If you have experienced violence or harassment, then you know that this is not an easy thing to go through. When your consent and autonomy are violated, it can shift your foundation and impact your health. While such cases are extremely common, this does not mean what happened to you is okay and therefore should be overlooked.
Sexual harassment victims often have issues after and they have a long road to getting better and starting to trust other people again. The road to the starting point is hard and takes time but it is the one you have to take to restore your normal social interactions and to better your psychological state. Some ask for professional help while others choose to go that path of recovery by themselves or with help of friends. Whichever way you chose to get to the desired goal, the first thing you have to do is decide to take this path to where you were before anything has happened.
You have survived this experience and that means you are strong. So, here are some suggestions that you can consider to keep moving forward and focus on rebuilding your health.
Allow Yourself to Feel
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When going through a traumatic experience, many individuals tend to shut off their feelings. It can be quite overwhelming to allow yourself to feel all the emotions that are raging inside you. Whether this is grief, anger, anxiety, or frustration, you must let it out. An important part of moving forward is understanding that your experience is not something to be forgotten.
Some medical examinations and tests proved that holding any kind of feelings inside, long-term will lead you to deterioration of your health whether psychological or health in general. Feelings are there to be displayed and it is OK to show them. They are nothing to be scared of and they are a normal process of your body and mind trying to grasp what happened.
It is something you will learn to cope with and live on time. But to do that, you must be honest with how you feel. So, don’t shut off your feelings or lie to yourself about how you feel. The first thing to do is, to be honest with yourself about how this experience has changed you.
Understand Your Options
Source: davidbryantlaw.com
The process of moving forward is not the same for all survivors of violence and harassment. Everyone heals and figures out their path in their way. What you want to do very much depends on how you feel about what happened.
There are two paths you can take – confrontation with the one or ones that harassed you or forget the entire situation. If you opt to forget it happened at all then you must seek professional help that will tell you how to manage that. If you opt to forget and shut inside yourself, you will not get too far with the improvement of your state.
The other way is if you want to confront the perpetrator and seek justice, then remember that you are allowed to do that. The first step would be to obtain professional advice on this matter. You can perhaps consider hiring Steven Polak personal injury lawyer since professional expertise will greatly benefit you at this time.
Look for Support
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A very important thing you need to remember and understand is the fact that you don’t have to go through this process alone. It is pivotal that you seek support from both professionals and your friends and family.
Friends and family are always the best solutions and a first step toward overcoming what has happened to you and the initial nudge toward seeking professional health if you see things are not going in the direction you intended. Friends and family will give you support and help you open up about your problems while the professional will continue from there. If you can open to a friend or a family member you will open to the professional as well.
You need to make sure that if you need help, you will ask for it. There is no shame in that. For example, if you feel that you have been emotionally or financially affected by this experience, then you shouldn’t hesitate to seek the help of personal injury lawyers serving Markham, ON since their experience in this field will be of immense help to you.
Take One Day at a Time
Source: counseling.org
As mentioned before, keep in mind that this is not an experience you can simply move on from in a day or a week. You need to take one day at a time and give yourself time and space to heal. You must identify the best ways you want to support yourself. So, don’t be afraid to think through your options. You must decide on what is best for you – not anyone else.
The emotional scars run deep and most individuals that wear their scars take a long time to heal them all. What people don’t understand is that emotions run deep and at first glance, they only cause superficial problems that are, seemingly, easy to solve. What ends up happening is that a professional goes a bit deeper than then you expected, and only then do you see that your problems have affected you more than you saw.
This is why it is imperative to take your time, don’t rush things and with mind and emotions you can never put a period on their healing. You might push it to get better faster but you also might create an entirely new problem that you won’t be aware of, at first.
The bottom line is that this whole process can make you feel very stressed and can even be quite triggering at times. In this case, remember to lean on those who you trust and love. The world is full of bad people but that doesn’t have to mean you have to suffer for it. If you were a victim of such people, work on your health and try to normalize everything for your own sake.
Justice is slow but achievable. If you feel like you can’t do anything to get the ones that made you feel this way, believe that there is a punishment much worse than what they did to you, wait for them at some point.
