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Sharing – Boundaries for Healing Childhood Trauma
ByMikeM April 20, 2024April 19, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

The article below provides many more details, but similar to what I wrote earlier this week about taking a mental health day, boundaries are personal. How I decide to interact with my family may look very different from how other survivors do it. My boundaries have changed over the years. What they look like now is different from what they were when I was struggling more with my mental health as a younger man. I still have boundaries. I define them for myself every day.

You should, too. You can decide where your boundaries are and when they can be adjusted. You decide what is safe for you. You decide who is harmful to you.

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Sharing – How to take a good mental health day
ByMikeM April 18, 2024April 18, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

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
ByMikeM April 16, 2024April 16, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

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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Blaming Social Media for Mental Health Issues is a Cop Out to Avoid Harder Decisions
ByMikeM April 10, 2024April 9, 2026 Reading Time: 3 minutes

What I read in this matches what I see in real life. Some people spend a lot of time on social media doing things that are bad for their mental health. (Comparing their lives to the ultra-filtered images they see on social media, filling their feed with information that is bad for their mental health, etc.) while others use social media to connect with an online support network.

Given that, the calls for banning social media use for kids seem odd, but they are based on that being the easy thing. Blaming big tech will never be unpopular, and there is a possibility that some people might be better off not using social media as much.

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In the News | Links

Sharing – Touch can reduce pain, depression and anxiety, say researchers
ByMikeM April 9, 2024April 9, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

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
ByMikeM April 4, 2024April 4, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

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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