Perhaps you’ve been struggling for years with feelings that you can’t understand or explain. Here are some of the ways sexual abuse affects a child, which can follow into adulthood. Maybe you’ll see some of yourself in the list below: Self-blame: When children experience trauma, their inherent egocentrism leads them to believe that they...

Sexual abuse has a broader definition than we may assume. There are four types of sexual abuse: verbal, visual, physical and psychological. Verbal sexual abuse includes sexual threats, sexual comments about your body, lewd or suggestive comments and inappropriate sexual conversations with children. Visual sexual abuse includes exposure to pornographic,...

Rough estimates put one in three girls and one in six boys in the US at risk for being sexually abused. But exact figures are hard to assess because most children delay reporting their abuse until later in adulthood or never report it at all. Many of the women I’ve led through healing were not believed when they did report it, or worse, they were...

Okay, that's a really corny title, but I've been thinking for a while about the verse in Song of Solomon which says, "Do not awaken love until it is ready." I think some of us have let our love be awakened too early, or too abruptly, and so it never really woke at all. Several routes to this disastrous awakening exist. The first is obvious:...

You might feel like you’re alone in this, but you’re not. Free email mentoring is available today. Request a mentor.  There are many reasons a woman may experience a diminished sex drive.  Men and women are very different sexually.  Women are emotionally driven while men are more physically driven.  The stage of life can be a factor...

Messages in bottles have been the stuff of folklore for centuries. Dying, desperate sailors have hurled them. Curious children have launched them. Nicholas Sparks wrote a novel based on them, but don’t read it—or watch the movie—unless you already have a prescription for antidepressants. The story I find most interesting about such bottles,...

When there are kids in the house both time and money can seem to be a barrier to romance. When you were dating and in the early years of your marriage the clock didn't seem to race as quickly and the paycheck seemed to go a lot further. Now that you have children who take up much of your time and money, has the romance suffered? Growing up with...