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The effects of childhood abuse do not go away simply through the passing of time. In fact, the problems can be compounded and reinforced over and over again. Only when a survivor starts consciously working with them can they be resolved.

Abuse takes many forms, sexual, physical, emotional. They can all seriously affect how we live our lives, how we relate to other people, how we see ourselves.

A common mistake that survivors make is to feel that the severity of their abuse wasn't 'bad enough' to justify how bad they feel as adults. It doesn't work like that and however bad or mild you consider your abuse to have been, the effects are real. You feel how you feel.

While each of us is an individual, with our own particular set of experiences and reactions to them, it often surprises survivors that there are some effects that we all share in common.

When we are children, we are completely helpless. We are dependent upon and vulnerable to the people who are supposed to care about us and keep us safe. If those people betray us either by committing acts of abuse upon us, or failing to take care of us and protect us from abuse; even by not giving us the love and nurture vital to our development, we find ways to protect ourselves, to survive.

Self blame is one of the survival mechanisms available to us as children in an abusive situation. This is especially true when we have been deliberately 'groomed' or when we feel affection for the abuser. It is very much less scary to take the blame than to live with the fact that the people we are dependent upon, and love, are abusive.

This self-blame affects us forever unless we begin to address it. We often continue to abuse ourselves, with drugs, self-harm, food or by staying in abusive relationships. Most survivors have no idea that they deserve, and can have, a much better life.

We have a lot of problems with trust. If our trust is betrayed as a child, it will take a lot of conscious effort to learn to be able to trust again, and how to trust appropriately. This can be so severe that we find ways to isolate ourselves, or we throw ourselves desperately onto people who will take advantage of our vulnerability, thus reinforcing the abuse.

Even in a loving relationship, survivors have trouble with intimacy, even with our own children in some cases. We may find ourselves pushing the people who care about us away, something loving partners find very difficult to understand. This is normal and natural for survivors, not strange or bad.

If

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