Police in Leicestershire issued yet another warning to parents regarding Facebook, as paedophile hackers have faked the names of real modelling agencies in a bid to groom children into posing online. Read the BBC story here.
– CBG
It seems ridiculous that this even happened, but apparent;y in the UK, it did. Survivors of child abuse say they have received death threats after the chairman of a Commons committee released scores of emails containing the identities of four abuse victims. In a letter to the home secretary, the victims, who have been campaigning…
My first thought, obviously, was about the workplace and the culture we have created there that rewards being “always-on” but I think so much of this pressure permeates beyond work. As technology has become commonplace we all live with this pressure and this expectation. Think about it, how many times in a given week are you apologizing to friends and family because you couldn’t get back to them right away?
I do it all the time.
Heck, I’ve gotten text messages while having lunch or dinner with a friend, catching up with someone I haven’t gotten to see much for the last couple of years, and then apologized for doing that and being unavailable. Why? That makes no sense but we live in a culture where being connected to technology all the time also means that we should be responsive all the time. Or at least we feel like we should. Frankly, that’s a lot of pressure.
I will admit, in healthcare, these two types of narrative incoherence could cause a problem. How would a medical professional move forward with a diagnosis when our response to the first question is to dump an overwhelming amount of possibly relevant, possibly not, information, or to dismiss any symptoms? It really would be difficult to know. We know that the folks who get to the quickest, and best, healthcare are the ones who come in with details like what is wrong, how long it’s been going on, what happened previously to an illness or injury, etc. Trauma survivors typically struggle with exactly that.
This is only one way where not being able to tell a story in a coherent, effective, way hurts survivors. It blocks us from legal proceedings, as I said before, and it blocks us from being understood by those closest to us quite often. So, if you really want to connect with others, and maybe get better healthcare, learn to tell stories. That’s how the world communicates. But, if you’re confronted with someone who is struggling to tell a coherent story, consider what kind of trauma they may be dealing with, and have a little patience.
Those folks need the opportunity to see another side to the story, and the more people who can safely tell their stories, the more we can let those folks know that they are, in fact, not alone.
If I’ve learned one thing from having this website for close to 20 years and being active on various social media platforms, it’s that you never know who is reading, and how it might impact them. Some people will tell you, and others will never mention it, but they are reading it. Would you rather be the person who helped someone feel less alone, and provided some hope, or the person who shut them down?
I know which one I have chosen.
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So says a new study out of Ohio State, and I’d have to say I would agree. The results suggest that it isn’t helpful to tell people with symptoms of depression or anxiety to simply be more grateful for the good things they have, Cheavens said. “Based on our results, telling people who are feeling…
