Safety in an Unsafe World
A sexual abuse survivor’s journey.
By Anonymous
Lies
It’s amazing the lies you believe in order to protect yourself. For me, those lies were about other people and God, but they were mostly about myself.
I took comfort in the belief that I was unlovable. It provided a seemingly reasonable explanation for why I was being abused. I was interfered with by an older male relative. It started when I was five and didn’t stop until I was 15.
If I’d believed that what he was doing was wrong, then it would have raised the question, “Why didn’t my parents intervene?” And if I’d accepted that my parents should have stopped it, my world would have become immediately unsafe. I mean, if you can’t trust the two people who are meant to love and protect you, then whom can you trust? So I chose to believe that I deserved everything that happened to me.
Consequences
As a result, I isolated myself from others. I mistrusted people. I developed the ability to make acquaintances, but kept everyone at arm’s length. I dressed in baggy clothing. During my teenage years, I was terrified of anyone finding me attractive. Every time I found out that a guy liked me, I’d feel increasingly ill and dirty. By the end of three days, those feelings would become so intense I often felt suicidal. I always felt I’d done something unwholesome to provoke the attention.
I deliberately put myself in situations where I was at risk of harm – at screwed-up parties, accompanying virtual strangers back to their homes, walking alone at night through dark places. To this day, I still can’t explain why I put myself in harm’s way.
I attracted predators too. When I was 16, I had a boss who used to grab me from behind. I would just freeze up, unable to speak. I eventually walked off the job.
A destructive vow
I also made a subconscious vow that would drive a wedge in my relationships with other people. I promised myself that I’d never need anyone and would never allow myself to get too attached. This affected all of my relationships, but particularly the way I viewed men. A part of me believed that if I were in a relationship with a guy, he’d only wound me. The only way to prevent that was to never enter into a relationship in the first place.
Yet a part of my soul yearned to be valued, cherished and accepted. As hard as I tried, I could not deaden that thirst.
In my late teens and early 20s I stopped avoiding guys. As my hunger for acceptance and affirmation grew, I began looking for ways to feed it. My ability to emotionally dissociate myself from my body made it possible for me to have short-term trysts with a number of men. I began to dress provocatively and to flirt. I enjoyed the sense of power it seemed to give me. At the same time, it made me feel cheap and emptier than before, so to dull those feelings, I drank heavily. The suicidal feelings resurfaced. I felt that the only way to make them go away was to make myself emotionally numb and deaden all desire for any sort of relationship.
The prospect of a romantic relationship remained threatening. So I told myself that I was defiled because of what had happened and that no decent man would want me anyway. To believe otherwise was to open myself up to possibilities I’d never really contemplated and to a future I could not control. I felt safer with the familiar – hating myself, seeing myself as cheap and believing that others saw me the same way too.
A ray of hope
And yet God was bringing into my life people who genuinely cared for me and were trying to break through the rock hard exterior I’d created. I began going to counselling with a pastor, who had suspected for months that I’d suffered abuse. It was during that period I went towards the opposite extreme in the way I portrayed myself. I covered up as much as possible. While I no longer dressed in a masculine way, I dressed to get as little attention as possible. I decided to never smile at a man. I was constantly anxious about appearing too friendly around men, because I didn’t want to give “come on” messages. But in my own guarded way, I allowed friendships to slowly form. During that period at different times, a few men at my church and work expressed interest in me. Each time, their interest made me feel ashamed and guilty and drove me towards feeling suicidal again.
I believed there was a God. I’d been trying to follow God since I was 14, although it was often one step forward, two steps back. Yet accepting that what happened to me was wrong and that I didn’t deserve it was causing another crisis of faith: why didn’t God stop it? Where was God when it was happening? How could a loving God allow such evil to occur? And how could I now trust him as a result?
I still don’t have the answers to that. But I do know one thing. God wasn’t removed from my suffering. Many a time I’ve felt the Holy Spirit reveal to me a sense of God’s anguish, his grief, over what happened to me. That may not answer questions about justice and fairness, but it says in the Bible that God is just and fair and that the corruption and suffering in the world won’t last forever. So with nothing to lose, I tried to seek the God of the Bible and to believe his promises. And I can say this –
all the psychiatric sessions, positive thinking strategies and counselling therapies alone could not bring me to the place where I am now; without God challenging me, comforting me, speaking to me in my brokenness and bringing quality people in my life
– without all those things and without God, I am convinced I would still be an angry, bitter, fearful person. But I am not. I am on a path to freedom.
