A Closer Look at the Topics to be Included

   May The Stars Shine Upon You is intended to provide my readers with a more personal resource for living as a survivor of abuse. I have spent a number of weeks thinking over the main topics I want to cover in my blog. There are so many aspects of living after abuse to consider and they tend to tangle together. The list is ever growing. I hope to be able to cover all the things that have crossed my mind for this particular blog.

  The current list is as follows, in no particular order. These topics are all things I think have value and a place in our discussion here.

• Social
• The way society views abuse and how it related to every day life. 
• Communication
• This section is multifaceted. I want to discuss the words themselves and how we use them to convey ourselves. I also want to help open a dialog for the survivors and their loved ones or the abused and those who can help. Its hard to know what to say but maybe there is a good starting place.
• Negative Emotions
• Surviving abuse can leave a person with a lot of very negative emotions. There is a wide range of them and I feel they are under-defined. I want to give them a definition that is more than one generic word. Then there is working past those emotions.
• Disassociation 
• The loss of time, memories, and perhaps yourself. How does one adjust to it, live with it and move past it?
• Self Worth
• Basically, how you feel about yourself. Self esteem, respect, and learning to love who you are now.
• Triggers
• The various stimuli and situations that bring about negative feelings, flashbacks, nightmares or self destructive behavior. Ways to avoid them and work past them.
• Nightmare and Flashbacks
• Living with the unbearable moments.
• Self Harm / Violent Impulses
• The impulse to cause injury to ones self or another. How to cope, when to seek professional help, how to ask for help... the whole nine. I want to make this under represented section of issues a real resource. 
• Control
• The reasoning behind abuse, how to maintain a healthy view on it, and how to keep it in our lives.
• Injuries, baggage, and bad habits
• All the little broken bits of ourselves that we walk forward with, and maybe how to live with them or get rid of them.
• Loneliness
• A look into why its so easy to feel alone, how to cope with it and how to make friends.
• Relationships
• A complicated jumble of what healthy is, how to break cycles, and how the abuse will impact new relationships as well as old ones.
• Sex
• Another multifaceted topic. I want to cover how sex does not equal love, its use as a social currency, how to have a truly healthy view about sex, having a healthy sex life, and rebuilding yourself in this light.
• Finding Safety
• The journey from being a victim to becoming a survivor. How do you redefine what "safe" is to you? Finding a healthy version of safe and learning to live as normally as possible.
• Emotions and Intuition
• A range of emotions beyond the negative and how to express them. What does it mean and why.
• Working on Issues
• Another aspect of that journey from victim to survivor. What feels impossibly hard and some of the ways people can get past it.

  The number of topics may increase as I work on the blog. Currently, these are the main topics that I could think of. Its all a bit of a jumble as life tends to be.