Child Abuse Survivor

My wife, and a bunch of her friends, have been using the social network Pinterest for awhile now, and being involved in the online community, I couldn’t help but notice how popular it is becoming. Always being one to want to check out new online tools, and a bit of a geek, I knew eventually I would give in and try to understand what all the fuss is about.

The one mental hurdle I needed to get over what that Pinterest was mostly for sharing recipes and fashion tips. Oh there’s plenty of that, but you won’t find that on my profile.

I did, however, think that Pinterest could be an interesting way to share some resources, and reading recommendations, for abuse survivors. They are still in the early phases, (at this point I’ve shared a couple of resources and have added a few of the books we’ve reviewed on the News and Reviews site in the last few months to the pin boards.), but if you’re a regular Pinterest user, you can either follow my profile, or just the pin boards aimed toward survivors.

It’s all part of trying to take some of the things we share here to you, wherever you are online. You can also check us out on other social networks:

Become a Fan on Facebook!

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I wrote a review for a book title It’s OK to Tell earlier today on the News and Reviews Blog, and I won’t repeat what I said about the book here, but reading it I did have a thought that was completely unrelated to the book.

In it, Lauren talks about the “absence” of her mother due to health issues, and the void that left in her live. She goes on to talk about how she was a lonely child who never felt like she belonged anywhere, and how the pedophile in her life sensed that, and used that to groom her for abuse. It’s not an unfamiliar story to me, and I’m sure it’s not to many others. It’s pretty common for kids who are missing positive role models, who have an underdeveloped sense of themselves, to fall prey to abusers. I’d say it’s the same thing when you look at kids who are being destroyed by bullying as well. It’s the kids without a healthy sense of themselves; who they are, what their place in the world is, etc. who are hurt, yet we continually focus all of our prevention attempts on the outside behavior of strangers we can’t control.

Instead of raising kids with a healthy sense of themselves, who feel loved, safe, and have the tools available to them to deal with bullying, or to possibly protect themselves from abusers, we spend all of our resources trying to keep abusers away from them, or launch giant anti-bullying campaigns that will only do some marginal amount of good.

Look, I’m not saying that those attempts aren’t good things, but if we think we can completely wipe out any bad thing from invading the childhoods of millions of kids, we’re sadly mistaken. What kids need most are the tools that help them deal with being bullied, to avoid being targeted because they feel safe, confidant, and loved, no matter what else may be coming at them from the outside world. They need positive role models, people who are capable of listening to them, and who they know they are safe with.

Simply put, the best thing you can do to protect your kids from abuse and bullying, is to be a good parent. Short of that, the best thing an extended family can do is fill in the gaps and provide a good, safe, loving atmosphere for the children in it, and lastly, a community can provide good role models, leaders, teachers, social workers, etc. who do the same. Give kids the tools to protect themselves, and you’ll find a lot less abuse and bullying, because there won’t be easy targets.

I came across this blog post the other day, entitled 12 Things Successful People Do Differently, and it occurred to me that many of the traits set out in the article also serve as good advice for survivors going through recovery.

Think about your own recovery and see how some of these apply:

• They create and pursue S.M.A.R.T. goals

• They work outside of their comfort zone.

• They focus on making small, continuous improvements.

• They maintain a positive outlook as they learn from their mistakes.

• They spend time with the right people.

• They maintain balance in their life.

As I look back on the years I spent in therapy and trying to rebuild my life as an adult, I can not only see where these things were useful, I can see even more how much not doing some of these things set me back. Not maintaining a positive outlook, partially created by surrounding myself with negative people, can do real damage to you as you heal, not to mention trying to do too much, or trying to do things that are impossible.

Take a look at the whole article, and despite the fact that it’s not focused on healing, think about how some of these skills are actually quite transferable. Then, figure out ways you can incorporate some of them into your healing. I think you’ll be glad you did!

I had actually been giving some thought to writing on this subject before Joe Paterno passed away earlier today, but he certainly does provide the latest example of what I wanted to talk about. With the news of his passing, there seem to be two schools of thought. He’s either being remembered as the coach and leader of the young men who played for him, an untiring advocate for education, sportsmanship, and a generous donor to the school that made him famous, or he’s the guy who utterly failed to do anything to protect innocent children who were being molested in the very building where he did his work, by a man who he chose to believe in instead of those young boys.

The truth is, Joe Paterno was both of those things, and that’s the problem when we make him, or anyone else, out to be a hero. For all the good, there are always faults, and the more you make someone a role model to be admired, the more you have to look closely at them, and the more likely it is that you will see those faults.

