Changing Sorrow to Healing, Virginia Jones, The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing, April 16, 2010

Changing Sorrow to Healing

By Virginia Jones
The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing
April 16, 2010

http://web.me.com/virginiajones/Compsassionate_Gathering/The_Garden_of_Roses/Entries/2010/4/15_Changing_Sorrow_to_Healing.html

Virignia at age 6, two years after being sexually abused.

As a Catholic, I feel sorrow. As a single mother of two active children who is also trying to start a not-for-profit, I can’t keep up with all the bad news there is going around about the Catholic Church. On one side I see articles that indicate that the Pope failed to act to defrock a priest with a horrendous record of abuse and that he, as a Archbishop in Germany, appears to have known about an abusive priest who was moved to a new parish rather than removed from ministry. Each day brings a new misstep, a new story of harmful actions.

To be honest, I am not surprised. It feels as though the whole church leadership knew and did the wrong thing about abuse within the church for millennia with occasional steps forward always followed by steps backwards.

Others sources I read credit the current Pope with doing much more than his predecessors.

Both views of the Pope are correct.

Can we hold the bad and the good together at the same time? Our society just plain didn’t support survivors of of any form of abuse until recently, and this progress has come slowly. I know this from personal experience.

I was sexually abused by two teenaged boys when I was four years old. I knew that what happened was bad although I didn’t know what it was. The event is seared into my brain like a beacon. Although an analogy of darkness is more apt. I have only three or four memories preceding the abuse, and then I was abused. Unlike some people, I never forgot it.

I didn’t remain silent. I told my mother about the abuse when I was six.

She said, “That’s where babies come from.”

But she didn’t do anything.

At age seven I talked some more. I told some teenaged girls I knew where babies came from. The year was 1966 or 967. Back in those days there wasn’t so much sex in the media.. The teenaged girls were shocked by what I knew but no one thought to ask how I knew what I knew.

In the meantime I had problems – problems with chronic depression, problems with touch and anxiety around males.

If my older brother brought home one friend to play with I was OK. If he brought home two, I went into my closet and wouldn’t come out. There were times when I had to be bodily hauled out of the closet.

But nobody really connected the dots. Maybe my mother sort of connected the dots, but she connected them the wrong way. She noticed I was afraid of adult men. She blamed my father and took me to a pediatric specialist. She told her theory to the specialist. He told me to go sit on my father’s lap, so I did. My reactions were normal.

“She’s fine,” the specialist said.

Of course I was fine with my father. He never abused me. He was a rock of stability and support in my life.

But I was not fine with my life. By the time I was in high school I was actively suicidal and my problems with touch did not get better. And I ran away from home.

There’s more to the story. I wrote it out. Nine thousand words, and that is condensed from what is in my diaries and letters. And the story gets worse. I was raped on a date when I was 22. I was raped by two young men I should never have gone out with, but I went out with them because my self esteem was low. I had no luck with boyfriends and wanted to be wanted if only for a one evening, but the evening didn’t go the way I hoped.

Afterwards I wrote in my diary, “I feel totally degraded, like dirt, a whore.....”

I didn’t report the rape. I told no one for years. I felt so much shame and guilt. I’ve read about a similar case recently, and it was thrown out of court. I am not about to report something that wouldn’t pass criminal muster. But just because something wasn’t illegal, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t harmful.

The rape changed me. I was one person one day and the next day I was a different person. It was as though someone had switched a light to off and placed fifty strips of duct tape over the switch so it could never be turned on again. I guess the abuse changed me too, but I was so young when I was abused that I don’t remember a before and an after. Moreover, I don’t blame myself for the abuse the way I blame myself for the rape.

Twenty-eight years have passed, and I am still not over that rape.

When I finally started talking about the abuse and the rape, I wore out the ears of my friends. I exhausted a very nice clergy abuse survivor in California and drove him away with my anger. I went through years of therapy and two spiritual retreats with the Compassionate listening project and professional mentoring with Eryn Kailsh of Workplace solutions.

I am better. My relationship and communication skills are better

But I still struggle to speak about the rape. Someone asked me to talk about the rape recently and I started crying – in public – in a cafe filled with people.

I wonder, Will I ever heal?

My next thought is about one of the things that hurts clergy abuse survivors and other survivors so much is when someone gives them the advice – just get over it, forget about it, move on. You don’t just get over abuse. Scientific studies have shown that abuse, like combat, changes the brain chemically and physically. Healing is a long journey as the brain builds new neural pathways as we learn by tore new reactions to old triggers.

Am I angry at those who abused me. No. After the rape I was angry at all men for a while, although I got over that in time. Am I angry at my mother for failing to support me when she knew? No. I never was angry at her. Moreover, several years ago my cousin told me that our aunt, my mother’s and her mother’s sister, told her that all the sisters in the family were sexually abused by our grandfather. By then my mother was dead so I couldn’t ask her what happened to her.

So my mother had her unhealed wounds of abused. How can I condemn her for doing the wrong thing when she went through worse than I did and no one ever helped her? She struggled with depression through out my childhood, and her profound depression was probably why I was so unsupervised at age four that I could be abused.

Abuse is not a wound experienced by distinct people, isolated and alone. It pervades the whole society. If we don’t all take a role in preventing abuses and caring for the wounded, it will keep recurring.

Church leadership has been trapped by an system that perpetuated abuses just as was my mother. Abuse and keeping quiet about abuse was a way of life in both Church and society at large. It still is a problem in both Church and society at large. And that is why the movement to expose the abuse and invite change is absolutely necessary.

If I as a survivor can’t heal in the 28 years that have passed since I was raped and the 44 years that have passed since I was sexually abused, how can I expect others to heal instantly?

That advice, just get over it, isn’t going to work any more with Church leadership than it does for survivors.

The reality is that these men in charge of the church from the parish priest to the Pope are all in a state of ongoing shock. Everything they believed in has been turned upside down on them. They keep grasping for familiar straws to save themselves, but the straws are just straws and they end up worse off than before.

Coming to terms with abuse and changing the way you live is a slow process of healing day by day. It is like the grief process with different stages. The first stage in the grief process is shock and denial. Most Church leaders and most lay Catholics are still in “Shock and Denial” stage of grieving. The numbers who have progressed beyond this stage is very small.

The question is how do we help people who are trapped in this stage of grieving move forward?

I have some ideas. Keep reading my blog, and I will tell you about them.

Contact me, Virginia Jones at compassion500@gmail.com.