#To be honest i think we need to rid ourselves of the idea of gender as something innate even though its nice to teach to well-meaning

[sammygender]

the thing thats always missing in conversations about gender in general is the fact that 'cis', as an identity, is not a innate Thing Some People Are, but rather a state of acceptance society grooms us into from birth

[arueshalaetablebuildingsociety]

Hi! It's me, the radfem you reblogged. (I'm using an ask because I get cut off with comment length.) I want to be abundantly clear that I don't like the article that was shared either: the Telegraph is right wing, the sample size is small, and it's sensationalist news that intends to instill a fear of trans people (who I don't believe are more dangerous than your average person.) I'd meant to post more about that, but to be honest? I forgot. (My bad.) I thought I might take a minute to outline my positions, so that for both our sakes we don't argue at cross purposes. After all, you can't convince me if you don't know what I think (and vice versa). To start, I do get you're coming from. I was so passionately involved in trans rights activism for years that I cut off friends and relatives readily. I had a sticker of JK Rowling draped in the trans flag on my laptop. Many positions I held then are still my own: I want trans adults to have the right to access gender affirming care, I don't think misgendering is productive, and I CERTAINLY don't want to ally with the right. Even the radfem label fits a little awkwardly – it was my trans siblings and friends that lead me to rethink my positions. That being said, my problem with gender is simple: I have always believed that oppression is based on the body. I believe that homosexuality is based on our physical bodies. I understand that some individuals feel dysphoria, an actual medical condition, that causes them to feel discomfort with their sex. I believe these individuals are trans and we need to do everything we can to support them, and if the best option is transitioning? We should support their transition. It was when more people I knew started transitioning – those who admitted they had no issue with their body – that I became "terfy." The source of their discomfort was gendered roles and expectations. I was told as much. I struggle to believe that we'll ever get rid of "masculine" and "feminine" as concepts if we try and physically change ourselves to fit with the stereotypes we made. This is why I can't relate to conservatives: gender is a social construct, and a malicious one at that. I love gender non-conformity; not "because it's better than being trans" (or whatever BS the right spouts) but because I am a GNC lesbian. I see identities like nonbinary and gender fluid as an insult to the intelligence of your average person. Nobody "naturally" fits into a box, everyone is nonbinary. The only reason many people DO seem to is the result of socialization, which I view as something to be undone not encouraged. I also don't believe the idea that gender is seriously important to people and deeply felt is an "excuse" to be regressive in this fashion. Religion takes a similar place in billions of people's lives, and I've been an anti-theist atheist all my life: spirituality, religion, and gender all go in the "things I hate" category. If you disagree with me on that, I can't complain! If you treat it as a conservative take, I can. At least we can DEFINITELY agree on something: "trans panic" is a disgusting "defense." These are hate crimes inspired by homophobia, sexism, and a hatred of gender non-conformity and deserve to be treated as such. You don't have to respond or stick this on your blog (unless you want to publically debunk me, which you're obviously within your rights to!) feel free to anon me back, or just ignore and block me.

I feel a little bad for doing this, as earlier I attempted to engage with you in private, believing your position to be earnest. However, I'm no longer so sure that's the case. Because I scrolled through your profile a bit just to see what you had been most recently posting or reblogging. I did not have to go far at all to find things I was not thrilled with.

So I'm going to go ahead and do something I don't normally do: I'm going to schedule this post for 24 hours after I write it.

I attempted to address the issues I saw, especially with the idea that Non-binary or Gender-fluid people were an "insult," in private, but just to be clear, the idea that someone else can be an "insult" is exactly what the hateful terrorists I cited in the post this is a response to say.

You say in the ask that you support Trans Rights, but even a cursory glance through your profile shows you reblogging post after post alleging trans women are secretly cis white men, or trans women are secretly just men who paint their nails; you also reblogged a post supporting a French anti-trans hate group who hijacked a pride rally. You reblogged a shrine post for JK Rowling's bioessentialist and anti-trans tweets with tags like "to think of all the vitriol I spewed in her direction." Did you spare any critical thought to what she was saying? Of course JK Rowling would claim she "encourages gender non-conformity," but does she?

