**** religious triggers ****
As I shared previously, I am working through a Bible study right now written by Beth Moore called Breaking Free. Two days of the study during Week 5 are devoted to healing from child victimization. Because I have many readers who are Christians, I thought I would share some of Beth Moore’s insights on forgiveness from a (helpful) Christian perspective.
Beth Moore does not share the details of her child victimization publically, but she has shared that, by the time she first learned what a virgin was, she was ashamed to know that she was not one. She has also shared that the person who raped her was a male authority figure who should have protected her, not harmed her. While I do not agree with everything that worked for her, I think most of what she wrote was helpful. This is definitely the best Christian writing I have seen for addressing healing from child abuse.
Of course, Beth Moore addresses the topic of forgiveness, which is a very touchy subject among child abuse survivors. I really liked what she had to say about it:
Forgiving my perpetrator didn’t mean suddenly shrugging my shoulders, muttering, “OK, I forgive,” and going on as if those things didn’t happen. They did happen. And they took a terrible toll on my life. Forgiveness involved my handing over to God the responsibility for justice. The longer I held on to it, the more bondage strangled the life out of me. God saw every bit of it, and He can far better represent me and uphold my cause. Forgiveness meant my deferring the cause to Christ and deciding to be free from the ongoing burden of bitterness and blame. ~ p. 112
While I would word my perspective on forgiveness differently, I think we are pretty much saying the same thing. Forgiveness has nothing to do with “forgetting” or letting my abuser off the hook. Instead, it is about choosing to stop nursing the bitterness as a gift to myself. By making this choice, I stopped thinking about my abusers so much and also stopped making them a central focus of my life. I was able to use that freed up energy to focus on my own healing and my own life.
She says that the “memories are still painful to me at times, but they no longer have power over me” (p. 112). This has been my experience as well. While I still have the memories of all of the abuse and can now access them at will, they don’t rock me in the way that they once did. They are a fact of my history, but they are not who I am.
Like many of you, I have also heard many unhelpful things about forgiveness from Christians, including from the pulpit. It is refreshing to hear a more realistic view from a prominent Christian teacher who has actually lived through child abuse and can speak from her own personal experience.
Beth Moore also equates the battle of healing from childhood abuse to the battle that David experienced when battling Goliath. She does not minimize the devastation of child abuse at all, which is also very refreshing to read.
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For me, a part of forgiveness requires that you experience the depth of the emotions and accept what has happened; otherwise, you don’t really know what you are forgiving. You need to own the experience in order to hand it over to God and truly forgive the other person. Just my thoughts
so agree! Forgiving requires knowing and accepting and feeling. And while I keep the knowledge I handed the responsibility( for justice) over to my Higher Power.
I have noticed that when ever the term forgive is coupled with the pronoun you rather than I do not buy it. As in you need to … or you can …
When someone says or writes “I” than I can listen.
In a way therapy for me is about my relationship with my therapist being more important than my relationship with my abusers. Important meaning my life while in therapy will have more of an effect on my life in the now and in the future than the relationship with my abusers.
This is a transference thing not a substitute. She cares about me she does not care for me.
I have not forgiven my abusers. I take what happened less personalty in a way in that what they did was all about them and nothing to do with me.
I also have come to understand that abusers are all of humanities responsibly. This helped with the vengeance part. If I were to stop any abuse it would have the same effect as if I stopped my abusers from continuing.
I just wishi I could actually feel anger and hatred toward my abusers….at this point I just feel numb about it and frankly don’t even believe most of the stories the other parts of me tell. I can’t forgive anyone until I actually feel what it was they did to me. I suppose I could actually get angry at them for what they did to the little me, but since the little me’s are actually me and I don’t feel any of it I continue in this insane circle that I cannot seem to get out of.
barbi
Good luck with it all Barbi…
I like Elaine’s response. She makes very good points.
