How nice would it be to make peace with the fact that you were not to blame for being abused?

In fact, it had nothing to do with you.

It was all down to your abusers who had pain inside that they chose to inflict on you.

I know you probably don't believe it wasn't your fault, but wouldn't it be nice to be in a world where you did? Well, I am here to tell you that it's possible. I know because I did it. There was a time when I believed it was all my fault, and that meant I could never tell anyone about it. After all, it was all "my fault".

Well, it's not true, and I'm here to tell you three ways to stop feeling like that. This week we will cover:

🙏 How to accept the abuse wasn't your fault

🙏 Why your abusers want you to blame yourself

🙏 How to move forward from self-blame towards self-love

Oh, and I figured if you're watching something like this, you're either trying to recover from CPTSD, or you're trying to help someone recover from CPTSD. If that's the case, I have dropped a really useful free guide here. If you follow this link, it'll take you to the free 6-step guide, which includes everything I did to recover from CPTSD.

Step 1 - Accept that your abuse wasn't your fault.

The first thing you can do to stop blaming yourself for the abuse is to accept that it wasn't your fault. If you have CPTSD, chances are you were abused when you were a child. You were a child. You were completely at the mercy of those that you loved and trusted. You didn't know right from wrong and you had no control over what people did to you.

The people who abused you, on the other hand, were likely adults. Every statement I just said is not true for them. They were in control. They made choices. They were supposed to protect you. Just because they may have told you it was your fault, or you may have felt like it was your fault because you did nothing, that's because you couldn't do anything.

Remember: you were a child.

You were not responsible for your trauma. The only thing you are responsible for is breaking the cycle as a result of your trauma. Not for being abused.

Step 2 - Understand that your abusers want you to blame yourself.

The next step to stop blaming yourself for the abuse is to understand that you blaming yourself for the abuse is exactly what your abusers want and they've taught you to do it.

Maybe they abused you and they followed it up with sentences like, "Well, if you didn't do that, I wouldn't do this." Or, "You know this is your fault. It's not because of me." Or maybe they kept quiet. Maybe they abused you but then acted like everything was fine every day.

Whatever they did, they were trying one of two techniques. One was to make you feel so ashamed and like it was completely your fault so you would never bring it up and you would never question it. After all, what have they done wrong? The other technique is the silent technique. They pretend like everything's normal so you think if you bring it up, everyone would laugh at you because... everything's normal, no?

Whichever happened to you, both of these tactics are designed to make you quiet. They're designed so you second-guess yourself, and they're designed to make you blame yourself.

If you blame yourself and keep quiet, in a way, you're letting your abusers win because you never stand up to them so they never have to feel like they did anything wrong.

It doesn't have to be like that, and at the very least you can stop blaming yourself.

Step 3 - Replace the pain with pleasure.

The final thing you can do to stop blaming yourself for the abuse is to love yourself. I know it sounds cringy, but one of the best ways that you can get rid of the blame is to replace it with a feeling that you're worth more.

By blaming yourself, you enter a cycle whereby an awful thing happened, and "now I'm gonna make myself feel even worse about it because at the time I was told I was terrible". You finish this circle of blame and abuse and blame and abuse.

You need to break that, and one of the ways to break a toxic cycle is to inject love and compassion and love.

It's really simple, and you can do it yourself; you just need to make time for yourself. If you replace the blame with a feeling that you're worthy of more, you will eventually stop blaming yourself. Because you'll believe that what happened wasn't your fault. You'll believe you deserve better. If you want to love yourself more, then things that work for me are pampering days, going on long walks, and picking up a new sport.

Investing in friendships, cooking better, all of these small things will help you feel more confident in yourself, and you'll realize you didn't deserve what happened to you, it wasn't your fault, and you'll stop blaming yourself for it.

So... What's the takeaway?

What I'd like to leave you on is the belief that you will stop blaming yourself one day.

I know that because I did, and also... When you stop blaming yourself, that's part of healing. Realizing what happened to you, accepting that it happened, and realizing it wasn't your fault is all part of the healing process.

It will happen, and you need to put the work in to do it. Now these three pieces of advice will help you get there, but I urge you to continue working at it.

You weren't at fault.

And if you would like to continue your recovery journey by diving deeper or you want more support, head to the link here, and it will take you to the free resource. That resource will walk you through the six steps that I went through to recover from CPTSD. I hope you find something useful and I hope you're okay.

DISCLAIMER

Please visit our disclaimer which applies to anything we produce on any Platform.