Abuse Left Me Wary and Alone
My childhood in South Africa was messy. Like many, I was a victim of sexual abuse, had an absent, alcoholic father, and a bad tempered stepdad with a gun.
It made me feel different and separate from others …
I lived in fear of my life as a child, suffered with nightmares, and had no emotional framework to process these things.
It made me feel different and separate from others, experiencing feelings of rejection, helplessness and loneliness. Trusting people was hard too. I was suspicious even of every hug or gift. One of my coping mechanisms – like an instinctive survival mode – was to shut down my emotions.
This is what trauma does. Perhaps you know what it’s like?If you do, I want to say that my heart aches with you. I also want you to know there is hope and healing.
For me, the journey to this began during high school when I attended a church where the Bible was taught as life-giving truth. Then, during a Christian music concert I attended around that time, I realised that I did not yet have a relationship with God, but through Jesus, who takes away my sin, I really could! I accepted God’s forgiveness and His work of healing in me started.
Trusting God has not been easy either. Instead of following him out of love or appreciation, I feared God because that is how I had felt about my own earthly father-figures.
It was some thirty years later, living in the UK with my own family and after the death of my stepdad, that my mind and body felt safe enough to open up my past. For the first time, I didn’t hide my emotions such as anger and grief. I brought them to God.
For the first time, I didn’t hide my emotions … I brought them to God.
I also found that in the Bible there are many other people who got angry with God, and I could see myself in them. Then one day, some words of Jesus I read jumped off the page: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46).
Jesus cried these anguished words as he gave up his life on the cross for me and my sins. In that moment, he knew those same feelings of rejection and loneliness. He too experienced abuse and mistreatment by others. Something within in me shifted – Jesus understood my pain! And not only that, by dying and rising again for me, he could offer healing, hope and freedom.
As I continue to walk this path, I have a greater sense that I am not so alone.
Jesus is my way now. He will show me what direction I need to take on this journey. Jesus is the truth, who is helping me identify my inadequate coping mechanisms and unhelpful thought patterns, in order to set me free from them. Jesus is the life I need – where I find increasing freedom, joy, peace and release from my past.
This Christmas, I hope you can start your journey by looking again at the one who entered our world, our messy lives, to set us free.