Peace,
mia
Barbi- As far as your not being able to feel your anger. You will in time. Of course you can’t feel it as long as it doesn’t seem like it happened to you. I hope you have a good therapist who can gradually teach you how to get in touch with those other parts of yourself. It can be done. You can logically/mentally own that they are part of you, and the abuse also happened to you, but you will not start experiencing it that way until you have a greateer level of permeability in what is shared between the person you perceive yourself to be, and the other parts of you that seem “not you.” A good therapist can teach you how.
As far as the “forgiveness” thing goes. It really amounts to a commitment to “not let the bastards win.” The abusers have already stolen enough from you. Deciding to not give them any more power to take things from you- by not having to invest your energy in them- by fearing them, by zapping your energy through submerged memories, by stealing quality of life from you. THAT is really forgiveness. It is saying “No more!” – Then moving ahead toward your own wellness leaving the abusers to their own devices and to divine justice.
If you can’t find anger over what they did to you in the past. Find your anger over what they are still doing to you, by robbing you of quality in your life. Then let your anger motivate you to get well.
Thank you Elaine, that does make sense. I guess since I became co-conscious I thought all the walls between the different parts of myself were already down. But now I see what you are saying is that the logical thinking walls are down but the emotional feeling walls are still not as permeable as they need to be.
Yes I do have a good therapist, very skilled and although he is not an expert on DID he still knows a tremendous amount and has worked with others with this. He’s also willing to send me to an expert if I would like, but my therapuetic relationship is well established with him so at this point I will stay with him.
Now that I think about it, what you are saying is very similar to things he has beensaying to me for some time, I just haven’t heard it in the same way.
Thanks for the advice…..and thank you Faith for continuing to go over issues many times, sometimes it takes lots of different ways of hearing things before it finally “clicks”.
barbi
I like the idea of turning over responsibility for justice to a higher power / God one trusts, and releasing oneself from that overwhelming responsibility and obsession.
I think part of this type of turning over is also doing what God (or in my case, Goddess) calls me to do after I turn it over. It is possible for some people, after turning over to God the responsibility for justice, God would guide them to take their abusers to court, disclose, speak publicly or something similar, and guide them through that process, which I would view as part of God being responsible for justice as well. It’s a subtle distinction.
There is a Christian quote I like “God has no hands but our hands to do his work today”. I’m not Christian, but in my own faith I believe something similar, that the Goddess will guide me and help me in what I am meant to do.
I also like: “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past” – Lily Tomlin.
I’d totally agree that taking some sort of action is important in breaking free from the power abusers once had over you. This type of “forgiveness” that has to do with detaching from trying to punish or control how it turns out for the abuser is for the sake of not having your energies consumed by it anymore. It doesn’t have anything to do with letting someone off the hook or enabling then to avoid consequences. There is a wonderful quote from the Bhagavad Gita (Hindu holy book)- “Do your Duty with Faith in God, without attachment to the fruit of the action.” the concept is called Nishkamakarma. It essentially means, do what you are called to do, and trust God for the outcome. There is so much that happens in the course of divine justice. We don’t always see all the peices, but we can trust that what we have helped put in motion through following what God/Goddess is leading us toward, that God/Goddess is faithful to complete.
That which to put in motion is very individualized. Sometimes all the abusers are no longer alive, but a person can speak out, and become part of the healing of others through sharing what they have been through. I have known people who have only remembered their abuse long after the fact, and can’t “prove” anything in order to take it to court, but they have still gone and met with a victim’s advocate so they could tell their stories to someone connected with law enforcement. They tell their story, and a report is made and documented. If the abuser is still around, their info is put in a computer file- so if there is ever another report about that person there is already something on file.
To me it seems like a two step process, and I don’t know that it matters which step comes first. The type of “forgiveness” that we have been talking about is a way of disconnecting yourself from continuing to be abused by the past. The “doing something” is how you regain your power and get past that feeling of helplessness.
A (Helpful) Christian Perspective on Forgiveness after Child Abuse ……
I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog
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