Shame

Shame Why don’t we ask for help? I want to tell you about shame. It is like sea mist, rolling in silently, obscuring us from the world and the world from us. Shame clings, pervading and invading, blinding our ability to know what is true and what is not. Shame...

The loneliness of alone

The loneliness of alone Why is being alone so hard for so many? When someone crashes mentally it feels as though they are in a living death that no-one else can have experienced, a torture that only that particular person can be suffering. There is a truth to this...

Recovery

Recovery This is the third post of a series on childhood sexual abuse, examining what recovery really means. Earlier posts are here and here. Recovery is a word that once had an almost talismanic meaning, a power that seems to have faded. It has become folded in with...

Why the abused becomes the abuser

Why the abused becomes the abuser This is part II of a series on childhood sexual abuse. To have the fuller context, here is Part I. It’s a survival mechanism, the abused becoming the abuser—simple, crude, an adaptive distortion. Our ability to adapt in...

The Perversion of Shame that Kills

The Perversion of Shame that Kills There is a bitter link between suicide in young men and the sexual abuse of children. It is not the correlation that some might jump to, as in the idea that some abusers are so overwhelmed by what they have done that they kill...

Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic Fallacy It’s one of those terms usually bandied about by people busy being clever. The standard habitat is under weighty by-lines in highbrow literary reviews, used in reference to something like a particularly perfect Haiku, perhaps one that imparts...