Hi Everyone!
Excited to be here to bring you a guest post from Sharon Shaw. Please help me by giving her a warm welcome!
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Would like a post on some insights on what finally
prompted you to write the book?
After I stayed with what my
gut knowing/intuition was telling me that my ex-partner was cheating and I
eventually found evidence that proved my intuition was right, I felt empowered.
I decided that I would always listen to my intuition even if people around me
were telling me something different, I would always seek internally to listen,
to understand and move to find evidence to show that my knowing/intuition is
correct. I was always aware I had this knowing/intuition but I didn’t believe
in it even though many times it had been right in what it would tell me. As a
child no one around me talked about intuition or a sense that I might get in my
stomach so I just thought I was weird and people would say I was too deep, when
I was a child would voice what my intuition was telling me.
At this time I was dealing
with a lot emotionally and mentally with our break up and wanting to ensure
that our children were safe and had time to understand changes that would be
happening within our family. I kept sitting listening to my intuition that
guided me in what to do, my intuition was telling me that I needed time to
understand and heal from this betrayal and that it was important that my ex
stayed with us within our family home so we all had time to understand what
changes would be happening, no matter what other people would say to stay with
myself. Other people thought it was weird that I would allow him to stay but I
found it was so healing, in going back to him to ask questions so that I had
more understanding. I had acknowledged from reflecting on my past in having
personal understanding, I heal and let go.
I also acknowledged at this
point in time that I had emotionally healed from past trauma as I was at this
time only dealing with this betrayal, my past painful life experiences were not
coming back up. This experience shocked part of me as my past experiences would
always come back up before. Whenever I experienced betrayal in the past, it was
so painful and I now understand that within that pain was also pain from
childhood abuse in so many ways. I acknowledged that because I had the
opportunity in University to complete lots of personal development building my
self-awareness and experienced personal counselling. These processes gave me
safe connections and the opportunity to tell my story, to show my pain to
people that could just accept me, this process helped me to see me and develop
self-love and understanding my own truth to past trauma. Through me seeing me,
and my dysfunctional development, I can now see why possibly others might
project out and hurt others in so many ways.
I wanted to go deeper to
understand my development emotionally, mentally and my healing. My intuition
told me I should write books that this will help me to see my development and
give deeper insight and give hope to so many people. Obviously I had so many
fears I started to write them down and understand where these fears interlinked
into my past experiences, I used safe connections my counsellor, mum, and
friends to communicate on anything I felt stuck on. This process was hard and
frightening to start with but so insightful, that would empower me more to keep
doing the process. I started to get light bulb moments in understanding my
development and mental defences that created fear, that I now acknowledge I had
built or taken from others as a child in order to try to keep myself safe, but
these defences had become dysfunctional as an adult as they closed me down and
made me fearful as an adult to live my life free to be honest and open and to
explore. I now don’t have the same fears and other people’s thinking doesn’t
affect me the same, therefore I am free to share all of me within my books, in
a hope that people will take whatever they need from my story and inspire them
to look back to their own childhood and understand their own life story,
emotions, thoughts and build on their own intuition. My wish as a child and
still now is for people to heal, from pain and fear in understanding
themselves, I believe that this process will break many cycles of perpetration
at different levels, but believe that people need to experience and see it for
themselves by finding a safe person or people and doing their own internal
work. My intuition tells me that all I can do is share, openly and honestly, so
that is what I am doing, sharing myself with love for everyone.
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A Child Inside: understanding, healing and freedom following childhood
abuse and trauma
Sharon Shaw is a
respected psychotherapist specialising in cases of childhood sexual, emotional
and mental abuse. Few of Shaw’s clients would know that her brilliance as a
therapist comes from profound personal experience. Her early life has inspired
and informed her therapeutic techniques, now shared in this remarkable
book, A Child Inside: understanding, healing and freedom following
childhood abuse and trauma. Now an adult woman with the language and
training to explain and analyse her experiences of abuse, Shaw revisits herself
as that damaged child, with the support of her personal counsellor, her mother
and other important safe connections. She reveals a frightened child, lost in a
world that was not safe for her, trapped in a body and with a developing brain
that wasn’t yet mature enough to understand and articulate the horrors she was
experiencing, thinking and feeling, all of which conflicted with what she had been
taught by family and society at large: she knew they were meant to protect her
but why had they failed to do so? A Child Inside explores the complex
issues of trust and responsibility between adults and children, charting the
progression from acute distress through cognitive and intuitive understanding
and ultimately towards forgiveness.
About the author: Living in
Doncaster, South Yorkshire, Sharon Shaw B.Sc. spent five years training as a
psychotherapist at Leeds Beckett University and now has over 600 hours of
clinical experience in therapeutic interventions specialising in play therapy
including a year at a local primary school and working with private clients.
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Happy Reading!
