We talk a lot in the advocate community about not being alone with mental health issues. I try to encourage anyone to see others who are dealing with the same issues around mental health and childhood abuse and recognize that they are not in this alone. There are many of us out here dealing with the same thing. Many in the US and other countries are alone in accessing care. That should shame us all.Â
This is why I look for the definition when I read anything about being fully healed. What does being healed mean to you? Is your definition possible? A definition that includes the abuse having zero impact on who you are today? Because that’s not realistic. But it also doesn’t mean you can’t go on to have a healed life while acknowledging that it is still part of who you are.
It was a traumatic event; they became part of us. They don’t have to rule us, though. That’s healed.
I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times. Kids are often vulnerable because they have no close adults to trust and lean on for support. No one is there modeling what a mature sense of self is, so they aren’t learning it. I don’t necessarily agree with everything Drs. Maté and Neufeld said in this interview that I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with everything in their book, but on this point, I agree. Kids need trusted adults who make them feel safe and loved.
Yet we keep creating a society that makes it harder to provide that for kids. We are paying a price for that.
What do we have to offer those kids beyond a message about how their already-high ACE score likely means they have a lifetime of poor outcomes to look forward to? It turns out we have a lot to offer them. By creating positive experiences, we can start to undo the damage and create a preventative buffer to help avoid further adverse events.Â
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.
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…
