growth.

Michelle Hall: 7:38

What positive changes have I noticed in my thoughts, feelings and behaviors? How have I grown since I began this healing journey? List three things you're grateful for today, no matter how small. How has practicing gratitude influenced your overall well-being and what ways have I shown self-compassion recently? How can I be more compassionate toward myself during challenging times? Reflect on a situation where you successfully set a healthy boundary. What did you learn from this experience? Are there areas in your life where you need to establish clearer boundaries? That's all for this episode. It was a shorty. Continue working on your personal growth, no matter how small, and record the progress that you make and think about the choices you have about how you spend your holiday time. It's all up to you, because you get to choose. Until next time, thank you for joining me on this episode of Broken to Blessed, and remember life can get better. You just have to do the work. God bless.