Shared Links (weekly) Sept. 7, 2025
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Shared Links (weekly) August 31, 2025
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Sharing – Opinion: Mental health support saved my life. But what if I’d had to wait?
At any point in that journey, through all the ups and downs, not having support and access to a resource may have meant the difference between my healing and my not being here to type these words.
I think about that a lot, too. I think about how many unknown people have been lost who didn’t have that one connection or access to that one resource that could have helped them keep going. It’s a haunting thought. It’s a thought that motivates me to keep speaking and expect better from our society.
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Sharing – You Don’t Need to Remember Everything to Heal From Everything
Thirty years later, I’ve done a lot of healing. I feel good about the life I’ve built and the people I’ve been building it with. I’ve found a way to want to continue living this life, and I’ve found ways to give back that fit into my life. What I don’t have is an exact timeline of childhood events that include all of the details of what happened to me.
It turns out I didn’t need that to get here. I have enough to know what happened. I have enough that I can share my “story” as I remember it.
That’s plenty.
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Sharing – Childhood Emotional Trauma Linked to Later Social Distress
I had to learn resiliency later in life. I defined it as the knowledge that even if something didn’t go well, if I screwed up at work, did something embarrassing, or said something dumb, that I would still be OK. That is what gave me the confidence to socially engage, rather than the avoidance I had grown accustomed to. Had I felt safe enough as a child, I might have learned that I would be OK at a younger age. That would have made a world of difference in my early adult years, which were a mess when it came to mental health.
I didn’t feel safe as a child. I didn’t grow up knowing that I would be OK even if something bad happened. Bad things happened, and I wasn’t OK because I was alone with them. There was no safe place. I had to learn how to be my safe place. That’s what those kids who struggle with distress and social avoidance are trying to do. Having safety as a child would go a long way to help.
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Sharing – The impact of non-recent child sexual abuse on the wider family
As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t wait until my 40s or 50s to tell someone about my abuse, and my family found out about it in my 20s, primarily due to my roommate having to answer their questions about my mental health breakdown. I didn’t get to choose whether my parents found out, but I’m also thankful that he went ahead and had that difficult conversation with them. I needed them to know what happened so that they could be part of my life while I tried to heal my mental health.
On the other hand, I would be lying if I said everything in the family was great after that. It’s complicated and occasionally messy.
