Memories and Abuse part 2
August 25, 2006The book I mentioned yesterday, Memory and Abuse, claims that 1 out of 3 women suffered abuse as children and 1 out 4-10 men suffered abuse as children. I have been astounded by these numbers. As soon as I began to talk, both privately and publicly, about childhood abuse, people started telling me their stories. Some of these stories come from friends that I have known for a long time, but they were just too shamed to tell what had happened to them. Remember, if you can't talk about, it owns you. If the trauma done to you was chronic, repeated over a long period of time, it is very common for you to block it out. Children survive repeated abuse by dissociating from it. Sometimes the memories are vague or can even be completely blocked out for a time. Painful memories trapped in our subconscious cause physical, emotional, and behavioral problems. If we do not have the opportunity to grieve and process the traumas done to us, we may suffer negative consequences indefinitely. If we block out the trauma completely, our healing becomes even more difficult. One of the things we are doing at Wellspring is creating and training prayer teams of 3-5 people to facilitate the healing of people who live chronic physical, emotional or relational pain.
Jack,
Two things that have helped the most in addressing this issue in my life and in helping other friends who were sexually abused are:
1) It is Christlike to despise shame! I don’t understand the full explanation for this, but when this truth was spoken over my life, it shattered a great deal of the stronghold of shame. This comes from the Scripture about Jesus enduring the cross for the joy set before Him, despising the shame…
2) This kind comes out by prayer and fasting. This was actually something I heard you teach years ago, Jack. I don’t remember the whole message, just the part about addressing childhood trauma as the type of oppression that comes out by prayer and fasting.
Also, while you’re actively dealing with shame issues, there is another type of childhood shame that is worse than the shame of sexual abuse. That is the shame of being disowned by a parent. Events have been orchestrated in my life to cause me to press into asking for greater and greater revelation of the Spirit of Adoption to be manifest in my life. About 7 years ago, I heard your friend, Rick, talk about the audible Voice of God. He said that what he was told was personal. Rick heard the Lord tell him to call Him, ABBA. Rick went on to say that you had asked him if he did it, and his answer was something to the effect of not very much. I was amazed that that was what the Lord had told Rick audibly because the Scripture about being able to cry out Abba, Father was something no one ever had to tell me twice about. The Lord had allowed my life to be set up to desperately embrace that aspect of experiencing God from the moment I heard it was possible!
The part of living that out that I was not well prepared for was the way the healing of those wounds would be mirrored in church life. The healing from mother wounds are typically relived and retested in church relationships, while the healing from father wounds seem to be tested through similar situations with religious leadership. Therefore the shame of not having a pastoral covering embrace equipping me for God’s purposes was a source of recurring shame until late this summer. The Lord has allowed some of His best equippers to significantly impact my life from a distance, but I obsessively longed for a local shepherd to embrace equipping me. Early on in the process, the Lord had made me a promise of the role of father being redeemed and the role of brother being redeemed 7 fold in my life. Due to the Lord releasing me into a new dimension of ministry this summer, I was especially whiny about a shepherding void at the personal level. This was settled a few weeks ago in a God encounter. It was a simple, yet profound ‘in my face encounter.’ The Lord, in full Love, with a decided firmness not of this world, proclaimed “I AM your Shepherd! You shall not want.” In that instance of time, every fiber of my being resonated with the reality of the Lord’s proclamation and things that were an issue before were instantly nullified. I still look forward to the father and brother relationships being redeemed but not near as obsessively.
Susan :: August 25, 2006 11:27 PM