Historically, Ireland has been a country of misery, and the Irish people have suffered oppression, famine, civil war, poverty and pretty much every kind of bad thing that can happen to people. Yet, through it all, they maintain a sense of humor and know how to have a good time! Listen to traditional Irish music, for example. The lyrics speak of a miserable existence, yet the music is upbeat, and full of rollicking fun!

I’ve always thought, as a survivor, that healing requires a little bit of that. In the midst of my worst days of trying to cope, I found that having those little moments of joy to look forward to, made it just a little bit easier. To this day, I know the quickest way to find some joy and happiness, despite whatever might be going on, is to have things I enjoy, and to be able to look forward to enjoying them!

So, as part of this month’s carnival, I’d like to add one more category to the regular categories. I want to hear about how, as a survivor, you’ve managed to find the joy in life and have a good time! We’ll call it the “Life is Grand” category, and I’ll be posting something more about why I chose that.

Of course, we will also take any and all submissions in the normal categories: Advocacy and Awareness, Aftermath, Art Therapy, Healing and Therapy, In the News, Poetry and Survivor Stories.

I’ll be publishing the carnival on Friday, March 26. (I would post it closer to St. Patrick’s Day, but that weekend is my grandmother’s 90th birthday, and I’ll be out of town celebrating that, speaking of things to look forward to enjoying!) That means, that if you want to be included in this month’s edition, you’ve got to get your submission in before the 24th at midnight EST.

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Head over to Issue Knitting and check for yourself! It should give us plenty to read for the weekend.

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Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that phrases like these are a way to draw attention to the very significant problem that child abuse, specifically sexual abuse, is. I’m sure that most of the people who make this claim are well-intentioned, seeking only to describe just how devastating it can be for a child to be sexually assaulted, but I would also like these folks to think a little bit more about what they say.

What’s the claim that I’m talking about? There are some slightly different connotations, but the gist of it is that child sexual abuse is a crime worse than even murder because of the damage it does to a child that lasts long into adulthood, possibly even affecting the next generation.

Here’s my problem with it. Murder is murder. If you kill someone, they are not going to recover from that. They will never experience joy, give of themselves, raise a child, or experience any of the millions of other positive things that life can bring. They are dead, their life is over. That’s all she wrote!

When we spend a lot of time talking about how child sexual abuse is even worse, what message are we sending survivors?  That they are damaged beyond all hope of repair, or that what happened to them would be less damaging if they had been murdered instead of surviving? That their lives are going to be so full of pain and despair that they would, in fact, be better off dead? That the world, including the very community that offers support to them, will always think of them as damaged, as “worse off than murder victims”? What kind of hope does that offer survivors?

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself, I refuse to send that message to any survivor. Every single one of you have the strength, the courage and the ability to overcome what happened, and should never give up hope. The sexual abuse of children is a horrific crime, and can do a great deal of damage to the childhood of it’s victims, but so long as we survive, and continue to breath, there is hope that our futures will be brighter than our pasts. Isn’t that the message we really want survivors to hear?

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In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

I couldn’t have seen it better myself. No matter how much today may seem to be a struggle, life will continue and tomorrow will be another day. It may be easy to get caught on the rollercoaster of struggling and healing, and struggling again, but if you can keep the big picture in mind during all of that, you’ll realize that while all of that is going on in your days, life just keeps going, and will continue to keep going, no matter what your day is like.

There’s so much hope in that, knowing that life will continue to go on, with all the changes, joys, sadness, and everything else that goes along with it. I hope you can see that as well.

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The purpose of the Carnival is to be a place where important posts are shared with others who may not be frequent readers of an author’s blog. I, myself, have realized that I cannot follow all the blogs I want to follow, so the monthly Carnival gives me a chance to see what else is out there. There are so many wonderful bloggers and you are all doing a wonderful service not only to yourselves, but to the cause of ending child abuse and recovering from child abuse. My sincere thanks to all of you.

I couldn’t agree more, and I’ll be over to his post to check out the other entries in this month’s edition!

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Today, we’ve had a couple of folks step up and create their own sub-groups on the network, “Support for under-18s” and “Girl Talk for Survivors”.

Obviously, being well over 18, and male, I’m going to entrust overseeing the groups and monitoring things to their creators, but if you happen to fit in one of those demographics, or know a survivor who does, and who might benefit from chatting with folks in a similar situation, let them know to come on by!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

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At these times, I find it important to point out that healing journeys are rarely ever a straight line. Not only are all of our paths to healing different from one another, but they tend to work in fits and starts, more than in a straight line of progress.

When I think about my own healing, I can clearly see the times where there was a great amount of progress in very little time, and also those times where progress seemed to be always out of reach, and even the times where there was regression instead of progress. We’re complicated creatures, and dealing with childhood abuse is a long process. For every sudden realization that changes our perspective almost overnight, there are just as many day in and day out struggles to simply cope with the information we are processing. I spent a few years in and out of therapy, on and off medication, working and seeing progress, then suddenly giving up, only to wind up back in the same place until the one session where a concept suddenly clicked for me, and healing seemed to come almost overnight.

