Child Abuse and Mental Health Survivors Information - Issue #40
Here's hoping you all have a lovely weekend. This week, we've got plenty of stuff to share, including this little bit of wisdom about anxiety, because it's true:
New from the Blogs
Sharing - Hot Take: The Teens Are the Sanest of Us All — www.childabusesurvivor.net The real question is, how do you "treat" this level of anxiety when feeling anxious is a perfectly normal reaction to what you see in front of you every day? Should we even be treating it versus accepting it and teaching young people coping skills instead? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that my own anxiety isn't going anywhere. I'm learning to live with it, some days better than others, but I don't see why I should think of my anxiety as an abnormal reaction. It makes perfect sense to me.
Sharing - 6 Things People Actually Need To Improve Their Mental Health Right Now — www.childabusesurvivor.net It's all well and good to suggest someone take a mental health day, or maybe a spa day to relax and recharge. No one has a solution for doing that when you don't get paid sick leave, or struggle to find childcare. It's easy to suggest time in nature to people who live in a high-rise Section 8 building barely scraping by, or suggest that kids should get help when budgets for in-school mental health programs are being cut. Suggesting it isn't going to make it possible. We have a massive problem with access to any kind of mental health care. If we don't figure that out, the rest of this doesn't make any sense.
Sharing - Addressing Childhood Anxiety as Early as Kindergarten Could Reduce Its Harmful Impacts — www.childabusesurvivor.net Kids who show the signs of struggling with mental health issues do a heck of a lot better if we intervene. Sadly, we don't do it enough. Sometimes it's because we don't have any intervention to offer them. There are no resources available to far too many families. Other times parents and adults are afraid to look for help due to the stigma associated with mental health issues, hoping the kid will grow out of it.
Shared from Elsewhere
How To Support The Mental Health Of LGBTQ+ Kids In Your Life Right Now, According To Experts – Forbes Health — www.forbes.com There are alarming statistics about LGBTQ+ kids that show exactly why their mental health needs to be protected. Here's how to help.
Do Our Kids Need Social Emotional Learning in School? - GoodTherapy.org Therapy Blog — www.goodtherapy.org Social Emotional Learning can help our children develop skills that benefit them during their early years and will carry them into adulthood
Grief Isn't Something to Get Over | Psychology Today — www.psychologytoday.com Remembering is what makes us grieve.
Should you feel compassion for prisoners? — www.karenlaw.co.uk ACE-Aware Scotland held the third ACE-Aware Nation conference on 1st June 2022. The first was in September 2018 with the international invited guest speaker being Dr Nadine Burke-Harris. In 2019 Dr Gabor Maté was the international guest speaker at the second conference, again attracting over 2000 delegates. You can find videos of all the speakers and more from the first two conferences at the ACE-Aware Scotland YouTube channel. The theme of this year's conference was Compassionate Prisons. At fi
Panic attacks: What are they? Symptoms and causes — www.smh.com.au Two in five Australians will have a panic attack at some point in their life. Why do they start? What’s happening in your brain? And are they dangerous?
From the Archives
It's Been a Rough Week So I'm Reminding Myself of These Things — www.childabusesurvivor.net Even when there are things in the world that I do not have the power to change, I use my own words to remind myself that there are things I CAN do. I can look after the people around me. I can add my voice to support mental health, survivors, and marginalized groups. I can find ways to contribute to making the world a better place in some small ways while also encouraging others to do the same. This also serves as a great reminder to myself that writing here about these topics is never a waste. I just found some hope by going back and reading what I wrote. Who knows who else might read these words and find a little hope too? That is another small thing I can do that is more useful than wallowing in my anxiety.
Sharing - Are You Hypervigilant? — www.childabusesurvivor.net Sound familiar? I know, for me, this is absolutely the truth, and even though I've done a ton of work to overcome this, and learn how to turn off this hyper vigilance, there are still times when it kicks in, like say during a pandemic. I've said it before, and I'll repeat it here. The last 16 months have forced everyone into being hyper vigilant. How do we suddenly turn that off? How exhausted are we from spending that much time constantly on the lookout for danger, and the worst case scenario? Personally, that exhaustion goes beyond any words I have to describe it. It reminds me very much of what it was like in my 20s when I only had the life skills I learned as a kid, which were mostly just responses to abuse, not healthy ways to live as an adult.
Want to Save the Children? Listen to the Experts, Who Say the Truth Matters — www.childabusesurvivor.net Somehow, I had missed the statement put out prior to the elections by almost every organization out there doing the real work of battling human trafficking. They minced no words, and I wanted to share them here, so that readers all know where I stand as well.