Child Abuse Survivor

While I was in London last week for work, I was sitting in my hotel room one evening, getting ready to head out to dinner, when the news program did a story about the lack of male role models for children in the UK. The concern is that while the number of single moms is growing, the number of adult males in professional areas like teaching, therapist, or other positions where they would be working with children. The news program seemed to highlight the fact that this was a difficult thing to talk about because there is an assumption that pointing out that having millions of kids grow up without any kind of male role model is somehow an insult to single moms. That is a problem, and being overly sensitive to people who point out the problem isn’t going to help solve it. Children, male and female, need appropriate role models of both sexes to develop the proper relationships and sense of themselves as adults.

One of the things the report didn’t talk about, but which I immediately thought of, is why are there so few men willing to work with children? Unfortunately, my own experience tells me why that is. Males who want to work with children, are automatically suspected of being pedophiles. I’ve seen the looks adult males get when seen in public with children that aren’t theirs, and I’ve seen the strange looks you get when you try to even attempt to volunteer to work with kids when you don’t have any yourself. Don’t have kids of your own but want to volunteer to coach a little league team? Good luck with that. Every parent out there is going to be suspicious of you. Heck, I’ve seen the suspicious looks given to me just walking around with my niece, who has blond hair and blue eyes and is obviously not blood related to me, let alone my nephew, who was adopted from Africa.

Unfortunately, we now live in a world where males seen with children without a female around, are suspects. Is it any wonder men don’t want to go into teaching? Is it any wonder why males without their own kids don’t want to volunteer to work with kids, whether it be Big Brothers or coaching sports? Why would you put yourself through that? The sad reality is, that the media has fed a frenzy leading us to fear strangers, especially adult males, when the vast majority of child abuse occurs within the family circle. How sad that when so many kids are suffering abuse within their family, they are meeting fewer and fewer people outside of the family who they might confide in.

So, even here in the US, as the number of kids growing up without fathers continues to grow, we’ll see more and more of them grow up without any one to model what is correct male behavior, and that is not going to help them lead successful, happy, and healthy lives as adults. We should do better.

While we all know that I travel quite a bit for work all the time, this week I’m actually headed out of the country, to London, for a few days. So I may be a bit slower than usual to respond to comments, emails, tweets and so forth!

On the other hand, I’m hoping to meet up with my cohost over on the News and Reviews blog while I’m in his home town. Keep your fingers crossed that it works out.

Ya’ll be good to yourselves in the mean time.

Anyone who spends as much time as I do online, and who is an outspoken survivor, inevitably gets bombarded with lots of requests to share information to their readers. Like most of you, I get a lot of those, and if it’s something that I think survivors might benefit from, I’m more than happy to.

What I won’t do, is sign your petition, voice my support, contact the media or a congressperson on behalf of someone I don’t even know. Here’s a good example of why I don’t so that, a Facebook post that went viral, purporting to name a wanted child molester, who in fact is not wanted and has absolutely no legal issues to speak of.

See, here’s the thing. Baseless accusations ruin people’s lives, and they hurt legitimate abuse survivors. If we want a world where abuse victims are to be believed, we need to be extra outspoken against anyone, anywhere, who makes false accusations. We need to be more skeptical when faced with social network posts claiming to raise awareness of a specific case when there is no evidence beyond an anonymous Twitter or Facebook account.

In this case, not only does this individual have a pretty good civil case against the person who started spreading the post, he has one against every single person who thought they were “doing their part” and shared it. Every one of those people has lost credibility. How many false rumors about potential molesters, or false claims of abuse being used as a child custody tool, before we are simply not believed any more? How soon before we reach a point where every claim of abuse is met with skepticism, because there are just so many false ones.

If we expect society to believe victims, then we have to weed out those who would take advantage of that by making false accusations, not continue to spread “support” when we don’t know anything about the case we are publicizing. False accusations are damaging to the people being accused, and to the survivor community in general. Think before you repost.

Why yes, yes it is.

I don’t know if it’s just me, or just a coincidence, but it seems like there have been a rash of tweets, Facebook comments, etc. challenging me on the very idea that survivors could ever really heal. These comments are coming from survivors too, which just saddens me. Most of them seem to follow along the pattern of “these survivors will never live without the damage caused by this, and are doomed to misery for the rest of their sad existences”.

