Dr. John A. King argues that trauma and abuse don't have to define your life. He warns against staying stuck in a victim narrative and pushes toward envisioning a different future instead of being trapped by what happened.
One of the challenges I have, and I talk about this in the book Deal With It, when people hear my story, they hear about, you know, growing up and the abuse and the sexual abuse and the range of different things that happened to me, is they want to talk about my past. They want to hear where it all started from. And I don't want to do that because I'm not my past. I'm my future. I think one of the greatest things that any of us that deal with complex post-traumatic stress To have is to have a vision of what our tomorrow looks like. We do just have to deal with our stuff. At some point, you just have to look at yourself and say, you know what, I'm just going to get over this crap. I have to move on. If we're not moving forward, we're dying. That's not only for us, but it's for everybody. And I think so many people, because of abuse or trauma, get trapped in a victim narrative and they just don't allow themselves to graduate to the unknown. Because think about it. Your past is very comfortable because you know it. The future is not because you've never been there.
