Until those who are abused address the truth obscured by passing time - that of a childhood of emotional abuse - true recovery is impossible notes counselling psychologist Lorraine Wilson.

Here are some other tips that you may find useful:

1. Practice to celebrate self - your presence, purpose, successes and gifts.

2. Empower yourself with a commitment to begin your healing.

3. Engage in behaviours that will reward you positively. This includes breaking free from any and all abusive experience. Remember, there are 'victims' and 'volunteers' - in an abusive situation you don't have to be either.

4. Embrace life - learn how to live and feel alive. This might require that you take time to be with self in order to centre yourself and get grounded. It involves getting intimately acquainted with, and redefining for yourself who you are and who you are going to be. It will be time well spent.

5. Right now you might be playing the role assigned to you by your abuser. Commit to resigning the position you hold as a player in your abuser's game.

6. Work hard to ensure that your outward success is a genuine reflection of your inward healing and not an attempt to overcompensate for hidden wounds. Often when someone is outwardly successful in most areas of life, no one bothers to looks within to see the hidden wounds, - but you moreso than anyone else, will know they are there.

7. Be assertive. Practice to stand up for yourself.

8. Invite confidence into your mind and this will translate to your body and lifestyle.

9. Emotional abuse can condition you to expect and accept abuse later in life. Do you find yourself accepting the responsibility for someone else's anger? "It was my fault, I just seem to provoke him/her somehow" or "Why can't I succeed at making her happy?" This might be the voice of the emotionally abused child talking.

10. Learn self-respect, earn the respect of others and make that respect the absolutely irreducible minimum requirement for all intimate relationships.

11. Act in spite of fear. Maybe you were never taught how to love and be loved in return; how to stand up and claim your rights. Therefore, you may not know what is involved. Learn these well and never settle for less than you deserve.

12. Educate yourself on an abuser's choice of weapons. This information may be valuable in the future. According to Vachss, "the primary weapon of emotional abusers is the deliberate infliction of guilt. They use guilt the same way a loan shark uses money: They don't want the 'debt' paid off, because they live quite happily on the 'interest'.

13. Be aware that the abuse may have left your perceptions significantly altered so that you view behaviours - yours and others - through a distorted filter.

14. Seek professional help to increase your awareness of how past abuse might play a role in the manner in which you engage in life. Do you find yourself engaged in a lifelong drive for the approval of others which you translate as love and acceptance? This could make you a prime candidate for abuse in intimate relationships.

15. Manage your emotions. Seek help to deal with the stress resulting from your childhood abuse so that you do not perpetuate this cycle of abuse on your partner or with your own children. If you have coldly and deliberately set up a system in which your child or children can never manage to "earn" your love, or have adopted your abuser's labels you may be emotionally abusing your child or children in the same way that you were abused. Do you really want to do that?

16. Forgiving your abuser may become a personal goal as you become stronger. However, you should try to focus on yourself right now.

17. It is never too early or too late to begin the journey of finding yourself.

Information provided by Lorraine Wilson, therapist, family counsellor and an associate of Family Life Ministries in Kingston. Email:divinelaw@hotmail.com.