Tracie has an interesting story about how she wouldn’t ask for help as a new mom, even when it was clear that she needed it.
More importantly, she also lists some great resources where you can reach out and get help, whether you are depressed, a victim of sexual assault, or suspect a child is being abused.
As Tracie, and many of us, learned, we all need help every now and then.
For me, I’ve always viewed holding space in terms of that word, safe. When I hold space for someone I’m not solving their problem, or questioning them. I’m simply letting them be. Whatever that might look like at that moment, and I’m making sure that they are safe. It means making sure that being in my presence, either in person or virtually, is a place where they are free to cry, vent, question, or whatever form of expression is needed to help at that moment. It means being the person who is simply there, listening, offering support, but above all else, keeping them safe, physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.
I also recognize how difficult that really is to do. Many of us weren’t raised to “hold space”, but to fix things. We see someone crying and our instinct is to fix, to do something to get them to stop crying, instead of simply giving them space to cry. Or we want to run out and correct instead of simply allowing people the space to tell their story safe from the worry of the person hearing it will overreact. This is so hard for us, we want to correct injustice, to fight for the people we care about, but sometimes by doing so, we eliminate their safe space to simply tell their story and stop listening to what they want from us. That is the opposite of holding space.
How do you hold space for others, and for yourself?
@Thriver mentioned this on Twitter today, and I thought I would pass it along. It’s the premeire issue of an e-zine called Light and Shadow. Light and Shadow is a quarterly e-zine which focuses on moving beyond psych labels, psych diagnosis and mental health stigma. There is a whole lot of stuff packed into the…
(ed note – this review was submitted by a reader.) Memoirs of childhood sexual abuse from the male perspective tend to be rare. “The Comic Book Kid Lives: A Survivor’s Story”, a daring and surprisingly heartwarming new memoir by Ryan Castro-Miller breaks the mold in more ways than one. While the book covers some topics and situations that…
“You may have just been told by your partner that he or she was sexually abused in childhood. You may have been suspecting this for a while. The world, as you know it, is reeling, and worse, you may know, and even like, the perpetrator, if it was a family member. Remember that you must…
When Nedra talks about growing up in an alcoholic family, naturally that was something that resonated with me. Growing up my father was an alcoholic. It was normal for me to fear your father, especially when they’d been drinking. It was normal for there to be violence at home. It was normal for children to be physically attacked for as little as making too much noise.
Perhaps worst of all, it was also normal to keep it all secret, to not share what happens at home outside of the immediate family.
Which made it all the more easy for the sexual abuse I suffered later to be kept secret. And, in some odd way, for it also to seem normal.