DOES SHE??

And did you catch that bit at the end of the tweet shrine where she says, "for saying sex is real"? Did you? Because I did, and that is a clear and demonstrable sign of bad faith. The LGBT+ movement does not argue the existence of sex, though it does argue that Intersex people exist (a provable fact) and that they have rights too (basic human dignity). But to hear Rowling talk, anyone who disagrees with her sounds ridiculous, right? Almost like that's why she said it. Almost like it's a strawman.

I pointed out, when replying to someone I thought was earnest, how every genocide starts with the genocidaires telling their victims what they are as a means of enforcing ownership of those people: You aren't Albanian, you're French. You aren't Croatian, you're a Serb. You aren't Armenian, you're Azerbaijani. You aren't Ukrainian, Georgian, Ossetian, or Abkhaz, you're Russian. You aren't a woman, you're a man with painted nails.

Even this ask has undertones of the debunked medical claim of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and the idea of Transgender Social Contagion, of which both are completely baseless, outright rejected by the medical and psychiatric community (except where controlled by the vociferously anti-trans and anti-feminism Rich White Man Wes Streeting), and still repeated by anti-trans, anti-lgbt+ hate groups.

This is more of the influence of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a zealously Evangelical Christian, anti-LGBT, anti-Choice, pro-"traditional values" Conservative think tank, which does a massive amount of activities to create anti trans, anti abortion, and repressive laws towards women. Do they have ties to anti-trans terrorism? Senators and Representatives affiliated with them were very quick to cover for the January 6th Rioters, and they publish a lot of the material that anti-trans mass shooters and terrorists cite. They also were the organization who formalized the idea of funding "LGB Against T" groups in the 1980s, EXPLICITLY as a strategy to undermine solidarity within LGBT communities with the ultimate STATED goal of ending Women's Suffrage and all LGBT+ rights and enforcing an Evangelical Christian Theocracy.

They sure don't sound like they have your wellbeing at heart.

[crisprandcas-blog]

Let's Go Exploring! #4

Note to readers: Let's Go Exploring is now a newsletter! Want to get our link collections and semi-coherent ramblings straight to your inbox? You're in luck! SIGN UP today!

Hello readers! It has been an eerily beautiful March week (thanks climate change, I guess), our respective science projects have been full of ups and downs lately, and we are ready to sit down and scream into the internet for a while. 

This week, we have been re-reading the Two Bossy Dames back-catalogues to Improve Ourselves, and came across this ask:

I used to think of myself as a creative person. Then I ended up in a field where I consume other people's awesome creative output all day, and in a city whose main industry is Big Smart Ideas. Now I'm stuck feeling like I need Big Smart Ideas and Awesome Creativity to be worthwhile, but at the same time I'm paralyzed by the fact that my crappy little initial efforts aren't going to be as great as the work I see around me every day. What's the point of putting a lot of work into something crummy? As ladies who also consume culture professionally, how do you keep that from paralyzing your own creativity?

Which had this answer:

We are not competition for these people. We are their colleagues. Their work informs ours, and (we flatter ourselves slightly), one day ours will inform theirs. There’s room for all of this and way more besides! Whatever your field of endeavor is, you’re practicing it right alongside of a bunch of other people, and yeah, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we bet you could do a bang-up job refining its design and rebalancing it.

Read the whole thing OBVS but basically we want to share this advice because it helped us so SO much in even contemplating starting a science link roundup/newsletter/writing team. We aspire to Dame Sophie and Dame Margaret levels of excellence and insight! In particular, the message offered by this answer is that you have a new perspective to offer just by being your unique self. Sure, other people may be making a similar thing as whatever it is you want to be producing, but you can add to the collection of amazing work by DOING amazing work.

We are trying to add to the collection of science-themed commentary already made excellent by the likes of Ed Yong, Erin Barker, Liz Neeley, Carl Zimmer, Peter Aldhous, and many others, and trying to inject our own background, experience, and humor into it. We started this for ourselves and for a few close friends, so we don't have to continually remind ourselves that this isn't a competition, but it does occasionally bubble to the surface of our self-conscience brains. "How many twitter followers do we have today?" is a question Cas finds herself asking far too often, for example.

