Self Help

Over the years I have been working with abuse survivors and PTSD sufferers, I have come to appreciate the urgent need of reconnecting people with their high positive memories to stabilise their energy systems and counterbalance the "trauma labyrinth." In 2020, I finally decided to make this official and created Star Matrix - the high energy, positive alternative to the endless quest for trauma. You can start with your own Book of Stars today. Read on.

Therapeutic metaphor work with child abuse survivors is both fascinating as well as intensely challenging. Because the experience of child abuse survivors isn't the same as that of "ordinary" people, likewise "ordinary" or stock metaphors, as you might find in a dream book or such, aren't going to cut it.

This is why child abuse survivors often react so negatively to standard therapeutic metaphors and may come away thinking that metaphor work isn't right for them - when nothing could be further from the truth. You just have to find the right kind of metaphors ...

I think there is a global and general if rarely spoken out aloud idea even amongst healers that child abuse survivors and especially child sex abuse survivors "are too broken to heal" and all we can hope for is some kind of minor symptom relief. I'd like to firstly, put this idea squarely on the table (and out of the closet!) and secondly, discuss the flaws of that presupposition.

I once knew an artist who had suffered from significant sexual abuse from an early age. This had caused major disturbances in his mind/body systems and as a result, he had nightmares, strange visions, problems of all kinds with his thinking and feeling. As a result he found himself, as so many child abuse survivors do, being far more "creative" than his peers and as is often the case, this led him to pursue a career in the arts.

However, there was a problem with his creativity. He painted the same picture, the same story, over and over again ...