A Voice For The Voiceless (Part 2.)

This post is brought to you by Graeme’s novel The Guilt Busters. Check out The Guilt Busters today to discover a path to healing from the pain of institutional child abuse.

In my previous blog I praised the choice of Grace Tame as Australian of the Year, calling her a voice for the voiceless. Many of you responded, referring to the courage and commitment she has shown already and welcoming her vision for the future.

There is no doubt that among the many voiceless people in our community and in communities around the world are the thousands of young people and adults who have experienced the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Whilst many people seem to cope with childhood trauma, possibly because of strong family support or early intervention, there are many who do not. This week, I want to share what I believe those who struggle with life, would want us to know, and what we will know if there are more people like Grace, with the courage to speak out.

TRUST. It is important that we understand that survivors of childhood sexual abuse may have an impaired capacity to trust. The nature of child grooming is building trust with the intention of abusing the child. That trust is violated when the abuse occurs. From then on, relationships and environments that the rest of us might easily assume are safe, are for them, potentially harmful.

SELF-ESTEEM. Many survivors have been convinced by our abuser that they we are in fact to blame for our abuse. This projected guilt, frequently leads survivors to self- hatred and low self-esteem. This may result in chronic depression and withdrawal or conversely to anger and aggression.

INTERNALISED PAINFUL EMOTIONS. Unexpressed emotion impacts every aspect of our life. Anger, guilt, fear and grief are for all of us difficult emotions to resolve healthily. When they are related to an event that has left us feeling ashamed, then internalising them is much easier than resolving them. However, this internalising of pain may lead to complications like depression, anxiety, difficult relationships and an abiding sense of broken-ness.

IMPULSIVITY. This sometimes causes us to act on urges and felt needs before thinking about the consequences. This may lead to high-risk activities.

ANGER. This will typically express itself in either aggression or disengagement from others. It may be difficult to con troll our anger. This the price we pay for repression.

DISSACOCIATION. This involves the mind separating itself from painful feelings to protect itself. Survivors may have a hard time remembering painful events. It is an automatic defence against painful feelings.

The good news is that many hitherto wounded survivors of child sexual abuse have found a new degree of emotional and mental health. Counselling is one of the avenues of help that are available to us.

For me, my recovery came through several different discoveries. As a teenager confused about the meaning of love, I discovered that God loved me. That may sound strange to some, but for someone who had imbibed the idea that people feigned love to fulfill their own agenda, it was not only a welcome realisation but a liberating one.

Some years later, still living with a heap if projected guilt I felt that God’s unconditional love empowered me to shift the blame from myself to my abuser. My counsellor convinced me that it was ludicrous to believe that a child could be responsible for their own abuse, but it was the certainty of God’s love and forgiveness that enabled me to forgive myself.

About this same time, I understood that I or the law could not devise a punishment for the perpetrator that would make up for the pain I had experienced and the more I demanded revenge the more controlled by my anger I would become. It was then that I decided to give up my anger and seek to live at peace with myself and my world. It was only then that I realised that I had forgiven my abuser in the way that Jesus taught we should.

From my experience I have coined this definition of forgiveness. “I forgive another when I set them free from the obligation to suffer at my hands, for the wrong they have done to me, as God has set me free from the obligation to suffer for the wrong, I have committed against him.

Whatever journey toward wholeness we decide to take, it is important to believe that we are not permanently broken, nor do we need to go on giving our abuser power over who we think we are and how we act. The journey toward increased health begins with the realisation we do not have to live forever in a prison of pain, believing that our abuser is the jailer. I believe with all my heart that forgiving ourselves and releasing ourselves from the compulsion and the need to stay angry, are the first steps toward a new life.

God Bless

Graeme

 To read more of Graeme’s teaching check out his books, The Guilt Busters and When The Tiger Roars at the Book Shop

Grief & Guilt

This blog post is brought to you by Graeme’s latest book: The Guilt Busters

When a child dies one of the most common factors that threatens to hi-jack the normal grieving process is the irrational guilt that invades the heart and mind of the parent. Marie, a key character in the newly released book The Guilt Busters reflects on her grief-guilt journey. It is almost three years since her husband, Vic and their twin daughters, Fiona and Grace had died in a horrific car accident. Their loss had been unbearable. Every moment of everyday had been like a horror movie. At night, she would sense that Vic was there lying beside her, and she would reach out to touch him and of course he wasn’t there, and his death would once again become a terrible reality. Some nights she would awake with a start and the three of them would be sitting on the edge of her bed smiling at her. In that moment she would be filled with joy and then they would be gone. Often during the day, she would hear the girls giggling in their bedroom and she would call them, but they would not come.

