Sharing – Language That Deepens Trauma Instead of Healing It
The amount of courage and effort it took to tell you deserves more than a dismissive comment.
The amount of courage and effort it took to tell you deserves more than a dismissive comment.
It all comes down to having safe, supportive, and involved adults (parents and others). Kids need that more than anything else. No social media or screen bans can replace that.
If we want to advocate for mental health, we need to advocate against policies that make mental health issues worse for so many people. Prisons do that. Putting more people in jail does that. The number of incarcerated people in the US is the highest in the world. Many of them need mental health treatment, not criminal records, and a felony conviction that prevents them from getting jobs, housing, and care even once they are outside of prison.
The question is, would someone treating me as a young person have decided I was an introvert and possibly on the autism spectrum, or would they recognize the possible trauma I was experiencing? I’m not a medical expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know for a fact that we miss the signs of childhood trauma often. I would not mind if we took a second look at some young people with a trauma-informed lens.
Whatever that looked like for you, we know that survivors often have difficulty feeling emotions, let alone expressing them. None of this is good for our long-term healing and I hope you’ll read Andrea’s story and how she approaches anger now. I think we need a reminder that we can heal to the point where we feel our emotions, and live with them in a healthy manner.
The last thing I want you to consider as you read the article below is that some of these effects are contradictory. For example, sexual abuse can cause hyper-arousal and sex addiction, while also causing survivors to not want to be touched. Two different survivors, despite suffering from similar abuse, may have opposite reactions to that abuse, while others may have some combination of both of the contradictory effects. (For example, that same person who is hyper-aroused may also cringe at certain kinds of sexual touch.)
The point is that this list of possible effects is helpful. It will help you understand some of what is going on with your partner. It’s not a replacement for open conversation about the effects that individual is dealing with.