How Childhood Abuse Affects Health

Amela Sandra Dzurlic 2/20/224:57 PM

Hello survivors, advocates, policy-makers, social workers, teachers, principles, business owners, parents, and community members.

Here are some resourceful articles which are published by medical, health and legal institutions about child abuse, sexual assault and neglect.

Keep in mind that you are not a statistic, you are a person with lived experience, and you are a survivor who is empowered to learn and to grow. You are in control of your fate. You have the power to heal. The journey of healing and recovery can be helpful when there is factual information to explain the challenges you or your loved one are facing.

I would not have began this community if I was not your fellow peer in solitude and sympathy for our shared label in which we have survived the circumstances. We are brave bunch, not only did we survive but we will thrive! Knowledge is power. Take your power and use it to improve the areas in life that need improvement. Nourish to heal, educate yourself on the traumatic events and what impact it may have on your health. Mend your needs, mend your hurt and remind yourself that recovery is journey. It will be challenging, it will feel shameful, it will make you feel like a victim, but then you will bounce back above the negative self-loathing with affirmations of your strengths and attributes. Your unique experiences are what you make you you. And there is no one else like you. But in this community you and I share surviving, healing and use those to transform and to inform.

If you are mental health professional or work in medicine, please read these articles with a conscious in which survivors are not meant to be diagnosed, labeled, or shunned. A survivor is someone who needs understanding free of judgement, free of shame and free of stigma. Please read these articles with the intention of helping, healing and supporting the survivor’s recovery.

Thank you,

Amela

Social Disadvantage, Severe Child Abuse, and Biological Profiles in Adulthood

https://www.asanet.org/researc...-and-social-behavior

- Journal of Health and Social Behavior

Child and Adolescent Sexual Abuse

https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Fa...exual-Abuse-009.aspx

- American Academy of Child And Adolescent Psychiatry

The long-term Effects of Child Sexual Abuse

https://www.counseling.org/doc...l-abuse.pdf?sfvrsn=2

- American Counseling Association

Signs of Child Sexual Abuse

https://familydoctor.org/signs...ldhood-sexual-abuse/

- American Academy of Family Physicians

What is Child Abuse and Neglect? Signs and Symptoms

https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/whatiscan.pdf

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Administration for Children and Families

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Frank Sterle Jr.Member

Since so much of our lifelong health comes from our childhood experiences, childhood mental health-care should generate as much societal concern and government funding as does physical health, even though psychological illness/dysfunction typically is not immediately visually observable. Also, if society is to avoid the most dreaded, invasive and reactive means of intervention — that of governmental forced removal of children from dysfunctional/abusive home environments — maybe we then should be willing to try an unconventional proactive means of preventing some future dysfunctional/abusive family situations.

Being free nations, society cannot prevent anyone from bearing children; society can, however, educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those high-schoolers who plan to always remain childless. One can imagine that greater factual knowledge of what exactly entails raising and nurturing a fully sentient child/consciousness in this messed-up world — therefore the immense importance and often overwhelming responsibility of proper rearing — would probably make a student less likely to willfully procreate as adults.

But due to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, the prevailing collective attitude, however implicit or subconscious, basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support programs for other people’s troubled families?’ While some may justify it as a normal thus moral human evolutionary function, the self-serving OIIIMOBY can debilitate social progress, even when social progress is most needed; and it seems that distinct form of societal penny wisdom but pound foolishness is a very unfortunate human characteristic that’s likely with us to stay.

2/23/228:05 PM

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