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Sharing – Just how useful is childhood therapy?
Unfortunately, whether therapy is effective for your child, or for yourself as an adult, depends on a number of factors. Finding someone you can trust is an obvious one, and sometimes a real struggle. Elsewhere in the article, Melinda talks about the child not currently being in a traumatic situation, notably one interviewee who was seeing a therapist for depression while also being sexually abused at home. She knew she could talk about that, so the therapy was doomed from the start.
Sometimes I believe we look at mental health treatments like therapy and dismiss them because “it didn’t work” without considering all of the outside factors that can influence whether it works or not.
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Sharing – Don’t Touch Me: Unwanted Affection Causes Stress
Turns out, we’re all a lot more complicated. If you read the rest of the article, what you’ll see is that none of this is simple, not only is there the line between wanted and unwanted affection, there’s also a point where we’ve simply had enough and don’t want more, and that line is not going to be the same for everyone.
All of this leads me to believe that the best way to navigate this in romantic relationships, or just with family and friends, is to communicate openly about what we want and don’t want.
Believe it or not, abuse survivors, you can do that. You can create your own boundaries, and ask for what you want in any relationship. It just takes some time to learn how.
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Sharing – Healthy Boundaries for Adult Children of Toxic Parents
There is some good advice in the article about how to create, and maintain, healthy boundaries with a variety of toxic parent “types”, but I will always fall back on one fact of life as a survivor of childhood abuse, we came out of childhood with no idea of what a boundary is, let alone why we would create one. We were never given the opportunity to learn or practice this skill.
It’s OK if it takes us a minute to figure it out before we get it right.
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We Teach Children all the Wrong Things
I came across this video of Emma Jean Taylor’s TedTalk about child abuse the other day and wanted to share it with you. First because, as the title of the video says, we teach kids to be wary of strangers all the time but we don’t teach them to also be wary of people they know, despite the fact that up to 90% of sexual abuse victims know the abuser.
I fell into that category. I remember learning all about windowless vans and strangers with candy. No one ever told me that someone within my own family could also be a sexual abuser.
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Sharing – Why Mourning for the Self Is a Necessary Part of Healing
It’s the step where you can truly understand at the deepest level that what happened was not your fault. Many a survivor will say that without ever really feeling it, and you can tell because they will say that and immediately begin talking about how weak or needy they were as a child. As if that explains why they were abused, when in fact the only explanation necessary is that someone decided to abuse them.
