The Children's Advocacy Center of Jackson County

Category: To Matter

  • Why it Matters

    This is a post by Randy Ellison, author of the book — Boys Don’t Tell: Ending the Silence of Abuse. Randy is also Board President of  Oregon Abuse Advocates & Survivors in Service (OAASIS)

    Why does what happened to me matter? Why does telling my story matter? Why does your story matter? What difference does it really make?

    Why does it matter forty years later that my minister sexually abused me? Well for starters it impacted everything I did or didn’t do. When we live in total denial of major trauma that happened to us in childhood, our entire reality is distorted.

    Because I had never spoken of what happened to me, every decision I made in life was informed by the trauma I suffered as a child. Technically I was a survivor, but as long as I held on to the toxic stress of child abuse, I was giving victim reactions to a lot of the input that came my way. It was not a choice I made, it was programmed into my brain to respond to people and situations as though they might be a threat.

    My quality of life suffered immeasurably, and over time I became just plain tired of trying to hold it all. I do not believe one can attempt to recover from child sex abuse to please or satisfy someone else. You have to want it or need it for yourself, more than the perceived safety of keeping the secret, with the pain locked inside.

    So as I started my therapy I had to learn to put health ahead of secret keeping. It took effort and intensity to break through my mind’s defenses and the shame that guarded my secret. To be honest, in my case it probably took a year before I realized how much others really meant to me. After a life of keeping everyone at a distance, when I started showing up, I found a whole new world open to me. As I learned to be present with others I was finally able to give and receive love.

    Reporting my abuser mattered. The places he had been a minister were notified so they could look for others that might have been victims and needed help. The faith community became aware of what had happened in their building and had the opportunity to discuss what they needed to do to protect children and work for prevention. In creating a safe environment for kids, everyone benefits.

    Telling your story matters more than you could ever imagine. It gives people you have never met the strength to share their own story. And the more we share our stories, the more we heal, systems change and our communities heal. As survivors, telling our story first changes our lives, and then it gradually moves outward through our love ones in an ever widening circle.

    Children’s Advocacy Center intervenes in this process for kids that have been abused and focuses on helping the child recover. What matters most is preventing abuse from happening at all. But until we are able to do that, we need CAC to help the healing begin as soon as possible. Help a child heal today.

    Imagine a world without child abuse. Together we make it happen. It matters.

    To find out more about Randy Ellison and his book, Boys Don’t Tell: Ending the Silence of Abuse, visit: http://www.boysdonttell.com/

    Randy Ellison
    Randy Ellison

  • You Matter!

    CAC Board Member, Mark Huddleston
    CAC Board Member, Mark Huddleston

    This is a guest post by Children’s Advocacy Center Board Member, Mark Huddleston.

    You matter!  In fact, if it weren’t for you, and people like you, our Children’s Advocacy Center would not exist today.  Some people think that our CAC gets the majority of its funding from grants, foundations and government assistance.  The reality is that we depend very much on the generosity of people and businesses from our own community.

    As the recently retired district attorney for Jackson County, and a long-time board member of the CAC, I’d like to share a little bit about how our Center came to be.

    The first CAC was started in Huntsville, Alabama in 1986 by then DA Bud Cramer.  The philosophy behind CACs is to change how the system works so that it is designed with child abuse victims in mind.

    In Jackson County, our CAC has been in existence for over 22 years.  The process for looking at the creation of a CAC came about through the JC Child Abuse Task Force.  That was a group of professionals who worked with kids, and which had largely been focused on training issues.   In 1987, Josephine County had gotten a large grant to build the first CAC in Oregon.  Thinking that we didn’t want Josephine County to get too far ahead of Jackson County, the Child Abuse Task Force began looking at the feasibility of creating a center of our own.  However, at the time, no other large grants were available, so we started on a shoestring.  The first step was to incorporate with the Sec. of State, and form a 501 C3 non-profit corporation with the IRS.  We started with grants from what was then the Jackson County Junior Service League and the Ben B Cheney foundation that totaled just over $20,000.

    With that money in hand, we found a small house at 816 West 10th street that was available for sale for $43,000.  Since we didn’t look like a good bet for financing at that time, we needed assistance to secure a mortgage.  That help came from the City of Medford, and from Jackson County, each of which agreed to guarantee the balance on the loan if we were unable to pay it off.  The purchase was made in December of 1990.  For the next year, we spent every weekend, and many weekdays working on the remodel of that old home.  It was stripped to the studs, and slowly was turned into a modern children’s advocacy center.  The work was done by volunteers mostly: from Kiwanis, St Mark’s Church, the Moose, Elks, boy scouts and many others.  Donations of materials and supplies came from Kogap Lumber, Hughes Plywood, and many other local businesses.  We opened our doors for business in April of 1991.  We could not have pulled it off without yeoman’s work from Bruce Abeloe, a Medford architect, who acted as our general contractor, and who spent most of his Saturdays for a year helping to direct activities at the site.

    I really think the fact that we didn’t have a big grant to simply build ourselves a new center, turned out to be a good thing in the long run – because it meant that we had to come to the community for support.  And we have had great support from our community ever since!

    That’s what I mean when I say you matter.  In fact, everyone matters when it comes to kids!

    The Children’s Advocacy Center is proud to be a participant in #GivingTuesday on December 3rd. #GivingTuesday is a movement to create a national day of giving to kick off the giving season on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

    You can make a donation to the Children’s Advocacy Center this holiday season at: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/youmatter/

  • The Power of Mattering

    This is a guest post by Ashland, Oregon teacher/facilitator, Marla Estes, M.A. of the School of the Examined Life.

    Some of us have a problem with the word “love.” First of all, it has many meanings and connotations. The Greeks have four words for love. Eskimos are said to have 100 words for snow; there’s an argument that we should develop as many for love.  And because the word love is overused, it’s become diluted. For some, it has been tainted by past experiences. Further, the word love can become confused with other things, like needing something from someone.

    A few years ago, one of my students shared that she felt she needed to know she mattered. I had a “aha” moment; I could feel the visceral effect that the words “You matter” had on me, much different than “I love you.” It felt clearer and cleaner, more direct, less nebulous.

    Sometimes loving includes ambivalence. We often have mixed feelings towards our loved ones, the result of the natural, very human, occurrence of friction in our relationships. But, at least to me, “you matter” doesn’t fluctuate.

    The dictionary says that mattering is “To be of consequence, significance, importance, of substance.”

    Where love can be ambivalent, mattering is clear. I feel it or not. Where anger, hurt, or disappointment may eclipse feelings of love, I can still feel the “mattering.” I can know that someone matters to me, is important and significant, no matter what ebb and flow might be occurring between us.  They have substance, and that they matter to me is validation that their essential existence has a place with me.

    It seems, too, that mattering can be felt in a more global way, less personal. In some of my large classes, I don’t know every student personally or even by name. But I know that they matter to me, and I know that I matter to them. Whether I say it out loud or not, I feel it and I believe it’s felt by them too. I wouldn’t say that I love them, though mattering seems like a nuance of love.

    But don’t take my word for it. I invite you to experiment in your own life: say it to others when you genuinely mean it, feel it (even if you don’t say it), and let yourself take in, really take in, that you matter to others. Let me know what happens.

    You can find out more about Marla Estes and the School of the Examined Life at: www.marlaestes.com.