I was so worn down by the devastating aftermath of all the traumas, hurts and horror I suffered throughout most of my life that in desperation I started praying to just be normal. I didn’t have a clue what ‘normal’ was – and I am still unsure – but I no longer live my life in emotional bondage to my past. If it doesn’t ever get any better than this, then I am satisfied.

As a child, I had a long history of humiliation, physical and emotional deprivation, and severe abuse. The stress led me to tear my hair out. I had to wear a cap to cover my bald head and I was ridiculed by everyone. No one would let their children play with me. All sorts of traumas converged to leave me floundering with enormous abandonment issues, rejection issues, and only God knows what else. I am now 55 and have been basically free from all this for 10 years. I'd like to share with you a couple of the many things that led me into the path of healing. I'll begin with an incident that was very significant to me.

I was 12 when my first period started. Having already been programmed to be terrified of my father for any and every thing, I begged Mama not to tell him. Nevertheless, she did. He screamed at me to come into the bedroom. Although terrified, I obeyed because I was even more afraid not to. His belt was in his hand. I knew what that meant as it was a part of my usual day. He made me strip down to my bare underwear. As I stood there, humiliated, he beat me with the buckle end of the belt.

Years before, I had quit crying when he beat me. This time, however, it was so horrific I screamed and screamed until I lost my voice. The belt buckle repeatedly bit into my flesh. My body still bears scars from this beating. After he exhausted himself on lashing me and I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor I managed to croak out, “Why?” All he said was, “Next time you will know better.” To this day I haven’t a clue what he meant by that.

As you can imagine, in the following years the after-effects of the trauma from this and many other incidents would regularly surface and almost destroy me. I could be having a good day when something would trigger a memory and all the emotions I had felt when it originally happened would come flooding back and I would be devastated all over again. Sometimes the grief would be so overwhelming that I couldn’t get out of bed. I was so burdened carrying this around inside me. I ached to be rid of it but I didn’t have a clue how to do so. I had prayed, begged, screamed and cried; all to no avail.

One day, when this memory came again, I just let it roll in my mind but this time I did something different. I invited Jesus into it. I did not try to short circuit the memories but proceeded to just pour out my heart to Jesus, as if it were happening right then, telling him everything I felt. At first I just felt so angry and hurt every time the belt hit me. I told God how much it hurt and how much I despised my father for doing this to me.

In my mind I saw Jesus standing over that little girl laying on the floor. As I pictured me there I asked Jesus to cradle me in his arms and love me. I saw him pick me up and hold me. I told him about all the love I wanted to feel from him. Then I asked him to make me as new; as if that incident had never happened. I asked him to make me feel inside as if I had been loved, instead of unloved and abused.

As I fell silent and just watched, I saw myself still cradled in his arms. Then he lifted his head for the first time. As he looked at me across the years tears trickled down his face. I knew then that when my earthly father did those horrible things to me, my heavenly Father cried. It hurt him as much as it did me. I knew he understood and cared. And the pain of that particular incident vanished, as if it had never happened to me.

The memory is still there but the pain is gone. It’s over. Jesus took it just like he says he will when we hand our burdens over to him. The problem is we don’t always know how to give our concerns to him. We need to invite him into our problem.

As a result of that experience I became a little more whole.

I no longer feel abandoned, unloved, misused and abused. This is not to say that I walk on Cloud Nine, but when faced with an issue that could make me feel bad, I can now hand to God every negative thought and emotion and trust him to take care of it. That way, any hurts or jealously I experience do not get a deep hold of my soul and rob me of today.

Let me now go back in time to an earlier incident that proved a significant step in my healing.

I had only been born again a couple of years when one day it hit me like a lightening strike that I hated my dad and Jesus did not like that. I mouthed a ‘lip service only’ attempt at doing what I felt God was demanding of me. “Ah . . . yeah, God, I guess I do hate him, so if you don’t want me to, then do whatever you want about it.” I then forgot that half-hearted prayer.

