Now What?

a full understanding that you have been through an emotionally damaging relationship, you know exactly what you dealt with. You can grasp what happened to you and why. You have memorized all the terms and swear, maybe even joke with friends, that you have inadvertently earned a PhD in Psychology. You can have all this knowledge, albeit unwanted, and still ask yourself…

…Now what?

Information regarding the path to moving forward from what happened, and often, what has been happening in many relationships your entire life, is not widely disseminated. When various abuse survivor YouTube creators put out a poll on what their next video topic should be, questions about healing garner the most responses I’ve seen in the comments recently. People want to know more about the process of recovery and what that looks like. They are done learning about the types and categorizations of abuses that permeated their lives for how many ever months to years. To be clear, not everyone is asking in these forums. There are still people making their initial discoveries and wanting to understand why the people in their lives behaved the way they did, but the numbers of people searching for ways to move on is growing and they are asking, “now what?”



If we don’t look at “now what” we are bound to repeat the same patterns of behavior that opened our lives to the predatory behavior of others. We have gotten really good at leaving situations when we just felt we would break and every day in that relationship was so heavy that our feet felt trapped in a sludge made of the pieces of our former sense of courage and self-esteem. We are good at leaving at the last possible minute when anyone on the outside would not blame us as our scars have become more visible. When we leave, we think we’ve done it! We are free! We have a momentary victory only to repeat these patterns again later because we didn’t carry our understanding of the situation far enough.

Continual shame, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, abandonment issues, overwhelm and activation of our fight/flight responses. Unprocessed Rage, grief, and frequent bouts of depression. These are all part of our personality that we didn’t realize we could change. How would we know? Why would we even think that we would, or should even, need to fix ourselves? This was not our fault. We didn’t ask for their anger, their lies, their recklessness, and their incredible lack of respect for human lives. We. Did. Not. Ask. For. This.

I just thought it was just part of who I was because I survived abusive relationships, parenting, etc. I mean, didn’t you? You say to yourself, “I’m just fine now because I’m out of situation a, b, c, and except for a few emotional scars, I’ll be okay.” This, of course, is until the next situation like this came along that we probably only realized in hindsight was toxic. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The last thing anyone needs when trying to pick up the broken pieces of their lives is to be told that in some small way, they are to blame for what happened to them. We already struggle with great amounts of shame about what happened and the belief that we did something to cause that is a burden we just cannot carry. The potential embarrassment enables us to lie to ourselves about our pain and the help we may need. Maybe now we can start to look at the ways we need to heal ourselves honestly and move on in a different way. We don’t need to “fix’ ourselves. We need to “save” ourselves. We need a toolbox…no, wait…we need an arsenal of defenses to keep people with bad intentions on the periphery of our lives instead of smack in the middle of them. We are too tired and have dealt with the fallout from our relationships too long not to put life saving measures into place. We owe it to ourselves to be happy long-term and not just in the interim between life devastating relationships.
To be fair, it’s not like we haven’t tried. We have read the self-help articles…the books…the things that tell us just behave this way or do this thing and you will change your life. These suggestions and processes never worked long term because the extreme dysfunction we experienced changed the core of our being. You can’t just slap a band-aid on that level of trauma and call it cured. We can’t mimic what someone more successful does or memorize a list of “to do’s” and change the ways in which we have been in what could be described as a survival mode that has gone on, for some of us, our entire lives. What happened to us is very much a part of us.

Okay…so…now what?




There was this meme I saw going around on the socials that said “one day you will tell your story of how you overcome what you’re going through now, and it will become part of someone else’s survival guide.” This is what The Keep Moving mission is about; compiling the survival guide so that someone else doesn’t have to wander in circles in the middle of the forest. So many times, I had asked questions about which way to go and so many times, I was left without answers. In full disclosure, not all the information and circumstances I write about will pertain to you, and that’s okay. Take what you need and leave the rest. Everyone is at a different stage in their personal healing journeys. You may still be holding on to “I’m okay” and terrified the process of healing is going to be worse than the events that brought you to this place in your life.

We’ll touch on the “whys” and “hows” of all of this as we progress, but, from this point on, you are going to have to buy into the process of real change and be willing to do the hard work that comes with it. You are going to have to be sick of the stories you tell yourself for not looking inward and accepting that just knowing the beast that broke you wasn’t enough. You will need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable when your views of life, who you are and even who the people you’ve had relationships with are challenged. You’ll come to understand that broken isn’t beautiful, but that instead broken and healing is. The time is now to make moving forward a mission and priority because your ongoing mental health and well-being depends on it. You will need to face the reality that whoever and whatever you wanted to come save you from all your heartache just isn’t coming…

…because this time, you will have to save yourself.