{"id":1062,"date":"2014-10-21T16:08:28","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T22:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/permissiontolive\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2014-10-21T16:08:28","modified_gmt":"2014-10-21T22:08:28","slug":"re-post-lies-we-tell-ourselves-about-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/permissiontolive\/2014\/10\/re-post-lies-we-tell-ourselves-about-abuse.html","title":{"rendered":"Re-Post: Lies we tell ourselves about abuse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This post was originally published June 2011.<\/a>\u00a0One of the things that prompted my finally admitting my own denial, was realizing I did not want to parent the way I was parented.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0I wanted to believe that how I grew up had not been harmful, I wanted so badly for my parents to be right, that I refused to think about it, refused to deal with it, and even repeated it. In the end, my desire to not hurt my kids was stronger than my desire for my parents to be right. \u00a0That is what snapped me out of the fog, and forced me to get help.<\/em><\/p>\n

(I have one more re-post after this one. To read about what prompted this, check out this post.<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"ipad-art-wide-QUESTION-no-evil-420x0\"<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We want to think the best of people.\u00a0We want to tell ourselves that we were loved and cared for. We want to be \u201cnormal\u201d and \u201cOK\u201d. So we find ways to excuse what was done to us. We find ways to explain what happened. If we can avoid dealing with it, maybe we won\u2019t hurt anymore. Here are some of the lies I was telling myself about my past.<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Abuse only happens when parents don\u2019t love their kids.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents love me. So there is no way they could have been abusive. Right?\u201d<\/em>
\n
\n<\/em>This is not true. People often do very harmful things with great intentions. Even if something was not meant to deliberately hurt you, that doesn\u2019t mean it wasn\u2019t damaging. Here is one simple example from my childhood of unintentional harm done by well meaning parents.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think that my parents sat down one day and came up with a plan for how to give their daughters insecurities about body image. But the action they took in forcing extreme modesty, my Mom comparing our bodies to hers and being paranoid about how much food we ate and how much we weighed, and even withholding food if we were being \u201cgluttonous\u201d, my Dad\u2019s criticism of our bodies as well as his refusal to ever say anything positive about how we looked because he didn\u2019t want to \u201cpuff us up\u201d, all took their toll. Even if something was not planned to deliberately harm, it can still hurt. (And physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse can be enacted through similar scenarios.)<\/p>\n

Tradition and Ignorance<\/em><\/p>\n

Abuse can be disguised when everyone else is doing it. Virtually everyone will recognize that female circumcision is abusive, that is why it is illegal in the western world. But in the areas of the world where it happens, this is a traditional practice, approved by parents who love their children. Centuries of foot binding in China was gradually phased out as the culture realized how damaging it was. Just because something is done in ignorance does not mean that it is not abusive.\u00a0What is heartbreaking is when people live in a society where the information about a practice being harmful is widely available and distributed, but\u00a0still continue to do it anyway.<\/em><\/p>\n

2.<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019ve dealt with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh how many times I\u2019ve wanted to tell myself that I\u2019m done dealing with it.\u00a0That I am fixed now<\/em>. I\u2019ve figured it all out. That I\u2019ve arrived. And every time I am proven wrong when another buried memory emerges, or I slip back into old patterns and\u00a0have to fight my way out of depression<\/a>. Again.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cDealing with it\u201d is a journey, not a destination.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s so tempting to stop working things out when it gets rough. Especially when lies about God get dragged into the process. \u201cAs a Christian you\u2019re supposed to \u201cforgive and forget.\u201d But forgiveness (much like \u201cdealing with it\u201d) is a journey, not a one-time event. And forget isn\u2019t even part of the equation. Do the memories fade? In a way they do. Not in that you don\u2019t remember anymore, but that they slowly lose their control over you. But can I \u201cforget\u201d everything and pretend as though my parents raised me in a way they didn\u2019t? No I can\u2019t. My parents were who they were, they are who they are, they did what they did. Nothing is going to make that go away, nothing is going to reshape those memories. My relationship with my parents can never start over with a blank slate, but it can continue to grow and change as time goes on.<\/p>\n

In a way,\u00a0living with abuse in your background is kind of like living with an addiction in your past. An alcoholic can stop abusing alcohol, but they will probably never be able to drink recreationally. A cutter can put away the knife, but the scars don\u2019t disappear. Nothing you do can make the abuse in your past disappear as though it never happened.\u00a0But you can change how it affects your life!<\/a><\/p>\n