That is just not true. Yes, survivors never forget what has happened, and the past will forever be a part of us. But let’s talk about what that does not mean. It does not mean we are doomed to a miserable existence for all of our adult lives. It does not mean that we can never have happy, dare I say, joyful, lives. It does not mean that we will never be able to develop meaningful relationships. That simply isn’t true. I, and many others survivors, have managed to accomplish those things. Yes, it’s challenging. Yes it takes a lot of work, and a lot of time. Yes, it can be a struggle to overcome the effects of our abuse, but to say that it cannot be done is a outright lie.

Here’s the thing. As I engage this response I have found a few common themes that seem to come along with this attitude about survivors.

1. Many of the comments are shrouded in the theme of justice, basically that healing is impossible because justice will never be served. While I am all for justice being served, healing is not, and can not be, tied to whether or not your abuser ever gets punished. That is not healing, that is vengeance. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue justice, but recognize that pursuit will not, by itself, bring you healing.

2. Another common thread I’ve seen is that the comments generally come from male survivors. This shows me two things, one, that far too many male survivors are still taking the path of “leave me alone in my misery” instead of reaching out to the broader survivor community, and that the broader survivor community does not do an effective job of getting the word out and making male survivors feel welcome.

3. Unfortunately, I fear that this attitude of giving up is a response to the fact that healing is hard work! It’s not easy. If it were easy, abuse wouldn’t really be a big deal. would it? It is a big deal because the damage done is real, but it is only a life sentence if you give up trying to heal. Taking the easy way out only allows your abusers to continue to damage you long after they had any control.

So yes, healing is hard, and it takes time. After all you didn’t get the way you are overnight. It takes everyone their entire childhood, and then some, to become the adult they later are. When that childhood development is robbed from you by abuse, you are simply getting a later start. It can be challenging to learn all the skills that make for a happy adult live, and to overcome the fear that plagues us from our previous experiences.

Just because something is a challenge though, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Nor does it make it not worth doing. If you are a survivor who has convinced themselves that healing isn’t possible or worth the effort, than I truly feel sorry for you, but you won’t find any agreement on that point here.

Recently, I blogged over on my other page about the problem when everyone follows the same exact travel advice, and how what might work for one person, kind of falls apart when everyone does it.

That really doesn’t have much to do with survivors, at least I didn’t think so. That was until I read something over at Seth Godin’s blog about loneliness that got me thinking.

The minute we realize that the person sitting next to us needs us (and our tribe, our forward motion and the value we create), we’re able to extinguish their aloneness as well as ours.

This struck me as something that absolutely is a problem in the survivor community as a whole. Survivors typically do not reach out. It’s the very opposite of what we’ve been groomed to do, and it’s one of the most fearful things to attempt for anyone with that sort of background. So, we tend to take the safe approach and wait for others to reach out to us. This is our own little, highly efficient, defense mechanism in that it serves two purposes. One, it keeps us from ever worrying about rejection, and it forces people who might want to help us to jump through a few hoops first, to prove that they really do care.

This is a fine example of behavior that might make sense to us as individuals, but what happens when everyone engages in this same behavior? How do you find fellow survivors to build a support system, or a sense of community with, when everyone who might be part of that community is waiting for someone else to reach out?

Eventually someone has to take a small chance and open up about being a survivor and be willing to share their story. If you feel like there’s no one around you who understands, maybe you can be the one to break the stalemate of everyone doing the same thing, and simply share your story. Nothing more. Just share the truth about yourself. I think you’ll be surprised how many people around you are dealing with the same things, in one way or another, and just don’t know who to talk to about it.

Just make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, and have the strength to tell your story with no expectations on what kind of response you get. You’re not sharing to manipulate people into supporting you, you’re sharing just to share and find others who might need support. That’s the kind of sharing that leads to truly supportive communities.

Some of you may know that I’ve been maintaining the Male Abuse Awareness Week Google Plus Page for the last year or so. As the full year has come to a close, I was sent the paperwork to become an “official” volunteer for the PLuna Foundation, the larger organization behind Male Abuse Awareness Week. It was in trying to find time to review the paperwork, sign it, and get it back that I really started to notice how little extra time I have for this project. (It was taking a long time just to get around to the paperwork!)

Given this, I also realized that the page deserves better. It deserves someone who can dedicate more time to raising awareness of Male Abuse Awareness Week, growing the Google+ following, and getting more involved in Google+ Communities. My ability to simply drop a couple of links in every week or two was nice, but it could be so much more if someone with more time could devote the time to it. So, I’m walking away from it, to devote more time to my own blogs, and making sure that I’m doing all the things that I need to for myself while my work life has me traveling so much.

