7 Small Miracles to Boost Recovery after Abuse
These aren’t acts of divinity; they’re small steps you can take to move forward in your recovery
If your life has ever been ruled by abuse, aggression, hate, and harassment, staying on the road to recovery may be the hardest thing you have to do in addition to breaking free from these traumatic experiences.
For nearly five years, my life included this kind of violence. It was a distressing period. When I managed to drag myself to the other side where I could see what was happening, I was able to look at the experience from a place of reason and I could think about how to flee the violence and take back control of my life.
Recovery doesn’t happen overnight, but once you’re on the road to it, small steps and insights will save you and move you in the direction of self-preservation, peace, and stability. Before trauma, I underestimated small steps — my awareness of them in my recovery has given me a renewed sense of purpose and self-faith.
Here are seven small “miraculous” things that have helped me. I describe them as miracles because they’ve created unexpected positive changes in a situation from which I never thought I’d be able to distance myself.
1. Beauty in Re-Building Slow and Steady
When you free yourself from abusive relationships, destinations are nowhere in sight. Abuse has the power to erase a victim’s sense of self, including visions of a future.
In the early stages of my recovery, I couldn’t make plans for the months ahead because I couldn’t see myself past the current day. With a fractured sense of self and dismal hope and energy, I could only move in small, staggering steps. My goals, therefore, were uncomplicated and unexciting: take a shower, brush my teeth, eat something.
Over time, I discovered the beauty and effectiveness of progressing at this pace, and I learned to enjoy the scenic view along the way. Small steps enable you to celebrate small successes in the present in manageable ways. They alleviate anxiety about a future you may not be able to access yet.
Eventually, slow and steady will reveal snippets of a desirable future, and you can add more small steps to your daily routines to begin to realize these early visions of the days ahead.
Accept and embrace the effective ways of a slower process towards something. People in recovery are exercising their right to self-preservation on these terms and savoring the beauty of slowly rebuilding their lives towards something meaningful and desirable.
“Don’t be afraid to start over. This time you’re not starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience.” — Unknown
2. Productivity
Productivity can be misunderstood as something uninspiring and mundane. In tough times, however, it’s a valuable and trusted activity towards progress and healing. Daily productivity can propel you forward and build a cumulative picture of success.
Inaction can reinforce helplessness in recovery and anchor you to it, so try to be productive every day no matter how small or partial the task may seem. For example, make your bed or just walk to the end of the block and back if you don’t have the energy for a longer walk.
Small as they may be, these tasks still have the desired effect — they fill you with a sense of accomplishment and convert inactivity into movement, change, and possibilities.
In recovery, I’ve also learned to be grateful for my unoriginal 9 to 5 job. The presence of a full-time, regular job in my life has forced me to get up every morning to engage with and contribute to the world. The professional productivity emerging from this everyday action has made me feel personally useful and needed within a team, an agency, and the community-at-large. Unless your work environment is toxic, practice gratitude for this seemingly mundane part of your life.
3. Connecting with Loved Ones
During recovery, you’ll develop a keen sense of who in your life is safe and can be trusted. These are the people whose company and support you should seek when your recovery feels wobbly.
The magic of connecting with loved ones occurs when you engage with intention. When I call up a trusted friend or family member or meet in person, I silently acknowledge the intimacy between us and enjoy the connection to something beyond myself.
During these encounters, I resist distractions and listen intently to what the loved one is saying. I give myself permission to trust the love and safety in the relationship and I let these positive qualities fill the space surrounding us.
Not only do mood and health greatly improve when you connect with loved ones, but the interpersonal connection builds your resilience and sustains recovery with hope and safety. Some days, I just can’t pick up the phone to call a support person, but on those days when I choose to take this small step, I make tremendous strides in healing.
4. Renewed Awe for Nature
In the thick of abuse, I struggled to find a patch of beauty in the world — I was awash in the ugliness that life and humanity offer. Your experience may have robbed you of the sight of beautiful things, too.
When abuse loosened its grip on my life, I felt reborn with a set of new eyes — beauty surrounded me like never before. Nature’s details produced the greatest personal awe.
On daily walks or in your garden, pay attention to the patterns of petals, the scents of flowers, the sounds of birds chirping, the shades of foliage, or the sprouting leaves on branches at the start of spring. Personally, I can’t stop marvelling at nature’s perfection and precision, as well as its order and ability to renew itself. Everything is as beautiful as it always was, and yet it’s more beautiful and inspiring than I ever remembered it.
Nature assumes a different role in life post-abuse. Its order and processes are a welcome modus operandi next to the chaos and confusion of abuse.
“Experiences of awe attune people to things larger than themselves” — Paul Piff
Nature is a powerful healing force and interacting with it can return you to a sense of purpose. Renewed awe for it can soothe your soul, remind you to pause and breathe, and places traumatic experiences, and understanding of them, in a universal context of earthly existence.
5. Say “Yes” to Healing and Health
Anybody in recovery understands the temptations of addictive and self-soothing — yet, self-sabotaging — behaviors on those shaky days.
Once I was committed to recovery, I knew what was off the table as far as coping mechanisms: binge eating, excessive screen time, rumination, negative self-talk, and disconnectedness. These are destructive habits to which I try to say “No” because they have little power to move my recovery forward.
When you know what is off the table, you can more convincingly say “Yes” to healing and healthy habits and behaviors. For me, this includes a short walk or run, a therapist appointment, human connection, a 20-minute writing session, a good book, meditation, a power nap, or an artist’s date.
Recovery is made easier when you understand why you say “yes” to healing and health and why you’re saying “no” to everything else. It relies on your combined knowledge of the “yeses” and “nos.”
6. The Power of Making Any Decision
The keyword here is “any.” Decisions don’t need to be made in leaps and bounds. Anything in between is valuable decision-making, too, and nudges you forward.
In recovery, making any decision, no matter how small, is empowering and clears the path for movement and follow-up decisions.
Realistically, big decisions are realized incrementally. I decided to walk away from abusive relationships, but the enormity of this decision didn’t happen in one fell swoop. Every day, I resisted abuse in small ways until I felt safe and confident enough to lift the curtains for the final act — the physical departure from the relationships and the closing of all doors to future abuse.
Post-abuse, indecision pervaded my daily life. Making ANY decision no matter how small or insignificant — selecting a burger rather than a chicken sandwich on a restaurant menu or just taking out the trash — can dislodge you from unhelpful places in recovery and pave the way for clarity, growth, and empowerment.
7. Savoring Simplicity
In recovery, I’ve surrendered to simplicity in daily living: early risings, routine, tasks, unwinding. On most days, nothing extraordinary happens in our lives. Rather than shun this reality or put your life on hold until extraordinariness visits, choose to be grateful for this simple ordinariness and reap its benefits for a healthy and fulfilling life.
Recovery is a messy beast with no expiration date and no promises of immediate gratification. After years of turbulence and unpredictability in my life, I craved days without conflict, fear, or tricks. Savoring the simplicity of single days and daily activities has granted me the precious gift of tranquillity, stability, and self-care.
Simplicity is more poetic than it appears and a powerful tool for giving you deserved freedom and control of your life.
In recovery, you are learning or re-learning that your life matters and that your space on earth is worth occupying. This kind of internal reprogramming takes time and patience, and small steps are simply the most “miraculous” ways to get you there.