The pain was excruciating. She could not bring herself to leave the house. It was painful seeing other families together or to hear the laughter of children. She avoided meeting with her extended family. She ceased going to Church or meeting socially with friends. She was encased in a cocoon of loneliness and never-ending tears. And there was the guilt. The overwhelming and ever-present guilt. If only I had been there to protect my beautiful girls. If only I hadn’t insisted that Vic drive home that night instead of staying with his mother. The thought that she and not the drunk driver of the other car was responsible for that accident on that fateful night was, she knew, irrational and illogical but it was so powerful that it threatened to destroy her. This guilt stood at the intersection of healthy and unhealthy grief, preventing her from embracing the reality that all she had now were memories of her family and that one day those memories would sustain her and enable her to live her new normal. Instead, the memories tormented her with the insistent thought that she had failed to keep her girls safe.”

The guilt that had crippled Marie was false guilt not real guilt. The accusation that she had levelled at herself was a lie. The real guilt belonged to the driver of the other car who had caused the accident by her reckless and irresponsible behaviour. Why then did Marie and many, many, others choose to believe a lie, as their way of dealing with grief? There are two answers to that question. The first is that it is natural to carry the responsibility of keeping our children safe, and if something bad happens to them, to feel somehow responsible. The second is that the loss of a child leaves us with so many difficult questions and in a time of such overwhelming grief the parent does not have the energy to confront them. As painful and as debilitating as false guilt is it is simpler to give into that emotion than it is to traverse the more difficult pathway of grief. And the pathway of grief cannot be traversed without confronting a myriad of seemingly unanswerable questions. To do that takes enormous emotional energy, which the grieving parent often feels they do not have.

There are three very helpful steps for addressing grief. One is to embrace the truth that grief is painful and will frequently feel overwhelming, but it will not destroy us. Grief is a normal response to loss. We will almost always need people to walk this journey with us. There is a temptation to believe that unless the people who support us have been through grief themselves, they will not be able to understand what we are going through. The truth is that they do not need to understand our pain to be helpful. Their love and their presence give us the courage and strength to grieve.

The second important step is to embrace the truth that memories of the person that we have lost are all that we have but they will become increasingly important to our survival and healing. At first our memories will seem to increase the pain, and for that reason we might avoid them, but in the future they will be the very thing that will sustain us and even give us joy. Using the persons name, looking at photos and recalling stories are helpful strategies for growing through grief.

The third important step is to re-evaluate what things, in addition to the grief we feel, that are still an important part of our lives. Continuing relationships with others who we love and who love us. Sharing our lives with our friends. Continuing to do the things we enjoy like gardening or other hobbies and of course our faith in a God who loves us, understands our pain and has promised to give us comfort and strength. Taking this third step, helps us avoid harmful strategies like self-condemnation, social isolation, self-medication and anger. Above all it enables us to grow through grief rather than be diminished by it.

God Bless

Graeme

To dig deeper into the topics of guilt and grief, checkout Graeme’s latest Book, The Guilt Busters

Breaking the chains of guilt.

There comes a time in the life of every abuse survivor whose goal is to be free from irrational guilt, when they must find a symbolic but effective way to release the shame, or if you like, break the chains that have bound them. In the recently released “The Guilt Busters” one of the characters, John chooses to write a letter that he may or may not post, to his abuser, Father McKean.  I have chosen to share some of that letter with you.

Purchase The Guilt Busters Here

“McKean, I cannot bring myself to call you Father, because I have come to believe that you were in fact the antithesis of all a man of God should be. I cannot even address you as Mr. because that is a term of respect that belongs to good men like my dad. My counsellor has challenged me to examine whether the guilt that I have assumed is mine for nearly 20 years, is indeed mine or in fact is projected guilt that really belongs to you. She has triggered a myriad of questions in me that I myself must answer.

Did you as you often said, love me and enjoy my company, or were you just grooming me for your own pleasure. For nearly twenty years I have convinced myself that it was love you felt for me not lust, but today I am daring to ask, ‘could I have been wrong?’ When I answer that question as a twelve-year-old boy, it is easy to answer it in the way I want the truth to be. Why else would you want to spend time with me when my own father seemingly ignored me? Why else would you choose me to be your camping partner? Why else were you so kind and gentle and understanding? Of course, you were concerned for a child you deemed to be neglected. You invested time and energy in me because you could see potential in me that others could not. I want everything you said about me to be true, because I ached then and still do, to be loved and valued by an adult. Such affirmation and kindness came to me from nobody else.

However, I am no longer a twelve-year-old boy. I am a thirty two year -old man, and although those kind and affirming things you said to me are still the only kind and affirming things that have ever been said to me until recently, I now have the courage to see them as lies.

