In a Mending the Soul intensive training I was in about a year ago, they showed us a brief clip of the documentary “Searching for Angela Shelton“. It was incredibly intense and powerfully moving. As my healing journey continues I decided to watch the entire movie to see what other good tidbits I could glean from her experience. Though the theme surrounds abuse and discovering how prevalent it is in our society, I was moved by how positive not only the producer’s message was, but also by all the inspiring comments from the other Angela Shelton’s that she interviewed. The theme was obviously focused on healing and not on the evil itself.
This made me want to search further for how she is doing now and was amazed at how far she has come from the girl in the video to the incredible Joy-filled woman she is today. Her blog (http://angelashelton.com/) is packed full of joy, laughter, healing, encouragement, and challenges to see yourself as the absolute best you can be. She has resources, videos, pages of reader’s questions answered, and articles to help in every situation you can imagine including sex after trauma. She also has a 30 day healing journey that I started and even after all this time in therapy, found to have very useful tools. I challenge each of you to explore it.
She has another website (http://www.survivormanual.com/) which is pretty self explanatory. On this site she allows outside contributors while maintaining her “only positive, non-triggering subject matter” boundaries.
I encourage everyone who is a survivor or knows one, which is about everybody, to check out these great resources and share them with your loved ones…or as Angela says, “Maybe even the woman at the coffee shop or grocery store.” We all have a story and we certainly all have a smile to share. -roughly quoted
Thank you to all the brave Angela Sheltons across the country, and especially to the one who started it all and faithfully continues to eradicate abuse by encouraging everyone to speak up; and with many of her own smiles, urges each one of us to find the beauty within, the beauty that rises from the ashes.
