By Roni Weisberg-Ross, L.M.F.T., Abuse Topic Expert Contributor

When we think of children who have been sexually abused, we think of fear, anger and violence. Most sexual abuse survivors talk of the terror and disassociation surrounding the abuse. Many still feel that way as adults and don’t enjoy sex now, even in a loving relationship. But there are those who have a more complicated story to tell. These survivors may have hated their abusers but experience an unspeakable shame over the fact that their bodies responded sexually to the abuse. They cannot live with the knowledge that they were sexually stimulated even as they were being raped. Now they are not only healing from the abuse but from the additional belief that they were partially responsible for the abuse – and that they may even have deserved it.

While adult survivors can intellectually understand that as children they were victims of their abuse, they don’t always feel that way. And they certainly can’t accept that fact if they responded sexually. Many of them can’t imagine how a child could respond sexually. So they believe that not only are they dirty, but that they are freaks as well. Yet children do have sexual feelings. Toddlers can sexually arouse themselves. And as they get older, many of them experiment and discover that their bodies respond. The myth that hormonal changes occurring at adolescence are the beginning of sexual feelings is just that, a myth. Read the rest of this entry

A GoodTherapy.org News Summary

The experience of being bewildered or mind-blown in the presence of an attractive woman is something that most men can attest to having had, but many may suspect that the analogy is simply a matter of hyperbole or romantic language. Not so, suggests a recent study performed at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Inspired by a meeting with a woman who effectively made him forget his own home address, the lead researcher set out to discover whether men really do lose their minds in the presence of those they find beautiful –and whether women themselves experience the same issue.

Working with groups of university students, the research team assigned both males and females basic memory tests consisting of strings of letters. After spending a while with the tests, the subjects spent a few moments speaking either with a member of their own sex or with an attractive member of the opposite sex. The participants were then instructed to return to the memory tests, and results were gathered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those males who spoke with attractive females performed far worse than males who spoke with another male. In fact, longer encounters with the females produced proportionately poorer results. Conversely, women did not show a significant decrease in performance regardless of whether they spoke with another woman or an attractive male. Read the rest of this entry

© Copyright 2009 by http://www.GoodTherapy.org Therapist Elm Grove Bureau - All Rights Reserved.

A GoodTherapy.org News Headline

Anorexia may be expected to experience higher rates of occurrence in stressful times, and as the financial crisis tightens its grip on the United Kingdom, stress is certainly a predominant result. Unfortunately, however, this stress seems to be contributing to an alarming rise in the rate of anorexia in British men, as a recent survey suggests. Citing heightened concerns about personal appearance in the wake of job layoffs and decreases in the ability to spend, researchers note that increased mental and physical health services for men struggling with the complications of the financial crisis are needed to help keep men from starving themselves.

© Copyright 2009 by http://www.GoodTherapy.org Therapist Phoenix Bureau - All Rights Reserved.

A GoodTherapy.org News Headline

Issues with rising obesity rates in combination with a growing percentage of people who report feelings of depression and anxiety have been considerable causes for concern in recent years, and analyzing popular trends and shifts in lifestyles may hold the key to understanding how and why the prevalence of basic physical and mental health concerns are changing. Seeking to examine the links between different media usage types and typical physical and mental health issues, the Centers for Disease Control along with two university teams have conducted a study with telling results. Some of the most striking data to emerge from the report has been the associations between adult video game playing and symptoms of physical and mental concerns; females who played video games reported higher rates of depression and poorer physical health, while males exhibited an increase in BMI in groups that participated in gaming. Fostering more balanced lifestyles may lead to an enjoyment of both leisure and personal prosperity.

© Copyright 2009 by http://www.GoodTherapy.org Therapist Coral Gables Bureau - All Rights Reserved.

A GoodTherapy.org News Update

Though there have been many positive trends in the worlds of therapy and mental health treatments over the past few years, not all areas have been improving. Amidst a chaotic and stressful society with increasingly tight demands on youth, eating disorders have become a more prominent issue in the United States and around the world than many had imagined, touching the lives of children –especially adolescent girls– with alarming frequency. A great deal of treatments and programs have been developed in an effort to help curb the development and pervasiveness of anorexia, bulimia, and other sufferances, but one approach proposed by Houston psychotherapist Mary Jo Rapini takes an angle that’s close to home.

Specifically, Rapini’s focus is on the relationship between girls and their fathers. While it’s well known that healthy relationships between children and their parents are essential for positive childhoods and the creation of many proactive behaviors, the specific interactions of fathers and daughters as they relate to issues of body image are less often discussed. Rapini notes that fathers can help their daughters achieve a more positive body image by participating in healthy family activities and being open about the paternal love a father feels for his child. Read the rest of this entry

© Copyright 2009 by http://www.GoodTherapy.org Therapist Culver City Bureau - All Rights Reserved.

By Patti Desert, LCSW-C, CEMDR, CP

Click here to contact Patti and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

Many men have a difficult time recognizing that they are depressed. Men often interpret the word “depression” as describing a state of helplessness or hopelessness, accompanying a general sense of feeling fragile or vulnerable. In many ways our culture conditions men to ignore these states or to experience little awareness of them. Men are taught “boys don’t cry,” and are uniformly rewarded with praise and validation when they “act like a man” instead of tearing up or expressing fear in response to a harshly distressing encounter. After years of this kind of persistent reinforcement these boys grow into men with a form of blindness whereby they often do not see or understand the nature of depression and they can become bound by painfully repetitive behaviors and feelings with no knowledge that they can change.

What men do recognize is the feeling of stress and they will commonly describe situations as stressful with no awareness that those situations are the triggers stimulating an internal state of dis-ease that often leads to depression. The following are some of the less recognizable experiences that men commonly describe as stressful and that are symptomatic of depression. Read the rest of this entry