June 15, 2015:

I don’t entirely know what to say today. But I know what I need to say will come. Because I know in my heart, there is so very much going on right now. I just wish I was gifted with a better manner of expressing myself. That way, I feel I could explain properly what I am going through, not only for my benefit. But also so that you, my journal, could have a better understanding as to the debilitating challenges that I face daily. So that you, my journal, could gain a clearer insight into the nature of trauma and of the seriousness of these crimes and the complex intricacy of the entirety of the human being. That way I feel you could gain a clearer understanding as to what makes all of us whole creatures. That way, you could experience more compassion, not just for me, but for yourselves. I have said before but will state again because of its importance that you all are brave warriors. I will try my best to convey this to you in what language gifts have been given to me. Let me begin by saying that it has not been a week since I have returned from the Paths of Courage retreat centre. I went there with high hopes, admittedly expecting much from the experience and feeling confident that it would affect me in significant ways. I have documented in previous entries how the experience went and what I did while I was there. One of the experiences we all had the opportunity to go through while we were there was to psychosomatically release our emotions and anger through physically yelling and expressing our feelings. This may sound like something not everyone would want to venture. Admittedly, when I first started, as well as in the days leading up to my own experience with this, I truly was frightened that I wouldn’t be able to control this anger. As time went on, it would prove to be an invaluable experience for me in that it has helped me to gain my own power over my own ‘voice’ while being validated and supported immensely by the others in the program and the incredibly brave facilitators. This was quite an important release for me. And for the first couple of days following my return from the retreat, I experienced a great peace. However, this peace that I felt would slowly dissolve into anger, increased feelings of shame and paralyzing fear. In the days following this experience, I really isolated myself emotionally and shut off from my friends even when I was around them. I found myself in a current that was headed in one direction and only because of my fear and sense of shame that I carried with me from the youngest age I can venture to remember. I remember, just a couple of days ago, feeling such a powerful sense of power return to me. It was like I was realizing for the first time, the true extent of damages that their actions caused me as a small child and until I was a young adult. So I was alone. Until, I felt in my heart an overwhelming need for justice. I felt such a cry for my story to be validated and no longer in the silence and shadows of the corner of the closet in which I hid and wept after being raped as a toddler. The desire for justice was not major in my mind but rather the sense that what happened to me indeed mattered to someone other than just myself. I reflected over and over in my mind, meditating on the fact that, to them, to my abusers, this could have been love. This may not have been abnormal for them. Though, I am almost certain that on a deeper level, they could see the shame, the filth, that it was truly wrong. If anything, I could see this in their desperation in keeping these acts secret and in the dark. But because I doubted sincerely their ability to consciously distinguish the difference between healthy and abusive love, I started to genuinely feel concern for others. I cannot really express the terror that I felt that maybe they were still doing these things to people, to children. Placing on these children the weight of their own shame and fear. I felt these feelings into the following weekend, when I went to church for service on Saturday. Only, they were increasingly powerful. I helped someone from the church family move earlier in the day and I was very tired. But I wanted to serve that night. I had a bit of difficulty with the collections. I was scheduled to collect at the far right side of the church hall. I wasn’t sure where I should have started and I always get a little confused as to where I should pass the basket down the aisle. In any case, I tried and I’m sure that the good people there also knew and recognized I was trying. We had Communion that night. And though I felt very unworthy to participate, especially with the thoughts I was having recently, I heard the Spirit whisper to me that I was meant to take part. While I was meditating and confessing sin on my heart, I saw an image of a waterfall and a voice told me that God loves me. It said, “You are going to glorify God. No one can take away from you who you are”. It asked me if I believed that God could still use me. I acknowledged. After I took the Body and Blood, I saw the image of the waterfall in my mind again. After this, I grew overwhelmed. I grew unsure of what I was to do and if there was a chance for me still. I went and prayed with one of my churches elders. I asked him to pray for me for discernment about the decision I was facing regarding whether to pursue justice. I admitted to Dave that I felt trapped and that I felt genuinely concerned for the safety of other children. Dave prayed for me. I could tell he was concerned also. After the service, one of the team leaders for assimilation offered to drive me to the bus as he often does. I accepted and felt such a powerful release again. As though I had done away with much shame and fear by simply voicing my concerns and by learning I have a voice as well. That night I went home and felt the powerful weight return. I called the elder of my church and talked about what I was feeling and asked for his guidance regarding what he felt I should do. He appreciated my concern and helped me a lot. I want you to recognize that I had every right, over the entire course of my life, to seek justice for what they did to me. I lamented that night and the next, having prayed to God to help me to experience the weight of the emotions and feelings I have so deeply repressed. I remember I went the following day to Starbucks and read more about child sexual abuse recovery. There in the Starbucks, I literally wept for a moment. My prayers were answered regarding the emotions. I felt so much that day. I read a bit of Scripture, the Book of John. I’m reading a French Bible right now. I find it’s helping to make me think a lot more about what I am reading, thereby, I hope encouraging the Word deeper into my heart. I called someone close to me that evening and repeated my concerns to her. She helped me quite a bit with understanding what would ensue. Then last night, after I had called her, I