Today, Kathy Hawkins sent me an email to let me know about a website she setup with a list of child abuse prevention organizations that you coud donate to. It looks like a good collection of organizations that all doing some great work to help end the epidemic of abuse in the United States.
Hey look, here’s a another male victim of childhood sexual abuse, someone many of us are familiar with, who is in the public eye, and who’s father was also sexually abused. Tell me again how sexual abuse doesn’t happen in your circle, only to other people. If you think that, you’re wrong. It happens everywhere,…
ake describes the risk of these kids growing up to be people pleasers. I’d go one further. Not only did I grow up as a people pleaser, but I also had zero sense of self. Without someone to react to and to become the person they wanted me to be, I was no one. I tell people this often but I spent more time in therapy figuring out who I am than I spent trying to process childhood trauma and that was a direct result of growing up as this chameleon kid. My entire personality was based on fitting what was needed by other people, starting with my alcoholic father and the person who sexually abused me, right through to friends and my first wife. I was what I thought they wanted me to be. When my therapist started asking about what I wanted to be, I was blank. There was nothing there.
Finding hope after sexual abuse tags: CA Blog Against Child Abuse – January 2012 Edition tags: CA As Victims, Men Struggle for Rape Awareness tags: CA Sexual Abuse in youth sports: 10 tips for keeping children safe tags: CA 5 Strategies to Soothe Stress tags: CA Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links…
ESPN is currently running an article about Olympic silver medalist Margaret Hoelzer, who decided after her success at the Olympic Games to use her new found platform to tell her story of being molested as a child. It’s a wonderful article, and there is so much that she talks about that I think many of…
Now, here comes a study, linked below, that has done the real scientific research and found:
“ACE scores can forecast mean group differences in later health problems; however, ACE scores have poor accuracy in identifying individuals at high risk for future health problems.”
Yes, there are statistics that show that there’s an impact at the societal level from childhood trauma. We should be addressing those issues as a society, things like child poverty, parents in the prison system, abuse, neglect, etc. because we know that as we lessen those impacts on kids, and make resources available for the kids who’s trauma we can’t prevent, we can impact the overall increases in depression, addiction, crime rates, etc. that are a direct result of childhood trauma. But, at an individual level, these things aren’t fate. How one person navigates trauma and is impacted by it, is not going to come down to just the number of traumas they dealt with as a child. When we identify one person with 4 or more ACEs according to the survey, all that really tells us is that it’s basically 50-50 whether or not they are depressed, or there’s a close to 30% chance they’ve used illicit drugs, but a 70% chance they haven’t. One person is not going to neatly fit every category and shouldn’t be treated as if they do.Â
This could apply to many things in our society right now, but I’m interested in its mental health aspects, especially as a survivor. “Arrogant persons not only believes they are always right, but also believe their religious, political or ethnic groups are right, while often harboring a deeply held conviction that those outside their group…