Living in South Carolina, as I do now, you see this very clearly in the history of this place. The Civil War and the Reconstruction provide many examples of Southern leaders who did great things for their states, rebuilding after the devastation of war, sacrificing their personal gain to remain loyal to their home state, giving up family fortunes to serve in public institutions and aid their fellow man, yet these same folks were also, in many cases, supporters of the KKK, or turned a blind eye to some of the most aggressive intimidation the country has ever seen.

Were these folks great leaders, or unrepentant racists? Again, they were probably both. History has too many examples of this to count. The people we view as “heroes”, when closely examined, did a lot of things we would not want to be associated with.

Abuse survivors know this all too well. Society likes to imagine that we know evil when we see it. That there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, just like in the movies. The good guys always do the right thing, and the bad guys are always out to hurt everyone else. Real life simply doesn’t work that way. The person who volunteers at the hospital, or works with a youth sports league, can be the same person who goes home after having a few and beats their kids. The teacher being fired for molesting a young child can be the same woman who has spent her free time and dedicated herself to educating those same children.

On the other hand, many survivors so want to cling to that belief that their abusers were totally and completely evil, that they create heroes of people who have done good things for them. Suddenly authors, or famous figures who fight against abuse, become their heroes, the people the model their lives after, because those are the “good” people. Eventually though, those heroes prove to be unable to live up to these unrealistic expectations, and disappointment ensues.

The truth is, there isn’t another human alive who is perfectly evil, and there isn’t one who is perfectly good. There are a great many people who have done things that we can admire. We should attempt to emulate those behaviors, and we should allow them the grace to have faults as well. At the end of the day, Joe Paterno was a great coach, and a great teacher to a large number of people. He was also someone who did not live up to his responsibility to the children who looked up to him within the State College community. He, like all of us, was a great number of other things as well, some good, some not so much. His good deeds were admirable, his faults came with consequences, end of story. He wasn’t a hero, nor was he a monster.

No one else is a hero or a monster either. Spend enough time examining any life, and you’ll find plenty of both types of behaviors. Even our biggest heroes have bad days, and behave poorly. All that does is prove that no one really deserves to be a considered a hero. They should simply be respected for the good things they’ve done, or judged for the bad things they have done. We can all have our own opinions about which side anyone falls on that fence, but we shouldn’t be looking for someone else to be the total example of how we should behave. They will always fall short.

I’ve been approached by a fellow survivor who is writing a book. They’ve gotten through Part 1 and really want to be able to share what they have so far with some kindred spirits, folks who are embracing healing from abuse and attempting to turn their adult lives into something positive. Basically, they would like some feedback on what is right now just a rough draft, really rough from what I’ve been told, to know whether what they are writing is on the right track, and would do some good out in the world. Unfortunately, due to a backlog of requests to do reviews, and a general time crunch for me professionally, I had to turn this down, at least for now. If you would be interested in providing some feedback to a survivor/author just starting out, leave a comment and include your email address in the comment form. Don’t worry, no one but me sees the email address that is entered in the form, but I will pass your address along to our aspiring author!

Anyone out there a bit freaked out by this Mayan “prediction” of the world ending this year? I know that survivors tend to worry about things like this a bit more than most, because we tend to really not like being out of control of events in our lives.

But, here’s the harsh reality, if the world really is going to end in December, (And for the record, I highly doubt it) there isn’t a darn thing you can do to stop it, so why spend even a minute worrying about it? Let’s spend our days affecting the areas of our lives that we can have an impact on, and not let the things that are outside our ability to impact distract us from our own healing and finding our own happiness.

If you read this site through Facebook or an RSS reader, you will need to click over to the actual blog to see this, so I thought I would point it out just to make you aware of it.

With this being a new year, I thought it would be a good time to try and highlight some of the posts that have been written here in the 10 years this blog has been around, in one form or another. So, I’m using a WordPress plugin called Time Machine to create that list of posts written during the current week of previous years. You can see the list over on the right-hand sidebar, under the “This Week In…” heading.

Try not to judge those early writings too harshly!

As we approach the end of another year, rather than making resolutions, I am much more prone to looking back and the last year, and measuring the success by comparing where I am in live to this time last year.

Wow, the end of 2011 looks very different than then end of 2010 did!

