Life After Abuse (Part 1): When Abuse Rears Its Ugly Head By Dr. Lisa Cooney

Often, by the time my clients come to see me, the abuse they experienced has ended. It may have been an isolated incident in their past or many experiences of abuse over decades.

Either way, when they come to me, they describe a feeling of stuckness, like being trapped in an invisible cage. They describe this cage as being a destructive force that blocks them from fully creating their life.

This invisible cage of abuse perpetuates destruction, withdrawal, separation, and isolation. When you are in the cage, you are in a constant state of degrading and disempowering yourself. This is abuse rearing its ugly head. Although the abuse may have ended, its ripple effects are pervasive.

If you’ve ever experienced abuse, you can get stuck in repeating patterns of the past abuse. Your health, relationships, and money flows are all limited. Your generative and creative capacities to do what you love in the world become blocked. It’s like the needle gets stuck in the song track of, “I can’t,” “I don’t know what to do,” and, “Something is wrong with me.”

Instead of creating your life, you actually—unconsciously—choose the energy of destruction. In subtle yet pervasive ways you destroy everything you desire to create.

This may look like: 

   • Destroying or ending relationships

   • Bankrupting yourself or indebting yourself financially

   • Being destructive with your body

   • Not ever realizing there is something else possible beyond the cage

This may feel like you’re paddling upstream and always confronting a struggle, obstacle, or catastrophe. Disharmony and conflict are what’s familiar. Harmony and peace are foreign.

The invisible cage is rooted in the lie that something is wrong with you. It’s based on a story that you are limited and that you lack something. These judgments that you make of yourself (and potentially others, too) are focused on destroying you and keeping you small.

I know this may sound insane.
Why would anyone choose to destroy their life rather than create their life?

Yet I invite you to consider these questions:

• Have you been creating or destroying your life?

• Have you been creating or destroying your relationships?

• Have you been creating or destroying your relationship with yourself?

• Have you been creating or destroying your relationship with money?

• Have you been creating or destroying your relationship with your body?

And be willing to be honest with yourself. The only way to move beyond the destructive, limiting nature of the cage of abuse is to first acknowledge that you are in it.

Over the past two decades I have worked with thousands of clients around the world. I am deeply humbled and grateful that the first two decades of my life, entrenched in so much abuse, became the catalyst for eradicating and eliminating abuse from the planet.

I discovered the keys for unlocking the cage of abuse. And I am excited to share them with you. Beyond the cage, beyond the bridge, is a way of living that is rooted in the energy of possibility and creativity. This way of living is what I call, “Radically Alive.”