“There’s this notion in the public’s mind that physical or sexual abuse is somehow more harmful than verbal abuse or other types of trauma,” he says. “The scientific evidence does not support that. I think parsing out the impacts of different types of trauma leads to a kind of reductionism that may be neither necessary…
As the daughter of an alcoholic, I have never felt the security and comforts of a sober father. I often spent days at a time on my holiday visits in a state of hyper vigilance, because it’s never safe to predict your alcoholic parent’s behaviour on any given day. Yes, as the son of an…
“What kind of relief is affordable, efficient, effective and nontoxic? The answer is touch. Hugs and other forms of non-sexual physical soothing, such as hand-holding and head-stroking, intervene at the physical level to help the brain and the body calm down from overwhelming states of anxiety, panic and shame.” Sadly, for many survivors of sexual…
An alcoholic home is chaotic and unpredictable. This is something that has a profound effect on the development of children. We see it among abuse survivors, and we see it with kids who grew up in broken homes, and dysfunctional families. (And the fact that there is a lot of crossover in those groups, should…
“Now consider our abuse occurring during this childhood developmental stage, before our little brains have opportunity to grow, develop and experience different perspectives. We are stuck and frozen in a time continuum with one-or-the-other or black and white thinking. Our world partly becomes defined by the perceptions we held during the abusive experience. These perceptions,…
So yes: those of us that are hurting want you to pray for us. Pray for your family member who’s depressed. Pray for your fellow church member whose anxiety has kept then from attending in weeks. Pray for the person who you’ve heard is battling an addiction or a manic episode or any other thing. And…
