Self Respect

What is self-respect any ways, it seems like everyone is always talking about it. For me self-respect is about taking care of you and loving yourself. It is feeling good about yourself and about what you are doing. What I also know is that it is something that was so foreign a concept for me when I was wrapped up in abuse.

My role in life it seemed was to always be the recipient of abuse by anyone that needed to dish out the abuse. When I was a child it was my mother and other relatives handing out the physical and emotional abuse and of course lets not forget the babysitter and the sexual abuse.

When I grew up I was raped by a gal I knew and there were two attempted gay rapes. Then I got to deal with three abusive wives. I thought that my life was about being abused and that was all there was to it. I even abused myself when there was no one there at the moment to do it, it was normal.

That is not self-respect by any measure under any circumstance what so ever. The first step towards self-respect was to recover from the drugs and alcohol that I used to escape the pain. The second thing I did to build my self-respect was to build a relationship with a God of my understanding.

That was very hard as I needed to get past the anger at him for putting me through all of the abuse. The third thing I needed to do was to remove the third abusive wife from the picture and anyone else in my life that was negative. From that point on I screamed from the highest peak that abuse is wrong and that men do get abused.

After two years of therapy and dealing with every aspect of the abuse that I endured I am finally feeling some sense of real self-respect. I have found a love in someone that understands what I have been through and has been supportive of my recovery. The final thing that I have to do for myself and my own self-respect is to not be silent.

I have recovered from the abuse and I am building a positive life for myself. I want to share with others how I did it so you can do it, too. You can do it. You can recover from the abuse you suffered and have a happy life filled with joy and happiness.im-breaking-free.blogspot.com