Similar Posts
Sharing – Nature helps mental health, research says—but only for rich, white people?
See, it’s easy to tell people who live pretty comfortable lives what a difference some time in nature can make for their anxiety or other issues. People living in poverty or dealing with racism every day might not get the same benefit from an afternoon hike. We don’t know what impact it would have, because we’ve mainly only been testing in relatively wealthy countries with relatively wealthy subjects.
We should be considering all of the societal and environmental obstacles that exist for people when it comes to mental health challenges. I suspect it’s only very recently that we’ve begun to do that, so any of our typical “advice” about self-care might not be appropriate until we’ve done more.
Sharing – Male Survivors Of Sexual Abuse Struggle To Find Treatment
When I was undergoing treatment with a therapist, she actually tried to get me involved in group sessions. The sexual abuse survivor group I attended a few times was not for male survivors, it was for any survivor, and I just happened to be the only male in the group. It didn’t last long. To get any help for me, as a male survivor, I had to kind of be wedged into programs and tools that were designed for female survivors. It still helped me, but it could have been better, and might not have helped a lot of men. I do believe it’s gotten slightly better over the years, but only slightly. It’s still a huge problem. We still don’t have any real idea of how many male survivors there are, or how to make resources available to them. Partly because we don’t talk about it enough, and partly because when men do talk about it, they aren’t listened to.
We pay the price for that. Those survivors grow up, and struggle, on their own, with mental health and other issues. They don’t feel safe coming forward, and they are often made to feel weak if they even consider asking for help.
That’s no way for anyone to go through life.
Sharing – Why cat lawyer and other funny videos help during COVID-19
As the article says, right now for many of us, there’s a lot of sucky stuff going on. There’s been a lot of sucky stuff going on for a long time. We need something to laugh at. We need something to smile about. We need to know that we can enjoy one moment of life and be ourselves again. So watch more silly videos. Make more stupid jokes. It helps.
Sharing – Validation Is Important in Supporting Trauma Survivors
It’s true, there are people all around you right now who have experienced horrific traumas in their lives, and the reason you don’t know is that they don’t feel safe talking about it. They’ve lived years, even decades, with this truth, only to be met with invalidating remarks like “Why can’t you just let it go?” or “you should be over that by now”, “it wasn’t that bad”, etc.
When your trauma, the thing you are struggling to overcome, is met with that kind of response you aren’t going to rush out to talk about it, which is a shame because talking about it to people who can be validating to us is one of the best ways to actually heal from it and have it no longer dominate our daily lives.
Link – How Emotional Abuse as a Child Made It Hard for Me to ‘Take Up Space’
This was a really interesting read to me, because I have always been of the belief that one of the worst things about growing up in an abusive situation is that you don’t ever really see yourself in a realistic way. I’ve always talked specifically about how surviving physical and/or sexual abuse is a full…
