Shared Links (weekly) Nov. 16, 2025
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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.
Sharing – Mental Health Care Deserves More Than AI Therapy
This is part of the connection we need for our mental health. It’s not clear that AI tools can provide this. It’s not human. It’s the illusion of connection when our humanity deserves the real thing. AI can supplement; it is always available and provides access to a wealth of information, but it can’t provide a real human connection.Â
Sharing – Supporting disclosure for adult male survivors of child sexual abuse
The reality is that men who were sexually abused at a young age don’t often see themselves as sexual abuse victims, and often it’s because what happened to us doesn’t fit the descriptions we see on TV. In his example, what his older brother and his friends did to him was “just sex”, because he is gay anyway, even though he was 7 at the time it started. For many other male survivors, sexual abuse is what happens to girls, not boys, or if it does happen to boys it’s when a priest, or boy scout leader does it, not older kids, family members, women, or close family friends. That’s not sexual abuse, that’s something else.
It’s the lack of communication around these kinds of experiences, on top of all the other reasons men are less likely to come forward for decades, that makes it almost impossible to truly know the rates of male sexual abuse. We simply have no way of knowing how many survivors there are who don’t even think of their experiences as abuse.
No, kids don’t get over it without help
 The truth is that abuse victims can be resilient, but generally not on their own. We also know that it doesn’t end there.Â
