A valuable article about childhood sexual abuse

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How do sexual abusers gain the trust of their young victims and why do parents “let” them? How do they get by with it? Why don’t the child victims say anything? How can a mother insist she had no idea what was going on? These are questions that trouble people whenever the subject of childhood sexual abuse comes up.

I found an article online that offers a concise explanation of the “grooming” process. It is all valuable information, but I wanted to highlight this:

Mother blaming tactics

The myths around child sexual abuse often describe the reasons the offender sexually abused the child as being the mother’s fault. Some of these reasons could be that the mother was sick, worked long hours, or was frightened of the perpetrator. As a mother, you are not to blame for the sexual abuse. The sexual abuse of children is just one part of a system of trickery and abuse created to maintain secrecy, isolation and the offender’s absolute power over the child and all others in the child’s life. The offender sets up a web-like structure of traps, lies and distortions to isolate the victim and recreate the child as problematic in the eyes of siblings, the mother, friends, family and neighbours. In particular, offenders admit that their prime target is to destroy the child’s relationship of trust with the mother (Morris, 2003).

The relationship problems between mother and child that are commonly seen after the abuse is disclosed are more likely to be the result of a campaign of disinformation orchestrated by the offender. The offender’s actions create a context in which the mother and child are blind to his role in creating the difficulties in their relationship (Laing and Kamsler, 1990). In fact, one of the most common tactics by the offender is creating a division between the mother and child. The mother blaming shifts the focus from the offender to the mother, in search for someone to blame.

Research shows that the vast majority of mothers do not know that sexual abuse was occurring, and this is part of the offender’s campaign to keep the abuse secret. Offenders work hard to be seen as the idea father, uncle, grandfather, brother or a trusted family friend who is wonderful with children.

Read more here: Sex offender tactics and grooming

God, love, and difficult questions

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Back in July, I wrote this:

This is not a mature, adult faith. It’s a mess, a broken jumble of confusion. But I’m posting it here because it’s real. Jacob wrestled with God. David asked Him tough questions, and lamented and wailed. The Bible is full of people struggling with God, people who didn’t have neat and tidy answers, people that we would feel uncomfortable having around if they showed up at our next small group meeting.

Way back when I was 11 years old, I threw two troubling questions at God, and He answered. Now I feel as if that wasn’t a lifetime ago, as if I’m still Little Me, all childish and earnest and troubled, desperate to believe and trust, desperate for answers that satisfy.

He’s the same God Who answered a crying little girl…the same God Who brought peace to a little girl who needed to cling to hope and beauty…He’s that personal, intimate God…Abba…Daddy…

It scares me. He scares me. Because I know that encountering His love never leaves me unscathed. Never. I will be undone. My heart will be broken…in the most beautiful and healing way. Who will I turn out to be, when I see myself through the loving eyes of my Creator?

I want to run…far far away from a God I cannot escape, at the same time that I want to throw myself into His everlasting arms.

So I stand on what feels like a mountain top, yelling to the Heavens, “Who am I? And You — who are You? What kind of God could possibly love me? And how will I survive Your unfathomable, wild, fierce, tender love?”

I still don’t have all the answers. Gradually I am learning to embrace the mystery. I am learning to want God more than I want answers, more than I want everything resolved and tidy and sensible, more even than I want healing and recovery.

Funny thing, though. Once I started focusing more on Him, and less on overcoming my issues, the more my healing has progressed. That verse I learned as a kid about, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you” — is this an example of that?

I no longer expect God to make perfect sense to my puny little brain. Frankly, I don’t want that kind of God — He would be too simple, too puny, too small. I want a real God, one worthy of my worship because He is so far above me…even if that means His ways don’t always make sense to me.

It’s been quite a ride, these last months of 2014, and the first month of 2015. I hope to be blogging about at least some of it. Quite a ride. Things have been neither easy nor serene. I have not been left unscathed; my heart is being broken in new ways, and I’m still trying to figure out who I am. But I wouldn’t trade this for anything.

Responding to a disturbing article about home birth

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This article has been bothering me ever since I read it this morning: Worshiping home births. It referenced another article: My True Feelings Regarding my Home Birth Experience

Articles like this demand a response. The following is a somewhat edited and expanded version of what I posted on Facebook about both of them.

