I've completed the upgrade to the newest version of Movable Type. I've still got a couple of things to work out, but I believe they're just on the backend, nothing that you guys will see, however, if you do see something, holler!
Rick Belden, the author of Iron Man Family Outing contacted me a little while ago, offering me a free copy of his book. Unfortunately, my to be read list is getting a bit long, so in the interest of getting his generosity pointed in a direction that would be beneficial sometime this year, I declined.
However, my backlog is your good fortune. Rick has offered to give away a free copy to one of my readers. I'm going to make this simple. In exchange for the free book, you agree to write up a short review of it. You can post that review on your own blog, and let me know about it, or you can write the review and send it to me, and I'll be more than happy to post it here.
So, if you're interested, and want to know more about the book, check the link below. The first one to comment here, gets it. Be sure to enter an email address in your comment. It doesn't get posted to the site, but I'll need it to put you in contact with Rick and you can arrange for him to ship you the book.
Matter of fact, if you want to review a book about child abuse, and don't have a blog of your own, feel free to drop me a line. I'd love to add some more book reviews without having to read them all myself! :)
As you can imagine, this blog gets a lot of spam comments. Movable Type does a pretty good job of catching those so that you guys never see them. In fact, I have the settings set pretty tightly to avoid you having to deal with them, but sometimes that means things get caught incorrectly.Most of the time, things simply get marked "pending" until I approve them. I get an email every time a comment gets marked pending, so they tend to get approved the next time I'm on-line. Occasionally, however, good comments get marked as spam, and dumped into the spam folder. I used to take a peek in there every once in awhile to make sure nothing was in there that shouldn't be, but had gotten out of the habit of doing that, mostly because it was very rare.
Apparently, over the last week or more, a handful of comments had gotten dumped in there that weren't spam. I hadn't noticed them in there until tonight, so some comments took a number of days before finally showing up on the site. I'm sorry, hopefully they're all posted now, and I'll try and do a better job of peeking in there so you don't have to wait quite as long to see your comments show up!
Annaleigh has the first Carnival Against Child Abuse of 2008 posted over at her site.
As always, looks like there are a number of good ideas and interesting things to read. Go take a look and if you have a blog, please consider contributing to one of the future editions. The more the merrier!
I cant say that I was really aware of this organization until I got an email from someone at CASA-Nashville yesterday. I did want to bring them to your attention though, if you live in the Nashville area:
I work with Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Nashville, Tennessee. We are a nonprofit organization that provides trained community volunteers as Special Advocates for abused or neglected children whose cases are currently in the court system. As you know, it is a huge challenge to serve all the children in our area who need a voice in court and a caring mentor. Last year, we were able to serve over 600 children, but 2300 cases of abuse and neglect came through the Davidson County court.
To raise awareness of child abuse and recruit more dedicated volunteers, we recently began a fundraising campaign in partnership with Network for Good.
We have a donation "badge" online for individual donors (http://www.networkforgood.org/pca/Badge.aspx?BadgeId=108465), and we are entered in a contest to recruit the most unique donors to our badge, for the chance to win $50,000. This would make a huge difference in serving many more children who badly need a safe, permanent, nurturing home!
If you are interested in assisting our effort, or simply in learning more about CASA, please visit our website at www.casa-nashville.org.
If you don't live in Nashville and want to make a donation to your local group you can check the National website for a group near you. I never had to go through Family Court or Protective Services myself, but I can only imagine how difficult that would be to deal with at such a young age. It's nice to know that there are people out there willing to help kids in that situation.
Before I begin this review, I need to apologize. Nancy Richards had sent me a copy of her book months ago, with the promise that I would read and review it here. At that time, I knew it might be some time before I had the chance to read it, and expressed that, however I really have no excuse for it taking this long. Simply put, I allowed other things to get in the way. Nonetheless, I made a promise and I am keeping it.
When Nancy first contacted me about her book, and said it was a completely different way of looking at forgiveness, I was excited to read it. As I read it, much of it seemed very similar to my own experiences, constantly being told the only true way to heal was to forgive the people who hurt me. I hated that advice, in fact, I'm convinced that advice simply did more damage to me.
