Just finished Flight by Sherman Alexie and once again that feeling of jealousy has crept up, the same as did when I finished reading Call Me Tuesday by Leigh Byrne. Feeling this same thing for a second time brought me to the revelation of why adults who were abused as children don’t want sympathy from others. We’ve spent most of our lives feeling sorry for ourselves.
We’re sorry for being abused; we’re sorry for the anger; we’re sorry we were (and sometimes still are) unable to fight for ourselves; we’re sorry for hating our abusers; we’re sorry for loving our abusers; we’re sorry for wanting our abusers to love us. We’re just sorry about it all. That’s not the kind of sorry that’s easily overcome. There are so many mixed feelings and the self-hatred associated with it goes directly against our desire to survive. It’s a life of great paradoxes and for most of us, if we’re even able to articulate, it makes no sense. Do we love them or hate them? Yes. Do we love ourselves or hate ourselves? Yes. I have found no satisfactory explanation for this. What I have found is that part of what keeps us going lies somewhere between the paradoxes. It’s a place of survival. It’s called secret. We survive on secrecy because the paradox is too great to explain. As long as we live with the secret, nobody can see the great confusion and diagnose us with bipolar disorder or manic depression or paranoid schizophrenia or whatever other mental disorder they can come up with. But once the secret is revealed, we have no place hide. That’s when sympathy begins pouring in. We understand it, but want to be as far away from it as possible. When knowing eyes look at us, we feel ugly and full of shame. Then there’s the accusing eyes—why do you love them so much when they hurt you so much? What’s wrong with you? Childhood abuse hasn’t made us crazy. We’re not case studies. We’re just people who survived. People who want to be loved and respected like everyone else. The paradox of the abused child is mostly misunderstood by social workers, sociologists and psychologist who assume that living with that kind of paradox is wrong and/or something that needs to be fixed. They seem to be missing the fact that it’s our spirit that’s broken, not our minds. But science cannot fix the spirit. Only God can. Our minds have protected us and will continue to do so as we grow and learn. And as God works on fixing our spirits, our thoughts and thought processes will change, not because they’re broken or wrong, but because we’re learning. |
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December 2016
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