If you’re interested in taking it over, or doing any other online volunteering for the organization, you can check out the volunteer recruitment post.

I do hope you’ll consider donating some time to a very worthwhile cause. Male victims of abuse don’t often get the public resources and acknowledgement that would encourage other males to tell their stories. Any efforts to bring attention to survivors, of all genders, is worthwhile to me.

So, now that we’ve had a few days to sort of digest the news that Google Reader isn’t going to be around, you may be asking yourself what all the fuss is about. Those of you who’ve never used an RSS reader probably don’t understand what you’re missing by following a site on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or somewhere else, instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Truth is, when you rely on one of those other services, you probably aren’t seeing everything. Facebook is using some weird algorithm to determine what to show you in your newsfeed, and Twitter is only as good as the amount of time you have to keep up with it. Most of you who use Twitter and know this go with the assumption that the “good” stuff will bubble up to the surface when the other people you follow share it to their network and you’ll see it eventually.

Last week, I wrote about how that changes things from a bloggers perspective. I realize now just how significant a portion of the people who follow me on Twitter, or Facebook, etc. really don’t see what I write here unless others happens to start sharing it. Like I said yesterday, that changes the dynamic between myself, and you as a reader. I’m somewhat at the mercy of you and your willingness to share what I write. Oh sure, there will always be those of us who continue to use RSS readers and subscribe to feeds, but it’s not a growing number or people. We’ll move to some other tool and keep doing what we’ve always been doing. The “growth” is in people scanning Twitter, or using a tool like Flipboard, to simply try and locate the popular things that others are sharing. Those of us who simply like to write and share our thoughts and experiences are facing an even higher hill to climb to get folks to pay attention, because there simply aren’t enough people reading, let alone sharing, to help that larger mass of people find us.

As I said, this changes things. Do I need to go from blogging things I think are interesting, to writing posts designed to get shared more often? And what does that look like, exactly? I don’t know. At least not yet.

In the mean time, if you are interested in actually seeing everything I write here, grab the RSS feed and take a look at some RSS alternatives, or you can always go the old fashioned way, and subscribe to the email list.

Of course, if you aren’t following at all, you can also try the Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus pages as well, and if you want to follow the News and Reviews blog, there’s a separate email list for that as well. You can find it in the upper right-hand corner of the site.

Most of all, I want to say thank you for those of you who do subscribe, or follow in whatever way you currently do so, and for sharing the site among your own network. Obviously, when it comes to building up readership and community around this site, that goes a long, long way!

Crossposted to Mikemac on Sports.

I was listening to a recent BS Report, a podcast about sports on Grantland, in which Bill Simmons had Mike Tyson and Jalen Rose on, and got Mike talking about some of the issues and demons that he has had to deal with throughout his life.

It was an interesting interview all the way around, but the thing that really caught my attention was when Mike said that early in his career, after he had found some success and starting making money, and people kind of came out of the woodwork wanting to be his friend, and attach themselves to him, and his money, that he knew they were using him, but he wanted to be used.

Now, it is hard to imagine someone as physically strong as Mike Tyson wanting people to use him, but he began to explain, and mentioned Stockholm Syndrome, and how when you grow up with nothing, being bullied and abused, that you start to simply expect this is how people will treat you, and it’s what you deserve. As he was talking I could really see how this made sense. He never had anyone growing up, suddenly people wanted to be his friend. He never really had any friends, but wanted some, so if being used was the price for having friends, and as far as he knew at this point, that was the way it is, then he would accept that and let people use him and his money.

The more I let that sink in, the more it really made so much sense. How many survivors have I talked to who simply accept being used, or abused again, as adults? How many simply assume that is the trade-off to being in a relationship, or having some take care of them financially, or have a partner in raising a child, etc.? Does that not sound like Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnap victims being to identify with their captors, and minimize the very real damage being done to them as a hostage? It’s a false belief that the only way to get love, companionship, friendship, etc. is to trade yourself for it, to let people use you however they see fit.

The struggle, of course, is to embrace the reality that is your past, accept it, and also learn to see it for what it truly is. In other words, to learn that you are more than something to satisfy the needs of other people. It sounds like Tyson is finally getting that, and trying to do different things with his life and make healthy choices. I hope he can continue to do that, just as I always hope the same for all survivors.

