UNITED STATES
Catholic World Report
February 03, 2014
Revealing her own history of abuse in a new book, former rock journalist Dawn Eden reflects on how the Church can improve its pastoral care of victims.
John Burger
The author of the 2006 best-seller The Thrill of the Chaste has revealed, in a new book, something of her past as a victim of childhood sexual abuse.
Dawn Eden, a Catholic convert who grew up Jewish, has woven her story with those of saints who suffered abuse of various kinds. In My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, Eden offers advice on how victims of abuse can heal through learning some of those stories, through prayer, and through forgiveness.
In an interview with Catholic World Report, Eden offers suggestions on how the Church can reach out more effectively to victims of abuse, whether that abuse took place in the Church or in the victim’s very own home.
CWR: What led you to write this book?
Dawn Eden: I myself am a victim of childhood sexual abuse. For me, when I received the grace of faith in Christ at the age of 31, I was instantly healed of the depression and temptations to suicide that had dogged me since my teens and which I later learned were the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the abuse. But what I discovered during my first years as a Christian, during which I was a Protestant, was that although I had experienced this dramatic healing from the worst aftereffects of the abuse, I still had other effects to contend with, including anxiety, flashbacks, and hyper-sensitivity. And my thought as a new Christian was that the fact that I had not yet received healing from these effects meant that I wasn’t fully surrendered, that I didn’t have enough faith. So I blamed myself for my own seeming failure to be living completely within the light of the risen Christ.
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