Loving Voices

Long into my family estrangement, the negative comments from my past continued to visit on the present. Sometimes, they played like a repetitive loop. Other times, a certain event triggered the voices of anger, blame, and rejection. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head: You are bad. You are sick. You are crazy. You single handedly destroyed our family.

I could feel myself shrinking and feeling small.

It is easy to get stuck. Even though we no longer had a relationship, I continued to yearn for my mother’s love and approval. I wanted her to replace the ugly voices in my head with new loving voices. I wanted her to accept responsibility for what she had done.

It’s easy to become seduced by our longing to receive support from the one place that it isn’t available. I knew I had to take responsibility for my own healing and to find support where it was available.

Over a period of many years, I developed a loving community of encouragement. With the aid of loving people in my life, I worked on healing myself by replacing the old unhealthy internal messages, feelings and responses, with new healthy internal messages, feelings and responses.

Slowly over time, I began tipping the scale from the negative to the positive.

As survivors, we need help changing the majority voice we hear in our heads - from that of our abusers – to that of love, so that we can heal, mourn, and move on with our lives.