Voice, Relationship, and Power

Last post, I mentioned the need to redefine what sexual abuse is and how we should view it's effects.  Most of my examples focused around childhood sexual abuse and incest, but sexual abuse also covers rape, whether by a stranger, a date, or a husband.  Sexual abuse is very different for everyone and there are many various degrees of hurt that are inflicted upon individuals.  Many factors come into play that make abuse worse - do you know the offender, are they a close friend or family member, are they in a position of power, were they supposed to be caring for you and protecting you instead of abusing, how far physically did the abuse go, how long did it last, how many times, where at, how did other family members or authorities react, what propaganda was given, were you punished for refusing, were you powerless to stop it, were there injuries, was there sexual stimulation or pleasure, all of these questions and more determine severity.

Today what I will focus on is speaking to the predictable ways in which sexual abuse damages people for years and years afterwards, especially if it was childhood incest or molestation.  My goal with my blog is never to give trite truisms, to never replace the value of one on one counseling, and to not lump large groups of people into one category and label them.  That's why I make a much better counselor than a preacher, I prefer speaking to specifics.  But in the same way that all auto accidents are different but have similar injuries, so all sexual abuse is different but has similar injuries.  Whether the abuse stunted growth in these three areas from the point of injury or whether it shattered them inside a person, or stolen from them altogether, most everyone who has experienced sexual abuse deals with three main deficits that need addressed and healed - Their Voice, their Relationships, and their Power.

Sexual abuse damages a persons view of their own voice, their right to speak up for themselves in the face of mistreatment, the ability to call attention to wrong and for it to be dealt with.  As a child you were given the clear indication either by your abuser, enabling family members, or just your own deduction that speaking up and saying the truth is a really bad idea.  This carries over into adult life by allowing people to hurt you, take advantage of you, and abuse you without feeling like you have a right to speak up.  Maybe if you told on your uncle for abusing you it would destroy the family, maybe if anyone knew what your dad did you would be sent to one of those homes you saw on the news.  Maybe if you told your boyfriend to stop pressuring you for sex he would leave and no one would ever find you good enough to be with.  So now you feel like your voice is unimportant, to be ignored, and that your protests as well as you are really unimportant.  Maybe your abuser even used shame to convince you this was something you were a part of, that you were enjoying it, and that it was "our little secret" that couldn't get out or you would be in trouble too.  So then you get treated poorly as an adult and come to believe you must somehow be at fault because when bad stuff happens to you then you are partially responsible at least.  Whatever it looks like it is a loss of belief in your own ability to stand up and proclaim truth, to call evil out for what it is, and let the world see it for what it is so that it can be made better.

The second wound comes in how you view relationships - who and what are you, what do others exist for, and what is your role supposed to be in relationships.  You are given tons of data to suggest that you are beneath other people, an object to be used and discarded when the other person in the relationship is through with you.  You are an obstinate little girl who deserves what is coming your way because you have been bad, or if you don't do this then your abuser will be cranky and hurt someone else, or you are just a walking vagina with no other worth, value, or purpose.  The basic message sent over and over is that you exist solely for the pleasure of those around you, you are responsible for their happiness and if you fail in that purpose you aren't good for much else and so lose what little value you had.  Relationships become seen as transactional, and you never want to have to owe somebody or feel behind in the transactions.  If you only exist to pleasure someone else then it is important for them to convince you not to look for anything in return.  This creates this weird paradigm where you are supposed to make everyone else happy, even at your own expense, because everyone in the world deserves to be taken care of and treated well, everyone except you, you're different.  Realizing you are a real person with the same rights as everyone else who deserves equality in relationships and can even have people take care of you is part of the healing process.

The third major injury most people who have been sexually abused suffer is a damaging blow to their sense of their own power.  You were put in a position either once or repetitively where bad stuff was happening that your mind may not have even been able to adequately process but you were powerless to do anything to stop it.  You couldn't prevent it no matter how diligent you may be, you couldn't stop it because of the size or power differential, and no matter how much you wished or prayed for it to stop it never did and so you were powerless and God probably was too.  Either he was powerless or just deemed you as deserving it, but either way it skews how you view God - especially when it is your earthly father doing the abusing.  So most people who were abused go one of two routes in response to this powerlessness, you either become a helpless victim or a merciless control freak.  Maybe you accept your powerlessness and decide you are just weak and ineffective, so even if you wanted to go back to school you can't, even if you wanted to lose weight you can't, even if you wanted to get out of that bad relationship you can't, you don't have any power.  Maybe you go the other route and decide no one will ever take advantage of you again, because you will be hyper-vigilant and totally in control of everything, because being out of control was just too painful for you.  You'll mockingly talk of your abuse as if it were petty and if anyone else shows weakness or powerlessness around you it will provoke an irrational anger at them for for not rising above it the way you have.  Problem is that either way the abuse has come to define you and when you don't allow anyone close to you because you can't trust them you can pat yourself on the back for being strong and in control or just see that your abuser has once again robbed you of something life-giving and you let them.  Either way you go power becomes something different than it is to others, either an elusive thing you wish you were worthy of having or the most valuable commodity on the planet that must be acquired and maintained at all costs.

