Growth, as an adult, can be hard to spot.
It’s not as easily measured as it is in childhood — when inches and pounds and academic assessments and lost teeth signal positive forward momentum. As an adult, as someone consciously working to unwind a manipulated psyche, growth can be fleeting, unexpected and difficult to immediately recognize.
I can’t tell you how many times I would talk out a situation with my closest friends, if only to vent or confirm that I handled something correctly, to ultimately have them point out the growth I was demonstrating. I was pretty much blind to it.
Because growth, after being caged in and shrunken down and controlled for some time, can feel foreign. Maybe even bad, just like how being treated well after being treated badly for so long can seem wrong.
Abusers embrace a state of stagnancy. And to keep the ship steady, survivors eventually do, too. Progress is bad, growth is dangerous, change is suspect. Stagnancy allows abusers to keep a firm grip on an environment they want to control and those who live in it.
So, when survivors begin to unravel the mindf*ckery they’ve endured, there are a lot of factors at play. They’re breaking with how they’ve learned to live. They’re learning to think for themselves without fearing the repercussions. They’re kind of re-entering life in a lot of ways. Like a new dawn.
It’s why every milestone should be celebrated for the growth — and positive momentum — it symbolizes.
Moments of growth could be as simple as:
Securing passwords to accounts or starting new accounts altogether.
Making a healthy decision regardless of how the abuser will react.
Recognizing manipulative behavior in another person.
Establishing boundaries and committing to them.
These moments aren’t measurable in numbers. And sometimes they’re conscious, sometimes not. Sometimes the decisions are dissected and tossed about and debated internally or with friends for days. Sometimes they just happen.
Either way, they are gigantic steps forward. And they should be recognized, because progress is one of those things that takes a weighty step forward and then two or three steps back. It’s not constant, especially when you’ve been groomed to question your own instincts and actual truth.
But, just like any other muscle, the psyche gains strength with repetition and commitment and increasingly challenging conundrums. And soon the moments that seemed so hard and foreign early on are as easy to lift as those two-pound dumbbells because you’re off navigating stickier situations — which could only happen because you started small.
It’s why patience goes hand in hand with growth. They’re besties.
So assemble your cheerleaders. 🥰 Accept the hugs and high fives. 🙌 Take time to reflect on your progress, because sometimes small moments can be overlooked in the rush of everything else. Congratulate yourself for every 🥳 little 🥳 thing 🥳 because it’s more than you could or would do in a previous life.
Growth deserves recognition.