As an adult I cannot equate your sexual abuse of me as love. I cannot see love in that angry face I see every night in my nightmares. I cannot hear love in that sneering, accusing voice I hear again and again in my head threatening me with the wrath of God should I ever tell anyone about our secret. Nor can I imagine why someone who loved me would reject me from that night on and pour their affections on another.

Not until today has it dawned on me that I am in fact one of those thousands of men and women who are so called survivors of institutional sexual abuse. That is what it comes down to. I am a statistic. The one out of five men who have been abused in their childhood. I am a recipient of those fine sounding apologies offered by politicians and bishops. I am the topic of all those radio talk-back shows, debating whether I deserve to be compensated. I am represented on those documentaries as a shattered shell of a man who will never recover, never be capable of sustaining a relationship, and never be able to make a worthwhile contribution to society. The ultimate victim.

Well, McKean, I want you to know that I have decided that I will no longer carry your miserable guilt. I will no longer blame myself for the evil you perpetuated against me. I will no longer fear the wrath of God for what has happened between us. With the help of my counsellor, I have taken hold of the blame I have borne for twenty years and placed it where it belongs. The shame I feel is no longer a result of your carefully and wickedly planned victimisation of me. The shame I feel now is that for so much of my life I have let the behaviours that have emanated from my painful emotions wound others who did not deserve to be hurt. But because that guilt is real, and not projected, I hope in time, I will be free of that shame also.

Hear me McKean I will be no longer defined by your intentionally victimising behaviour toward me. I refuse to be a statistic or a topic on talk-back radio. I am a person, and albeit years later than it should have been I choose to be a healthy adult. I no longer need protection as I did when a child, although I must admit that every step I take toward a healthy adulthood, is formidable. In the safety of my own space and on a good day I dream of unwrapping that potential and value through which maybe I might still bless the world in which I live.”

It is essential that in the pathway to recovery, sexual abuse survivors make this transfer of shame. It does not belong to us. It belongs to the perpetrator. If we choose not to move it to where it belongs it will continue to rob us of the joy and fulfilment we were meant to enjoy.

God Bless                                                                                                     

Graeme

Click here to read more from Graeme on the effects of institutional child abuse for victims and their families.

Reflections on humility

I want to introduce you to three people. You might recognise them, or they might remind you of someone you know. Their nicknames are Narco, Abas, and Humi. Each one of them are members of families; they have parents, siblings, life-partners, children, friends and workmates.

Narco is a man who you might say is wrapped in himself. His nickname is short for Narcissistic. He is the centre of his own universe. He has an excessive need for admiration and is constantly fishing for compliments from others. He can be dismissive of other’s achievements, impatient with people who seek his attention and totally incapable of empathising with their feelings. Growing up in an average family he attempted to hog the limelight, exaggerate his own abilities and became angry or distressed if he felt ignored. Those he chose to be his friends tended to always have the same need for attention. They were image conscious and obsessed by their appearance. In marriage he focusses on appearances and is sensitive to what others might think of him, his wife and his children. He tends to place a high priority on material possessions. At work he is often unco-operative with peers, rarely gives compliments and is frequently overlooked for promotions even though he has such a high view of his own abilities.

Abas is the opposite to Narco in every respect. His nickname is a shortened form of abasement, or more accurately self-abasement. Aba acknowledges nothing good or likeable about himself. He constantly attempts to devalue himself in the presence of others. He is a loner. As a child he was a follower rather than a leader. His relational style is to self-deprecate, he avoids responsibility, but accepts the blame for mistakes even when it was someone else’s fault. As a husband he seeks to please but cannot receive his partners compliments. As a father he is loving but berates himself for being inadequate. He compares himself negatively with his peers all the time. Some people would call him humble because he never puts himself forward or self-promotes or seeks attention. But he is not humble. He is self-hating and relates to others by self-debasing.

Then there is Humi. Her nickname is a shortened form of humility. Unlike Narco she is not into self-promotion and attention seeking. She is comfortable with who she is. You could even say that in a non-assuming way she loves herself. What is obvious however is that her love and concern for others is greater than her self-love and this is demonstrated by her compassion and generosity toward others. Growing up she was an ordinary fun-loving mischievous child, but her focus was always on including others and her perception of how others felt always seemed to be accurate. When she excelled at school, she was pleased but not boastful. She praised others, encouraged them and was always ready to help. In her teenage years and into her adulthood she did not, like Abas, ever feel the need to put herself down or to downplay her achievements, but she never stopped delighting in the achievements of others. As a spouse and a mother her strongest gifts to her husband and her children are her empathy and her encouragement.

