Similar Posts
Link – Paedophiles – Monsters or Humans?
Whether you agree with the Kavanagh sisters call for getting help for pedophiles or not, and there’s a lot to consider there that I’m not going to get in to, this is an issue that we have to start to deal with: “What do you think of when you hear the word “paedophile”? Do you…
Link – The Double Standard of Mental Illness
This is something we should all take a minute and think about: If a family member walked into your living room, bent over in pain and screaming for help, what would you do? You would help, of course. And generally, you’d know what to do. If you saw blood, you’d try to stop it. If…
Sharing – America’s Lack of Bereavement Leave Is Causing a Grief Crisis
So people who are grieving do it privately. They barely function through the workday and then go home and grieve by themselves. They are left to process grief without any community and the support that provides. They are left to feel like there is something wrong with them because they still miss their loved ones as if that is somehow not normal.
It is normal, we don’t simply forget the people we lose or the tragedies we experience and then move on. It sticks with you. You feel it again on birthdays and holidays, in places where you are reminded of them when you want to pick up the phone and tell them some exciting news. That doesn’t just go away after a set amount of time.
We should stop pretending that it should and start making sure everyone has some space to grieve, no matter how long it’s been.
Sharing – Why Birthdays Should Matter to People Who Have Been Suicidal
If you’re still here after struggles like Kelly and I have had, how do you celebrate that?
Sharing – Supporting disclosure for adult male survivors of child sexual abuse
The reality is that men who were sexually abused at a young age don’t often see themselves as sexual abuse victims, and often it’s because what happened to us doesn’t fit the descriptions we see on TV. In his example, what his older brother and his friends did to him was “just sex”, because he is gay anyway, even though he was 7 at the time it started. For many other male survivors, sexual abuse is what happens to girls, not boys, or if it does happen to boys it’s when a priest, or boy scout leader does it, not older kids, family members, women, or close family friends. That’s not sexual abuse, that’s something else.
It’s the lack of communication around these kinds of experiences, on top of all the other reasons men are less likely to come forward for decades, that makes it almost impossible to truly know the rates of male sexual abuse. We simply have no way of knowing how many survivors there are who don’t even think of their experiences as abuse.
Link – The 3 Parts of Your Brain Affected by Trauma
This seems accurate. “Traumatized brains look different from non-traumatized brains in three predictable ways: The Thinking Center is underactivated. The Emotion Regulation Center is underactivated. The Fear Center is overactivated. What these activations indicate is that, often, a traumatized brain is “bottom-heavy,” meaning that activations of lower, more primitive areas, including the fear center,…
