One of the most important discoveries for adults who experienced childhood sexual, emotional, or physical abuse is that they are no longer the abused child. Adulthood confers opportunities for emotional and spiritual growth which were not available during childhood. It is often painful and difficult to see this truth — that as adults we can now genuinely protect and nurture ourselves in new ways as well as be nurtured by others.

We have often spent years either protecting ourselves from the horrors of our abuse or recreating them. We have developed behaviors and understandings which are effectively addicted to the abuse — we feed on the abuse as we don’t know other ways of nurturing ourselves — without the abuse we are empty.

The Institute for Staged Recovery offers a series of programs where adult survivors of childhood abuse can give up their addictions to their unproductive behaviors and positively integrate their childhoods with their adult lives. We gradually give up much of the fear, rage, sadness, and loneliness which are the souvenirs of childhood. Our programs emphasize bringing our understanding of ourselves into the present and on creating a sense of complete recovery’s wholeness of body, mind, sexuality and spirit.

The Institute philosophy expands the definition of recovery and includes psychological and cultural addictions like self-sabotaging behavior, self-diminishment, projections of negativity and other outer manifestations of internalized dilemmas. These dilemmas are the unconscious defense reactions that keep us from fulfilling the relationships we may be looking for ... barriers to the intimacy we seek. The recovery in this sense is from conscious and unconscious blocks — including, but not limited to what we customarily call addictions — that prevent us from getting our deepest and most basic needs fulfilled. It is a recovery of spirit.

The Institute will be starting a survivors of abuse group this fall. There is also an ongoing program that is open to new participants.