For similar reasons to why ALL should write a book…
Protect Others via:
Protect Others: Tell Your Story (Please Help Break the Silence-Shame-Intimidation-Exploitation CYCLE …)
How can telling your story, as one friend told me, protect others? I suppose that as one progresses, and learns
how to overcome, those lessons learned along the way can help prevent that same harm from befalling other
vulnerable people. But how?
1.
Well, if the first childhood memory is one of sad anger, of loss, the green Caddy driving to NYC may impede, for a
lifetime, that love of large cars and of the Big Apple that so many Americans seem to boast. If that memory is
tied to a borough where the kids rejected you, and your next memory was of being locked in a room, at 4 years of
age, hearing your mothers screams as furniture fell and things broke in the living room, as her boyfriend beat
her, how do you use this to protect others?
By coming up with a plan for teaching children to protect themselves from silence, from shame, intimidation and
from exploitation, via:
A New Adult Rite of Passage as part of the larger context of needed societal and cultural changes.
2.
If one was sexually abused at 6, and told not to tell, how do we protect children from parents who can protect
neither their children nor themselves? -Teach kids that Silence = Death, because silence can lead to
suicide, after a few years.
3.
If one took refuge from bullies by running and retreating, how to undo that shame? -Teach kids that we ALL have a
right to our personal boundaries, to equal bodily respect, and to equal human dignity.
4.
If one was refused self-defense because “young ladies don’t fight” but they can come home in bruises that will be
ignored, how does one learn to stand up to intimidation? -Teach kids that if you stand up, you might or might not
be hurt today, but if you cower you WILL agonise for years to come.
5.
If one was physically and sexually abused as a teenager, with all the blame heaped on a 15 year old, how to learn
not to exploit nor be exploited? -Gandhi and Frankl cite adult choice and power: UpHold your Values and Create.
6. Only then is one ready to be An Adult:
This is the real answer to Millie’s question,
and a summary of the Adulthood thread: see Phase II of Project Do Better.
ShiraDest,
April, 12015 HE (Holocene/Human Era)
Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better 
Thanks to Rachel for her support in this regard. ShiraDest, May, 12015 HE
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Something that might help CristinaBurcus (Ra and Her Stories): When I first began substitute-teaching, my friends told me that I had the habit of saying things, even statements I thought were ‘firm’ as questions. For example: ‘Please get out your notebooks’ with the tone of voice and timber/inflection UP on the word notebooks, which women tend to do, but men do not, is actually just like putting a question-mark into your voice, and confuses the kids.
(actually, it only confuses the ‘good’ kids -the other kids know that that means that you lack self-confidence, and they can do what they want…).
It took me reading lots of books, observing lots of ‘tough’ teachers, and learning to walk up and down the class-room to get out of that habit. I also found that when I was too tired to deal with my partner’s kids, all I had to do was say ‘No Fencing, no snow-ball fight tomorrow.’ and the boy I ‘lived with’ 4 days of the week would get his sister to behave!
But he knew my tone of voice: if I was not tired, it came out differently, and he would just look at me and laugh, because he knew I liked fencing and snow-ball fights too! So he only listened when I was tired enough to make it stick.
Moral of the story: Flatten your voice to Make It Stick.
Shira.
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