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Sharing – Pay attention to the chameleon kids
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.
Link – Child victims of violent and sexual crimes ‘not being taken seriously’
We still don’t want to acknowledge what is happening. We’d rather pretend that these stories of horrific abuse are made up, or a child’s imagination. They aren’t, and they need to be taken seriously. Child victims of violent and sexual crimes are not being taken seriously when they report offences, the victims’ commissioner for England…
Sharing – Common Mental Health Advice We Should Actually Ignore Right Now
For example, I’m not anxious JUST because my brain is working overtime, or because I find myself focusing on the negative. I’m also anxious because over 400,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19 and a large number of people in my local area feel no need to change their behavior in acknowledgement of that fact.
You know what that is? That is reality, and there’s no amount of “good vibes” that is going to make that reality not a reality. It’s totally normal to feel anxious about that, and telling me to “think positive”, or get more sleep, or exercise, isn’t going to change that.
We all live in a very uncertain, and difficult, reality right now. The answer to social injustice and racism, again, is not just thinking positively about it. It’s having difficult, often painful, conversations about the topic. It’s about listening to other people’s experiences and working hard to understand the world differently than we did yesterday.
That too, is a source of anxiety.
