Reclaiming Your Agency
When you survive childhood abuse, your agency was taken from you at a young age. A crucial part of healing involves reclaiming that agency, reconnecting with your innate power, and refusing to let others control you again.
This reclamation doesn't happen through avoidance or fear of failure; it emerges through experimentation, setbacks, growth, and renewed attempts. The development of agency requires engagement with life's challenges, not retreat from them.
The foundation for handling inevitable failures along this path is self-compassion. There's a profound freedom in realizing no one can control you anymore. You become selective about whose validation matters, choosing only those you trust deeply—people who genuinely care about your wellbeing and have no interest in manipulation or control.
Growing up without experiencing supportive validation makes any connection feel dangerous. You learned it was dangerous to be connected to someone else because they would manipulate and hurt you.
Thus, as an adult healing from childhood trauma, choosing vulnerability and forming connections becomes an act of rebellion and courage—a testament to your strength as you willingly face uncertainty while trusting in your ability to handle whatever comes.
Childhood trauma taught you that some experiences were simply too overwhelming to process. You lost faith in your resilience. But it is never too late to learn resilience, risk-taking, and the cycle of falling, self-nurturing, rising, and trying again.
The Acceptance and Commitment Therapy technique called “Anchoring” can help ground you when life's storms (rumination, self criticism, excessive worrying, etc) threaten to sweep you away. It allows you to say: "I choose to remain present, not dwelling on future worries or past regrets or the stories my mind fabricates. I will stay rooted in current reality and remember that I am loved, worthy, and belong."
Anchoring will help reduce the shadow of self-criticism so that it no longer follows your every step—that voice insisting you're inadequate, prompting endless mental replays of conversations, dissecting every word exchanged, imagining others' perceptions, and berating yourself for what was or wasn't said. This all stems from fear of rejection and desperate craving for validation in order to be safe. Because when you were younger, how your abusers perceived you, affected how you were treated. In order to survive, you learned to please, preform, and prove your worth. You were just a child, in a healthy parent/child relationship, you would have been seen and celebrated for the goodness that is inherently inside you.
Through Anchoring you can practice noticing when these unsupportive thoughts creep up and allow those thoughts to simply be. Acknowledging that these thoughts are trying to help you become “worthy” but it’s actually not helping because you already are. Not forcing the thoughts away, but instead engaging in the the here and now. Deciding that what truly matters is feeling grounded, authentic, and genuinely connected with genuine interest in those around you.
Instead of striving to appear impressive, you look for what makes others unique and what you might learn from them. You embrace not knowing, approaching life with wide-eyed curiosity about the humans before you. This authentic connection far surpasses the external validation of others' approval. While many chase validation from one another, the focus should shift toward delighting in others rather than needing others to see you as delightful.
Thus, taking back your agency, your ability to connect with the inherent worth that resides within you and cultivate the courage to connect to the goodness in others.