Granted it wasn’t really overnight, it took many long months after that to start to build an adult life for myself, and it took years of work and struggle to even reach that point, but the progress I was making sped up dramatically after the day I finally saw myself as a capable, responsible adult instead of a victim. That progress wouldn’t have come, and couldn’t possibly have been that quick, without all the other struggle that came before it. That slow time, and all of those times where I didn’t think I was ever going to get anywhere, were part of my process. The very same process that changed my outlook and my life within a short year or so. I couldn’t have had one without the other, and all of you fellow survivors, are on a similar journey. You’ll have times of great progress in a short amount of time, and times of great struggle that can last for a very long time. That’s pretty typical, actually.

It’s not a race, and the pace will change as your life, and your health dictates. The important thing is that you follow the advice of Winston Churchill. “When you’re going through hell, keep going!”

Keep working, no matter how slow the progress is, it’s better than giving up.

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Think of it this way, many little children blame themselves for parents divorcing, or other things that go wrong within the family, mistakenly believing that if they had just been better, things wouldn’t have happened this way. When they grow up, they realize that what their parent’s decided to do had nothing to do with them at all, they make their own decisions. Too many survivors continue with this belief, well past the physical age of maturity. They continue to believe that all the bad things that other people do are somehow a result of them not being good enough to stop it, or some sort of punishment for their own sins.

That couldn’t be more wrong headed. It’s time for all of us to grow up a little here and recognize that life is bigger than any one of us, and that people are only responsible for their own individual decisions. When another human being makes a decision to act, that’s exactly what it is, their own decision. Just because another person chooses to do harmful, destructive things, doesn’t mean you have the power to change it, or that you caused that decision. It is their decision, and their responsibility. Do the mature thing, and understand that not everything is a statement about you.

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After that much time, and close to 600 posts, I do feel like I don’t have many original thoughts left. Then again, I’m not ready to simply quit writing here either. I know that lots of you read these posts and find value in them, so I’m going to continue to do that, and give myself the freedom to write what’s on my mind, regardless of whether it’s a topic I’ve covered, and as time allows. So, hopefully I’ll still be covering some original ground, but I’ll also probably be covering some things that are familiar to anyone who’s been reading for a long time. Sorry about that, but then again, there are probably just as many people finding this blog for the first time too. Maybe if I update it more often, they’d even come back!

Seriously though, reading that there are 39 millions sexual abuse survivors in the US alone, reminds me why, even if it takes time and energy to write this blog, or keep up with the Survivors Network, it’s worth it.

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I thought I would take a few minutes and help you all understand some of the new things I’ve been doing around the site while I had some spare time over the holidays. Overall, the thought is to make it as easy as possible for anyone who is interested in this site to follow along. In light of the fact that life has gotten busy, and that has kept me away from writing here as much as I’d like to, I wanted to find ways to make it easier to share things here, and for you all to know when something new is here without having to drop by every day.

So, I created RSS feeds for comments, added an email subscription list and a Facebook fan page.

I had toyed with the idea of creating a Facebook group, or fan page last year, opting instead to create the Survivors Network on Ning because it allowed me to let the members enjoy some privacy. It is important to me that survivors have a place they can share as much, or as little, information about themselves as they felt safe. Facebook doesn’t really allow that. You have to give up some personally identifiable information, that’s sort of the whole point of Facebook, and so having a Survivors group there meant that all the members would be tied to that information.

On the other hand, I know there are lots of people who read this site, who also use Facebook. Some of whom would love to share some of the content here with their Facebook network or who just want to keep in touch with myself and other readers of the site while they’re spending their time on Facebook. I didn’t think my personal profile was the place to do that. I use my Facebook profile for a number of other reasons, professionally and to keep in touch with family and friends all over the country. Trying to force the connections I have here, and the things I write about here onto that profile wasn’t something I was comfortable doing. Not because I’m hiding anything, I use my real name here and link the site from my other profiles, but because it would mean mixing together things in a way that everyone might not enjoy. I didn’t want everyone who knows me professionally, or through my family, to be forced to see me contemplating child abuse, depression, mental illness, etc, nor did I want folks to know me from this site to have to see me talking about technology and eDiscovery if they aren’t interested. By creating a fan page for both of my websites, I can give you the option to follow what you like. If you’re a big fan of either sites, but don’t care about the interactions I have with family, friends, and coworkers, you can simply became a fan of either site and interact that way. If you want to interact with other survivors on the Facebook platform, you can do so there. If you need more privacy, or want to interact in a safer environment, the Ning network is probably where you want to go. Or you can be part of both. Again, you have options this way.

One other new thing I’ve added, and will be working to update, is the Delicious links. They’re on the sidebar of both blogs of this site, and will be included each day on the Facebook page. They’re also included if you subscribe to the News and Reviews feed or email lists. That’s been a good tool on my other site to easily share articles and other links of interest without having to take the time to write up new blog posts, so my hope is to provide the same service to this community.

I want to thank the folks who have already signed up to be fans on Facebook, who have subscribed to the different feeds, or who continue to come back to the site and read, leave comments etc. It’s not like I have any advertising budget for any of these services. People only find them because you all spread the word, and they only work because everyone is willing to be part of the community, especially on the Network. None of this would be as valuable without you.

So, however you choose to be part of things here, thanks!

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