The emergence of COVID-19 and the trauma and pain it has caused around the world have brought a new way of life: a way of life for the average user just seven months ago.
“People keep saying, ‘I have to get my life back as it was,’ people tell people writer and speaker Cheryl Hunter.”And I think the myth is that we can. Once something shocking, traumatic, unwanted and unforeseen has happened, it must come back to life as it was.The door has been opened and cannot be closed again.No bells ring.”
Hunter would know: the pain, trauma and healing that can result from the devastating maxims he has experienced all his adult life.
Hunter is a survivor of kidnapping and rape; a motivating public speaker who encourages others to use forgiveness and acceptance as a way to succeed over tragedy.
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She will stop by Dr. Phil on Thursday to communicate in depth about her reports and how she was encouraged to dedicate her life to helping others succeed over their own traumas.
Hunter’s story began when he was 18.She and a friend embarked on an adventure full of adventures in Europe, Eurail passing in hand and her small hometown of the Colorado Rockies thousands of miles away.
When a guy with a camera around his neck posing as a photographer approached him in the south of France and asked him to take style photos, she says he didn’t hesitate, and when they met in a café, he drugged her and whipped her.a site of desert structure.
There she brutally raped and beaten before being thrown into a park in what Hunter says police suspected an attempted sex trafficking went wrong.
“Finally, once it was all over, they pulled me out of the car, on the floor of a park.And the guy says, “Honey.” And I looked back and he took a picture of me,” he recalls.
For more than a decade, Hunter kept his pain a secret, without even telling the friend he was traveling with or his own parents, a resolution that resulted in years of depression and post-traumatic stress, he told PEOPLE.
“I that other person, ” said the former model. And yet I cannot admit that it happened, neither to me nor anyone else.I think I’m literally going to lose my mind.
Hunter, who is also the author of a documentary series and a podcast called RISE, nevertheless acquired the courage to go public while running a seminar on forgiveness, and soon after, her story was included in the 2010 documentary Discover the Gift.that she used as a way of, however, making the enjoyed aware of their internal problems.
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Like many, 2020 is a challenge: Hunter says she lost her beloved grandmother and mom in quick succession, as well as four friends, and endured a painful divorce while facing a leg injury that left her in a wheelchair and crutches for 18 months.
But if she has learned anything from her past, it is that accepting difficulties is the only way to do it, a lesson that she says surely applies to others who suffer similar pain due to coronavirus.
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“I keep hearing from other COVID-19 people and this new global we live in, and it’s similar to what I’ve been through.It’s like, wait, I didn’t need it. I didn’t point to this ,”I just need to go back to life the way I was,” he says.”And since there is no return to life as it was, what can we do now?How can we integrate the classes we have learned from what happened?and that we didn’t need, and however counterintuitive it may seem, any gift I’ve received, who do we turn forward with, because there’s no backtracking?”
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Hunter says many of his struggles over the years are due to the fact that he never took the time to mourn his old world, or the loss of the user he had before his attack, and now encourages those with similar considerations to take.this vital step.
“We had another global and he’s not here anymore,” he says.”I don’t know what the new one will look like. No one knows, but I found out it’s helping to go through the grieving process of what it was.”
To learn more about Hunter, log in to Rape
If you or know that you have been sexually abused, send “STRENGTH” to the crisis line at 741-741 to be contacted by an approved crisis counselor.