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.
Pin The other day, my friend Hannah, who is a runner in the very real sense, (she’s run the Boston Marathon, as opposed to the “runner” I am, where I run out for pizza.) posted something to her Instagram account about her recovery from an ankle injury that I thought was beautiful: Injury continues to teach…
Pin Narcissism isn’t something we usually associate with survivors of child abuse; however, I was thinking of that exact thing recently. Let’s see if I can explain this. Last week, I got to spend the week in Australia for work. Traveling to Australia from the US is a fairly surreal experience because of the time it…
This is a fine example of behavior that might make sense to us as individuals, but what happens when everyone engages in this same behavior? How do you find fellow survivors to build a support system or a sense of community with when everyone in that community is waiting for someone else to reach out?
I got a comment on my last entry from Ophelia, and I wanted to post my response here, and also ask any others who have been diagnosed with any level of dissociation to share their own thoughts. First her comment: can you write more about the dissociation? i was diagnosed with PTSD and i have…
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 These all ring so true to either my own experience or the experiences of other survivors I have known through the years. One of the biggest hurdles we have to clear before we can really even begin to have a semi-normal adult life is believing that the way we grew up is the way all relationships work. Even all these years later, I still have to remind myself that what I do is good enough, at home and at work. Or that it’s OK to emotionally connect with new people. It’s really difficult to unlearn those lessons from childhood, and yet it’s so freeing to realize that what happened to us, wasn’t because any of these were true. What happened to us was the result of someone else’s actions that are completely unrelated to who we are, or what we deserved.
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