experienced a powerful dream. It was about espionage. About spies trying to search out weaknesses in a place that resembled my home in my dreams. It continued to happen over and over again that a white van would come and park itself on my property and try to infiltrate my family and friends. Then eventually, I got fed up and ran out to confront one of these vans when a bunch of them cornered me and started to chase me. I cried for help. I then woke at 3:33 am literally saying the words, “Help! Help! No, I don’t want your help. I want the help of Jesus.” In my sleep induced delirium, it took me a while to get back to sleep. But then when I slept again, I experienced a dream of a child sitting next to me on a school bus with the child turning and looking at me, saying, “Thank you.” It then offered me a Bible and pointed to a verse in Scripture. When I woke again, I spoke in tongues and felt such powerful feeling of forgiveness. I had a vision then of my own abusers crying and weeping. And I was reminded of my original decision to forgive them. I realized that my fears were perhaps my own projection about how I felt about my own abuse. Something really changed for me with the week I spent at the Paths of Courage retreat centre. But what was greatly more important than getting out all of that negativity and pain was replacing what had been released with positive feelings about myself. What was enormously more important than releasing these emotions was filling my heart that had been emptied with the love of God and of the beautiful, loving sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. A voice again whispered to me the next morning, “Your life has unfolded like poetry. It’s really beautiful.” I rest in the truth that whatever needed to happen, happened. I am thankful for the experience I had at the retreat because it probably encouraged a lot of these feelings to come out of my heart. The motivation that I have is to move from bondage to freedom. To a place where I can recognize that I am saved purely by God’s grace and not because of anything I have done. I am driven to be a whole person. To recollect the shattered pieces of myself and my soul that were broken and lost as a result of everything that happened to me. I can truly say that forgiveness has been a process for me. I thought once that it would have been accomplished and put to rest every problem I have ever had, once I made that initial act of forgiveness. But I could recognize after a while that forgiveness is a continual battle. Like love, it’s an act of the will. But it takes a while for the feelings and emotions to follow. I had blamed myself for the abuse. Forgiving them involves forgiving myself first. We need to be as compassionate toward ourselves as we try to be toward others. I needed to take care of myself first. I needed to forgive myself for being human, a child and show myself the compassion and love that I deserve. I felt so much shame as a result of what they did to me. For so many years, I hated myself because I thought on some base, core level, I was filthy and worthless. I still feel unlovable at times. I want anyone who has been through these experiences to know that it’s not okay to feel this way. These were crimes that happened to us and no child, regardless of what they were doing, deserves to feel this way about themselves. The weight of this crime is on the abusers. This is a sin that particularly upsets God. But with each act of forgiveness that I offered to the people who hurt me, the more I felt complete within myself, closer to my God. Each time I was able to extend that mercy towards them, the more compassion I started to feel for them. It would become clearer to me that there was good in their lives. This was an aspect of their lives and not their total lives. No matter how often it happened, this wasn’t everything they did with their lives. When I first remembered, it was difficult for me to have sympathy for people who could commit such terrible crimes against children. It was easier and safer for me to look at their dark side. There was no way, at the beginning that I could have seen them as human beings instead of evil incarnate. This belief served to detach my soul from the overwhelming degree of shame that I was experiencing and also to give validation to the fact that I was in every respect completely innocent. As time progressed, I could determine to remember a number of good memories and could identify specific things that encouraged me. As time progressed, my heart softened a bit. My first thought when I remembered was that they were pure evil. This feeling festered for a while as I remained, for self-preservation’s purposes in a state of bitterness. Then I realized they were just hurting. They deal with their pain by doing what their perpetrator did. They need compassion as well as judgement for their actions. They made the choices. But they are people who suffer just like us. I can’t believe their focused desire was to ruin the lives of children. They were acting out of horrendous pain and not out of intentional evil. After I was able to forgive for the first time, I was able to think about their anguish. I truly believe in my heart that a lot of the stuff that happens in our world is learned behavior. I don’t want to think of some of this stuff like child abuse as intentional, deliberate decisions to harm innocent creatures. I began to see them as more than vile, heartless creatures. What they did was wrong. But they too live in pain. This in no way justifies their actions but it humanizes them. To realize that they were not totally depraved and not deserving any kindness or sympathy. I realize that they also have done some good in their lives. They are more than their sinful actions. Eventually I was able to forgive my perpetrators because I saw them as victims just as I had been. They repeated behavior they had learned. I don’t think enough about, appreciate enough, how much I myself have been forgiven. How can I not forgive others, whatever the offence, when I have been forgiven so much more than I can even conceive? God not only forgives sin, God loves the sinner. That’s the example I want to follow. I like to think of the Creation like this: Man was created in the image of God. This means that we are all created as good, whole, perfect beings. It’s the enemy who comes to destroy. He is the one who placed lies into the minds of mankind, turning us against each other. A lot of the time, I have to remind myself how blessed to have a God who knows what it’s like to be human. The temptations, the fears, the shame and the hopes and dreams. We can unite in love and faith once we realize that everyone suffers. That everyone hopes. That everyone dreams. It’s a truly global cause that every human experiences pain. Have faith. Society is increasingly isolating itself with technology and other coping mechanisms. We need to do this together.