haha what

In the past, many students weren’t finishing the FAFSA because it required them to manually enter their parents’ tax data from the previous year. That was a big hurdle, but there were also clear fixes, including making the FAFSA available earlier and requiring parents’ “prior-prior” year tax data instead. The latter allowed more students to utilize the IRS tool, which can automatically answer most of the FAFSA’s tough tax questions.

In 2015, the Obama administration agreed to these fixes, and so far this year, FAFSA completion rates are soaring.

But that progress may be on hold. Students who recently tried to use the IRS tool were told: “This service will be unavailable due to system maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

“System maintenance,” it turns out, wasn’t the full story, either.

Applying For College Aid Just Got Harder

me: hi

Here’s the question I received on the website: “One topic I’d love for you to discuss on your channel someday is recovering from an emotionally abusive, emotionally unavailable, or generally ‘mean’ mother. How do we heal from the hurt of not having a 'good-enough’ mother? As adults, how do we fulfill that longing to be held and hugged and, most importantly, feel fully accepted, understood, and comforted?”

So, how do we heal from an emotionally absent mother? When we don’t have an emotionally available mom it means that we never had a safe foundation or that we could push off from. What I mean by that is that we never felt we could safely and easily go out into the world to try new things because we didn’t know if support would be there when we got back. This can cause us to feel unsure about ourselves and hinder our development.

It can also cause us to struggle in relationships and with wellness. Since no one demonstrated expression of emotions or told us it was okay, we can become very uncomfortable with them, and even seeing them in others can be too much for us. We can also prefer to be isolated because having someone close to us doesn’t feel “normal” or comfortable to us.

Now that we can somewhat understand what our symptoms may be, how do we heal from it? The first step in healing is to start giving a voice to that child self that never had one. This is often called inner child work, and something that I have my clients do is to write a letter from that child self to their adult self. It sounds strange at first, but it can be so very healing.

Self-soothing is another thing we will need to work on, because no one ever soothed us as a child or told us it was going to be okay. In order to heal from that we need to learn how to soothe ourselves and being the re-mothering process. In Jasmine Lee Cori’s book she offers up some “good mother messages” that you probably didn’t hear and encourages you to figure out which ones you need to hear most and learn how to say them to yourself. This could be done through a letter from your adult self to that child self, or simply by practicing self-care.

Lastly, build up your supports. In order to do all of this hard work we are going to need to have people around us to help us get through it. In addition to having a treatment team (therapist, psychiatrist, etc) it’s also very important to have supportive friends too. That way they can check in on you every so often and you can vent to them about this as needed.

I know there is so much more to talk about when it comes to this topic, so let me know in the comments if you want more videos like this!!