Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter
Excerpted from Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors. Purchase a copy here.
As discussed in detail in Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips and Tools for Abuse Survivors, victims of abuse have been conditioned to think like victims. It is this thinking that hinders recovery. Victims can get so accustomed to living cyclical patterns of seeking and avoiding pain that they do not understand the real extent of their unhappiness and level of dependence on harmful power imbalanced relationships.
You may live and work in environments where these dysfunctions continue, the boundaries of personal respect are habitually violated, and personal rights are not honored. Your self-esteem suffers, and you live to avoid pain rather than pursue and seek joy. Perhaps you do not even know what brings you joy. The distorted thinking and skewed beliefs that create invisible barriers to your happiness can also create barriers to your healing.
So, here are five fundamental truths to help you challenge what I believe are the biggest falsehoods in your thinking that have hindered and will continue to create obstacles in your healing journey.
TRUTH #1
Believing lies does not make them true and not believing the truth does not make it a lie. Truth IS truth. Lies are lies. This is indisputable!
TRUTH #2
We manifest in life what we believe to be true!
We live to provide the evidence that our beliefs are true – even if in reality they are not!
Read this again!
We manifest in life what we believe to be true (even if our beliefs are really lies).
TRUTH #3
The human brain cannot process two opposing thoughts.
Let’s break this down a bit more.
If we believe we are the source of our pain, must suffer to be lovable, deserve pain rather than joy and we are powerless to the pain (all lies we were taught to believe in childhood), then when we become adults, we create the lies we believe and become attracted to relationships and people that continue to bring us pain.
This is how and why abuse spreads from our caretakers to us and from us to our children and is perpetuated from generation to generation. Yes, the broken ones before us taught us to believe their lies; we became pain-based inauthentic versions of ourselves who teach the same lies to our children. We attract those who prey on vulnerabilities we developed because we did not and do not live authentic lives based on our personal truth and divinely provided human design.
Read “What You Don’t Know About Dysfunctional Families and Intergenerational Abuse” here to learn more.
In addition, emotional vampires like narcissists and psychopaths who cannot generate their own power, bank on our vulnerabilities and the false beliefs that we are deserving of pain and are powerless to those who trigger it.
TRUTH #4
Abusers find us. We do not find them!!
Sorry to disappoint you, but abusers do not have some magical power over us and no, we are not the source of our pain and we do not deserve to be in relationships with weak, spineless, aggressive, uncompassionate, lazy people who steal our energy from us and who want all the benefits we can provide without any of the work.
Listen and learn more on the “Toxic Tango of Empaths and Narcissists” here.
They are aggressive but the truly weak ones who cannot generate their own power so they steal ours from us. Aggression is not power, folks. Abusers hunt for and prey for those with our vulnerabilities, the false beliefs and fears we were taught in childhood. In fact, they bank on our vulnerabilities so they can feed off of our compassion and benefit from us, like a parasite feeds off of its host, for a very long time. Read more here on the differences between harm, fear and real danger.
TRUTH #5
We can heal. Our abusers cannot.
The good, and really not so surprising news, is that with hard work, self-compassion, and self-care, our brains can rewire. Absolutely they can. We have the divine ability to release the pain and replace these false beliefs (the lies we were taught to believe) with truth, build our self-worth back up to their true levels, take our power back, and then find others whose truth aligns with ours in power balanced mutually respectful relationships we truly are deserving of.
This is how we heal! This is how we thrive! This is how we become the deserving joy-based authentic versions of ourselves we were put on this earth to be!
I explore these truths and share many more lessons, tips, and tools that will facilitate your healing in Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can read more about the book and purchase a copy here.
May your spiritual source guide and protect you in your healing and in your search for truth!