When that question rises up of its own accord, what she tries to ask herself instead is "What have I written today that I'm proud of?" In fact we both think this is a question that everybody should ask themselves (possibly in a form more tailored to your particular choice of extracurricular content creation) instead of focusing on how many people have thumbs-up'd or hearted their stuff lately.

The above was written entirely for our own benefit, but we hope it helps you in your own endeavor to greatness, whatever form that takes!

The Links

Crispr reads:

This week, WIRED excerpted a book called Deadliest Enemy: A War Against Killer Germs. I haven't read the book, but the WIRED article is a quick read about what we can expect from a post-antibiotic world, and a reminder about why it's hard to regulate antibiotic use. (One problem: it's difficult for doctors to refuse anxious parents a prescription they don't think is necessary, especially when it seems basically harmless and might even help.) The article opens with a story about the bacteria found in the 4-million-year-old Lechuguilla Caves, which have genes that make them resistant to common antibiotics. This is cool but scary: cool because biology, wow! Scary because it's a reminder that a lot of bacteria already have all the tools they need to escape our attempts to get rid of them. Antibiotics were a miracle, no doubt, and they changed the world, but fighting bacterial infections will continue to be a war waged in every generation. Hopefully we'll be waging that war with effective antibiotics, but you never know.

On that note: the graphic novel Surgeon X is a cool comic about post-antibiotic London. It's not perfect, and I'm going to let it play out for a few more issues before I decide whether I'm totally sucked in, but I love the timely concept and the social commentary. Read it and have Thoughts? Let me know!

Very related to antibiotics: yesterday was World Tuberculosis Day. Many of us, me included, think of TB as a disease of the past. Only Victorian ladies in novels get consumption! (Side note - did you guys know that tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion for decades? Looking ill was totally in!) But it's definitely still a very present disease -- 1.8 MILLION people died of TB in 2015, and drug-resistance is really f***ing us over in this case. Luckily we're a lot more knowledgable about what TB is caused by and how to treat it nowadays... no more eating the liver of a wolf boiled in wine! A common treatment of the past was shipping people off to the "fresh air" -- which probably did actually help a lot in some cases. They would travel to places like Colorado (mountain air, fewer people) and live in sanatoriums, where patients lived in semi-isolated huts. This week I learned that many of those huts that were used to house TB patients in Colorado have been turned into tool sheds and art studios! So cool.

And finally: Why surgeons make good artists. George Butler draws surgeons at work and talks about the similarities between art and surgery. Great artists make me jelly.

Cas reads:

Oh hey y'all. Did you need a reminder that coding is the most useful skill you can learn today or tomorrow, but preferably yesterday? Well, let WIRED give you one anyway. Why yes, WIRED, I should be learning to code in my "spare time". Many, many people have told me that programming is the path to the future. Let me complain about this for a hot second: I actually like to code. I've taken a few intro programming classes and I find it fun, satisfying, and completely unapplicable to my day-to-day work. I could 100 percent design a project in my field around messing with with the mass amounts of data available to scientists. I could 200 percent improve my job prospects by doing so. But I work and read all day in order to make sure my project is moving forward and I'll have a satisfying story by the time I'm thinking about graduating... and this doesn't require any computer skills beyond basic command of word-processing and access to the right computer tools. The thought of learning to competently code simultaneously makes me prematurely tired. To be honest, in my free time I'd rather be doing what I am right now: reading random things on the internet and writing about them. 

But yes, coding is the way of the future. So: people who HAVE learned to code when they didn't need to- how did you do it? What motivated you? Was it fun? Tell me your inspiring stories! Somebody give me a good kick in the butt! (I promise I'll thank you later.)

ANYhoo, moving on: National Geographic did an article about how weird small things look. Look, phage! 

And speaking of phage, this is an AWESOME book about them. It's hand illustrated AND free. Download it today! Or buy it for a lot of money... I'm seriously considering it as coffee-table-topping material.

