Survivors

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Sharing – Validation Is Important in Supporting Trauma Survivors
ByMikeM November 1, 2021November 1, 2021 Reading Time: 1 minute

It’s true, there are people all around you right now who have experienced horrific traumas in their lives, and the reason you don’t know is that they don’t feel safe talking about it. They’ve lived years, even decades, with this truth, only to be met with invalidating remarks like “Why can’t you just let it go?” or “you should be over that by now”, “it wasn’t that bad”, etc.

When your trauma, the thing you are struggling to overcome, is met with that kind of response you aren’t going to rush out to talk about it, which is a shame because talking about it to people who can be validating to us is one of the best ways to actually heal from it and have it no longer dominate our daily lives.

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Links

Sharing – 5 Powerful Self-Care Tips for Abuse and Trauma Survivors
ByMikeM October 30, 2021October 30, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes

How often do I see survivors talking about being healed as if there’s some end where they are done and never have to think about the trauma again, and berating themselves for not having yet reached this state when it doesn’t really work that way. Self-care and learning never stop. We never reach a point where we know everything and live happily ever after. Real-life does not have a happily ever after, it has ups, downs, twists, and turns, and healing will not be any different.

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Links

Sharing – Why Healing from Trauma Can Get Harder As We Age
ByMikeM October 19, 2021October 18, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I’ve said before, we were too busy simply surviving the abuse to learn the things we were supposed to learn as children, so we often start out behind in various ways.

Of course, in order to learn those things we need to do the work as an adult, to first unlearn the things we learned, and then learn the things we didn’t learn to start with. This is, perhaps, one of the real tragedies of so many survivors not even telling anyone, let alone starting this work, for decades.

That’s so many more years of doing the things we need to unlearn, and undoing that is just going to be more difficult the longer this has been true for us. So, what can we do?

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Weekly Links

Shared Links (weekly) October 17, 2021
ByMikeM October 17, 2021October 17, 2021 Reading Time: 1 minute
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In the News

More Proof That Early Interventions Are Key
ByMikeM October 16, 2021October 18, 2021 Reading Time: 3 minutes

So, when I see a study like this, I don’t feel defeated, I don’t feel like we are all just broken and doomed to poorer outcomes. I see the possibility that there is room to change this current reality, but it’s going to take changing how we deal with childhood adversity and doing it in an open, honest, and immediate way.

High levels of childhood adversity don’t have to be an early death sentence. We can, and should, intervene early in order to prevent many of these outcomes. We just need the determination and will to make it happen.

Do we have that?

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In the News

French Catholic Church News Reminds Us Again – Boys Get Sexually Abused
ByMikeM October 11, 2021October 10, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Actually, I think it usually takes something like this, or the scandal in the Boy Scouts, etc, to remind people that oh yeah, sometimes it’s boys who are targeted en masse for sexual abuse. I suspect we don’t often think about it because, as it turns out, many men don’t feel like they can talk about having been abused.

That’s why it was a bit heartbreaking to read Phil Goldstein’s recent opinion piece:

French Catholic Church abuse report highlights the special toll faced by boys

As Phil points out, for a variety of reasons, male survivors tend not to talk about being an abuse victim, and the numbers back that up.

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