I will try to avoid avoiding writing. My procrastination is maddening as well as frustrating.

During this pandemic, while children are isolated with abusive parents/parent or with a sexual abuser which may be a sibling or caretaker, many children have more to fear than the virus. It is a pandemic all its own, and most children have no place to turn for help.

“Research on the effects of early maltreatment tells a different story: that early maltreatment has enduring negative effects on brain development. Our brains are sculpted by our early experiences. Maltreatment is a chisel that shapes a brain to contend with strife, but at the cost of deep, enduring wounds. Childhood abuse isn’t something you “get over.” It is an evil that we must acknowledge and confront if we aim to do anything about the unchecked cycle of violence in this country.”

—Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, Scientific American

“There are hundreds of thousands of children like the ones I am about to describe, and they absorb enormous resources, often without appreciable benefit. They end up filling our jails, our welfare rolls, and our medical clinics. Most of the public knows them only as statistics. Tens of thousands of schoolteachers, probation officers, welfare workers, judges, and mental health professionals spend their days trying to help them, and the taxpayer pays the bills.

The Long Term Effects Of Incest

The results were unambiguous: Compared with girls of the same age, race, and social circumstances, sexually abused girls suffer from a large range of profoundly negative effects, including cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, high rates of obesity, and selfmutilation. They dropped out of high school at a higher rate than the control group and had more major illnesses and health-care utilization. They also showed abnormalities in their stress hormone responses, had an earlier onset of puberty, and accumulated a host of different, seemingly unrelated, psychiatric diagnoses.

The sexually abused girls have an entirely different developmental pathway. They don’t have friends of either gender because they can’t trust; they hate themselves, and their biology is against them, leading them either to overreact or numb out. They can’t keep up in the normal envy-driven inclusion/exclusion games, in which players have to stay cool under stress. Other kids usually don’t want anything to do with them—they simply are too weird. But that’s only the beginning of the trouble. The abused, isolated girls with incest histories mature sexually a year and a half earlier than the nonabused girls.

Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clocks and the secretion of sex hormones. Early in puberty the abused girls had three to five times the levels of testosterone and androstenedione, the hormones that fuel sexual desire, as the girls in the control group.

Results of Putnam and Trickett’s study continue to be published, but it has already created an invaluable road map for clinicians dealing with sexually abused girls.” The Body Keeps The Score by Besel Van Der Kolk

Everybody has a story. I am just beginning to understand mine. How many times have I said to myself or another “I don’t know how I got here.” My words were met with exasperation by others, and helplessness by myself, followed closely by deeper depression. It always seemed I was in someone else’s body and they were in control and I was the one to blame. I mindlessly allowed every emotion to guide me, and I continually found myself in places I did not want to be,