SELF-ARCHEOLOGY

Child Abuse in a Local Supermarket or  Children Are Human Beings I’m continuing my article series on awareness for mental health and child abuse, where I take a story or an example of child abuse, and talk about why this is harmful to the child and what effects it may have in the future. (My previous article When We Get Hurt for Being Hurt – How We Learn Not to Feel can be found here ; and my answers for Caring Witness about intervening, in a form of an article Being A Witness Of Child Abuse , can be found here .) Today I’d like to share with you another personal story about child abuse in public I’ve witnessed some time ago. I was reading parts of my journal and found this entry from last year. I think I’ve shared this somewhere on Facebook back then too, so I apologize if you have already read this. But hopefully this will be interesting for most of my readers. [Originally written on January 19, 2012; slightly edited] I was in a local supermarket, and not that far from me...

When We Get Hurt for Being Hurt   or How We Learn Not to Feel  In my last article I wrote about child abuse and its results in today‘s society . And I mentioned that when children are hurt they sometimes receive scolding instead of empathy. To my estimation, this phenomenon is quite common and it’s very harmful to the child. In this article I’ll give one quick example that I’ve witnessed recently, and then give my thoughts on why and how this is harmful to the child and how it manifests itself in later life. A couple of weeks ago I was in a supermarket, and I saw a father with a boy. The father had a basket in his hand, and the boy was walking close to the father. At some point the boy turned his head and accidentally bumped his head to the basket. He hurt his eye and started to cry. His father got annoyed and in an angry and demanding voice started to ask the boy questions.  “What happened?!” “I hurt my eye…” replied the boy in tears. “I told you to be careful! Com...

Mental Health Awareness Ribbon Recently I’ve finished a big project. It included transcribing (i.e., converting from audio to text) over seventy half-hour long interviews with 7–12-year-old Lithuanian children about their relationships with their family members and the children's various life experiences, mostly their attachment to their parents and potential abuse they are – or were – suffering. A small minority of these children were from foster homes, where the situation is, of course, more complex. But the majority were from "normal" families. Because the client who asked me to do these transcriptions asked me to keep them private, I won’t be talking about any specific examples in detail; however I’d like to write a quick overview. It won’t be a "scientific study." These are just my overall thoughts and impressions. So, here we go. These interviews validated my own estimation about the degree of, and ignorance about, child abuse in today's society. ...