#shareyourflame

This trauma causes the disconnect and lack of tools we need to mentally gauging truly “knowing better.” Our communities and often our justice systems help cripple this more in cultural conviction and prejudice, making “toxic norms” feel ok. Allowing the cycle of abuse and trauma to be repeated and untreated. 

We must learn to now view DV as “mental injury” with a net result of physical and sexual injury. Now placing the mental injuries as one of the primary objectives of care for ALL sides of DV violence victims, survivors, and abusers. 

A large part of my own DV recovery and healing was redirecting the energy that was wasted in thinking in the past and the past actions I could’ve made. They become too many to count, and too many things to give my power once more. With that energy I decided to redirect my focus to helping others in the multiple stages I seen my children and I. With this energy I forged a new spirit of determination allowing me to create Helping Others Onward HOO. Continually making forward movement to enact meaningful change for DV and all types of traumas, I’ve devoted my focus to healing trauma wombs through reforms and meaningful change. Here my ultimate goal is not only providing to help my children not carry any toxic cycles and maintain a well rounded healthy life after DV, but making this reality available to other families, specifically children after exposure to DV and trauma.

Helping Others Onward (HOO)’s mission is to create Domestic Violence (DV) reform in order to obtain meaningful change in mindset and within broken structures, in all levels of our Justice system. We seek reform in our courts, police departments, legislative processes related to DV, and within community resources that are not unified in the way DV is approached and treated. Our justice system lacks education and procedures centered around mental health and trauma. This is often the gateway behavior to more physically violent crimes.  To do this, we must change “Domestic Violence Culture.” This will allow us to better implement preventive care, exits, and treatment in all sectors of domestic violence. HOO will refer to ALL domestic “abuse” as domestic violence (DV). Largely because the face of DV should be changed and perceived as it truly is. DV is injury! DV injury is, and should be recognized as, an injury to every aspect of the victim’s physical, mental, and emotional being. Domestic violence is “the repeated use of forceful physical or psychological behavior for the purpose of coercion without regard for the individual rights of another.” This is the definition we have to recognize on a national level to better care for the cause and continuation of domestic violence.

In changing this identity, we should also explore the stereotypes and stigmas attached to the words “Domestic Violence.”  We have to release so many unhealthy notions and stop seeing DV as “a woman’s problem.”  We need to see the umbrella term for what it is and how it hides countless disgraceful acts within. We need to acknowledge ALL the abuse, trauma, and crimes that encompass domestic violence. Child abuse, molestation, elder abuse, animal abuse, and so many more unspoken traumas are experienced within the realm of domestic violence but are rarely acknowledged as such. It is time to expose the monster we’ve allowed to continuously run rampant in our communities. By definition, DV is an epidemic and one that’s gone untreated for too long.

In HOO’s current efforts to create more meaningful change in Domestic Violence (DV) and trauma we are pushing for awareness to create a greater in-depth explanation of the way we would like to see people, communities, and government approach future processes.  In doing so, we can cut through the toxic culture of DV and start to rebuild broken systems that are currently only treating symptoms and effects. We hope to begin treating the actual causes of domestic violence. We want to begin setting the foundation for healthy treatment and resolutions based around the human psyche and trauma.  Creating a new approach based around the psychology of trauma allows us to officially classify DV as a behavioral/mental health matter and construct treatments around brain functions as they relate to trauma.  Making acknowledgments of exposure to injuries and trauma of any kind, especially those unseen psychologically, that set the stage for all types of injuries especially physical and/or sexual. Prioritizing DV as a mental injury, as opposed to being looked to as a physical matter or a matter of physical displacement will allow us to actually treat DV opposed to the symptoms and effects of DV. This newly adopted approach will allow for actual recovery processes.