Shared Links (weekly) Oct. 5, 2025
For more like this, subscribe to the newsletter and get everything I’ve been sharing in your email.
-
-
Shared Links (weekly) Sept. 14, 2025
For more like this, subscribe to the newsletter and get everything I’ve been sharing in your email.
-
Sharing – Surprising lessons from studies about post-Katrina trauma
Post-traumatic growth can happen. Healing from any trauma can happen. It occurs more frequently when the survivor has the financial means and social support to seek help.
This is not something we do on our own. It requires resources. It requires people in our lives to be there with us through it. Ignoring survivors’ current needs and assuming that they will eventually see growth is harmful. It might just be the missing thing, preventing growth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We can’t rehabilitate while actively harming the mental health of prisoners
Being in prison is a traumatic experience in and of itself. Experiencing violence, witnessing death, sexual assault, etc., are additional traumas. We know for a fact that the higher the number of traumatic events that occur in our lives, the higher the rates of mental health issues. Yet, when it comes to prisoners, we seem not to care. We joke about violence and sexual assault in prison. We do nothing to combat corruption and violence among people who work in prisons, and we cut programs aimed at helping people adjust once outside of prison.
