Coping and Caring for Yourself as a Survivor: Building Your Toolkit

By Christine Murray

Abusive relationships can impact your mental and emotional health, leaving many survivors feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted. The emotional roller coaster of the healing journey often spills over into other areas of our lives as survivors. 

Despite these challenges, there is hope. You can navigate these difficult experiences positively by taking good care of yourself, especially by building a diverse, effective toolkit of coping resources that work well for you. This blog post offers steps to help with exploring different coping strategies and other tools to support your healing journey.

Assess the Toll on Your Well-Being. Start with an honest, self-compassionate reflection on the impact of the abusive relationship on your well-being. This kind of self-reflection is useful for identifying areas where intentional healing is needed, along with possible coping tools and strategies that might help you process your experiences and manage any distress you feel. 

Set, Communicate, and Maintain Boundaries. Abusive relationships often involve unhealthy boundaries, including chaotic, unclear, or overly rigid ones. Learning to define, establish, and maintain healthy boundaries is crucial for promoting positive relationships and minimizing the negative impacts of abusive ones. Consider any boundaries you may want or need to put in place in any and all areas of your life to help you establish a sense of calm and self-direction.

Acknowledge and Process Difficult Emotions. Abusive relationships can lead to complicated and challenging emotional consequences, such as anger, hurt, and ambivalence. Coping tools can help you explore difficult emotions and identify healthy ways to acknowledge and process them, which is often a key part of coping with and healing from an abusive relationship.

Practice Self-Care and Self-Love. Abusive relationships often lead to neglecting self-care and self-love as you focus on navigating the harmful actions of the abuser. For many survivors, their abuser's actions may have affected their sense of self-worth. However, practicing self-care regularly is vital for both coping and recovery. Taking intentional steps to care for and love yourself is an important part of the healing process.

Build and Prioritize Healthy Relationships. Healthy relationships can be a powerful source of support when healing from abusive ones. Abuse can erode your confidence in building and maintaining healthy relationships, and many abusers use isolation as a tactic for gaining power and control over their partners. By increasing your skills and knowledge about fostering positive relationships, you can enjoy many positive interactions and navigate difficult ones more effectively. Although strong relationship skills do not guarantee you can fully avoid unhealthy relationships, they can significantly enhance your ability to build and sustain healthy ones. My team and I have developed the Healthy Relationships Initiative, which I’ll link here as one possible resource for learning about healthy relationship skills and information: https://healthyrelationshipsinitiative.org/. 

Conclusion

Remember: Your own coping and healing journey is unique. It can take some time, practice, and experimenting with different coping strategies to figure out what tools will be most helpful to you, and the tools you need might varying different kinds of situations. There is no single "right" way to heal from an abusive relationship.

Be intentional about addressing any thoughts or feelings that arise during your healing journey. Abusive relationships are tough, and the healing process can be equally challenging. Practice patience and self-compassion as you navigate your path to recovery.