Trauma

  • Sharing – How to Respond When Mental Health Advice Feels Like Judgment

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Look, I get it, you tried something and it helped you, or you’ve seen it help someone else. Clearly, you are excited about the possibility of helping others, but you’re forgetting something. You’re forgetting that the person you are sharing this advice with, isn’t you.

    When you come walking into a conversation with friends, or especially into online communities with statements like the ones above, the message you are actually sending is “Gee, fixing this is easy, you’re just doing it wrong”.

    Imagine using those actual words towards someone you barely know. You wouldn’t, would you? At least if you’re a decent human being, you wouldn’t. But you are totally willing to take your beliefs, your own experience, and completely railroad another person’s current reality with it, you are doing something awfully similar. In a moment of emotional vulnerability, you have come in, guns blazing, with the suggestion that all of this pain they are in, and all of this struggling they are going through, should have been easy to avoid.

  • Sharing – I’m Open About My Depression—But Not Completely

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As I have written before, being an advocate online for me means writing, sharing information and insights, interacting with other survivors, etc. but sometimes I just can’t. Not because I’ve lost interest or don’t want to do it, but because I’m just tired of the pushback. I’m tired of having stories about male victims challenged or dismissed, tired of people in the mental health space telling me that everyone should just do what worked for them, tired of dealing with other people’s definitions of what healing looks like, or how long it should take, and on and on.

    It’s all stigma, it’s all the stigma that I want to fight against, but some days it’s just exhausting. So I’d rather not talk about it.

  • Shared Links (weekly) Feb. 14, 2021

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    The Many Impacts of Self-Stigma

    New Study Explores How Trauma-Focused Psychotherapy Works

    Emergency Rooms See Significant Rise in Mental Health Visits During Pandemic

    The Shame No One Talks About In Sexual Abuse

    KTLA reporter Gene Kang shares experience overcoming child abuse, domestic violence

    How I overcame my dad abusing me and loaning me out for sex at a ‘paedophile brothel’

    Subtle Childhood Trauma Symptoms You’re Ignoring

  • Shared Links (weekly) Jan, 31 2021

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    Unseen scars of childhood trauma

    Two thirds of child sexual abuse survivors didn’t tell anyone about abuse at the time

    Why we should never use childhood trauma to excuse male violence

    – Can we also talk about how offensive these connections are to male survivors?

    Is Stigma Derailing Your Mental Health Goals?

    9 Books to Make 2021 a Happier, Healthier Year

  • Sharing – Population vs Individual Prediction of Poor Health From Results of Adverse Childhood Experiences Screening

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Now, here comes a study, linked below, that has done the real scientific research and found:

    “ACE scores can forecast mean group differences in later health problems; however, ACE scores have poor accuracy in identifying individuals at high risk for future health problems.”

    Yes, there are statistics that show that there’s an impact at the societal level from childhood trauma. We should be addressing those issues as a society, things like child poverty, parents in the prison system, abuse, neglect, etc. because we know that as we lessen those impacts on kids, and make resources available for the kids who’s trauma we can’t prevent, we can impact the overall increases in depression, addiction, crime rates, etc. that are a direct result of childhood trauma. But, at an individual level, these things aren’t fate. How one person navigates trauma and is impacted by it, is not going to come down to just the number of traumas they dealt with as a child. When we identify one person with 4 or more ACEs according to the survey, all that really tells us is that it’s basically 50-50 whether or not they are depressed, or there’s a close to 30% chance they’ve used illicit drugs, but a 70% chance they haven’t. One person is not going to neatly fit every category and shouldn’t be treated as if they do. 

  • Sharing – Facing Down a Mental Health Crisis

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    The pandemic and other events have, perhaps, crystalized this reality for people, but let’s not kid ourselves. The lack of available treatment resources for many, many people has been a sad reality for years. Decades even.

    Simply finding more therapists isn’t going to cut it. I’d agree with that conclusion from the article, and perhaps some of the ideas shared could help. I don’t know if they will, but I know what we currently do, doesn’t work for too many people.