More small things: Ernst Haeckel drew a lot of microscopic animals in the 1800s/early 1900s and MAN are the prints beautiful. He also drew bigger stuff but I like his depictions of the crazy diversity of protozoa best.

Something not so small: the gender bias in academic peer review. Especially in men against women... duh.

Randomness from the week: flat-faced bunnies!  Really cold leaves! Lego tape!

And we're done! Thanks for reading, and keep exploring!

[charly-ra]

Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember (MozCon 2019)

Last year at MozCon, I talked about how as content marketers, we need to grow up and we need to be more accountable. And while we haven’t exactly solved all of our problems, we are seeing some positive results.

According to Point Visible, 70% of marketers are prioritizing content quality over quantity. Even better, 77% of B2B marketers are creating content based on stages of the buyer journey. Those are great stats to see and as content marketers, we are making progress.

The thing is, we can always be better. Whether you’re a content marketer who wants to try something new or an SEO who relies on content to be successful, there are so many things we can do.

So instead of thinking about how we can grow up, I want to think back to what we did as kids – we read. We read things like the Velveteen Rabbit and Where the Wild things are. We read Dr. Seuss and Cinderella. We read these great stories that used words and images to capture our imaginations and connect us to these characters for life.

Now I’m not saying I want everyone to go out and create a classic story, but what I am saying is I want us to think about how we as content marketers can use our storytelling skills to connect people to our brand. To create something that people remember.

Because there are already brands out there doing just that. Take Wegmans for example. Wegmans is a grocery store based out of Rochester, NY that has done an amazing job curating and creating content for social, for email, and for their print magazine.

  The key to all of these things, is they create content their audience cares about. They create content their audience can relate to, that helps solve their problems, and makes their life easier. They create things that are actually memorable.

That becomes our jobs. Our jobs as content marketers, as storytellers, is to create something that does just that. To create something they care about, that reflects their interests, and that connects them to us.

And to do that, we need to make sure we are doing these four things:

Identify Audience Needs

Think Simple

Get Creative

Tell a Story

Identify Your Audience Needs

Let’s be honest, this alone isn’t a new tactic. As marketers, we have to understand who our audience is and what they want. This should always be our goal as marketers but it certainly needs to be our goal if we want to create something our audience will remember. We need to find out who they are, what they care about, and what problems they have. 

Who is your audience? 

To understand who our audience is, we can spend thousands of dollars a month on tools that tell us this, or we can use the ones we already have.

Google Analytics Demographics – It’s not perfect but it will certainly show you some information on who is coming to your site.

Email Database – Analyze your email database to better understand locations and job titles.

LinkedIn Audiences – Location, seniority, job function…LinkedIn is another one that isn’t perfect but it will certainly give you insights into your audience.

SEMRush Display Research – This is a tool I really like. If you are running display ads, you can get insights into who is actually seeing your ads. If you aren’t, try a competitor. You might get some good info along the lines of age, gender, interests, and more.

What do they care about?

When we are trying to identify the needs of our audience, we have to ask ourselves, ‘what do they care about?’ This is where our search prowess comes in and where some of our favorite tools can shine some light:

BuzzSumo – An all-time classic in my book, BuzzSumo’s Influencer Tools show us what people are sharing and what topics they talk about most frequently.

Keyword Everywhere – Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension that shows you the various keywords and suggested keywords around a search. Take a look to see what else people care about.

Kparser – Kparser is another free keyword tool that not only shows you all of the various terms related to your primary term, but it also will show you terms by Google News, Amazon, Youtube, Google Images, and more. It’s a really great way to understand what your audience is looking for across various platforms.

Identifying what our audience cares about isn’t that much different than keyword research or content research. At the end of the day, we want to know what they are looking for.

What problems do they have?

Creating something helpful is key to creating something that’s memorable. Just like how we can use keyword research to understand what our audience cares about, we can use our amazing question tools to find out what problems they have.

SEMRush – One of the things I love about SEMRush is the various functions and tools within the platform. In this case, the topic research tool can prove indispensable. We can identify not only the top headlines dominating search for our industry but we can also identify the questions people are asking. Brilliant!