When she writes about divorcing her mother, not forgiving her, but simply saying "enough is enough", leaving for her own well being, I wanted to applaud. You rarely see anyone give survivors permission to be selfish. The bottom line is that your first priority is taking care of yourself. You're a survivor because someone failed to take care of you as a child. Perhaps even many people failed you. As an adult, it is your job to take care of yourself. The people who tell you that you haven't "truly" healed until you can confront your abuser, and tell them you forgive them, are more than likely setting you up to be hurt all over again.
That was why, for the majority of this book, I completely agreed with what Nancy was writing. I could see a lot of my own story in it. I recalled the conversations I had with my therapist about how I needed to decide what sort of allegiance I owed my parents, and what sort of relationship, if any, I wanted to have with my family. I remembered my own feeling of freedom when she told me I didn't have to do anything in regards to my relationships with the person who molested me, or the parents who failed to protect me, I only had to decide what was right, safe, and healthy for me.
Once past this point in the book, however, Nancy's story and my own deviated quite a bit. She goes on to discuss the fact that only now, after doing some immense healing, is she ready to start the process of forgiving. While I appreciated that, I'm just not sure I agree with the word, or the concept of forgiveness. If you'll allow me to get theological for a minute here, biblically speaking forgiveness is only meted out by God when a sinner asks for it, and repents. To me, forgiveness is about reconciling our relationship with God the only way that we can, by admitting we are sinful and need His forgiveness. The call for survivors to forgive is backwards, to me. I can't forgive and enter into a relationship with someone who will not even acknowledge the pain they caused me, in fact, who continues to cause that pain. I can only decide what boundaries need to be in place within that relationship to prevent them from hurting me. I need to take care of myself.
Now, Nancy, however, obviously defines forgiveness differently. She, and many others, regard forgiveness as "letting go" of the anger and rage directed at those people. While I can certainly understand and agree that is an important part of truly healing, I don't call that forgiveness. In my own history, I refer to that more as the point where I quit caring about those people who hurt me. I did what I needed to do in those relationships to be safe, and quit caring about the consequences of those actions. I quit mourning the things I didn't have, and simply accepted that this is the way things are, the way those people are. I took the steps necessary in my life to find what I was lacking previously, in a healthy way that works for me. You might call that forgiveness, and we may just be arguing semantics here, but I would love to get survivors focused off the idea of forgiving their abusers, and onto the idea of taking care of themselves first, and letting their anger and rage be replaced by the simple contentment that comes from that.
So, if you're sick and tired of being told you need to forgive your abusers, before you've managed to heal yourself at all, I highly recommend taking a look at this book. It will serve as a great reminder that there are others out there struggling with the idea of forgiveness and give you the freedom to not forgive when you need it.
This was just a part of an email someone sent me the other day, and I wanted to share it with you.
I also want to say that your wife Angela must be an amazing woman.
You speak of her often, and the love you have for her shines through your words. You know how when you read written words, you actually hear yourself saying them silently. I was to a point where I came to your wife's name.... Angela, and to myself I said 'Angel'. Then I corrected myself, and read Angela..... and just then, I thought...... to Mike, she is
~His Angel~.
It made me happy to see that without having to get too sappy in my writing someone can see how much my wife means to me. I've never been a big proponent of having the right wife, husband, boyfriend, etc. be an important part of healing yourself as a survivor, because I did a lot of healing before she came along, and I believe each of us has the ability to do that work in ourselves. I don't need Angela to be healthy.
On the other hand, it is important to have people in your life who you respect, and who inspire you to improve yourself. My wife does that in a couple of different ways. One, I adore her and aspire to be the husband she deserves to have. I can't do that without constantly striving to improve myself. Secondly, she inspires me in her day to day life. When I watch the way she makes friends easily, interacts comfortably with people, is hospitable towards them, and generally attracts people to herself though her generosity and thoughtfulness I realize that I want to be more like that. I learn how to be a kinder, more thoughtful and better friend by watching my wife every day.
So, while I may not have needed my wife to be there supporting me to learn how to heal, it sure helps to have people in your live who do support you, inspire you, and who teach you through their examples how to improve yourself every day.
I hope, in 2008, you can find your own forms of inspiration, no matter where they come from!