A sense of powerlessness is the key experience of abuse and the gateway to addiction

A sense of powerlessness is the key experience of abuse and the gateway to addiction, we can end up feeling that we can’t stop people invading our lives even though now we think we are adults. We can’t say no to people who want to live in our life, or people who want us to live in theirs. It’s a difficult thing to get to the point where we realise that we can now start to erect boundaries, and that we can (and we must) as adults learn to say ‘no’. Much of the work of therapy in recovery from abuse is in gaining the confidence.

The recovery process is one where we begin to learn to get our lives under control and where we learn to ask for help with it, rather than insisting that others do it for us, or giving up on it entirely. We can ask people to help but we cannot ask them to come and do it for us remember it’s our responsibility.

We will only get on top of our own lives if we say no to other people’s. Some of us like to play at recovery and point out to everyone around us when they need to do there own recovery and how they should run their lives. We may do this to be liked, but if we don’t respect other people’s boundaries and we are invading their lives to rescue them, then we are doing a passive version of what abusers do. We are still taking over. If I walk into your life and start rescueing you, you might be grateful today, but I will be disempowering you tomorrow.

The one word that is more effective than any other at erecting a boundary is ‘no’. And yet ‘no’ can be the hardest word for us to use. ‘No’ is what we wanted to be able to say when we were children, but so often we couldn’t. It may have been ignored even if we had said it. It might have exacerbated the abuse. And in most cases the freeze response in us made any protest impossible. Whatever the reason, ‘no’ is a word that many of us find very difficult to say. But unless I learn to use the word ‘no’ and have it mean something, then I cannot in fact meaningfully use the word ‘yes’. When we cannot say ‘no’, we end up saying ‘yes’, not because we want to, but out of coercion. Our ‘yes’ isn’t really our ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ isn’t really our ‘no’. That’s confusing not just to other people, but to ourselves as well.

Many of us were taught in childhood, either implicitly or explicitly, that ‘no’ is rude or wrong. But far from it—‘no’ means that our ‘yes’ when given is freely given—it really does mean something. So we can trust people when they say ‘yes’ if at other times we know that they are willing to say ‘no’. And we need to understand that ‘no’ just means ‘no’. It doesn’t mean withdrawal of relationship, or withdrawal of love. It doesn’t mean anger or fury or rage or rejection. It just means, ‘I don’t want that in my life, thank you…but you are free to put it in your life if you want to.’

It takes us a very long time to realise that everything that exists within our life has a right to be there. We can have our own feelings, our own thoughts, our own opinions, our own hopes, our own fears. Growing up, We believed that we had to think the same as our parents, feel only the feelings they allowed us to feel, and share their opinions. The rejection and disapproval when we disagreed with them was too much to bear. According to their worldview, We shouldn’t…shouldn’t have feelings, shouldn’t have opinions, shouldn’t do anything other than tend their lives—supporting their avoidance and denial of feelings,  supporting their exclusion of our reality, our feelings and our trauma.