So you're a survivor and you’re ready to move beyond recovery, and thrive. This is life post survival.
Join host Kelly, an ex-Evangelical, childhood sexual abuse survivor, as she explores faith, healing, identity, and moving beyond the past.
Did you want an answer? I'm sorry, I don't have one mija.
This is the best I can do:
Keep your heart open to love. You will find resonance with other open hearts and whatever love you have, whomever it's for, will grow. Love doesn't go to waste, even if it feels like it's been poured out. Make it worth something. Don't be afraid -- take another step forward, and then another. You got this.
When I was young, I used to repeat over and over to myself that my mom hated me.
I would lie in bed, yelling "mommy hates me" for hours. You may be thinking, wow, what a strange kid, but there's often a method to a child's madness. I hadn't just been banished to my room and denied dessert; the injustice was a lot bigger.
My mom was looking the other way, pretending she didn't see me and the pain I was in so she could stay in her marriage and keep her family together and her husband in her home. She was pretending I was fine, and that my father wasn't abusing me. And I couldn't articulate anything besides "mommy hates me." Neglect really does speak of hatred, and so in a way, it was the truth, and it felt SO good to tell the truth in a home where the truth was not welcome.
Children don't have the experiences or maturity or literally the brain development to understand and speak out larger truths. They're just children. All the complexities of my situation were distilled into one partial truth, and this truth became my identity: "I am unloved. Rejected."
It's interesting to me now how fiercely, how tenaciously, I clung to this truth. It was so precious to me! It felt amazing to be able to point out my family's lies and hypocrisy in my small, albeit loud, way -- You can't be a mom and let all this go on and then say you love me every night before I go to bed.
Time passed, and this statement, that I was hated and rejected, became my identity. In many ways, I WAS hated, but just by a few people....it's just that these few people comprised my entire world as a child, and their opinion of me, and how they treated me and saw me, was everything. To a child, family is the entire universe. There are no other people who really matter, except maybe grandma.
So I grew up, and my family's abuse and neglect became the most important fact of my existence. I wouldn’t accept any love or comfort from anyone else, ever, because I thought to accept love would diminish the pain and consequence of what they did. ”I am hated” was a rejection shroud I pulled around me as a way to show the world the pain they caused me, perhaps to find some kind of recompense, but it didn't hurt them. Only me. I never got any kind of satisfactory "payment."
When I was young, I wasn’t allowed to tell the truth. So just being able to speak the truth was liberating. They did this! They didn’t love me! They don’t get to say that!! But…after all the acknowledging, after all the therapy, and after years passed, nothing changed. I stayed there, in that place of rejection. I didn’t move on, and change the larger truth of my identity, which is “loved.”
You have to let go of that old identity. They can't pay you back for what you lost, anyway. They don't have the currency. They are unable to pay that bill.
You receive your recompense when you accept the larger truth of what and who you are -- today. Now. I’m loved, in a larger, universal sense. My family doesn't get to define my identity for me just because I grew up in the same home as them. I’m accepted, in a universal sense. And I’m the one who has the power to make these determinations, because every person gets to decide for themselves what they are and what they will be.
There’s the truth, and there’s partial truth, and there’s whole truth. It’s a partial truth that I was rejected and hurt by my family. Yes, that’s true. But it’s not the whole truth of what I am. The whole truth is that I exist in a much larger ecosystem of people, and in a much larger world than my childhood home. There is so much love out there. For me, it starts with God. I am loved by what I see as the creator of this beautiful universe. And God declared that I am good. And I can see that this is true. I am good. I’m worthy of happiness, peace, joy, friendship, love. Everything that’s good in this world. My larger identity, my whole identity, rooted in the whole truth, is that I am loved and accepted. By God. By me, and by all the things in this world that are just going to love me.
You have to separate out the world of childhood from the larger universe of which you are a part. You have to question your fierce loyalty to your old identity. Do you fiercely cling to something that’s not telling the whole truth? Have you inadvertently pulled a wrong identity around yourself? Is it more important to you that your parents hated and rejected you than it is that God, and you, and so many others love you?
I am made of love.
You cannot let the things that happen to you, or how other people treat you, define who you are. It happened to rain on you today. That doesn’t define you as a person upon whom it always rains. Move to the desert.
Someone screamed and yelled and cussed you out. Do not let that person for one second define for you who you are, or blame yourself for their terrible behavior.
Who and what you are is so much bigger than that, and more basic. It’s so, so simple. But step back, and observe from a higher perspective. The childhood home is so small. And it's in the past. Your identity is something that is bigger than time or years passing. It's bigger than what people say about you. You are an accepted part of the world you live in, this larger, whole world. And you deserve to be loved, and to love others.
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