Over in the forums, someone has posted a rather complex legal issue. I wanted to point it out here so that those of you who maybe have some more experience working with children’s services and the legal system could take a look and see if there was some words of advice or encouragement to offer.
Or if you just wanted to post something more than what I could! Thanks!
Pin I could not heal until I unlearned that my abuse was something I somehow caused. Unlearning that opened up the possibility of learning something different, namely, that I was abused because someone decided to abuse me. Did that happen overnight? Of course not! Unlearning is a process, and the more closely we identify with a belief, the more difficult it becomes to unlearn it. So many survivors learn at a very early age to keep secrets, that bad things will happen if they tell anyone.
People who’ve never had that belief drilled into their young minds wonder why victims wait decades to come forward and tell their stories. That’s why! That belief is hard to unlearn. Many of us grew up with silence being the thing that prevents the abuse from being worse. Why should we start discussing it? If you tried to tell someone as a child and got shut down, this only gets worse.Â
You know the old saying “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger”, or some variation of it? I just heard that line in a song and thought, wow isn’t THAT true! I realize that there’s no way for that to happen but I do wish, for all of the…
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this subject of late. I won’t get into any of the details of why, but suffice it to say, I’ve had a number of conversations and seen stories of people who find themselves in situations, as adults, that from the outside seem easily changeable, yet they don’t do…
The second thing was that so many of the things your kids need when you find out they’ve been abused are the same things that adult survivors need as well. We need to be believed, we need to feel safe, we need to know that we are worthy of protection, and we need to be heard. Those things are a significant part of healing, regardless of our age. If you have a loved one of any age who is trying to heal from sexual abuse, these are good things to remember, and you should read the whole thing!
Pin I was reading this article last night, and I found it to be true. There Is No Simple Solution for Depression In it, Therese talks about how she went through so many “cures” in dealing with her depression, and that none of them really cured much of anything; some even made her worse. She makes…
Got an email today from a reader, who’s just getting ready to start therapy again to deal with an abusive childhood. He asked if I had any hints for a “newbie”. My advice was simple, nothing really that deep, just know going in that it’s a long process, the first session is much more about…
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The situation Leah described in the forum was horrible for two reasons: first, because of the abuse, and second, because of the actions (or inactions) of Children’s Services.
These types of situations have another, less-heralded consequence as well – the automatic presumption of guilt whenever someone’s accused. And the tactics used to get a small child to claim abuse aren’t always caring and gentle. Recently, an under-qualified, inexperienced social worker who was interviewing my six year-old about something that happened with my older son (yes, he did molest her, and he’s in a residential treatment program now), asked a series of leading questions, and repeated them over and over until my daughter told her what she wanted to hear, and said I’d touched her inappropriately.
I went through a nightmare investigation, and so did my wife and children. I was proven innocent, but the damage to my life has been done. The guilty should be punished, but the innocent shouldn’t be destroyed along the way.
Thanks for reading!