Frankly, I didn’t care. I enjoyed hating my dad. After all, didn’t he deserve my hatred? Although he was quite rich, he had allowed me so little to eat when I was a child that had I not been petrified about the consequences I would have regularly stolen to try to ease the gnawing hunger pains. Often I ate out of the neighbors’ trash cans. One breakfast he served was a can of split green beans cooked in two inches of rancid grease. After being backhanded, I took a bite and immediately vomited. He slammed my head down into the vomit and screamed that I had better eat what he had fixed for me or he would make me eat every bit of that vomit. Once, during my period, he forced me to school in a dirty dress and no sanitary napkin, with blood trickling down my leg to the hoots of mocking schoolboys. Another time he forced me into a shop wearing nothing – not even panties – except the only thing he let me sleep in – his old T-shirt with a gaping hole exposing my breast. On and on I could go, filling a book with accounts of his cruelty too extreme for many readers to find believable.

Another factor in my holding on to hate was my utter lack of even knowing, much less understanding, God’s Word about forgiveness. Had I known such a thing was in the Bible would I have cared enough to seek the ability to forgive? Nope. Not one little bit. I was too young in years, too young in Christianity and just too devastated by too many people. Even if I had understood it, the burden of merely starting the process of forgiveness would have been an impossibility.

A week later, I attended a prayer meeting held in a house. It was almost over when a stranger walked in. I despised him on sight. He tried chatting with me and I told him I was not interested in wanting to hear anything he had to say and that he was making me very uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he continued to want to discuss my father with me. I was perplexed. How did this man know about my father? Instead, he continued to tell me that I had to forgive him and that I did not have the right not to forgive him. Was I ever mad! I tried to sit there stoically and just ignore him. He kept at me, on and on. I felt tears welling up, but I was determined not to cry. I sure didn’t want this stranger to know he was getting to me! Suddenly tears gushed from my eyes, running like a river down my face. I exploded! I stood up and cursed him, using every single filthy curse word I had ever heard. I screamed out all that my dad had done to me and told this man why I had the right to hate daddy. He sat patiently while I raved. When I eventually ran out of steam and quit my rantings and cursings I felt a very hard, tight ball beginning to leave my chest.

The man seemed to know exactly what was happening to me. As this ‘thing’ was leaving me he told me it was a demon of hatred and that now I was free of it. My chest literally ached from where this hate had been entrenched for so long.

Tears dripped down this stranger’s face. He hugged me and told me he loved me. He said he had fasted all week for me.

Suddenly I remembered all the curses I had screamed in this Christian home in front of all those people. Mortified by the realization of what I had done, I looked around to see their reaction. They were just eating their cakes and chatting with each other, seemingly oblivious to what had happened. I heaved a sigh of relief that it seemed no one was going to throw me out of the house for my bar room behavior.

I turned to thank the man for what he had done for me but he wasn’t there. I searched all over the house and couldn’t find him, so I supposed he had left.

The next day I phoned the lady in whose house the meeting had been held and I asked the man’s name. She didn’t know who I was talking about. I explained I was referring the man who came in right after the prayer meeting and just before everyone started having cakes and coffee. She said she did not remember anyone and asked me to describe him. I could not. I had absolutely no memory of how he looked. I thought, Well, she was busy, so he just slipped in and out without her noticing. I was puzzled, however, as I recalled how everyone had seemed to ignore my outburst. I apologized to her for my behavior of the night before. She asked what I was talking about. Feeling prompted to say nothing, I let it drop.

Had this stranger been an angel? How could that he have been? He said he had fasted all week for me. Did God block all the others in that room from witnessing my behavior? The man had spoken of a demon. At that time in my life I had no thought that demons even existed. I later discovered that besides that man, not a soul in that room even believed Christians could have a demon.

