Sometimes I hear stories of people who were abused as children.  This never gets any easier for me, nor should it.  Abuse by a parent, sibling, or other trusted adult is the most difficult to comprehend and to recover from.  Of late, dreadful abuse by coaches in a variety of sports has come to light. Abuse may be physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional, and each terrible permutation produces its own particular pain, terror, and sorrow for the survivor.  How can a parent, violate the sacred trust involved in having a child, and exploit a child’s innocence and vulnerability?  I don’t know.  But I do know it is rarely because of a mental illness, an emotional disorder.  Abusers most often fall into the category of personality or character disorders, which means they are likely to be narcissistic, deceptive, and impulsive.  They have a low tolerance for frustration, disregard the rights of others, hold grudges, and may have an exaggerated sense of their own importance.  These character deficits enable them to hurt or abuse without feeling empathy for their victim, or appropriate shame, remorse, or guilt.  Substance abuse exacerbates these behaviors.  In what can be called the one-two punch of abuse, the victim will tend to feel empathy for his abuser rather than for himself.  In this process of empathic reversal, the shame that should be felt by the perpetrator is absorbed, felt, and re-experienced by the survivor.  It is with cruel irony that trauma hijacks our very physiology to a place of shame. It is so important that we share our outrage about the abuse with the survivor, so they might begin to experience their own healthy anger.  To bear witness to the truth, especially an evil truth, takes courage, but it is our obligation to individual survivors and sometimes to our communities.

We all know there is an epidemic of eating disorders in this country.  They are the most deadly of any of the psychological disorders.  The majority of its victims are girls and young women, but anorexia is also increasingly affecting young men.  What we might not know is that we can all play a part in the prevention of this disease.  We are aware that bacteria spread infection, but that common sense precautions, like hand-washing and vaccinations, can help prevent bacterial illness. Eating disorders can have a number of causes, but a significant causal factor is the omnipresence in the media of dangerously thin women.  Up until the 1970’s, eating disorders were rare.  If we chart the height and weight of Miss America during the 20th century we can see how “ideal” body types for women have drastically changed.  Miss America 1952 was 143 lbs, and in 1965 she was 5’6” and 124 lbs. It was in the 1990’s that Miss America’s height shot up and her weight plummeted, putting most contestants below the World Health Organization’s cutoff for emaciation.  Since 2002, these stats for Miss America aren’t even made public.  Even more toxic are the relentless images of anorexic women in the media, a powerful message to girls that their normal bodies are defective.  Who decided that the ideal woman’s body should change like this?  It certainly wasn’t women themselves, nor was it the men who love them.  Research shows most men are not attracted to stick-thin women whose bodies remind them of themselves as young adolescents.  We should all be asking the question as to who benefits from women and girls feeling relentlessly insecure about their bodies.  And it is when we all begin simply noticing the destructive images, and then speaking out against them, that change really can begin to happen.  The life of someone we love could be at stake.

Siblings matter.  No matter if we are kids ourselves or all grown up, our brothers and sisters are an important part of our lives.  The importance of sibling relationships tends to be minimized, even though our siblings can be the lengthiest relationship we ever have.  While everyone’s experience growing up in a family is unique, no one understands our family like our siblings do.  They share our family history.  They remember us when.  They remember when I threw up on my birthday cake or when our brother used the car without asking.  If I mention THE fight between Mom & Dad, I don’t have to explain what THE fight was about.  It is among our siblings that we first learn (or not) to share, to negotiate, to manage conflict, and to resonate with another.  Even if there is an estrangement, we cannot divorce a brother or a sister.  Friendships can end, but sibling-ships continue for a lifetime.  There are some exceptions, however, like an addiction or narcissism, where a sibling’s behavior or choices can rule out closeness. But our siblings tend to see – and tell – the truth about us.  And we see – and tell – the truth about them.  We can teach our children and grandchildren to value their siblings, no matter how mad they are at each other at the moment.  And even if we still have no idea how we could possibly be related, we can still sustain and affirm our own sibling relationships.