My Story, my Responsibility

I have been pondering on how to share my personal experience of abuse, in a way that does not reflect the pain and confusion I had to endure. As a woman I recognize the inner conflict that young girls sit with growing up. The feelings of low self worth, grounded in relationships that lacks skills so important to families (our nurturers and protectors). What are little girls made of, what are little boys made of, sugar and spice and all things nice, snails and puppy dog tails. This picture have become a guide for so many, it certainly did for me; realizing that my fears of acceptance and losing control, was damaging my self esteem and my outlook to life. Being responsible for the choices I had to make was the only way out, instead of focusing on the pain I‘ve had to work through. I took every opportunity I had to go for counseling and held on to a belief system that made sense to me.
My vision is to help young girls assume a fundamental attitude of personal responsibility. I want to achieve this by assisting young girls and marginalised women to develop interpersonal skills which will better their chances for assuming responsibility. Instead of emphasizing what has been done wrong in the past, we should be able to deal with conflicting choices, which affects our existence with a sense of acceptance and autonomy. Educational disparities further diminish women’s opportunity for empowerment. We not only learn from the consequences of our behaviour provided by other people, but from the consequences or feedback we receive from our feelings. The opportunities which were presented to me became beacons of hope, making sense of being raped at age 12, escaping in seeking affections and a sense of love and making bad relationship choices. Support structures became a sense of relief, an awaking of a new day when I realised what opportunities awaited me. Worldpulse like so many other interventions have become a gate way of opportunities for me to share with other women in safe spaces. I’m intrigued by all the people I can connect with and learn from. I want to collaborate to offer an online training service, making available skill sets to women and young girls that will allow them to make informed choices that diminish engaging in self-defeating thinking.

Accessing self-help information, and life skill programmes helped me in overcoming my confusion and offered hope of a “better me”. It didn’t happen without rethinking, questioning and unlearning the feedback of “you not good enough” “you responsible for what happened to you”. This learned behaviour became further clouded in how I perceived the messages I received from significant others in my life. Having an absent mother, made my adolescent years challenging. Constantly, wanting her affection knowing, that should she find out about my walking around, would be disappointed. She must be proud of me, not look at me with disgust? As a child I buried my true feelings, thinking, and acting in ways to gain approval. I became quite good at being alienated from my feelings.

I am stronger now; I can make choices as to how I behave.

One of the main skills in relating to others is the capacity to relate well with yourself.
Though other people and my circumstances may be difficult, nobody can remove the necessity for choice from me or you.