BuzzSumo – BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer not only gives you questions related to a specific topic but will also group the questions into themes.

Storybase – Storybase is a tool that’s fairly new to me and what I like about it, is it offers topics, questions, and also demographics tied to your queries. Pretty cool stuff at a relatively low cost.

There are certainly more tools that can help us find questions but the message is this —  if we don’t understand who our audience is, we’ll never know what content will resonate with them.

Think Simple 

One of the hang-ups I have with content is the idea that we have to go big. But that’s not true. What we need to be doing is helping our customers, answering their questions, and giving them the things they need.

A brand who does a really great job of this is Summersalt. Summersalt is a swimwear company that promotes inclusivity, body positivity, and environmental awareness. Seems like a lot just to sell suits right? The thing is, they really do tell that story in their marketing. And they do it in a simple way. Here are some images from their Instagram:

They also have what I think is a brilliant, and very memorable piece of content – their swimsuit size finder. Unlike competitors, who have put together long-winded explanations or unhelpful charts, they built a tool that asks you five simple questions. At the end, it not only gives you a size but also recommended swimsuits that would be a good fit.

That is brilliant content and they do it based on your body and your needs!

So how can we keep it simple? There are a few ways:

Get to the point.

Have you ever to find a recipe online? You’ve likely encountered the life story with a recipe at the end. Yes, that story is valuable in connecting with your audience but give users a way to access the recipe right away. Give them what they want.

Forget word count.

Look, I know that we are often fighting the search results. I spend hours analyzing competitor content and SERPs to understand how I can make mine better and that often means making something bigger and better. But it doesn’t mean you have to make everything bigger.

The same thing goes to answering questions. Don’t bury the answer. Whether you are creating a how-to video, a step-by-step guide, or even a comprehensive article, answer the question as soon as possible. Every piece of content doesn’t have to be the biggest. The next time you’re writing, throw your content into a summary tool like eSummarizer to see what you can get rid of.

Be helpful.

The content I remember is content that is helpful. The Summersalt swimsuit fitting tool isn’t just a cool piece of content, it’s a cool piece of content that’s simple but also helps me figure out what I need.

Think simple means giving your audience what they want in a direct manner.

Get Creative

Creative is hard. As a result, we default to generic images. In fact, according to Venngage, stock photography (40%) and infographics (37%) are the most frequently used visual content. Ugh! Stock images do not equal memorable content.

We want images that connect customers to our brand, inspire them to take action, get their attention, and stand out in a sea of junk.

A couple of months ago I came across this ad on Facebook:

Not only did I stop scrolling but I clicked on the ad. It was colorful, it was fun, and it stood out in my feed. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I was in REI, and what do I see? This same exact coat! The ad was so eye-catching that I remembered the coat, saw it in the store, and even tried it on. That’s the impact visuals can have.

Now, here’s the challenge. Most of us, including myself, see images or videos and think, I don’t have time for this or I’m not a Photoshop expert. The great thing is, you don’t have to be. We now live in a world where technology has made this easy. As Arby’s would say, we have the meats…well, the tools.

A few tools that can make your life easier and help you create better content include:

Pixlr – Pixlr is a photoshop alternative that’s easy to use and great for editing pictures.

Remove.bg – This is one of the coolest tools I have used in the past few months. With Remove.bg, you put in a picture of people, and it’ll remove the background.

Snappa – Similar to a Canva, Snappa can help you create cool data graphics that can be used for just about anything.

Recordit – I love making gifs. They are fun, they catch the eye, and they can drive engagement better than a static image. Recordit is a free tool that will do both screen recordings and gif creation.

Giphy – How about straight-up gifs? The Giphy app allows you to upload photos or videos, and it’ll spit out a gif for you. Easy as pie!

Images play a role in everything we do as marketers. In emails. In print. In search. Go beyond stock images and starting creating something worthwhile. Upping your creative game doesn’t have to be hard and if you really want to make something that your audience remembers, you are going to have to move beyond words.

Tell a Story

I want to circle back to the idea of stories. Because when we are talking about creating something that’s memorable…you need a story. And that can be an image, a video, or just a great story.

