Sharing – How to take a good mental health day
What we need as individuals and what we need on a given day can vary. If we know ourselves, though, we can use the mental health tools we have, including a day off, to our best advantage.
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Sharing – Suicides make up majority of gun deaths, but remain overlooked in gun violence debate
Trigger warning – discussion of suicide attempts. If you are struggling, please call 988 in the US or a helpline in your country. There is a lot of media coverage about guns in America, but this part is underrepresented in all of that coverage. Suicide is the leading cause of gun-related deaths in the United…
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Sharing – Touch can reduce pain, depression and anxiety, say researchers
The more I see research like this, the more I become convinced that one of the most significant losses many sexual abuse survivors suffer has to do with how complicated touch becomes for us as adults.
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Sharing – The Importance of What Wasn’t Provided
The impact of what you weren’t given as a child can be just as real as the impacts of physical and sexual abuse. The struggle to navigate relationships and work, emotional immaturity, the lack of trust, the inability to be vulnerable, etc. Those are all things we should be learning throughout life, and they are all something we can learn throughout life. It sure would have been nice to have been able to start that process in childhood, though.
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Sharing – Lifelong Imprints of Childhood
We hear stories about this all the time. If your parents constantly compare you to an older sibling who could do no wrong, you spend much of your adult life believing you are not enough. If you come from a family that didn’t express emotion, you find it hard to be close to someone emotionally as an adult, and so on.
You take those messages about what is expected from your surroundings and adjust your behaviors and beliefs to fit in with them. It can be very difficult, not impossible, to overcome that and relearn a different message.
If this seems familiar to you, I want you to take the next step and imagine what kind of messages a survivor of childhood abuse carries from their childhood.
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Sharing – Psychologist Explains Why Forgiveness Sometimes Does More Harm Than Good & You Don’t Owe It To Anyone
We haven’t talked about it here recently, but I know a lot of abuse survivors are bombarded with messages about forgiveness. Some of those messages are awful, such as demanding we forgive our family members for their benefit; some are more well-meaning but not helpful. What we don’t hear often enough is that you can…