My deliverance from this hatred for my father did not alter the way we related. The relationship I so much desired from my father was never forthcoming because he remained unchanged and would not have allowed it. Had he ever let Jesus into his life and become a changed man I would have welcomed it and embraced him in love, even if he had never acknowledged what he had done to me. He continued to treat me just the same and I still responded to him exactly as I always had. It’s impossible to like your verbal or physical whippings. It is absurd to imagine that forgiveness of a tormenter means acceptance of his evil and the ability to endure abuse. It is likewise absurd to believe that you will feel waves of love for him and that if you don’t, it means you haven’t forgiven. In my case, after being so miraculously delivered from hatred, the only difference I could see and feel was that I no longer prayed Daddy to die and go to hell where he belonged. I still didn’t like him but I now prayed for him to find God’s forgiveness so that he could avoid suffering in hell. The hatred never came back, though had it been left up to me to keep it out, it would have come back full force, with more besides.

When he became elderly and ill I had compassion on him and helped care for him. I fed him, changed his diapers and cleaned his behind. I kissed his cheek and patted him. I found myself free to do as God wants, instead of being driven by hatred and unforgiveness and being unable to extend to another the kindness I would want extended to me.

One of my daughters took him to church a few times and he went forward once. Even though we saw no change in him we have hope that maybe, just maybe, he is with Jesus. I truly hope so.

Once we come to Jesus, admitting that unforgiveness is a wrong attitude that we need to be freed from, then the process of healing can begin. But healing is seldom instant. If we don’t realize that healing takes time, we can suffer unnecessary soul searching wondering if we have truly forgiven the one who offended us. It’s been my experience that once we have asked God to forgive us for the sin of being unforgiving and we have put into motion the necessary prayers for God to bless this person, then in the spiritual realm it is a completed work. However, we don’t always feel we have forgiven because we still feel the pain of not yet healed emotional wounds. There is a process to being able to feel this forgiveness deep within one’s self. For me, the process began with confessing to God my sin of unforgiveness, then praying for the person who had hurt me, and asking God to heal my wounds. I have found that I have to literally invite God into this healing by telling him all about how I feel and what hurt me and asking that he show me my responsibilities in all this. I ask him to tell me how I am supposed to regard the incident and to show me how to handle it. There have been times when God told me ask someone’s forgiveness. He knows, however, that not all people are safe for me to be in close relationship with.

There is an answer to our pain. It’s a process we have to walk through, with God’s help and wisdom every step of the way. He wants us to be whole. I used to think I was a loving person because I needed love so desperately. When I allowed the Lord to start this healing process on me, I found that I wasn’t loving at all. I was equating my neediness with an ability to love. God in his wisdom showed me they weren’t the same at all.

Even as a Christian I have made many mistakes and I have suffered the consequences. I would have been condemned many times over in my life if God wasn’t so understanding and forgiving of me. Nevertheless, I always feel being cradled in God’s arms whenever I reached out to him.

God is faithful. He can, and will, walk you out of your distress, as he did me. Maybe he did not do this the way I wanted. He never waved a magic wand that turned me into Cinderella and gave me a rich prince charming. Nevertheless, he can heal our wounds as we learn to give them to him and trust him.

In the type of devastation I suffered, no one but God is capable of keeping a person close to him. I believe this is why he has given me so many spiritual touches, a vision and other supernatural blessings. It took such experiences to keep me holding on when absolutely nothing else was changing in my life.

Yes, there are still times when I cry. At times I still yearn for that ‘magic wand.’ When I hurt or feel the losses in my life and the pain of unfulfilled yearnings I have learned to simply have a chat with God. I don’t know what he does but those gnawing feelings just go away and I can live in inner freedom until eventually something disturbs me again and once more I bring it to him.

I hope what I have shared has helped you. I want you to have the same victory over tormenting feelings as I have found. God can, and does, do it. I am living proof. So hang on, and keep seeking God.