Forgiveness
For many years, I lived in denial about the effect the abuse had on me. I’d always thought it didn’t affect me, because at surface level, I wasn’t angry at the perpetrator. I didn’t realise that the reason I wasn’t angry at him was because I blamed myself for what happened. Acknowledging that I was a victim was terrifying because it meant admitting that I’d had been powerless. In many ways, I preferred to believe what had happened was my fault because it gave me a sense of control. I could not cope with the thought of not having control and being vulnerable.
It took me months of counselling before I could concede that the abuse had affected me. Suddenly I was confronted with the reality that part of my childhood had been stolen from me. The grief I felt was crippling. For the first time, I also felt angry at the perpetrator, because I could see that what had happened to me wasn't my fault.
I began looking through books on sexual abuse. Some were Christian books, others weren't. Many of the Christian books I looked at said that I had to forgive the perpetrator. The Bible, which I upheld as the manual for my life, said I had to freely forgive. This caused a huge crisis of faith. How could I forgive something so terrible? Didn't forgiving him mean that he got off scot-free, never to answer for what he'd done? On one level, I wanted to see him pay. On the other level, I cared for him because he wasn't just a stranger off the street. He had always been part of my life.
I began to resent him to the point of sometimes hating him. At one level, I wanted to secretly forgive him in my heart and just move on and forget about the past. On another level, I knew I had to confront him. But the prospect of doing so, and having him potentially laugh at me, made me deeply fearful. Eventually, I did confront him and ask for an apology. He denied it happened and accused me of being disturbed and imagining things. That was another blow to me and left me shaken for days. However, I felt a sense of release because I'd had the courage to confront him.
I've been able to forgive the perpetrator since I've realised that forgiveness doesn't mean that what happened was acceptable. Nor does it mean that it was my fault. In forgiving the perpetrator, I'm acknowledging that he did the wrong thing. It also means that I'm actively choosing to no longer harbour ill will towards him. I've also learnt that forgiving the perpetrator also doesn't mean that you need to trust that person. My fear of him is gone but I'm cautious of him. I probably always will be.
Forgiving the perpetrator involved a crisis of my will, and it took years before the feelings of bitterness and anger towards him went away. But from the moment I decided I would forgive him, I felt this incredible sense of freedom. I am convinced that I would not have had the strength, courage, compassion and grace to forgive him and confront him, without God active in my life.
I have forgiven my parents for their complicity and neglect and am working to rebuilding my relationship with them.
I have forgiven God. It was something I needed to do. I was able to forgive him because he forgave me first – for ignoring him, for turning away from him, for turning towards destructive sources of comfort when he stood before me with outstretched arms, for relying on defence mechanisms long after I had other options.
This year, a couple of guys at church expressed interest in me. It was completely unsettling. I immediately felt unsafe again. Truth be told, my immediate impulse was to shave my head and dress in baggy clothes. It wasn’t until days later that I realised how far I’d come. Despite my immense discomfort, I realised that I no longer felt suicidal. Their interest in me didn’t make me feel ashamed of myself, didn’t make me feel dirty, didn’t make me doubt my self-worth. That is a huge step for me. If you’d told me all those years ago that I would one day be living without those self-destructive responses, I would have thought you were lying.
Lessons and truths
I’ve since learnt one thing about the world and about safety: the world is NOT safe. But we don’t make it any safer for ourselves or other people distrusting others, isolating ourselves and relying on our own paltry defence mechanisms to pull us through. Safety can only be found in the arms of God. But that’s not to say we don’t need other people. We sorely do.
My ability to trust others has come from relationships with people who have proven worthy of my trust, and above all, from my relationship with God. Both have required me to step outside of my comfort zone and take risks. At every step of my on-going emotional recovery, God has proven himself more trustworthy and sufficient for me than I could ever have imagined.
A few years ago, I took part in a course for sexual abuse survivors. A co-facilitator of the course showed me this passage from the Bible:
Forget the former things;
Do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
And streams in the wasteland.
(Isaiah 43:18-19)
Through thick and thin I have clung to those words and when everything seemed desperate and hopeless, I have kept repeating them. It reminds me that Jesus makes us new creations - “The old has gone, the new has come.” And that if we allow God into our lives and believe him and allow the revelation of his overwhelming love to transform us from inside out, he will prove just how faithful and loving and powerful he really is. He is the reason for my hope. Every good thing in my life is because of him. I have come this far because of and him and I cannot imagine a future without him.
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