Definitions

What is Abuse? 

Abuse is the use of might, mouth, or money to hurt, control, threaten or manipulate. - Sam Blakely.

Abuse can be verbal, mental, physical, sexual, and financial.

What is Trauma? 

Trauma is the result of an event/s that overwhelm the child or adult’s ability to cope and integrate the ideas and thoughts of that experience.

Trauma can occur as a result of (but not limited to) a threat to life, bodily injury, or to psychological well being like abandonment of a child.

Children may form beliefs about themselves during trauma, like they are to blame, even though the situation was not their fault. The brain structures (e.g. emotional or limbic system) respond with a life or death response to stress and terror. As humans we use coping strategies to deal with threat, for e.g. freezing, dissociating, etc. all of which improve our chances of survival.

These same strategies and symptoms in later life may interfere with our functioning, for e.g. avoiding relationships, anxiety, panic attacks, forgetfulness, depression, guilt, anger, sleep disorders, etc.

What is Healing?

  Healing is a term to be defined by each person that may vary over time. Marc Ian Barash (1993) says that healing can be:
 
- The re-establishment of communication with our selves; 

- Finding meaning of pain, woundedness, etc. in terms of the totality of one’s life; a re-framing of meaning in experience; 

- Restoration of balance from disease to incorporating healthy aspects into one’s life;

- Willingness to change, an adaptation that moves beyond habitual patterns of thinking, behaving, or feeling which in turn can alter biological processes.