Over on BBC Radio for the next three weeks, you can listen to the 5 part series of Alan Cumming reading from his very personal memoir about his relationship with an abusive father, named Not My Father’s Son.
There are also links to support services in the UK listed with each episode.
If you’re interested in listening, you can do so from the BBC website, where it will be available for a limited time!
One of the struggles that I had as an abuse survivor, and one that I know other survivors have talked about, is defining who we are. Take everyone else away, remove all the ways we define ourselves based on our relationships with others – son, daughter, spouse, brother, sister, parent, coworker, friend, employee, boss, etc.
Who are you? As I often say, when you’re too busy trying to survive the chaos of an abusive childhood, you don’t get the guidance that would help figure this out. So we exist in these relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners, and we don’t know who we are outside of how they see us.
Thanks to the wonders of multiple TV rights, UK viewers saw this episode last week. “Captive” departs from Law and Order tradition because the victim isn’t found dead at the start, but rather the “distraction actors” doing something totally unconnected to the crime, stumble upon a kidnapping that happens right in front of them. Post-credits,…
One of my frequent notes about auto/biographies featuring child abuse is that they fail to go into relevant detail about the recovery process. Josh Cannon’s Silent Scream, which I read in hardback, sets this right by bookending the whole story with being shipped off to recovery, some in the UK, but at the beginning of…
I like the fact that they not only offer concrete things to say but also some background on how to define your own boundaries and what that means. I know for may survivors, we have to first address the core issue, the elephant in the room, before we can start the practice, so let me just go ahead and say that:
You deserve to set your own boundaries.
Full stop. Let that sink in, let it rattle around in your brain, keep reading it until you believe that about yourself.
Then, go take a look at the practical examples of doing that.
What boundaries do you struggle with? What has helped you do better at maintaining them?
There are a ton of links from there. What I found unique about the page is that they are tackling the issue from two different perspectives. One, how journalists should write about mental health and people dealing with mental illnesses or PTSD from traumatic events, and secondly, how to take care of their mental health as they cover war, disaster, etc.
Both are important topics, and I would love for anyone, from professional journalists covering a war to a blogger writing about mental health or sharing a story of trauma, to consider them. Please consider how we cover trauma and mental health, and how we make sure to take care of ourselves in the process.
I don’t think we can promise that your first visit will be as good as the one described in this story, but I like that it tries to give a more accurate picture of what it’s like. Before I was referred to a psychiatrist, I imagined something like a scene from One Flew Over the…
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