Comment by Grantley Morris

With God, there is always more. There are always deeper levels of love and healing available to us if we keep seeking even more of God in our lives. Neither Mary, nor anyone on the planet, has reached perfect wholeness, and God treats each of us as individuals, taking us on a unique journey in that direction. So Mary’s experience cannot demonstrate the exact methods God will choose in your journey to wholeness. It illustrates, however, God’s power and his eagerness to move in your life.

Related Pages

Recovery from sexual abuse: Supernatural Solutions

If anyone has reason to hate God, it’s Sue

You must read this inspiring story and how one woman found peace and healing in the midst of hate and bitterness.
An amazing webpage filled with compassion and life-changing answers.

Writes one abuse survivor:
This is some kind of testimony!! I am going to print this out and pass it on. I will read it again and again.

 

Recovery from sexual abuse: Supernatural Solutions

Support in breaking blockages that hinder healing

Bookmark, or note the address of this webpage. These links are so important that you will want to keep returning until you have visited them all.

“I had always thought it was my fault!”

It is common for people to wrongly be convinced that they were to blame for being molested as a child. The more certain you are that it was your fault, the more you need to read Why children mistakenly believe they have “seduced” sex offenders.

The Dilemma of Feeling Pleasure When Abused

So powerful is sex that it is almost inevitable that any sexual encounter – no matter how despised and unwanted – will contain elements of pleasure and deep bonding. In an unwanted encounter, these are highly obnoxious consequences of sex but they are such an integral part of sex that they are almost impossible to completely remove from forced sex. This fact is so rarely understood that sex crime victims usually end up loathing themselves or at least being confused and deeply disturbed over what is just a normal reaction to unwanted sex.

Vast numbers of abuse survivors know from bitter experience that pleasure inflicted by a sexual predator can be more damaging than severe physical pain. Some survivors, however, have experiences so different that they find this incomprehensible or even offensive. Experiences differ for the simple reason that abusers differ in their techniques.

If predators are sufficiently skilled, the pleasure they inflict will be sexual. Otherwise – in the case of pedophiles – the pleasure their victims feel will be the gifts they bribe children with or the attention they give love-starved children. Rapists can even force unwilling adult victims to experience sexual pleasure. This very pleasure inflicts horrific, but quite unnecessary, pangs of guilt.

A degree of pleasure or bonding in no way justifies the offender, nor in any way hints that the victim might be perverted or immoral.

The memory of pleasure suffered (yes, “suffered” is the right word) during abuse might currently be suppressed but it could surface at any time. So it is good to prepare oneself by learning about this rarely understood consequence of unwanted sex.

More about this vital, frequently misunderstood subject

Vent your Anger

What the person who hurt you deserves. The execution of justice on your behalf. Turning hate into healing. A moving, enlightening and therapeutic experience that could forever change your life.

Sweet revenge!

Discovering that you don’t hate God after all

In your pain it was natural for you to lash out at the hideous, unfeeling monster you supposed was God. The God you thought you hated is just a figment of your tormented imagination. It’s time you met the real God – your Healer.

Just as there are things about its loving mother that a tiny child cannot comprehend, mysteries remain when we try to understand the infinitely superior mind of God. Nevertheless, the following webpages will help.

Where was God when you suffered unspeakable horrors?

Why would a God of love allow suffering?

God’s plans for you are comforting, not fearful

If anyone has reason to hate God, it’s Sue

Life’s Mysteries Explained

Discovering God’s love for you

Tragically, so many people bungle through life living shallow, wasted lives. Through Jesus we can leave behind a meaningless life of selfishness headed for endless regret. We can choose a life in which every second counts for all eternity, achieving the highest good in union with the God who made you and loves you more than life itself. Life can be crammed with so many urgent things that we forget the really important ones. Don’t let this wonderful opportunity slip from your grasp. Make life’s most important issue top priority.

You Can Find Love: What your fantasies reveal A most significant webpage

The key to supernatural healing Why Christ’s suffering can change your life.

God as Mother Feminine aspects of God. Healing for those whose father let them down.

