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Reviews Elsewhere – The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How we Learn from Love and Loss.
Losing a spouse, parent, sibling, etc. for me would be different than losing one of my friends. I love them differently, and I imagine I would grieve differently.. Losing anyone you love hurts but you likely have a variety of different relationships with people so it only makes sense that you would grieve them differently too, and then it also becomes obvious that we all will grieve differently from each other. There’s no straight line, there’s no “normal” way to grieve, there is just one individual processing the loss of another person that they had a unique connection to.
Wherever you are in that process is where you are. It’s not a contest and it’s not a pre-defined timeline. It’s a loss and you are free to mourn that.
Sharing – When You Have a Lifelong Struggle With PTSD and Depression
It can be a struggle when so many of our friends and even professionals want to help us overcome abuse to “get back to” ourselves when there is no previous version of ourselves to use as a target. I don’t think this should be the goal anyway. The goal for any child abuse victim should not be to go back to being a younger version of themselves before the abuse, the goal should be to build a life after abuse. I didn’t find much healing in trying to remember my early childhood, but I found a ton of healing in having someone help me design the life I wanted to have as an adult and helping me feel worthy and capable of having that.
Video – How Trauma Affects Memory
I saw this video shared on Lauren’s Kids Facebook page and wanted to share it here because I think what the folks who work at this Children’s Advocacy Center have to say about childhood trauma, and what children remember is incredibly valuable.
We often expect child abuse survivors, especially when the abuse was so recent, to remember the details, and be able to provide an exact timeline of events. When they struggle to do that it becomes a little too easy for us to start doubting that they are telling the truth, instead of understanding that this is exactly the way it’s supposed to work.