If Narco and Abas sit at the opposite ends of a continuum then Humi sits somewhere comfortably between them. From her we learn that loving who we are does not have to be a negative as it was in Narco’s case. Humility includes self-acceptance and an ability to celebrate our life and achievements, whilst not engaging in self promotion and attention seeking. Humility recognises that who we are and who we continue to become throughout our whole lives is a consequence of living comfortably and gratefully as part of an extended community. Our achievements are the sum of the investments made in our lives by many others since our birth. Humility also sees as its most appropriate expression a commitment to care for others and to always put them ahead of ourselves.

It is helpful to have a model of humility that we can look up to and for the Apostle Paul and many of us, Jesus is the perfect model. Listen to what Paul says about Jesus as an example of humility. “You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a servant and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.”

That is humility. Complete knowledge of who he was. Supreme confidence in the love of God. Unlimited love for those he came to serve.

God Bless

Graeme

Differing ideologies same core values

During the presentation of the recent budget and the ensuing debate some journalists made a big deal out of the fact that a Liberal Government, incurring a mountainous debt by pumping billions of dollars into the economy was a radical departure from the “Party’s ideological” base. It got me thinking about the limitations on a nation, community or individual who can only respond to an opportunity or a crisis by strict adherence to a particular set of ideas and views of the world, at the exclusion of anything new or different.

This musing brought me to think about my father. He had been raised on a dairy farm and had been the beneficiary of generations of farming wisdom and knowledge, much of which he practised. However, he was also guided by another value, which was; “A particular idea or method, developed in a different era, subject to different climatic conditions and economic constraints, may not be the most efficient or beneficial approach in the present or the future and may not contribute to us becoming the best farmers that we could be.” This value led him to constantly learn by reading farming magazines, listening to the “Country Hour” on radio, asking questions and listening to the answers. Consequently, he was often experimenting with new things, even pioneering new methods and of course becoming a better farmer.

The question is, if his approach to farming was not based on a body of traditional ideas, what, if anything was his ideology? I am sure that he would not have articulated it like this, but I think he was not driven so much by an ideology but by two core values. Connection and Compassion.” There is no doubt he had a strong connection to the land, a love for his animals, compassion for his family and kindness and generosity toward his neighbours. This compassion and connection served as his moral and professional compass. His decisions, his farm management and his role and character as a man, a husband, a father and a friend were based on these values and expressed through his humility, his honesty and his diligence.

When I consider the question of whether or not a stubborn loyalty to a particular set of ideas has the potential to limit the freedom of decision makers to respond creatively and effectively to a crisis or a present social issue, I find myself answering in the affirmative. In a democratic nation a worker should not be forced to choose between a Political Party that is reputed to understand their circumstances and another Party that does not; nor should an employer be forced to choose between a party that is reputed to favour business and one who does not. The same is true of pensioners, our first peoples, migrants, youth and women. We may prefer one Party’s policies over another, but we should have confidence that the leadership either Party will give will not be solely based on an ideology, but function out of the values of connection, compassion and justice. We should know that in a crisis these values will provide them with the courage and flexibility to respond in a way that a fierce commitment to their ideology may not. We should be certain that each party is not simply comprised of men and women who ‘toe the party line,’ but are, as much as is humanly possible, connected to their community, compassionate toward every need and support policies which are just and fair.

I suggest that the  combative approach to politics, based on who is the most connected to the needs of a section of the community, and who responds with the most compassion and who values justice more highly than the other no longer serves us well. On the other hand, the energetic debate around policy must of course continue. There is always more than one pathway to a destination and individuals will prefer one ahead of the others, and that is why civilised debate, is still a very important aspect of democratic government. What should stop is the bitter claiming and counter claiming that the moral and political compass of one Party benefits some section of the community and not others. It may seem a little cynical but it seems to me that the rubbish talk heard every day on Question Time in Parliament, is not driven by the values of connection, compassion and justice but by the desire to justify their ideological position and improve their chances of winning the next election.  

I salute every man and woman who becomes a local politician. I believe that they are by and large driven by the values they hold. They work hard and we should be thankful that they are willing to serve their communities as they do. My concern is that the ideals with which they enter the political arena, are frequently blunted by their party’s commitment to a set of ideological beliefs and ideas that no longer serve us well and therefore limit Government’s ability to respond to needs and crisis in the most creative, just and compassionate way.

As a Christian Pastor I have often lamented over the same issue in the governance of religious organisations. The unassailable position and power given to tradition, theology and dogma, becomes the narcotic that effectively dulls the vigour and excitement of faith in Christ, and like most narcotics such slavish engagement with it becomes addictive. The constant battle that must be fought and won is to always choose to be influenced more by what Jesus taught about humility, love, forgiveness and hope than dogma and traditions, no matter how important to our history they may have appeared to be.

God Bless

Graeme