SIGNAL 09. Post-Abuse Reclamation Part II.
After realizing I was in an abusive cycle, I began climbing out, choosing stability over survival. Here’s what I did first after Rapid Self-Interrogation revealed the truth. Rebuilding in real time.
If you haven’t yet read Part I, please start there.
This post is about the steps I took to get myself out and onto safe ground after discovery. I have a resource that I use, called Rapid Self-Interrogation, which led me through the discovery.
"The truth doesn’t set you free until you’re willing to live inside it." – Rache Brand
I am flying the plane in real-time as I build it. I don’t have all the answers, but I am a student of the experience and sharing as I go. This is all new news for me. Some of it I have spent years thinking about, and other items I have spent seconds thinking about.
After the recognition, this is where the real magic is happening… If you or someone you know is being shamed, hurt, or abused, please reach out. I am here to discuss and provide support.
Step 1: Climbing Out of the Bucket
"I wasn’t trying to thrive. I was just trying to stop drowning."
You don’t climb out all at once. You claw. You slip. You try not to fall in deeper.
After any abusive cycle, the first step isn’t healing. It’s surfacing.
For me, it started when I admitted what had happened 15 days ago. Not just what had been done to me, but what I had done within it. I had learned dysfunction so well I could perform it with precision. And for a while, I called that strength.
What I didn’t realize was that I had become so accustomed to survival that I had developed an allergy to stability. When things got quiet, I would stir the water. When I got close to love, I would sabotage it. When help arrived, I would reject it because safety wasn’t familiar. Survival was.
The bucket isn’t just your partner, your job, or your family. It’s the belief system you inherited. It’s the nervous system you never rewired. It’s the identity you built around enduring instead of choosing.
To climb out, I had to rebuild my definition of worth. Of love. Of effort. I had to reintroduce my body to peace. Not perfection, just peace. Stillness without fear.
And when I finally started to feel that stillness, not as a trap but as a truth, I knew: I wasn’t in the bucket anymore.
I was standing beside it. Watching it fill with the stories I no longer needed.
To stay outside of the bucket, I have learned quickly how to create a transparent cellular force field of energy around me. I am present in my moment and clear that I can only go forward.
Step 2. Standing on Solid Ground
"Before you rebuild, you have to stop flinching at your own stability."
When you’ve lived for years on shaky ground, solidity doesn’t feel safe.
It feels foreign.
Solid ground is a nervous system that doesn’t spike every time a door closes. It’s a conversation that doesn’t end in panic. It’s trusting that a day without drama is not a setup for collapse.
This is the part where I realized: being safe is not the same as being numb.
Until now, I have confused adrenaline with aliveness. I mistook chaos for chemistry. I thought love meant effort, meant pain, meant proving, meant a deeper connection and knowing that we were supposed to be together to do the hard work.
Love is rooted in truth and doesn’t demand that you disappear. It calls you into presence.
Standing on solid ground required discipline. It meant I needed to walk away from people who disrupt this pattern of self-reliance and put myself in a position where I can truly get well. It means earning less for a while so I can rest. It means asking for help and letting the kids and my parents help me.
It means rebuilding slowly, on my own terms.
Rebuilding for the first time in a way that truly creates the legacy for my own life is what I want to see.
And I have to get good at being boring. At repeating healthy behaviors. Choosing calm over the high of emotional intensity.
Ground is not glamorous. But it is where roots grow. And I was finally planting my own.
This first step for me is to say, I am going to be S L O W in my new approach to life. I have another 56 years if I plan to reach 100. I need to start from my death and work backwards. A new exit strategy, per se. It means everything else in my orbit has to move to a new speed. It has to work from this new angle.
Step 3. Rebuild & Reclaim
"You can’t rebuild your life with the same materials that broke it."
This part isn’t about revenge. It’s about design.
I am building again, but differently.
I ask myself: What is mine to carry? What is mine to create? What am I no longer willing to perform?
And I am reclaiming.
My mornings. My parenting. My relationship to systems. My relationship to society. My creative expression. My nervous system.
I am no longer creating to impress. I am creating to architect my new life carefully and with absolute intention. Right now, it isn’t about anything but alignment.
I am examining my patterns as indicators of emotional avoidance.
I am being honest. I am sober.
I am standing up for what I believe in and using that as the excuse to get out of the loop.
I am no longer feeling like stablity is a crap shoot. It is a choice, my choice, to be here and be present in it.
Rebuilding isn’t just about walking away from what hurt me. It is about walking toward what I hold to be the most important.
I am not here to be the best. I am here to be true, and that is the best.
And as I reclaim the parts of myself I have buried to make others comfortable, my voice, my anger, my art, my spiritual knowing, I see it clearly:
I am not broken.
I am not lost.
I am not too much.
I have just been buried.
And now, I am rising.
Step 4. Why I Started Signal: The Role of Witness and Community
"Healing alone is powerful. Healing while being witnessed is transformation."
Signal was born out of necessity.
We don’t heal just in private. We heal in witness. In reflection. In telling the truth where it hasn’t yet been spoken.
I needed a place where people could say:
"This happened to me. This is what I did. This is how I stayed. This is how I left. This is what I’m still figuring out."
We live in a culture that pathologizes vulnerability and glorifies performance. But the real medicine? It lives in messy middle.
Signal is a space where stories metabolize shame. Where the language of trauma gets rewritten in real time. Where you get to speak, not from the wound, but from the scar that knows something now.
And the people I am speaking to are entrepreneurs and parents who are on their own journey and disovery.
It’s why I write. Why I share. Why I build.
Not for catharsis. For connection.
Because when enough of us tell the truth, the system can’t keep lying.
Signal is not the solution. It’s a start. A beam of truth in a fog of confusion. A line drawn in the sand that says:
"No more passing this down. Not on my watch."
Welcome in to The Collective.
With Hope for our Collective Growth,
Rache
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Hi, I’m Rache.
Mom of 2 bios, 2 bonus kids, and I am a founder and board member. I love the work I do. I am an advocate for doing the work; a philanthropist at heart.
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