Revue newsletter for Child Abuse Survivor - Issue #29
I hope you have a great weekend, if you need something to read we've got you covered this week.
New From the Blogs
It's OK to Just Enjoy Something For Yourself — www.childabusesurvivor.net 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.
Sharing - Persuading a Loved One to Seek Mental Health Support — www.childabusesurvivor.net There are quite a few ideas to consider before you talk to someone you love that I highly encourage you to read. The last thing you want to do is create a situation where they feel judged or stigmatized but it happens more often than it should. (It should never happen, we aren't even close to that.) However, there is one thing that I have found really helps whenever someone is talking about their own mental health issues, or feeling embarrassed about considering therapy for themselves and it's quoted right there in this article: "If you’ve gone to therapy, you can share your experiences with them, too. It can help to let them know they aren’t alone in seeking help. "
Sharing - The Emerging Science of Suicide Prevention — www.childabusesurvivor.net I'm not a researcher but these two facts make me wonder if there's not something we can do. If we have a list of "nudges" that can help people feel like they belong or help educate people about things like safety plans, etc. and we don't know who is at risk and which nudge might help them, maybe we should just continue to generally be kind to the people around us. That means trying to understand what makes them feel supported, connected, etc., and doing those things consistently. It also means noticing if a "nudge" has the opposite effect, and trying something different instead. Help people feel like they belong, educate people about prevention resources, help them stay connected to family and friends, involve them, accept them, etc. Help your friends and loved ones by communicating the kinds of things that help you. When you feel disconnected or like you are a burden, what can they do to keep you connected? What things do they do that make it worse? When we don't talk about these things we only make it worse, and we only continue to lose more people. We have to learn how to have these conversations. We have to be open to listening to the people closest to us and connecting to them without stigma and judgment. The researchers will keep working to learn more about prevention, but in the meantime simply caring about each other and being honest with each other is the best tool we have. We should use it.
Reviews Elsewhere - The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How we Learn from Love and Loss. — www.childabusesurvivor.net Losing a spouse, parent, sibling, etc. for me would be different than losing one of my friends. I love them differently, and I imagine I would grieve differently.. Losing anyone you love hurts but you likely have a variety of different relationships with people so it only makes sense that you would grieve them differently too, and then it also becomes obvious that we all will grieve differently from each other. There's no straight line, there's no "normal" way to grieve, there is just one individual processing the loss of another person that they had a unique connection to. Wherever you are in that process is where you are. It's not a contest and it's not a pre-defined timeline. It's a loss and you are free to mourn that.
Shared from Elsewhere
Australia is finally having a crucial conversation about sexual abuse. But let's not forget about male victim-survivors - ABC News — www.abc.net.au Australia has been having a long-overdue conversation about the harassment and abuse of women. But child sexual abuse is not gender-specific – and too many male victim-survivors are suffering in silence, writes Craig Hughes-Cashmore.
Linked: Nearly half of employees received no wellbeing check-in last year, research reveals — www.mikemcbrideonline.com You cannot claim to care about the people who work for you, and not even check in on their well-being. Those two things do not go together at all. We have to get to that very minimum level before we can do more, and if we can't even be bothered to get there, I see no reason why anyone with a choice would want to continue working for you.
55 Mental Health Resources for People of Color | Online MSW Programs — www.onlinemswprograms.com Providing effective mental health services for people of color requires acknowledging and understanding their different lived realities.
New Report Shows an Increased Effort by Tech Companies to Detect CSAM on the Internet - Thorn — www.thorn.org If you’re following Thorn’s work, you know the critical role that tech companies play in identifying and reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on their platforms. Today, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) released its annual overview...
Poor U.S. Mental Health Care Is Confirmed by a Top Authority | Psychology Today — www.psychologytoday.com Thomas Insel’s new book makes poor mental health care a human rights issue.
From the Archives
Link - What I’ve learned about child abuse: Advice from a child protection detective — www.childabusesurvivor.net So much of this. Straight from the “keyboard” of someone working in law enforcement. Read it all. https://www.zebracentre.ca/blog/2017/3/14/what-ive-learned-about-child-abuse-advice-from-a-child-protection-detective
How Even Advocates Shame Victims — www.childabusesurvivor.net I want to follow up on something I shared on the News and Reviews blog yesterday. It was some comments on a blog article related to shame, and a
ACE Awareness - Good, Bad, Both? — www.childabusesurvivor.net If you're not familiar with the now somewhat famous ACE studies, what we are talking about here are studies that seemed to show that the more Adverse
Another Reminder - To Reduce Suicide Risk for LGBTQ folks Just Accept Who They Are — www.childabusesurvivor.net So again, we see that simply accepting people for who they are has a pretty large impact on the risk of losing them to suicide. Why would we do anything else, for anyone?
Sharing - Psychological and Physiological Power of Validation — www.childabusesurvivor.net Note what it says, words like listening and acceptance. Note also what it doesn't say, like anything about fixing things or changing their feelings, etc. I talk often on here about simply being there. Sitting with someone who is struggling. Validation is all about that, and as you can read further, validating someone is maybe one of the best things you can do to keep open lines of communication, help them feel valued, and not dismiss their emotions.