We Are Adult Survivors of Child Abuse and Neglect

April is supposed to be Child Abuse Awareness Month. How many mentions of it have you heard by the media this month? Not even the President has said anything. And yet, he announced on Monday a $6 billion investment into cancer research. Don’t get me wrong. I applaud his efforts to find a cure for cancer, but I want to put the issue in perspective.^[1]

There is a major problem in America in that many people either don’t recognize or they deny the amount of violence and abuse occurring in their families.  Let’s first talk about some of the characteristics in the family that contribute to violence.

A big part of my healing from child sexual abuse was to shift my thinking about myself and how I viewed the world. It was extremely difficult because I had been brainwashed as a young child to believe that I was only allowed to act and think in a certain way. I am going to describe two cycles of behavior.

I have written several times about how the American With Disabilities Act needs to be strengthened to protect those of us with mental illnesses. Now I want to bring your attention to a tactic that many corporations use to distant themselves even further from working with survivors.

A teacher has responded to my March 16^th blog titled “Abuse At Home and School Performance.” We are discussing this issue and I invite as many people as possible to make their voices heard about their own experiences and to provide recommendations.

America has struggled with the long-term consequences of abusive and neglectful parenting since its founding. Every aspect of the results of ineffective, abusive, neglectful, and/or non-training of parents has been analyzed, reviewed, and discussed with resulting recommendations for over 200 years. 

When children are not taught healthy self-management skills, proper boundary management, how to get their needs met in a healthy way, how to think independently and make valid interpretations about what is happening to them, or how to express their emotions in a healthy way, they many times develop dysfunctional coping skills which they carry forward into their adult lives.

In 1990 Congress enacted groundbreaking legislation protecting the rights of disabled workers. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) put employers on notice that they could no longer fire disabled employees willy-nilly just because they couldn’t keep up with their healthy co-workers. Reasonable accommodations had to be provided to help level the playing field.

Why do children run away from home? Why do many of them turn to prostitution? Why are children who run away from home and turn to prostitution victimized as adults when they can’t break out of their circumstances and get off the streets?

If you, as a child abuse survivor, are happy about the recent Mental Health Parity legislation, you need to understand that there is so much more to be done, and it will take a long time. The legislation was a wonderful, long-overdue, first step, however, you have to be able to at least track mental health expenditures to make sound Congressional funding decisions.