GIVING UP HOPE

Hope is necessary for life. Why would we strive to make our lives better if we had no hope that we would succeed?

However, there are circumstances where hope is futile and ultimately damaging. It can stifle us and hold us back. It can keep us stuck where we are.

Those of us who suffered abuse often live with the hope that those who abused us will do an about turn and apologise. If those abusers were our parents, we live with the hope that they will love us if only we could just get it right and become acceptable to them.

This hope keeps us from recovering and moving on.

When we do finally give up hope, we experience deep grief and anguish. Yet this is the beginning of our coming freedom. Freedom to be who we are and freedom from the abusers. Freedom from the need to be loved by them and freedom from the need for them to apologise. Freedom from their continuing presence in our  thoughts.

We come to realise that we are already good enough and always were and we become free of the pain of constantly striving and falling short. We come to see that for love to be love it is unconditional and that what we were led to believe by our abusers, and by religion too if that was part of it, was love was nothing of the sort but control and manipulation.

Hope is necessary for life but being abused corrupts this hope into something malignant and soul destroying.

Coming to the realisation that what we hope for will never be is often our greatest challenge and can be experienced as most fearful. Yet it is imperative that we reach that point in order to free us of the chains out abusers have wrapped us in for years. We cannot free ourselves without giving up this malignant form of hope.

Make no mistake, it is WE who free ourselves. Our abusers cannot. They would not if they could. We have what we need inside us to break free.

The hope that we can recover and be free is a life giving hope and this hope we cultivate and cherish and let go of.