I was quite active in the “birthing community” back in my day, up until about 15 years ago. During that time, I read a lot of birth-related books, magazines, publications, and websites. I was a La Leche League Leader and an officer in the Los Angeles chapter of the Cesarean Prevention Movement, which later became the International Cesarean Awareness Network. I even edited their newsletter for awhile. I knew more than a few doctors, midwives, doulas, childbirth educators, advocates, and birthing moms. As part of all that, I met some outspoken proponents of home birth (including two ob/gyn’s and at least one pediatrician) and even some advocates of unassisted birthing. But I can’t recall meeting anyone who “worshiped” home birth. Nor have I ever met a pregnant woman who seemed so woefully ignorant of childbirth as the woman who wrote the article about her own home birth. (Spoiler alert: she actually expected childbirth to be “glamorous”! I’m not kidding! She wrote, “I went into my home birth wanting that picture perfect birth — just like all the other home birth photos showed. I wanted to be that pretty momma — laughing during labor — sitting in the pool looking glamorous and happy.”)

I have met women who gushed a bit embarrassingly — and I thought excessively — over their male obstetricians and women who practically sang the praises of their epidurals, but I would hardly accuse them of idolatry.

Out of my six births, five were planned home births. Three were actually born at home. One of those births resulted in an emergency transport. I was told by the doctors who treated our son that he arrived in better shape than if he had been born in the hospital available to us had we not chosen a home birth. His condition would not have been prevented by a different birth location.

At the time, our midwife had delivered about 500 babies at home and a little more than that in the hospital. She had not lost one baby. Another midwife in the same area had delivered over 500 babies at home and the only one that died was due to a father refusing an ambulance transport and insisting on taking a long, out of the way route to the hospital because — as the midwife learned later — he didn’t really want his child to survive. I have been told — by doctors — that even ob/gyn’s with low risk practices do not have such a good record of outcomes.

I chose home birth because, after doing extensive research, I concluded it was the safest option at the time. When that proved no longer the case, we changed our plans. We chose our birth attendants with great care, and got to know the midwives and assistants quite well, something not usually possible with doctors. They also got to know us well.

I’m not sure why the midwife in the referenced birth account did not succeed in talking sense into this mother and giving her a more realistic concept of birth. Was everyone involved in the birth as incompetent as this mother paints them? Anyone who has such a ridiculous fairy-tale (she actually used that word!) notion of birth either has serious mental issues or simply refuses to listen to anyone. I feel sorry for her. I’m sure she would have been equally, if not more, traumatized by a hospital birth because nothing could possibly live up to her unrealistic expectations. (Spoiler alert: she seemed overly concerned with getting beautiful pictures and expected to be happy and smiling the entire time: “It was not a pretty birth. It was not glamorous….I wanted a fairy tale — picture perfect birth. I invested thousands of dollars into it — along with hundreds and hundreds of dollars into a photographer — and I walked away feeling like a failure.” Did she take childbirth classes? Watch unedited birth videos? Carefully screen her birth attendants? Learn about the process of birth? Or was she more concerned about the photographs?)

My heart goes out to this woman whose priorities caused her to be so ill-prepared for birth, and who chose a home birth for all the wrong reasons. A traumatic birth can be devastating, no matter the reason. At the same time, here are some lessons I hope this mother learns from her cold, painful dash of reality:

• Birth will never be perfect, because life is not perfect.

• Life is not a fairy tale. Neither is birth.

• Mothers need to behave like responsible adults and prepare themselves as fully as possible for the very real difficulties of a very real life.

• There is a reason we use the word “labor” to describe the process. In my experience, labor and childbirth has been hard, physical work. When we do anything difficult and strenuous, we shouldn’t expect to look all glamorous and pretty, or to be laughing and smiling, nor should we expect all to go perfectly.

• Babies are far more important than pictures.

I could trot out lots of hospital birth horror stories, and accuse women who birth in that setting of worshiping hospital births. But I think it’s time we stopped trying to demonize other people’s choices, as well as time we took full responsibility for our own.

Redeeming the day

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Yesterday, I ended my post with these words:

There was a time when I insisted to my therapist that my rape was so terrible, so dark and ugly, that there was nothing about it that God could possibly redeem. He proved me wrong…but that’s best left for future posts.

Almost immediately, the following came to mind. It’s something I wrote in 2009, after I’d been in therapy a few months. I’ve only done a few minor tweaks for readability, leaving the rest alone. It’s kinda raw. But it’s the raw and broken things that need redeeming, not the clean and pretty ones.

