Clearly, I can’t know most of you, my readers. Some of you have emailed me sharing your
feelings and your story with me. Where
possible, I’ve replied. Many of you are
simply names to me. Most likely I don’t
even know which continent you live on.

The fact that you have joined my list suggests that you are
looking for something in your life that you don’t currently have. It could be information, hope, something to
sustain you through a dark time. I
can’t know. I can only guess.

It goes without saying that I wish you love, joy, peace,
prosperity, healing and self-worth in 2008.

Whatever your reason, I feel privileged to have you as my
reader. I may not know you personally,
but I truly care about your life. That’s why I do what I do. I
care about your suffering and I care deeply about your recovery. I may not know what you have been through,
but I believe implicitly in your capacity to rise again from the depths into
which an abusive relationship has cast you.

The longer I work with abused women the more I see their – your
– extraordinary strength and ability to take the recovery tools available and
use them to start healing fast.

It goes without saying that I wish you love, joy, peace,
prosperity, healing and self-worth in 2008. Those are the outcomes I want for you. There are also other things I want for you, things that will act as
signposts, directing you along your journey. My list follows. It is not
intended to be a complete list. It’s
just a starting point that may stimulate you to add other things that spring to
mind.

• I
  wish for you to believe that your past does not determine your future,
  you do. You may have been travelling down a rough path to nowhere, but there are always turnings off it you can take. They will lead
       you to a better place.

• I
  wish for you to become as good at registering the positive feedback you receive as you are at picking up on the negative comments of hurtful people. If you can be so successful at practising selective deafness (and, believe me, abused women
  are without equals when it comes to turning a deaf ear to the positive, supportive things people say to them) in time you will be become deaf to
       destructive comments. Listening
  out for the positive stuff will go a long way to turning down the volume of the hurtful remarks.

• I wish for you to be able to sniff out an abusive man at 20 paces. If an abuser can sniff out a possible victim then an abused woman can learn to trust her nose also. It wasn’t that you didn’t have misgivings at the very start, the fact is you chose to ignore them. Trust that initial intuition, enlist the wisdom of supportive friends or family and learn to recognize the
       behaviours of abusive men. There
  are plenty of resources that will help including my article: http://ezinearticles.com/?16-Ways-To-Spot-An-Abusive-Man&id=131715
       .

• I wish for you to develop a strong sense of your boundaries. Your boundaries are wherever you want them to be. Nobody has the right to overstep them or tell you to take them down. A person who is not prepared to respect your boundaries is someone with whom you cannot have
  a safe relationship.

• I wish for you to have respectful, loving people in your life. These are the people who will cherish
       you the way you are, without needing you to be fatter/thinner,
  older/younger, prettier, smarter, weaker/stronger, richer/poorer, wittier, quieter/noisier.

• I wish for you to have the wisdom to know who you can trust and how far you can trust them. Again, your intuition will know, even if you can’t rationalize the messages it
  gives you.

• I wish for you to believe that your life is precious. It is precious to the people who love you and it will come to be precious to you also. If you really were worthless an abuser would never have had to work so hard at programming that damaging belief into you. Despite his best efforts, you know there is a part of you that never bought into that programming. That part of you is right. Make time to listen to what it tells you. It is incapable of lying. Nor will it ever let itself be completely silenced.

• I wish for you to know that you are not alone. There is an army of recovering women out there. You may not know them –  us – but individually and collectively we care. Every woman who takes the road to healing helps move others forward. There is no shame in what we have been through. Our recovery helps to make other women safer, friends, family, children, women we may never meet. Our recovery changes the climate for other women also.

• I
  wish for you to cultivate the habit of giving thanks daily. Making time to give thanks daily for
  what is good in your life is the fastest, most effective way of turning your feelings around from despair to hope and faith in the future. I’ve worked with women who walked in fear of their life and risked having their children taken away from them. Giving thanks for the good things in their life (like their children, friends or family, the sunshine) did not suddenly change their situation. It did give them the courage to fight another day, rebuild self-worth and start to believe in a better future.

• I wish for you to be aware of the power of your thoughts. As Mike Dooley (http://www.tut.com ) says: “Thoughts become things.” You can choose to think the good ones. Maybe you can only
       choose positive, sustaining, inspiring thoughts 5 or 10% of the time. That is still enough to create a new habit and move you forward. 

• Come Christmas 2008 I wish for you to look back, take stock and rejoice
  at how far you have come.

Wishing you healing, hope and happiness in 2008,

Annie