Thanks to a comment she left here today, I saw this post on Survivors can Thrive about creating an event to raise money and awareness for survivors or sexual abuse and rape. It’s certainly a big idea, but why not? Why can’t we get all these folks together to raise awareness and funds to help victims of rape and sexual abuse? It’s certainly worth thinking about.
Pin I came upon this idea later in life than some of you may have. Thanks to an abusive childhood and a fairly demanding church involvement in my teens and twenties, I was about 30 when I finally gave myself the freedom to take on a hobby just because I enjoyed it.
For me, I grew up never feeling good enough or worthy. I needed someone else to tell me it was OK for me to do something, or heaven forbid to spend money on something just because I liked it.
Pin As she and her guests shared their stories and the research around how this happens, I kept replacing all of the stories; the pain of giving birth, the struggle to bike up 4,000 feet of incline, and others with trauma and PTSD flashbacks. When we have those kinds of reactions, we become different people. Often we become the child who was being abused instead of the adult we are, and we act accordingly. We lash out, self-protect in unhealthy ways, or try our best to hide from it.
The exact reactions are not the important thing. We need to know that it happens. When in an extreme emotional state, we have the capacity to act like a different person. We all do. The problem comes from the fact that we don’t know that person. We are not good at predicting how we will react. When we are in a cool state, the warm state version of us makes no sense, and how we think we’ll act turns out not to be the reality of what happens at all.
Dan was kind enough to leave me a comment with both a pointer to his blog about being a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and also a pointer to malesurvivor.org. His blog is intensely personal and quite moving, while the other site is a very useful resource for male survivors.
Pin “What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.” -Epictetus, Discourses, Book II, ch. 17 A couple of years back, I shared an article about learning based on this quote. I shared…
I’ve been reading blogs written by survivors for quite awhile now and one of the things that has always struck me, when compared to my own blogging, are the detailed descriptions of the abuse, and certain events from their childhood. It’s not that I don’t want to be that open with my readers here, the…
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Wow! Thanks for the link! I appreciate your support. Hopefully, when this big idea actually gets off the ground, I can say a big “We” appreciate your support!