The context for this quote is a handful of stories where someone felt ashamed of an event or something that they’d allowed people to believe about them that wasn’t true. Marisa goes on to talk about how when we have something we won’t discuss, it creates a separation from other people, and that separation can take away from humanness. Our interactions with other people are blocked off. We know we aren’t sharing our whole selves with the people we should be. That block can protect us from potential pain, but it also prevents us from having all the benefits of having close relationships with other humans.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like growing up keeping our abuse secret?
We grow up with shame around something that was never our fault. That shame prevents us from fully connecting with other human beings. That lack of connection harms our mental health as adults. We struggle to heal without one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal as human beings, other people. We keep our secrets and hide our shame, meaning we will never know the healing power of being accepted and loved by those who know our whole selves.
I know, don’t you hate that? Its like their well dries up or something.
I started a column titled “Illusively Lost” and put those disappearing links under that heading…maybe they will come back…if not…well I guess I will take them off permenantly.
Hi, I don’t know if these blogs are “insirational” but I enjoy reading them, Maybe you can check them out.
http://www.moby.com (click on Moby and then journal)
http://www.darrowart.com/blog/index.html
http://www.wilwheaton.net
http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com (from Iraq)
All four talk about their lives etc.
I seldom email, but enjoy your blog. You are a great guy….really…..you are!!
I know what you mean when you say a lot of interesting/inspirational bloggers just stop writing after a while…
One I think is quite good is http://mukoduck.blogspot.com
it belongs to a woman I know through an online forum – she has been struggling for the past 30-odd years with Cystic Fibrosis, she has been through three lung transplants and every day she thanks god that she is still alive, against all odds.
Unfortunately, since her last lung transplant she has written very sparingly – it always scares me a bit when she doesn’t write – I always worry something might have happened to her… and read the archives, there is some powerful stuff in there!
My blog where I tell EVERYTHING about how life is truthfully living with progressive MS. But it’s a FUNNY blog, believe it or not, because when you have an incurable disease, you HAVE TO HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR or there’s no reason to get out of bed. Laugh or cry. I choose to laugh and often wet my pants doing it. HA!
I’m Dan and I’m an adult survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA).
So a little about me first. I’m forty-eight years of age. I have been married for thirteen years and have two step-daughters and four grandchildren, three girls and a boy
I am visiting different websites directing Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse to my blog site where I describe my own dysfunctional upbringing, my abuse and its after effects. It took me a long time to disclose what happened to me during the early seventies. It took nearly thirty five years and me gainning sobriety to tell the whole story to my wife.
I’m sharing my story to show that it is possible to recover from CSA no matter “how bad” you are. I have spent nearly five years in different psychiatric units and treatment centres for my addictions and I had buried my abuse so well that I didn’t even refer to it whilst an inpatient. I admited to having relationships with men and of being a “Rent Boy” for a number of years but I never divulged my age. I was fourteen when I was originally groomed, assaulted and raped, and boy did that screw me up. Especially after one of my abusers suggested that I was “very probably gay or at the least bi-sexual”. That one thing gave me a sexual identity crisis so large that it is only in the last few years that I have really realized that I am and always was hetro-sexual.
My wife has added her own thoughts of being a partner to someone who has suffered Childhood Sexual Abuse.
If you know of any male that needs support please pass on my url or pass on the details of an American site named malesurvivor.org there are a few of us Brit’s there. Its handy to have during those long sleepless nights that all survivors suffer from every now and then, unfortunately some of us suffer from those on quite a regular basis.
TRIGGER WARNING
Both sites contain triggers.
Malesurvivor.org can be found at
http://www.malesurvivor.org
And my blog site can be found at:
http://www.waltonhop.blogspot.com
Please do not read unless you feel well and truly grounded.
Comments and suggestions welcome.
Stay safe
Dan