How Child Abuse and Major Natural Disasters Are Similar

You wouldn’t think something like a major natural disaster, which is covered all over the media for weeks, and something that lurks in secrecy like child abuse would have much in common, but bear with me.

I was recently having a conversation about non-profit fundraising in Louisiana, part of a future, longer, post of it’s own. Someone who’s lived and worked in the area much longer than I have mentioned Katrina, the infamous storm that hit the Gulf in 2005. That was 13+ years ago. The news media may have gone away, but the area has not gone back to “pre-Katrina” normal. Far from it, in fact. It was explained to me after the storm hit, there were people, businesses and other givers who never came back. Sources of funding that organizations were dependent on for the stability of their programs went away, never to come back. Some were diverted toward disaster recovery, others just left the area for good. All these years later, they haven’t been replaced. South Louisiana now is not the same as it was before Katrina hit, and it never will be.

I often hear people dealing with abuse, or some times people who haven’t ever had to deal with it, claim their desire to just go back to the way it was before.

New Orleans and the whole Gulf area did not go back to the way it was before. It’s healing, and building. It’s recovering. It will survive and go on.

Abuse survivors will as well. We can all recover and build something new.

But we won’t be able to be exactly the same as we were before the abuse. That is gone.