This is a good suggestion for those times when you feel the pressure to respond right away, don’t want to upset anyone, and just agree. It’s classic people-pleasing behavior. Far better to just give yourself a pause to make a better decision.
As shocking and dark as the details of the Duggar family and their relgious beliefs may be to many of us, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that they were so many people with a vested interest in the show, the religious organization, and the family were encouraged and even forced to gloss over the reality of what happened. If you’re shocked that anyone would go to such lengths to hide child abuse and ignore victims, you simply haven’t been paying attention. It goes on everywhere, and I hope the more cases like this one that we can bring to light, the more we’ll start to understand how horrible this is.
Jeremy does a great job describing the skills necessary to do this. It’s well worth your time to read. Personally, the area I see people struggle with the most is the inability to sit in silence, which then leads to feeling like they need to say “something”, and that can often wind up not reserving judgment.
There was no gift involved in child abuse, no silver lining, and no reason for it to happen. It was abuse inflicted on me by another person. Period. That experience is part of me, but not nearly the sum of who I am. I refuse to let anyone define me that narrowly.
I agree with Janet. There is content available on the internet, and social media, that is dangerous for kids. There is also content available that is beneficial to kids as well. Protecting them from harm without killing off all of the positive things technology brings into their lives every day is not a simple task.
Anyone telling you it is simple, or claiming that we “have to do something”, without explaining all of the trade-offs is not to be taken seriously.
There are certain books that I’ve seen discussed in the survivor community so often that it can be easy to overlook them when talking about recommendations for someone starting out on their healing journey. Bessel van der Kolk’s book about healing from trauma, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in Healing Trauma, falls into that category.
