When you look at your path through life, how do you feel about yourself? If you’d like to change your attitude towards yourself from what you grew up with, what can be an easy first step right now?

Unfortunately, on this planet there are numerous children who experience far worse than I did. I still maintain that it’s not so much what we experience as how we respond. And I don’t mean in the moment. I mean within ourselves over time. And I’m not suggesting any particular response to anyone. What helps a person reclaim a sense of well-being about themself is individual to each person. But I guess I do maintain that as far as cultivating inner peace is concerned, also feeling good about oneself is integral. Even as I say my peace, self-trust and sense of security were shattered; I walled off the emotions associated with this shattering, along with the memories of the various traumatic events. So, as I grew older, I wasn’t consciously aware of this loss. In the parts of myself that weren’t walled off with the trauma-induced feelings and memories; I was able to enjoy all the love and stability that my family and society afforded me. In one physical body there was sort of a parallel path of the child who grew to adulthood relatively normally and the abused child on hold waiting in the wings for healing. So, I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as abused. I grew up thinking of myself as well-loved, capable and normal.