First off, the obvious. Last year I was working at a different firm and living in a different state than I am now. It was difficult to pick up and leave Ohio behind. I’d lived there for 25 years. I have family there, and dear friends who I would miss seeing on a regular basis, not to mention the 6-7 months that I’d be living apart from my own wife after I moved down here. This has been a huge change, and the change has provided a number of challenges, some of which I knew going in while others were fairly unexpected:

• I missed my wife, more than I even thought I would. I went in thinking it would be like she was traveling for work, only for a couple of months at a time. I forgot just how much I depended on having friends around when Angela wasn’t. Now that I was the one away, from her and friends, there were moments of profound loneliness. On the other hand, there was the knowledge that this was temporary, and was a step to us living in the South, which was the goal.

• Despite all the advances in online resources to connect with local people, it’s really hard to meet people and develop friendships when you work very different hours than they do. Greenville, SC is not friendly to those of us who work until 8 in the evening. This is not NY, DC, or even Columbus. Much of Greenville closes down not much after I get done working in the evening.

• On the flip side, Facebook, email, texting, etc. gave me a way to keep in touch with those friends I was leaving behind in Ohio. It’s not the same as being able to spend time with them in person, but when it’s all you have, it’s a godsend. I’m eternally grateful to the folks who have kept in touch and provided a sense of community from far away. I look forward to showing some of those far flung friends the beauty that is the mountains of the Western Carolinas some day soon too!

• I never knew so many people up north had such difficulty with the concept that there is a North and a South Carolina. For the record, we live in SOUTH Carolina, though we are close to the border.

• Of all the stress involved in moving and starting a new job, none of it compares to picking out the house you and your wife are going to live in, when she’s not here to have any input.

• When you change this much at once, it’s difficult to find the same routines again. I sort of “fell” into new routines, and struggled to get back to doing things like writing, or taking the camera out to explore, the same way I had before. Heck, even living with a spouse is a routine you have to get back into after being apart that long!

• Now that we are both here, and settled in to our new home, knowing that we made it through all of these changes gives me a sense of confidence in myself, and our marriage, that I have never known before. Other survivors of childhood abuse can understand what it’s like to not develop self-confidence, and being deathly afraid of change, but the ones who can look that fear in the eye and do it anyway, get to see so much growth and healing. I wouldn’t have had this much growth in one year without these challenges.

I will say that the big lesson I will take away from this year, is to always look forward. Getting through all this new “stuff” alone was much less about the strength of my character than it was about knowing what the goals were and being able to see where it fit in with what we wanted from our lives. There was a point to all of this, and that knowledge made it possible to carry on through the stress and loneliness. I think that’s a pretty important thing to keep in mind as we struggle through healing from abuse. There is a point to the struggle.

If I had a resolution, it would be to find my routine again, to get back to doing the things that make me happy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly happy with the choices we made this year, but I’d like to maybe have some time to be a little less overwhelmed and find happiness in the small details of life again.

I hope that whether 2012 brings you tremendous changes, or just small ones, that they bring you much joy and happiness going forward!

This has been a bit of an off year for me as a photographer. Dealing with all the changes and challenges of this year has kept me busy, obviously. (More on that in a later post.) Not really traveling much this year compared to the last few certainly contributed to that as well. On the other hand, I have spent some time exploring some of area I am now living in, and while I don’t have as many photos to choose from this year, I have many that remind me of the wild ride that has been 2011, and have enough personal meaning to be among my favorites of 2011. I hope you enjoy them as well!

Over the long holiday weekend, someone left a comment on an old post, that happened to also be the 1,000th comment on this iteration of the blog. I won’t go into the whole comment that was left, but the opening line of the comment left me thinking:

I cannot say that I’m a survivor, I’m still alive. That’s it.

In responding to the comment, my first thought was, well if you can survive the childhood you lived through, then yes, you are a survivor. Survivor’s don’t necessarily have all the answers, and survivors aren’t the folks who have spent years healing, and who seem to have figured out some way to struggle less with their demons, and survivors certainly don’t all have “happy” lives.

Survivors are those of us who have lived through the horrors of an abusive childhood, and yet still keep going. Being a survivor of child abuse does not depend on having a nice, healthy, drama-free, adult life. It does depend on going forward. How tragic would it be for us to have the strength and character to survive a childhood full of abuse only to allow it to destroy us later in life? It doesn’t have to be that way.

You are strong, you are resilient, you have gotten through a childhood that many others could not, and moved into adulthood despite attempts to crush you as a child. If that’s not something to be proud of, it’s that’s not “surviving”, then I don’t know what is.