YOU ARE NEVER ALONE

A while ago, OasisAgainstViolence compiled a healing aphorism for our survivor community, designed to help strengthen your resolve and confidence as you brave the journey away from violence and violent relationships.

It reads - I represent the pain and struggle of all those violence survivors who have come before me, but I also represent the redemption and healing journey towards self-love and recovery from violence and violent relationships from all who have survived them as well.

Just as with all other acts of DOMESTIC VIOLENCES waged against our human family - from slavery, to the holocaust, and all others far and in between, it is crucial to understand that we as survivors are never alone in our plights.

For those who seek to coerce, control, distort, divide, and destroy through employing acts of violence, transcend all cultural backgrounds, religious affiliations, races, genders, and sexual orientations... and do so under strongholds of seclusion and indifference.

Violence truly thrives in the valleys of fear, dissuasion, separation, and silence -  serving as powerful catalysts of our individual and collective demise, when we close the doors of our voices and of our truths and of the proclamations of our protected promise of freedom and the liberty of our justified pursuits of happiness in the world, for the aspirations of those with malevolent aim for us.

We mustn't allow such harmful tendencies to take shape, by excluding ourselves from the communal strengths to be had in connecting our experiences with other survivors who understand through personal account, the complexities involved in SOCIALIZED INJUSTICES happening across the globe.

For just as there should be no shame in healing from the culmination of harmful life experiences, there should likewise be no doubt that the trauma sustained within unhealthy relationships is somehow foreign or alien in that we share them alone.

We are never alone in our plights, and in our pain or on our journey towards healing.

And while we might face volatile circumstances disjointed, the culmination of our experiences are representative of all those who've faced the harshness of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE as well AND SURVIVED.

There are droves of communities who understand the complexities involved in SOCIALIZED VIOLENCE and are well equipped to support us in ways that help us to further our survival efforts so that we may thrive in the world.

May we embrace them on our journey towards progress and wellness.

- OASISAGAINSTVIOLENCE