This morning I received an email that I could have written
myself, 6 or 7 years ago. It came from
a woman I’ve never met, who lives a few thousand miles away on another
continent. She writes: “I
feel like I’m completely broken to pieces.” 

She’s a woman at rock bottom. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do,
how or if she can possibly go on. All
that she does know is that she ‘wants out now’. She wants to live.

That is the start of recovery

 When I felt just like she does if anyone had told
me that I would, one day, be where I am now, in a position to help other abused
women, I would not have believed them. I could not have believed them. 

When you are in a black hole, all you see is the
black hole. Maybe there is a tiny
patch of light way above you, maybe there isn’t. Either way, anything other than the black hole appears totally
out of reach for you.

But here’s the thing: recovery starts with the
sincere yearning for recovery, with the desire to live and start over. 

Beyond that, I believe that we all create our own
recovery cocktail. 

Some of the necessary ingredients are:

• support,
       ideally from friends and/or family, as well as experts in the field of
       abuse recovery
• understanding
       so that you can identify the mechanics of abuse and break out of the cycle
• new
       knowledge, so that you can replace the old hurt mind-set with a view of
       yourself and the world that will serve you better.
• hope. When you are too weary to hold that
       hope for yourself, the example of other women who have moved forward can
       take the place of that hope. If it
       can be done, then that means that you also can do it, and do it much
       faster, provided you have some guidance.

In my own case, my recovery was a mix of
counselling, hypnotherapy, coaching and other resources that I put together as
I went along. Some were free, some were
not. Some were perfect for me at the
time, some weren’t. I had no idea of
what I was doing, I just did the best I could to keep myself afloat. A lot of the time I was clutching at straws,
trying to keep from drowning. 

But I was taking action, however small and
tentative these actions were. And
together they made for powerful change.

Of course, I didn’t understand it at the
time. I saw sameness, not change. I wondered what on earth I was doing, and if
I would ever move on. 

I learned a lot along the way, the hard way. My ebook “The Woman You Want To Be” is the distillation
of a great deal of what I learned, about the effortless way to fast-track
recovery. 

But there is more. 

I don’t know where most of you are on your journey
to wholeness and self-worth. I do know,
from my own experience, that recovery is a cocktail that you mix for
yourself. The basic ingredients remain
constant. The rest are a ‘mix and
match’ selection that you add yourself.