"AN OBVIOUS ANSWER IS TO OFFER HOPE to those who have experienced sexual abuse and guidance to those who work with abuse victims. One of the central messages of most books on abuse, this one included, is freedom from guilt of the past abuse. What occurred is not your fault!
Unfortunately, that message is at first heard as good news but often does not endure over time.
This fading does not invalidate the good news. It simply implies that more must be done than affirm abused people and implore them to forgive themselves.
What is the enemy? What are the factors that make past sexual abuse so shameful and the basis of such grievous self-contempt?
The answer involves a strategy that seems to intensify the problem: peer deeply into the wounded heart. The first great enemy to lasting change is the propensity to turn our eyes away from the wound and pretend things are find. The work of restoration cannot begin until a problem is fully faced.
This book is about damage, the damage done to the soul by sexual abuse. It is also a book about hope, but hope that loves only after the harm of abuse has been faced…
There is a natural reluctance to face the problem. Christians seem to despise reality.
We tend to be squeamish when looking at the destructive effects of sin. It is unpleasant to face the consequences of sin—our own and others. To do so seems to discount the finished and sufficient work of our Savior. And so we pretend we’re fine, when, in fact, we know that something is troubling our soul…
The unbelieving culture is not so dishonest.
Our society faces realities that other eras chose to avoid. Unfortunately, however, it offers solutions that lead to even greater denial. The secular path for change seems to involve some form of self-assertion, setting one’s own boundaries and choosing to act on the basis of one’s own personal value system. Invariably, the result is a strong, more self-centered humanist, who lives less for the sake of loving others than for his perceived advantage and benefits.
The solution the secular path offers is in fact filling a leaky cup with luke-warm water.
It leaves the soul empty and unsatisfied.
It never admits that the deepest damage is never what someone has done to me but what I have done regarding the Creator of the universe.
The damage done through abuse is awful and heinous, but minor compared to the dynamics that distort the victim’s relationship with God and rob her of the joy of loving and being loved by others.
This process is the end of secular solutions, but many so-called Christian alternatives are even worse. Several paths offered to the abuse victim often increase the burden and lead to revictimization: denial-based forgiveness, pressured demands to love, and quick relief from pain through dramatic spiritual interventions….
(it goes into these three in great detail, which I may later expound upon but for now…)
THE BETTER PATH
The argument of this book is that the best path is through the valley of the shadow of death. The crags of doubt and the valleys of despair offer a proving ground of God that no other terrain can provide. God does show Himself faithful; but the geography is often desert-dry and mountainous-demanding, to the point that the path seems too dangerous to face the journey ahead…
The journey involves bringing our wounded heart before God, a heart that is full of rage, overwhelmed with doubt, bloodied but unbroken, rebellious, stained, and lonely. It does not seem possible that anyone can handle, let alone embrace, our wounded and sinful heart. But the path involves the risk of putting into words the condition of our inner being and placing those words before God for His response. The Lord has promised He will not put out the smoldering flax or break the broken reed (see Isaiah 42:3).
But promises have been made before by a supposedly trustworthy person, and we swore betrayal was the last we would ever allow our soul to experience. The obstacle to life is the conviction that God will damage and destroy us. The problem is that the path does involved His hurting us, but only in order to heal us.
Why does abuse make it so hard to come to the Lord for the succor and life that our souls crave?
What is the enemy to the healing process? In brief, the answer is shame and contempt.
The damage of past abuse sets in motion a complex scheme of self-protective defenses that operate largely outside of our awareness, guiding our interactions with others, determining the spouse we select, the jobs we pursue, the theologies we embrace, and the fabric of our entire lives."
- Excerpt from The Wounded Heart, Dr. Dan Allender (MDiv, PhD) serves as a professor of counseling psychology and president at Mars Hill Graduate School. He travels and speaks extensively to present his unique perspective on sexual abuse recovery, love and forgiveness, worship, and other related topics.