So whether you want to think of yourself as the survivor of sexual abuse or not, if your injuries look like the above three it doesn't really matter, just get the help you need to become all of who God created you to be initially before the sins of others changed the arc of your life.  I've walked with men and women through the process of redefining themselves through God's eyes, healing from past injuries, and counseling has helped them bloom into far more than they ever thought possible, and it can be the same for you.  The common excuses of it is too expensive, or I don't have the time for it, or shouldn't I just suck it up and get over it don't apply here.  You wouldn't give those excuses if you had a physical injury, no one has time to get their broken leg reset but you make time for it.  I see it like a total knee replacement, you could go the rest of your life limping and unable to do all that is within your potential or you can take the time and money required to have the surgery, with all the pain and all the months of rehab, but in the end you can run and jump and get up and down stairs like you've never remembered.

My Amazon widget appears to be malfunctioning but here is my book suggestion on this topic - http://www.amazon.com/Counseling-Survivors-Sexual-Abuse-Library/dp/1591605199/ref=sr_1_1?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1316457871&sr=1-1

Three Sources of Worth

Back in college there were a number of classes that I had to take that met requirements but seemed pretty worthless at the time - I place Anthropology in the list of worthless classes but Film Appreciation was awesome. In my UNC-Chapel Hill class, Introduction to Ethics, we can assume Christianity wouldn't be the accepted cultural worldview, so one goofy question caught me off guard when I was asked to argue it.  Why is it that killing and eating animals is all right but killing or especially eating people is not, is it not just species bias that makes us think we are better than animals?  If you take belief in a God who created humans in His image out of the picture then it becomes pretty tough to come up with a valid reason why chickens and humans shouldn't have equal rights.  You can't even go with the argument that we are stronger and smarter or we have to say aliens should have the right to kill and eat us if they are smarter, or that killing babies, mentally retarded people, or anyone less strong or intelligent must be OK.  So why are we as humans better than any other animals in creation?  Well, we are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God, with infinite worth and value because of the spark of the divine within us - period.

If we take this to be true then it keeps us from finding our worth, value, or acceptability in anything other than His image - our race, our possessions, our status, our education, our job, our family, etc.  Anything else we could base our worth and value in can be taken from us, as the storms come and destroy the house built on the sand, only the strong foundation of our Imago Dei can withstand the trials and tribulations of life.  What happens when we get let go from the job we gave our best to for thirty years, when our last child heads off to college and we are no longer just a Mom, when Alzheimer's threatens to steal what we have stored up in the treasury of our minds - our very identities are threatened unless the foundation was seeing ourselves as God see's us.

Problem is most of us buy this for everyone else in the world, just not us.  You would never kill or even intentionally hurt another person because you see others as having worth and value just for being a human being created in the image of God.  It's just us, we are somehow inferior to others and don't have the same worth and value.  If the above viewpoint is the truth then there are two lies that threaten to steal our worth and value in our own eyes.  The first lie is Ascribed Value - we are only as valuable as what other people say about us.  Gold has value because people decide that it has value, not because it is particularly useful - it's too malleable to make any decent tool out of but we pay tons of money for it and fearful Americans are pouring their life savings into it.  But what if tomorrow we just decided gold wasn't all that great?  It would cease to have value.  If that is our view of ourselves then we need to do everything we can to sway the opinions of those around us - please as many people as possible, have as little conflict as possible, and work hard to get people to like us.  Our view of ourselves will be a roller coaster depending on who we are around - in one group we are valued and deemed worthy but around someone else we are nearly worthless, our value is like the stock market, constantly in flux.

The second lie we could believe is that of Utilitarian Value - that we are only as valuable as what we are able to do.  Like a shovel we have value because we can be used to do stuff for people, so the more we accomplish, the more we do for others, the more value we have.  But what if we are going through a busy or difficult time and can not do as much for other people, do we feel bad and lose worth?  If we are in a car accident and are paralyzed and can never do anything for anyone or even ourselves, do we cease to have value?  We become human doers, not human beings, constantly striving to do enough to be deemed worthy in our own eyes, but we can never do enough.  Ultimately this was the lie of the Nazi's, that in order to create a better nation you must only kill off any humans who can't make it stronger, anyone considered weak.  So maybe you start with the physically and mentally disabled, those considered inferior like Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies, and eventually just the Aryan race is left.

We don't have worth and value because other people say so, we don't have it because of what we are able to do, we have worth and value because we are human beings and humans were created unique and special by God to bear his image and accomplish great things in his name.  This applies to all humans, even you.  The only way our worth can be static and defined is if humans, those around us or ourselves, don't get to decide our value - God does.