anon1922

I'll keep that in mind, thanks. I just happen to have a name that, as far as I've been able to tell for decades, uniquely identifies me in the world (due to unusual spellings). And after many years of a very slow crawl through the justice system without the job, I have long lost any kind of savings (and would be homeless if not for the support of a couple people around me).

The top google results for my name - even with a usual expected typo I get, lands on articles online from the day of the arrest. Only reporting on the arrest itself, therefore not declaring the guilt, but it hardly matters to any reader or automated tools that copy those articles over and over again on random blogs. It's a terrifying ride going forward, no matter how much I figure out healing and therapeutic tools.

Not all prison sentences are the same. I am in a trial case for possession of illegal pornography (yes, that..). My name came out in the media on the day of my arrest, and society has already concluded the trial years before it is scheduled to take place. Lost the tech-related job, had to move out, lost all social interactions, etc. I've had severe mental health issues and a very difficult past so I had always been searching for therapy without much success, but that made it even harder.

On the plus side, all these years I've put to some use in learning that if nobody can help you with therapy you can still build it back up yourself. Pick from all the toolsets of DBT, CBT, read with a critical mind zen or buddhist writings, use the time to figure out what healing and coping are and how to put it in practice at every moment, and moment-to-moment. And I've only done all of that because when all things fell apart a couple people still stood by me and I figured I couldn't trust myself a whole lot more than I could trust their hearts, so I put in the work.

Doesn't exactly matter though, because prison will hit like a truck even though I was socially sentenced years ago, and pretty much every single program I've ever heard of for people "from prison" would use murder as the paramount example, but nobody will touch my kind of conviction with a ten foot pole.

All the sexual offenders I've been in group therapy with were either leaning on secrecy (jobs that don't do background checks, their names having remained undisclosed to the public, etc) or they were at the end of their rope. I have a couple people in my life who love me and am thankful for their help, but I very much suspect I'll fall in the latter category when justice officially passes over me.