*****

During my therapy session today, Donny asked about the anniversary of the rape, and I told him I knew it was in August, but didn’t know the date. For some reason, after I got home, this started really bothering me. I went online to find an August 1981 calendar, and I started plugging different events into different days and finally, by process of elimination, I figured out that August 23 had to be the date.

And then I sat there, thinking, “Damn. I figured it out. But I don’t quite know what to think about it, or how to feel.” Then I realized that I was still being raped on August 24…the day that later became my wedding date. I regretted my figuring out the date, because I felt as if my wedding anniversary was now forever ruined for me. My imagination went into overdrive. I became convinced that, instead of celebrating our upcoming 25th anniversary, I’d be hiding in bed, having flashbacks, reliving that horrible day and the next day in awful, nightmarish detail.

So I posted to my online support group and Matt responded, “Well, think of this: for many years you did not know it was an anniversary. Which proves the date is not forever ruined, because you have had many August 23rd’s since your rape. And that endows you with a whole lot of post-rape August 23rd memories to recall, which are clean of any such traumatic triggers.”

That made sense.

I decided to quite whining to God, “How could you let me pick August 24 as my wedding date? And why didn’t the church let us have our first choice? Why? Why? Why?”

Then I thought, “What a coincidence…what are the chances that I would get married on that day?” But then it dawned on me — how cool, how redemptive, how absolutely victorious is it that, on the 3rd anniversary of my rape, I was having a rehearsal dinner with most of my favorite people in the world? The ugliness of the rape was the furthest thing from my mind that night. Three years after Lou and Carl finally stopped raping me, I was asleep in bed, dreaming happy dreams of marriage. Three years after that horrible shower, I was getting ready for my wedding day. Three years after sticking a gun in my mouth, feeling broken and ruined and filthy, I was walking down the aisle in a beautiful white dress that had been lovingly sewn for me. I remember that, during the wedding, I had kept thinking, “God is good”. I felt like I was basking in His love. And I actually felt beautiful.

God is good. I had no idea how good. He really did give me beauty for ashes, and the oil of joy for mourning. And He couldn’t have told me that in a more obvious way.

This August 24th will be my 25th wedding anniversary. It will also be the 28th anniversary of when they stopped raping me…the 28th anniversary of the day that I cleaned myself up and went to my first day at a new job, trying to pretend nothing had happened, the 28th anniversary of the day that I didn’t pull the trigger, the 28th anniversary of the day that I took my first steps towards being a survivor.

The “coincidence” of those dates, of forgetting the date of my rape until figuring it out all these years later — it all seems to me like a beautiful, redemptive story that God has made out of the ugliest days of my life. I feel as if He’s just given me the best 25th wedding anniversary I could think of getting.

*****

One of the things we, as survivors, often tell ourselves and each other is that the process of healing and recovery is not a smooth and constant one. There are setbacks along the way. That is the nature of healing in general, but I think that there can also be something else going on when it comes to recovery from sexual trauma. Based on what I have read, and my discussions with people experienced in the field of psychological trauma, I have come to believe that sexual trauma is unique in the damage it does to the human soul. Because of this, I also believe that the process of recovery is a sort of spiritual turf war being waged over one’s soul.

In retrospect, this seems obvious to me. 2009 was one of the most difficult years of my life. A tragedy brought me into therapy. At the same time, my husband almost died. Our entire family walked through some very deep waters. I experienced anguishing dark nights of the soul. All of that almost destroyed me.

In the midst of all that, God brought healing and moments of redemption. I wish I had trusted Him more and failed Him less. But despite my stumbling about, the fighting and wrestling I mentioned in my last post, and moments of absolute rebellion, He was faithful. He never gave up on me, his all-too-prone-to-wander prodigal daughter. No matter what, He always loves me back home again.

Why didn’t God stop them?

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I was overwhelmed with the love of God. It came completely out of the blue, with no explanation, no rhyme nor reason, just the awareness and certainty of God’s love filling me on that summer evening back in 1981 as never before. What I felt was not an impersonal love, or a love for all mankind: He loved me — me — after everything I had done, and everything I hadn’t done…despite my every sin and failing…He loved ME.

This amazing sense of His love overwhelmed me in a parking lot of all places. I leaned against my friend’s orange VW squareback, looked at her across the roof of her car, and tried to articulate this incredible epiphany I was having. And then we returned from our errand to have dinner at my neighbor’s apartment.