Yourlifelifter 
I read your story out OUT LOUD!! FELLING LIKE I wrote it ,,feeling YOU. Your a trooper,forsure. I cried sad😂 and HAPPY tears,for you …hang in there YOUR AWESOME.🤗
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The business of this soul searching work is exhausting but I know now essential if you want your soul to survive and thrive. Yesterday for the first time in years I listened to some Pavoroti. I needed to soothe myself as I felt the emptiness and loneliness of abandonment creep in again. I have always loved listening to beautiful music and all generes. Beautiful music was always on in our home . My four beautiful children were raised on it but in the last few years it ceased to exist in my life. About a month ago my daughter Angela sent me a long text , a letter really. In in she wrote; Mom we want our mother back. We know you are still in there we’re just waiting for you to come back. It broke my heart but still I felt powerless to fix it. After 12 years with a man that I loved deeply did everything and I mean everything for , here I was my life a shambles,my beautiful home GONE , as a result of ALLOWING the vampire to convince me to sell it and who within weeks had a 45 k check in his hands to pay off his many creditors . The home we were suppose to buy together never materialized because little did I know he was up to his eyeballs in debt. He owned a very successful 60 seat restaurant and has the most charismatic personality you you could imagine ( and the darkest cruelest side you could NEVER imagine) he has a ton of friends and many high profile influential ones at that. But people like him also leave a trail of equally numbered enemies much like the trail a slug leaves of ruined lives , messes they can’t or won’t clean up. It would leave you dumbfounded if you took a close look at it. Let me not digress as you have heard it ALL I’m sure. Something happened 2 weeks ago that led me to a radio interview you did on the subject of narcissistic abuse and your book TAKE YOUR POWER BACK that literally kept me from falling into an abyss of oblivion. While I no longer lived with this monster I still continued to go back with months of no contact . You know the vicious cycle. And I would hide it from my children family and friends who knew what he was all about. 4 months ago after another round of a 3 month NC he calls me at 1am drunk and love bimbing me! I LOVE YOU ! I DONT WANT ANYONE ELSE ! WE WERE MEANT TO BE TOGETHET! I NEED YOU! ILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES! BOOM HOOKED AGAIN! Within in a few DAYS surprise surprise! The abuse insults discard starts all over again and I go NC again for 4 months. Then one day I am at work and his brother comes to me and tells me that he’s had a heart attack as a result of complications of diabetes and a lifetime of living like it was his last day on earth. Of course as soo. As my shift ends true to form I’m at his bedside showering him with soft kisses and affection telling him I’ll always love him and he’s saying the same thing !! When I tell him I’ll be back tomorrow he’s says NO ill call you . I’ll write you a letter! He’s already living with someone (a fact I find out later from a mutual friend) he is completely devoted to HER now and as he told our friend! “You can’t believe what’s she done for me !” Even when near death there are no bounds to a narcissists capacity for cruelty ! While he danced around about his new girlfriend he had to throw in ; ” you need to find someone who you can tell what to do .” JUST INCREDIBLE! Here we go with the gaslighting game again. A MAN who spends his life controlling people accusing people of the very things he is guilty of . Then the final blow . He needs to be with someone who cares about him and asks me what’s it going to take for me to move on. Translation he needs someone just like me ,a clean slate an empath with money of course to take care of him. Bingo ! New supply! …and he’ll get away with it too. Needless to say I did not stay much longer! I left there stunned confused demoralized , as if hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat. HOW do they get away with it all. WHY did I go there. Anyway it’s all so unbelievable but with the help of
Your book and website and my sisters and close friends and coming clean being honest FINALLY and with TRUE COMPASSION for myself this time I’m going to land in my feet! I love to read and all kinds of subjects , history nature philosophy . One of my favorite philosophers is the late Joseph Campbell . I remembered when you spoke of compassion in your book that Joseph Campbell a master of Latin explained that the word COMPASSION means with suffering. And all of a sudden I realized I NEVER did the painful WORK of introspection and real soul searching. And while this is HARD to do I MUST DO
IT if I want to live a meaningful joy filled life
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Am proud of you and your courage….am so happy my book is helping you find truth.
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