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Link – The Wrong Way to Keep Kids Safe From Predators
Sadly, this is true: Now that I have a kid, I’ve noticed that most parents think like this. They believe children are safe only when they are in the care of adults, in part because kids have to be protected from would-be pedophiles and abductors. But as a psychologist with an expertise in child abuse,…
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.
Sharing – What not to say to someone with mental health issues
In my own experience, at my worst, I was alone. I made people uncomfortable because they didn’t know what to say or how to fix me. The truth was I didn’t need them to fix me. I needed them to treat me like they did before. They needed to talk to me about the ball game or the latest music they were listening to and stay connected to me somehow. I couldn’t speak to them about what I was going through, and I didn’t have the words to convey the pain I was in, but it would have done so much good to have someone remind me that I was still me, in the midst of all that.
Hey, thanks for mentioning my article, dude! 🙂