The key is to have some compassion for yourself, similar to the compassion you might have for someone else in a vulnerable situation. When you can do that, suddenly what the other person does isn’t as important, you’ve given yourself grace, and acceptance.
As childhood abuse survivors, of course, this is tricky. Self-compassion is not generally one of our strengths. How could it be? All our lives we’ve been told that bad things happen either to bad people, or for a reason, and we’ve had something horrible happen to us, so we must be broken in some way to have had that experience. Didn’t we all think that way at one point or another? How could we not?
Some of the best journalism of past weekend on the English and Welsh child abuse scandals ofthe past 40 years came from the Independent on Sunday. In addition to its own retrospective on the North Wales Jillings report (here in case the link didn’t appear in the previous story) they also profiled a family of…
As sometimes happens on social media, this review by Jennifer Gilmour randomly came to my attention a few days ago, and since I know some of my readers are always interested in reading the stories of other survivors, I thought I would share it with you. The book is by Jessica Aitken-Hall and from Jennifer’s review…
“The case lays bare how toxic and twisted social role of masculinity is. It has relied on the cartoonish cliche of school boys as horny, hormonal messes who always want sex. It caricatures boys as constantly “up for it” to the extent that their ability to consent or not to sexual acts is taken less seriously….
That’s the theory, called polyvagal theory, put forth in this Guardian article by Stephen Porges. I think this is something we need to consider: Can you explain polyvagal theory in layperson’s terms? Polyvagal theory articulates three different branches of the autonomic nervous system that evolved from very primitive vertebrates to mammals. And it’s quite interesting how the…
