The first reason is one that we’ve talked a lot about here. Therapy can’t be the answer for everyone because it isn’t accessible to everyone.
So if it’s not accessible to everyone, we’d better figure out some other things that might help. She offers some.
I found out about this online training recently and wanted to share it:
Learn to support someone struggling with their mental health through this online course created by Jack.org in partnership with Born This Way Foundation.
You can sign up on the website below and let us know what you think about it.
Kids who show the signs of struggling with mental health issues do a heck of a lot better if we intervene. Sadly, we don’t do it enough. Sometimes it’s because we don’t have any intervention to offer them. There are no resources available to far too many families. Other times parents and adults are afraid to look for help due to the stigma associated with mental health issues, hoping the kid will grow out of it.
It’s all well and good to suggest someone take a mental health day, or maybe a spa day to relax and recharge. No one has a solution for doing that when you don’t get paid sick leave, or struggle to find childcare. It’s easy to suggest time in nature to people who live in a high-rise Section 8 building barely scraping by, or suggest that kids should get help when budgets for in-school mental health programs are being cut.
Suggesting it isn’t going to make it possible. We have a massive problem with access to any kind of mental health care. If we don’t figure that out, the rest of this doesn’t make any sense.
The real question is, how do you “treat” this level of anxiety when feeling anxious is a perfectly normal reaction to what you see in front of you every day? Should we even be treating it versus accepting it and teaching young people coping skills instead?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that my own anxiety isn’t going anywhere. I’m learning to live with it, some days better than others, but I don’t see why I should think of my anxiety as an abnormal reaction. It makes perfect sense to me.
For Jeremy, the abuse stopped, and then he went on with life seemingly without issue. Until later, when there was an issue. We assume that all survivors keep their secrets because they are ashamed, and many of us do. But there are also survivors who don’t “look” like abuse survivors, they go on with a relatively normal and successful life, until one day they don’t. Someone who looks like your abuser, a different overwhelmingly stressful situation, an inadvertent touch, or a smell, can all bring it rushing back into your consciousness.
This is another reason why people don’t tell until much later. They don’t really have a reason to, they seem to be “over it”, but they aren’t always really over it.
This is yet another example of survivors being unique individuals and the fact that how each of us is impacted can be different too. Just because another survivor has a different journey than you, doesn’t mean much in the end.
