This story about the newly released documents from the New Jersey Child Welfare system are very sad. I know children service administrations try to do the best they can but, obviously, they need to do better. No child should be put in these situations by the very people who are supposed to be protecting them.
I’ve been in Chicago at ABA Techshow, so I didn’t get a chance to submit anything beforehand, and haven’t been over to read any of the submissions this month, but, as always, it looks like there’s some great stuff over at the carnival.
Pin Think about it. Right now, this very second, you are reading this post because either you found the headline intriguing and clicked, or someone shared it with you and said you should read it, and you clicked. In both cases, you were persuaded by another person to do something. If you saw it on Facebook or other social media platform, there’s a Facebook algorithm watching you and trying to give you more stuff you like, to persuade you to keep coming back to Facebook, and you’re reading it on a device that you were persuaded to purchase by some other factor in your life.Â
Not to mention the fact that parents, teachers, or someone, somewhere, persuaded you to learn to read. You were persuaded, even manipulated, to go to school, study, become the sort of person who could get a well-enough paying job to own a piece of technology and pay for an internet connection, and all of that wound up with you, right here, right now.Â
You were “groomed” to do what you are doing right now. And yet, so many want to look at children, and make them responsible for knowing which persuasion is good for them and which isn’t.Â
Pin I’ve been thinking about this topic for awhile now. Some of it has been brought on by hearing many of the comments about the Joker movie, some by the way people react to violence, and even some on the way political discussions tend to take place in the US these days. It all came together…
Pin Recently, an old friend started going through some old photo albums and scanning the photos to share them on Facebook. She and I were in the same church group back in those days, and many of the photos, despite being cringeworthy reminders of what we did in our younger days, have also brought back a…
Pin I could not heal until I unlearned that my abuse was something I somehow caused. Unlearning that opened up the possibility of learning something different, namely, that I was abused because someone decided to abuse me. Did that happen overnight? Of course not! Unlearning is a process, and the more closely we identify with a belief, the more difficult it becomes to unlearn it. So many survivors learn at a very early age to keep secrets, that bad things will happen if they tell anyone.
People who’ve never had that belief drilled into their young minds wonder why victims wait decades to come forward and tell their stories. That’s why! That belief is hard to unlearn. Many of us grew up with silence being the thing that prevents the abuse from being worse. Why should we start discussing it? If you tried to tell someone as a child and got shut down, this only gets worse.Â
I’ve been tracking the comments and responses to that last post about friendship and wanted to share some of what I’ve been thinking as I read through the responses. Andy got the real key to what I was asking, the bit about whether our expectations are realistic. Acceptance, understanding, love, protection, loyalty – that about…
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