This Chapter? It’s Not About Blame. It’s About Reclamation.

There is a temptation, when we are hurting, to look backward. To trace the path of our pain back to its origin. To name names. To tell the full story. To make sense of why things unfolded the way they did. And there’s value in understanding — but there’s a line where understanding stops serving us and starts chaining us to what broke us.

This chapter? It’s not about blame. It’s about reclamation.

It’s about gathering every lost part of yourself — the parts you handed over too quickly, or the parts taken when you didn’t know how to protect them. It’s about standing in the wreckage and choosing to survive it and rise from it.

Blame is heavy. It anchors you to the past. Reclamation, though? Reclamation says, “I still choose me, even here.”

It’s no longer about who hurt you, who misunderstood you, who failed to love you the way you needed. It’s about who you are becoming now that you know better. It’s about who you are when you stop waiting for someone else to fix what’s broken and decide to build something new with your own two hands.

Blame looks outward. Reclamation looks inward. Blame says, “It’s their fault I am here.” Reclamation says, “Maybe so. But it’s my responsibility to decide where I go next.”

This chapter is quieter. More deliberate. Less about telling the story of what happened to you and more about writing the story of what you are choosing next.

You may still grieve. You may still ache sometimes for the apologies you never received, the understanding you never got, the closure that never came. But those longings don’t get to hold the pen anymore.

You do!

And with every boundary you set, every time you choose yourself without guilt, every moment you tend to your healing with fierce tenderness — You reclaim a piece of yourself.

You are not rebuilding the person you used to be. You are creating something new: a version of yourself rooted in wisdom, resilience, and radical self-respect.

This is not the chapter where you explain yourself. This is the chapter where you own yourself.

This is reclamation. And it’s just beginning.

"Healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about loving myself enough to move forward without dragging it with me."

Becky Shaffer, CLC, M.Ed.

www.liveinconfidence.com