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The Link Between Childhood Trauma and Sexual Abuse in Adulthood

 

Please check out our latest Healing Our Ghosts' podcast with ECHO's executive director and #metoo Harvey Weinstein's silence breaker Louise Godbold. Healing Our Ghosts shines light into the suffering we keep hidden. We are not alone in our struggles and when we share our pain, we lift the shame secrecy that keeps us alone and disconnected from each other and prevents us from healing. With humor and compassion, Ana Joanes interviews a wide variety of guests about their messy lives, how they hurt, survived and thrived and, more often than not, how they use their life's journey to contribute to the world. Ana believes the trauma-informed movement must be lead by those personally affected. She is the director of Wrestling Ghosts, a powerful and intimate documentary about childhood trauma and healing.  HealingOurGhosts-small badge

https://www.wrestlingghosts.co...l-abuse-in-adulthood

Louise's decision to speak out was fueled by her desire to share her insight on the link between childhood trauma and sexual abuse in adulthood. But her experience with the media was often re-traumatizing. Her story too often was reduced to that of being a victim and her expertise, as the director of a trauma advocacy organization, overlooked again and again. In this episode, Louise explore why childhood trauma can set the stage to more victimization in adulthood, as well as why the trauma-informed movement must be led by survivors.

Bio:

Louise Godbold is the Executive Director of Echo-- an organization whose mission it is to educate trauma survivors about trauma and resilience in order to promote survivor empowerment, resolve individual and community-level trauma, and create the safe, stable, nurturing relationships that break the cycle of generational trauma. Louise is the developer and lead trainer for Echo’s professional development curriculum on trauma- and resiliency-informed practice. She is also a trauma survivor and #MeToo silence breaker. 

Links:

Echo website: https://www.echotraining.org

Echo's 2020 Conference: https://www.echotraining.org/conf2020/

Article about code of conduct for media when interviewing survivors: https://psmag.com/ideas/a-code...ors-of-sexual-trauma

Bessel Van Der Volk, The Body Keeps The Score: https://besselvanderkolk.net/t...keeps-the-score.html

Still Face Experiment: https://www.wrestlingghosts.com/what-is-trauma

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Yep it should be led by survivors with all kinds of lived experience. 

Psyche drugs do not treat trauma and the only treatment we have for severely traumatized kids in much of the country is talk therapy or manualized  TF-CBT (and the T.F. part comes from going to a 1/2 day discussion on the ACE study - inadequate) or more commonly, psyche drugs w/o any kind of therapy or environmental modification.  (We need advocacy to get CPP/PCIT/NFB/Parts therapies and body oriented therapies available for everyone who needs them). 

It would be a tragedy if traumatized kids were thrown into the waste bin of psyche drug therapy with medications that may harm the developing brain.   (Robert Whitaker’s excellent presentation at BVK’s trauma conference 2019). 

And yep  we survivors are more prone to be taken advantage by predators. Absolutely.  It’s like a neurodevelopmental deficit. 

Last edited by Former Member
Jane Stevens (ACEs Connection staff) posted:

And vulnerable people haven't been taught to be able to spot predators, often because "predator" behavior is so similar to what they've been raised to think is normal.

yes, absolutely!

Emma-Lee Chase posted:

I have read that when there has been childhood sexual abuse, a female is several times more likely to be sexually assaulted as a teen or adult woman. I believe that predators know how to sniff out at vulnerable people, etc.

 

 

Emma-Lee, it is indeed and unfortunately more likely. It's possible that predator can "sniff out vulnerable people" but another explanation is that the strategies that children developed to survive their childhood are, as adult, making them more vulnerable to abuse (like freezing for instance.) I hope you listen to the interview and I'd love to hear your feed-back if you do. 

And vulnerable people haven't been taught to be able to spot predators, often because "predator" behavior is so similar to what they've been raised to think is normal.

I have read that when there has been childhood sexual abuse, a female is several times more likely to be sexually assaulted as a teen or adult woman. I believe that predators know how to sniff out at vulnerable people, etc.

 

 

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