The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Obviously the people in these Good Mother roles must feel safe to you. What is happening is nothing less than a radical transformation, changing your self-image, how you are in relationships, and awakening the child states that have been frozen inside. If you developed a hardened defense structure and have taken on the critical voices of those arou

For many children it is safer to hate themselves than to risk their relationship with their caregivers by expressing anger or by running away. As a result, abused children are likely to grow up believing that they are fundamentally unlovable; that was the only way their young minds could explain why they were treated so badly.

Even in the absence of any obvious dramatic trauma, an unavoidable consequence of childhood, of the process of understanding and adapting to the complex demands of reality, is that we judge certain aspects of ourselves to be unacceptable, to be “bad,” and we tend to dissociate those aspects of ourselves.