3.<\/strong>\u00a0I was never hurt (or) It wasn\u2019t that bad.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Denial was a coping mechanism I had honed to an art. I buried memories. I explained abuse away when I could, and took the blame for it when I couldn\u2019t explain it away.\u00a0(If I had been smarter, better behaved, godlier etc. etc. Then they wouldn\u2019t have done that to me.)<\/em>\u00a0If I could pretend it hadn\u2019t happened, I could still believe that I was not broken, that I had nothing to work through, nothing to grieve. Opening the door to the truth was scary, because it risked crumbling the entire delusion I had built for myself.<\/p>\n

Denial takes on many forms.\u00a0It can look kind of like being a murderer in court, trying to convince the judge to let you off because you only killed one person, \u201cAt least I wasn\u2019t a serial killer!\u201d you protest. \u201cI killed the guy with a gun, it\u2019s not like I went after him with an axe!\u201d The fact is, you are still a murderer, and you still have to deal with the repercussions of that.<\/p>\n

Another example of this is sort of like the Pharisees\u2019 prayer in the Bible where he prays, thanking God that he doesn\u2019t have all the sins of other people all while completely ignoring his own sins. In this denial, you might say \u201cI thank God that I wasn\u2019t like those homeless children, at least I HAD parents. At least I am alive! I could have been one of those children who got killed by their parents, so I have it pretty good. I should be grateful.\u201d\u00a0You keep busy telling yourself what didn\u2019t happen to you, so that you never have to face what actually did happen to you.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I kept telling myself\u00a0that my parents had done the best they could, and that it was really my fault that I hadn\u2019t been a better child. My parents tried,\u00a0but did they really do their best?<\/em>\u00a0In refusing to deal with their own issues, they perpetuated them onto their children. Instead of recognizing and working through their own pain and anger over where they had come from, they justified their faults and their abusive behaviour. My parents were not concerned with what was best for me, or my siblings.\u00a0They were concerned with what was best for them.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>What they felt was best for \u201cGod\u201d, and what was best for the image of godliness they were trying to project. My parents did their best to make themselves look good, they did their best to make me into the daughter they wanted me to be. They did not accept me for who I was, or love me regardless of how I performed.\u00a0They did not do what was best for me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes when you mention past abuse,\u00a0the abuser or other people in their life will say things like \u201cThat was a long time ago\u201d or \u201cThings are different now\u201d or \u201cThings have changed.\u201d This can even be a lie that people tell themselves to avoid dealing with the effects of past abuse in their life.<\/p>\n

While people do have the power to change and that is wonderful, the fact that things are different now does not mean that there were not issues in the past that need to be addressed. Just because something happened along time ago doesn\u2019t mean it didn\u2019t happen. Saying \u201cThings have changed\u201d serves to distract from doing real work in the present to correct past wrongs by claiming that everything has already been resolved. No apologies are needed, reform has already happened according to this logic.\u00a0Often times, \u201cthings have changed\u201d serves to recast the victim of abuse as the bitter party who cannot \u201cmove on.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0In these scenarios usually only extremely tiny or superficial changes were made, or even none at all. When this is the case, tossing the \u201cthings are better now\u201d card means\u00a0this discussion is over.\u00a0<\/em>The abuser is really claiming (quite preposterously),\u00a0\u201cI have already without ever taking the time to understand what went wrong, resolved every problem related that abuse. This is true because I say so not because I have made any real effort to substantiate change.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

If you are telling yourself\u00a0that \u201cthings are better now\u201d means that the situation is resolved; you are buying just one more form of denial that distracts you from really finding healing from past abuse. Actual change would be something both parties can see and experience. It would be something lived out through tangible effort and work such as therapy,\u00a0issuing genuine apologies<\/a>, joining recovery support groups, and real public change in behavior.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
What are some of the lies you\u2019ve heard about abuse?<\/em><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post was originally published June 2011.\u00a0One of the things that prompted my finally admitting my own denial, was realizing I did not want to parent the way I was parented.\u00a0\u00a0I wanted to believe that how I grew up had not been harmful, I wanted so badly for my parents to be right, that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1145,"featured_media":1063,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,22,30,31,17],"tags":[62,63,53],"class_list":["post-1062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abuse","category-conservative-christianity","category-healing","category-my-childhood","category-shame","tag-growth-and-change","tag-realizations","tag-spiritual-abuse"],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Post: Lies we tell ourselves about abuse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This post was originally published June 2011.\u00a0One of 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