At a seminar in El Paso, I said, "Healing is not an event; healing is a process."
One man said, "I needed to hear those words." At age 43, memories of abuse by a church deacon began to surface. He had gone to a therapist for nearly three months. The question he had planned to ask me before the seminar was, "Why am I still not healed?"
One man said, "I needed to hear those words." At age 43, memories of abuse by a church deacon began to surface. He had gone to a therapist for nearly three months. The question he had planned to ask me before the seminar was, "Why am I still not healed?"
Without knowing his question, I gave him the answer when I spoke to the entire group—something most survivors could have done. We'd like to believe that we have a moment—a special insight—and we're free forever.
I wish it worked like that.
We need the experience of enlightenment, awareness, or what we refer to as the aha moment. That's where we begin. Once we face the reality of our abuse, we start down a path of healing. Notice I used the word start.
None of us knows where the journey ends.
1 comment:
The more recovery work I do the more depressed I sometimes get. This is indeed a process. For me I know the journey will end when I move on to meet my Maker. Abuse is terrible and that cannot be understated regardless of the frequency or seeming severity. But that is just the beginning. As fallen images of the Father we all come with the usual variety of weaknesses that even without the added on Abuse we suffered, would still send us down various paths of bad choices and tendency toward selfishness and pettiness. All of which in order to learn to live in joy and kindness to ourselves and others and find meaning in our lives would have to be addressed also.
Addressing these innate failings we all come naturally with is necessary to complete the healing and overwhelming effects of sexual abuse. We cannot do this alone. Just as we need assistance in caring for our physical bodies simply because we cannot see our entire body outside and certainly not inside without technological assistance; so it is with our personality. We have behavioral and perceptive blind spots in our make up we cannot/ will not see without help. Someone at some point needs to point and say there's a problem.
It has taken me decades to discover that. Before that I was clueless and even when I would stumble over a clue, I had no one to ask or speak to about it. Denial is a terrible place to try and live.
I am not the man I was. I am not the man I need to be but I am trusting the process to lead me to the man I can be. It is not easy but nothing is that is worth doing. If I had not begun years ago, I don't want to think about where I would have been by now.
Just my thoughts.
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