About Healing the Trauma of Domestic Violence: A Workbook for Women and SuperBetter

When I started therapy last year I set the following goals:

1. To have closure
2. To build confidence
3. Not to repeat the same mistakes
4. To change my relationships by having good communication and strong friendships

I had no idea what I was dealing with. Through therapy I found I was:

1. Doing a lot of anticipating for fear of being judged
2. Doing a lot of negative self talk
3. Saying a lot of “Supposed to’s”
4. Having a lot of nightmares
5. Having a lot of irrational anxiety for unknown reasons
6. Doing a lot of avoiding of conflict by not asking questions
7. Not being my self-advocate by not asking for things I want or need or putting my foot down for myself

I chose the workbook Healing the Trauma of Domestic Violence: A Workbook for Women because the chapters spoke exactly to the things I wanted to work on. It covers:

1. Self-Advocacy
2. Strategies for Letting Go
3. How to Stop Negative Self Talk in the chapters “Feel Better by Changing the Way You Talk to Yourself” and “the Power of Nonnegative Thinking”
4. How to manage stress by controlling Muscle Tension
5. How to get rid of your guilt
6. How to get rid of “Supposed to” beliefs
7. How to be assertive
8. How to overcome fear
9. How to identify potential perpetrators

I’m not that far through it, but I already see it gives you some great tools to help you get better, such as a Negative Self-Talk Tracking Form. But, it can be hard to get through it. It is also difficult to deal with PTSD because I often feel very isolated. And I think I know that some of the reasons why I am isolated is because of the behavior I have adapted over the years from being abused.

Now that brings me to SuperBetter!

With SuperBetter you can:

1. Identify your goals
   1. It is probably better for these to be broken down into smaller missions that you can accomplish in a day or week
2. Identify your “Bad Guys”
   1. These are the things I listed above like anticipating or saying a lot of “Supposed to’s”
3. Identify your “Power Ups”, the things that make you feel better
   1. Power Ups can be anything as small as “look at pictures of kittens” to “go for a walk at a park” to as a big as “going to some place new and foreign”, whatever makes you happy and feel empowered or excited about life
4. Invite Allies, your close friends and family members, to join you in the game and assign them a mission
5. Your Allies can also assign you missions

I already see some immediate benefits here to playing the game.

• It can make getting better fun
• It helps break down isolation
• You are more likely to put the effort in to meet your goals
• You can check in daily or weekly and see immediate results

Here is a story of a person with Crohn’s disease who played a game similar to SuperBetter for more information on how it works:

http://crohnsend.com/tag/superbetter/

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