Take for example Casie’s Dog Bakery. Casie sells dog cakes and dog treats and she wants to get the message across that dogs love her baked good. What tells a better story?

  or this…

Telling a story doesn’t have to mean writing the next great children’s book. It simply means creating something that allows you to get your story across in a way that people remember and connect with.

Final Thoughts

As content marketers, as SEOs, as digital marketers in general…we should always be evolving. That means taking our content beyond the traditional blog post, taking it beyond stock photos, and creating things that show results. Creating things that stick in people’s heads and make them remember you as the brand that helped them or the brand they trust.

That starts with the four things above and it starts with you. Start trying new things and testing them. Create a gif and test it against the static image. Create a simple FAQ page and see how it performs.

Our job as content marketers is to create content that helps our audience and helps our business. It isn’t magic. It isn’t brand new. It’s simply progress.

  from http://bit.ly/2lCNif2

[stopsubstanceabuse1-blog]

How to Address Family Secrets Without Causing a Rift

New Post has been published on https://www.substanceabuseprevention.net/how-to-address-family-secrets-without-causing-a-rift/

How to Address Family Secrets Without Causing a Rift

Do you keep secrets from your family?

If you’re mentally rifling through all the skeletons in your family closet, you’re definitely not alone. Even those who pride themselves on openness probably have a secret or two that they’re not willing to share — even with the people they hold most dear. From issues as traumatic as sexual violence, to those as relatively mild (but still potentially contentious) as who we vote for, most of us have secrets we’d rather not share with our families.

Keeping certain things to ourselves can be a normal and healthy aspect of privacy. But more serious secrets — those that are motivated by shame, or that could potentially impact a family member’s wellbeing — can haunt families for years and disrupt healthy familial bonds.

But how can we tell the difference between healthy privacy and harmful secret keeping? And if we do choose to open up about tough subjects, how can we preserve our family relationships — if it’s healthy to preserve them at all?

I caught up with Rachel O’Neill, Ph.D., an Ohio-licensed professional clinical counselor and Talkspace therapist, for a conversation about why families keep secrets, and how to talk about the things we’d rather keep secret.

Why Do Our Loved Ones Keep Secrets?

“Every family is different, but I think in general families tend to keep secrets around things that they have some sort of shame associated with,” says Dr. O’Neill. Besides shame, family members can be motivated to keep secrets if they fear that revealing something would upset the family equilibrium or have implications in the broader community.

Some common secrets Dr. O’Neill sees in her practice include gender and sexual identity; physical, sexual, or substance abuse; or even an unpopular political opinion (something Dr. O’Neill says she’s seeing families hide more often in the current political climate). In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Dr. O’Neill also says she’s heard from a number of people who have been inspired to open up about sexual violence they previously kept secret.

In some circumstances, secret keeping isn’t motivated by shame but rather, by the desire to protect someone. This often takes the form of a parent or caregiver trying to protect a child from information they think would be too painful. However, says Dr. O’Neill, this desire to protect can sometimes backfire.

“Oftentimes parents and caregivers tend to try to do what they think is in the best interest of a person, of their child, and I think sometimes that is misguided,” she says, citing examples of parents not telling children they were adopted or not being open with children about the death of a loved one.

In these situations, Dr. O’Neill advises that honesty is the best policy. “The more honest we can become in these family relationships the more we can decrease the long-held stigma and the shame associated with these kinds of secrets.”

Healthy Privacy vs. Harmful Secret Keeping

Not all secret keeping is unhealthy, however. After all, we all have parts of ourselves that we don’t wish to share with anyone else, or parts of ourselves we reserve for spaces outside the family — whether that be the exact details of our voting records or of our sexual escapades.

“When I hear ‘keeping a secret,’ to me there’s that aspect of wanting to rid oneself of it, that idea of keeping this as a burden,” Dr. O’Neill says. On the other hand, she defines privacy as an active choice that the person is okay with. With privacy, says Dr. O’Neill, a person feels “a level of comfort with having decided to not share this information.”