You are loved When you can’t feel God’s love

Release from blaming yourself

Handling guilt is the first of many helpful and encouraging webpages about overcoming guilt feelings. Follow the links.

Healing from abuse

The Path to Healing A brief and most helpful overview of the steps to full healing from the devastation of abuse.

Overcoming feelings of worthlessness

To God, you are special

Power to escape the trap of bitterness

Should you forgive your abuser?

This most serious, often misunderstood, issue is carefully examined in two special webpages listed below. It is vital for your healing that you read them. So much hinges on this delicate matter.

I am convinced that just as martyrs are especially honored in heaven, so are those who have suffered greatly and yet have forgiven.

Forgiving others is tough. It is so critical to our own emotional and spiritual well being that our spiritual enemy strongly attacks us on this issue. Nevertheless, divine help is available.

People suffering great difficulty in forgiving others usually have as the basis of their agony the (sometimes subconscious) pain of having great difficulty forgiving themselves. The two sides of forgiveness – forgiving yourself and forgiving others – rise or fall together. Many people raging against someone else's guilt are pressured by a subconscious urge to keep suppressed the tortured screams of their own conscience. Peace soothes our troubled mind when we dwell on the extent of the forgiveness and purity that we have in Christ. When we realize how much God has forgiven us, it becomes easier to act more Godlike and have that same forgiving attitude toward ourselves and others. For this reason, I recommend beginning with the webpages about handling guilt.

Breaking the stranglehold of bitterness:

Unforgivable!

Lord make him regret what he did to me!

Why Me?

Tragically, sexual abuse increases one's vulnerability to more abuse. The following links explore reasons for this.

Why abuse survivors attract the wrong sort of people Predators hunt the wounded

Why bad things keep happening to some people

Overcoming destructive thinking

Whether it be the desire to hurt yourself, or to hate yourself, or to hate others, it is a temptation.

Becoming a Winner! begins a series of webpages about overcoming temptation. Follow the links.

Memories

When you can’t forget

When haunted by memories, or terrorized by flashbacks

Learning to appreciate your sexuality

It is natural that anyone for whom sex has been a source of suffering would to some extent resent the fact that God made us sexual beings.

Celebrate your sexuality This webpage is intended particularly for singles but could help anyone for whom sex has unpleasant memories.

How holy wives express marital love

This, of course, is intended for wives or women close to marriage. There are some useful thoughts there, but expect many of the suggestions to be beyond what you are presently capable of doing.

When You Don’t Want Marital Relations

It might be so severe that you are determined never to marry, or maybe it is just that an aspect of the physical side of marriage makes you feel a little uncomfortable, but an almost inevitable consequence of sexual trauma is a lowered enjoyment of sex. You deserve the full restoration of the ability to enjoy marital relations. There is a web series specifically written to help you:

When a Woman Doesn’t Want Sex

Lost virginity

The enormity of God's forgiveness makes all of his children chaste virgins in his sight, but how would a potential Christian marriage partner see you?

Who says Christian men prefer women who are physically virgins?

Lost Virginity Can Be Restored

Handling Depression

Dark Blessings Follow the links.

When you can’t feel God

Spiritual Wilderness Survival Guide

The Healing Secrets of 6 Abused Women

Healing from sexual abuse: A testimony

For the abused: A beautiful Poem

Patti Willis: A testimony of hope

Sexual abuse led to substance abuse: I was gang raped

Finding answers to hate and anger: If anyone has reason to hate God, it’s Sue

Personalized support

E-mail Grantley Morris, the author of these webpages: healing@net-burst.com

Not to be sold. © Copyright 2001, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged; if used in a webpage, the new page is significantly different to this one. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.com  Freely you have received, freely give.
For use outside these limits, consult the author.

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Change of pace

Exciting webpages by Grantley Morris on many other subjects

Stimulating, compassionate, often humorous, webpages

My Shame The limitations of these webpages