| NAASCA Posters / Essays Celebrating April as National Child Abuse Awareness Month | |
| Child Abuse lives everywhere -- don't be afraid to talk about it | 25 of 30 .. |
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Child Abuse lives .. ...... in every community ...... leaves scars inside & out Child abuse comes in several forms including sexual assaults, violent or physical abuse, emotional and mental traumas and neglect (also known as maltreatment). Each type of abuse leaves a set of scars, some on the outside, but most of them hidden. Between 4 and 5 kids die each day in our country, most of them infants and toddlers who can not defend themselves from the adults around them. Many more children carry bruises, welts and contusions, obvious signs of physical trauma. But the worse effects of child abuse are unseen .. invisible and frequently lifelong. People say we should "get over it." This is the experience of by far the largest group of adult survivors of child abuse. We struggle to recover. As NAASCA family member David Pittman, founder of "Together We Heal," says in a recent article, "Many of us, including myself, wonder when things will “get better.” In group this week we even talked about how we didn't understand why, after going through so much therapy why we would still have the past come back and bite us in the butt. We even have members of our family or friends say, why don't you just get over it? The thing is, we never “get over” what we have been through. The best we can hope for is to “work through it” and to heal. And so together, helping one another with what has helped each of us, we try to do just that." And later .. " As I was writing this I thought of something to say the next time I hear those words…I'll ask them, would you tell me to “get over it” if I had cancer or heart disease? Of course not because that would be ridiculous. Well, what we are going through is like a cancer of our minds and disease of our hearts. If we don't address it in a healthy way it tears us apart from the inside out." 42 million American adults are survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and most of them, and their scars, remain hidden. Please see: http://sol-reform.com/News/get-david-pittman/ |
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