Research backs up this distinction. A recent study found that the psychologically stressful part of secret keeping isn’t actual the act of lying about your secret. Instead, it’s the stress of thinking about the secret so much, and therefore feeling inauthentic. It stands to reason, then, that people who feel comfortable with their secret may obsess about it less.

On the other hand, there are some secrets that definitely shouldn’t be kept. If your secret could negatively impact someone else’s health and safety, it’s important that you come forward. Pressuring someone else to keep quiet about potentially harmful issues is also a major no-no.

According to Dr. O’Neill, this kind of enforced secret keeping unfortunately often occurs around instances of family violence and substance abuse.

“It becomes this network of secret keeping,” she says. “There’s the perpetrator, the person who’s perpetrating the abuse or the substance abuse and there’s those individuals around them who are intent on keeping that information a secret.” This becomes an abusive pattern in which survivors are made to, in Dr. O’Neill’s words, “suffer in silence.”

This is reflected in the statistics about sexual violence. According the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), 2 out of 3 sexual assaults go unreported to the police. Among survivors who didn’t report, 7% said they didn’t want the perpetrator to get in trouble. And overwhelmingly, perpetrators are close to victims, with 33% of rape victims assaulted by an intimate partner and 34% of the people who abuse children are their family members.

The Courage to Open Up

“We tend to make changes in our life when we become uncomfortable with something,” says Dr. O’Neill. She says that people often choose to reveal family secrets when an outside event inspires the revelation, or when it simply becomes too burdensome to keep the secret inside.

This makes sense, considering that secrets can feel like an actual, physical burden. One 2012 study found that people who were preoccupied with secrets perceived hills to be steeper, distances farther, and physical tasks more onerous than those without secrets. The more we think about secrets, the study found, the heavier they seem. That’s why opening up about the secrets that are weighing on us can feel like a literal unburdening.

The Discomfort of Revealing Family Secrets

When family secrets are revealed, however, this sense of unburdening can also be accompanied by serious discomfort, as truths we assumed about the people we’re close to change rapidly. In the wake of such revelations, Dr. O’Neill says, the path to healing depends on what the family members’ previous relationships were like, as well as the nature of the secret.

In situations where the family members have an otherwise good relationship and the secret, though potentially discomfiting, was kept with the best of intentions — for example, an otherwise loving family keeping the real cause of a family member’s death secret with the intention of protecting a child — there is potential for the family members to work through the issues and heal.

In contrast, when the family relationship was already strained or the secret was harmful, like physical or sexual abuse, healing can be much more fraught.

Dr. O’Neill says that it’s best to tailor responses to what impacted individuals want. In cases of violence and abuse, she says, one of the most important things is to remember that the survivor is never responsible for what happened to them and should not have to take on the burden of coming forward if they don’t want to.

“My goal with working with folks is always to help foster a sense of acceptance around what has happened in the past,” she says. “If you choose never to come forward, you’re not responsible for this person continuing to abuse, that’s just simply not fair for a survivor to have to bear that burden.”

Sometimes, healing can best occur by taking the person who offended out of the picture entirely, i.e., removing them from your life. In any case, O’Neill says it’s most important to first prioritize the needs of the survivor and then, if they wish, engage with the family unit.

Healing Relationships

While it’s definitely possible to heal individually and as a family after the revelation of a disruptive secret, it’s best to establish an atmosphere of healthy honesty in the family from the beginning.

Many issues that were once stigmatized, like adoption, divorce, and LGBT sexuality, are becoming increasingly accepted. Talking about these issues with openness and honesty right off the bat helps affirm to all family members that their experiences aren’t shameful, but are normal and valued.

In these situations, honesty is a form of love. When it comes to preventing abuse, experts advise being open about healthy sexuality and teaching children healthy boundaries beginning from early childhood.

By cultivating honesty within families, we can prevent issues from happening or deal with them in a healthy manner when they do arise. Of course, if you do still choose to keep some things within the bounds of healthy privacy, we promise we won’t tell grandma about your new boyfriend.

Source: https://www.talkspace.com/blog/2018/11/addressing-family-secrets/