Shared Links (weekly) – Dec. 6, 2020
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A Digital Resource Toolkit for Prioritizing Your Mental Health
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Trauma unmakes the world of the self. Can stories repair it?
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Sharing – I’m NOT going to heal everything
It’s all forward-looking. It celebrates how far I’ve come without constantly constantly reminding myself of what I haven’t done. In Todd’s words, it allows me to simply be human, like every other adult. In the end, isn’t that what we all want, to not see ourselves as the freak abuse survivor, but as an adult like other adults? With strengths and weaknesses, with quirks, and with success alongside failures?
We need to let ourselves be human and create a life where we can feel safe to be human.
Sharing – It’s Also Okay Not to Talk About Your Mental Health
As I said earlier, we don’t live in an ideal world where everyone has an open mind and is comfortable having conversations about mental health and trauma. We have to make choices. For some, there are serious consequences to being identified as someone with mental health struggles in their professional lives. Others aren’t safe enough to talk about the trauma they are currently dealing with. We all make choices when dealing with different people around us, who we know are safe, versus those we don’t feel safe with.
Your choices are valid. They don’t have to be the same as mine because your life isn’t mine. All I ask is that you be thoughtful about your choices so you don’t find yourself in an unsafe situation. That’s all we can expect of anyone, no matter how much we want to see and hear more voices talking about mental health in the world.
Sharing – Childhood Emotional Trauma Linked to Later Social Distress
I had to learn resiliency later in life. I defined it as the knowledge that even if something didn’t go well, if I screwed up at work, did something embarrassing, or said something dumb, that I would still be OK. That is what gave me the confidence to socially engage, rather than the avoidance I had grown accustomed to. Had I felt safe enough as a child, I might have learned that I would be OK at a younger age. That would have made a world of difference in my early adult years, which were a mess when it came to mental health.
I didn’t feel safe as a child. I didn’t grow up knowing that I would be OK even if something bad happened. Bad things happened, and I wasn’t OK because I was alone with them. There was no safe place. I had to learn how to be my safe place. That’s what those kids who struggle with distress and social avoidance are trying to do. Having safety as a child would go a long way to help.
Sharing – Teen suicide is on the rise. So I talked to teens who attempted suicide.
Read the whole thing, because there’s a lot to consider but I really wanted to highlght these two paragraphs. Sometimes, people who aren’t familiar with caring for teenagers at risk of suicide worry that there is nothing they can do to help if a teen is determined to die. Resoundingly, teenagers expressed just the opposite….
Finding Balance and Diversity in our Social Media Use
I came across this article today: The Internet and Mental Health: It Helped & Hurt My Recovery As many of you know, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, because I think, despite media attention to the contrary, can be part of helping abuse survivors, and those with mental health…