Only the dinner was a ruse.

After pre-dinner cocktails, my friend became suddenly and mysteriously so ill and light-headed that she went to my apartment to rest. I was urged to stay because, after all, the Italian meal had been fixed in my honor. My host seemed to think it tragic that someone who had been to Italy had never even eaten pasta fagiole, and he had supposedly been slaving over a hot stove for hours on my behalf.

So I stayed.

Later, when I asked them to let me leave, when I tried to convince them to let me go, when I begged and pleaded, they refused. Eventually I wanted to die. The next afternoon, I came as close to killing myself as I think it is possible to do and remain physically unscathed.

Almost 28 years later, I sat in a therapist’s office, finally telling the entire story of my rape for the first time, instead of the highly abbreviated one sentence version, or scattered bits and pieces. Before then, I had only shared on a “need to know” basis to very few people.

One of the things I told my therapist was that it was as if God ceased to exist during that whole nightmarish, seemingly endless ordeal. One moment I was being love-bombed by Him…the next I was utterly abandoned.

That’s what immediately came to mind when I saw this on Facebook this morning:

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Yes, I was 23 years old when I was raped, but when my daughter was that age, do you think I would have walked away and left her at the mercy of a serial rapist and his accomplice/trainee? Was I more merciful than God? More moral?

There is no easy way to deal with these questions. Flinging platitudes and Bible verses at my pain did nothing to ease it. I had many dark nights of the soul, some so dark they almost consumed and destroyed me. I wrestled with God, to the point that I thought Jacob in the Bible had nothing on me.

Those who are satisfied only with an intellectual approach to God, based on chapter and verse of the Bible, won’t find much, if anything, of value in what I’m about to write…well, except perhaps for the first part. But I don’t believe God has chosen to confine Himself to the pages of His book. He is far too mysterious and wild and great and marvelous for that…and far too personal and immediate and, dare I say it, loving.

Here is how I came to make peace with the questions that plagued me…

1. Donny looked eager to tell me something at the beginning of one therapy session. “I almost called you,” he said, “but I thought it would be better to tell you in person.” During his devotions, he was reading systematically through the Bible, and he encountered a verse he had never noticed before:

“Woe to him who gives drink to his neighbors, pouring it from the wineskin till they are drunk, so that he can gaze on their naked bodies!” Habakkuk 2:15 NIV

Amazingly enough, there was no accompanying verse saying, “Woe to naive and overly trusting stupid idiots who don’t have sense enough to refuse drinks from their sleazy neighbors, who shouldn’t even be drinking with men in the first place, and who sin by drinking too much — you get what you deserve.” Apparently that was my victim-blaming opinion, but not God’s, so I was left to ponder the question my therapist posed: if God hated it when a neighbor got someone drunk In order to look at their naked body, how much more must He hate what my rapists did?

But if that was true, why did God abandon me?

2. I don’t have chapter and verse for this next one. All I can say is that, after much arguing and wrestling with God, there came a time when I just knew that He was there that night. Even though it felt to me, during that terrible night, as if He had ceased to exist, He was there all along.

That was hugely comforting and an amazing breakthrough for me, but it left unanswered the question: why didn’t He stop my rapists?

3. Eventually I came to realize that God places a high value on our free will. (Yeah, I know — Calvinists, you might as well shoot me now.) He didn’t stop Adam and Eve from sinning — and their sin opened the door to all the evil, suffering, and death we must now endure. I don’t pretend to understand this. I don’t pretend to like it. But a God who would overrule free will to stop all child rape would have to do the same for all rape…and all abuse…and all violence…and all betrayal…and all selfish use of another person…and all unloving acts…and where would that stop until we were rendered robots, without free will, forced to love God and all people?

4. I have had to make peace — as much as one can make peace with such tragedy — with the terrible fact that we live in a fallen world, one filled with sin and suffering and death. Part of making peace with that is my belief that this world is not all there is. I cling to a future hope, when all will eventually be made right.

5. I have come to believe in redemption. One day, all will be redeemed. In the meantime, God keeps showing me glimpses of redemption. There was a time when I insisted to my therapist that my rape was so terrible, so dark and ugly, that there was nothing about it that God could possibly redeem. He proved me wrong…but that’s best left for future posts.