I can’t necessarily vouch for every blog on the list, but the Depression Treatment Center has put together a list of the Best Depression Blogs over on their site. In their words:

Finding the best blogs on depression and depressive disorders can take a lot of time and can be depressing all on its own. We have compiled a list of the best blogs on depression that you can keep an eye on without having to do your own searching. Each one has been selected based on quality of information as well as how frequently it is updated. We know that you will find these quality blogs to be just as informative as we do and well worth reading.

Whether you are searching for help yourself, to help a loved one or just for more knowledge, we’ve got you covered. We have handpicked the top ten best blogs about depression on the Internet. These authors are depression survivors, physicians and therapists who want to help. The newest studies, firsthand accounts and helpful tips are just some of the great morsels you’ll find in our top ten.

I am only familiar with a couple of the blogs on the list, but if you’re on the lookout for more information about depression, and want to follow some blogs that you can continue to learn from, you could do a lot worse than starting with these 10.

What are your favorite blogs on depression?

Recently, I had occasion to speak to two friends, on the same day. The conversations couldn’t have been any more different. One friend was celebrating some good news, while the other was struggling under the weight of health issues and needing someone to simply listen and sympathize with them. As someone who cares about both of these people, I was glad to have both conversations but it served as an important reminder about friendships.

Survivors, and others, often find themselves complaining about the lack of friends around us, or the drama that the friends we do have bring into our own lives, without understanding both the nature and limits of friendship. The fact of the matter is, as much fun as it was to laugh and celebrate a good moment with a friend, it’s just as important, if not more important, to be there for the bad ones too. Friends don’t get to pick and choose which moments they get to take part in. Well, at least if you expect to remain friends. Too often I see people complain about no one being willing to sit through their bad moments, when they have never done the same for any of their friends. It’s a sad fact that survivors often get so caught up in our own pain and healing that we forget other people have struggles too. When a friend is going through a hard time, and you see that as a chance to remind them how much worse you have it than they do, don’t be surprised if they don’t want you around during their bad, or good, moments any more. Would you want someone incapable of seeing past their own situation to share those moments with you? I wouldn’t. Ultimately, your ability to be there for others, in healthy ways, will increase the likelihood that others will be there for you.

It’s the healthy part that I think survivors struggle with. I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue to say it over and over, child abuse survivors rarely learn how to be adults, and how to function in relation to other adults, until much later in life. That’s not an excuse, or at least it shouldn’t be. There is also no reason that survivors cannot learn to be adults and have adult relationships with other people. But, as a survivor, do not confuse the way you have related to other people from childhood on as normal and healthy. Most likely, it is not.

If you find other people’s ups and downs to be too much for you, you are not acting like a healthy adult. Healthy adults have boundaries. Not just in how they expect others to behave toward them, but in how much they allow other people’s lives to impact them. When I talked to one friend about her good news, I was honestly happy and excited for her. I was very hopeful that this news would help with some of the things she had been struggling with. Later, when I reached out to a friend who I knew was having a hard time, I was honestly concerned and pained by knowing that someone I care for is hurting. I am still both happy for one friend and sad for another. I am also living my own life and taking care of the things I need to take care of, regardless of how I may be feeling toward these two friends. That is what adults do. They are not derailed from their own life because they have a friend who is struggling. They care, and they do what they can for their friends, and then they go right back to living their own life. Because, ultimately, making yourself miserable in the course of empathizing with a friend is not helpful to anyone. You must have boundaries. You must have the inner strength, and the proper sense of self, to be your own person regardless of whatever drama may be going on in the lives of those around you.

People without a proper sense of self are the ones who find themselves constantly being dragged into other people’s lives in ways that are not healthy for anyone. Without that sense of self, they are left to find self-worth in how other people see them, and are open to being mistreated in a variety of ways. Some of those are on purpose, others are simply a result of being involved with other people without a proper sense of themselves. This results in all kinds of life drama, because no one has the inner strength to simply walk away and go live their own life. Unfortunately, most child abuse survivors do not grow up with a sense of themselves, and are used to seeing themselves only through the eyes of those who’ve abused them. That leaves us open to being overly involved in other people’s messes.

The good news is that it’s not too late to learn how to have a normal, adult, sense of yourself. It just takes some time and the willingness to learn. Surely that beats the alternative, no?