[UPDATE: All They've Been Waiting to Say]
Got this in:
Hi John,
My name is L., and I’m a survivor of childhood abuse. My brother, seven years my senior, started molesting me when I was very young. My first memory of it is when I was about five years old. I believe it went on until I was about twelve. I know he raped me multiple times.
I did not grow up going to church. But I believe that I know God, and have for a very long time. God is a vital part of me, and I believe that without him I would be dead, or just freaking crazy.
I have been diagnosed as dissociative (no surprise, given my past), and have had a counselor tell me that my “God” was created by my childhood psyche to help me cope with the abuse. There may be some reality to this, as I remember God being with me, talking to me, and playing with me as a little child, distracting me from what was going on. The memories are very bitter sweet, as I’m sure you can imagine. Instead of remembering being molested, I actually remember playing games with my “God,” singing with him, etc. And I even remember Him telling me when to leave my body because my brother was coming. Regardless if this is all in my mind, I believe that God taught me how to dissociate so that I would survive.
I recently confronted my brother about what he did to me. Afterwards I cut him off from my life, refusing to deal with him. I wanted to have the last word. Now, though, he wants to “sit down and work things out” with me. He is begging my family to talk me into sitting down with him. My family (who for years has known about what he did to me—and who allowed the abuse to occur) insists that now I’ve not only opened a can of worms, but that I “owe it” to my brother to meet and talk with him. They say I owe my brother because I am a Christian, and so must forgive him.
Honestly, I often have quite vivid, very non-Christian like thoughts of my brother dying. I know that in reality I don’t want him to die. On some level I actually do love my brother. But I feel better when I sometimes allow myself to think these things when I’m hurting. And I don’t feel guilty sometimes for the hate that I feel towards him. It has been at least twenty-five years since the last time he sexually touched me. A lot of time has passed, but this is still very fresh in my mind and the anger burns sometimes like a fire in me.
Do I really need to forgive him? I can hardly believe that God would send me to hell for angry thoughts I have about my brother. Just wondering your opinion.
You’ve “opened a can of worms”? During the most vulnerable years of your life your older brother, for years on end, sexually abuses you; as an adult you find the courage to bring that horrific truth out into the open—and your family responds by accusing you of having “opened a can of worms”?
Who are these cretins? Who would say such a thing?
Oh, that’s right: people trying to shift responsibility for their evil onto the victims of their evil.
They want you to suffer now with the same silence you suffered then. That’s what is best for them.
And don’t you want what’s best for your family?
Don’t you love your family?
And boom—that’s the hook they use to catch you: that’s how they turn your natural love into their unnatural hate; that’s how your light becomes their darkness. That’s how they get you to tape shut your own mouth. That’s how they make you your own worst enemy.
Go away, little girl, they say.
Go to your room.
Shut the door. Shut your mouth.
And keep your mouth shut until you die.
Ugh.
Your family—or at least those within it who tried to blame you for responding to what happened to you—are animals. Here’s hoping they don’t remain that way until the end.
You do not need to forgive your brother. “Forgive and forget” sounds spiritually enlightened, but the fact is that it’s simply not possible for any person to forget an egregious violation against them. Your brother did do what he did. You literally cannot forget that. And you’re under no moral obligation whatsoever to make him feel better about it. His conscience is his responsibility, not yours.
The Greek word most often translated in the Bible as “forgive” is aphiemi. It means to depart, separate from, bid goodbye. The word is derived from apo, a prefix implying separation, and hiemi, meaning to put in motion, send. It means send away.
And that is something you want to do. You do want to send away the pain your brother caused you. You want to separate from it, bid it goodbye. You want it away from you.
But that’s about you, not about your brother or your family. You.
You take care of you. God will take care of your brother and family.
So the question is, how do you “send away” the pain and anger that you feel for your brother? Well, the first thing is to simply acknowledge the validity of those emotions. What happened to you should cause you anger and hurt. It should engender feelings of revenge and retribution. Those feelings have an organic integrity. From your brother’s violation of you is naturally born within you the same righteous anger that you would feel toward anyone who has victimized any innocent. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel that anger. That you do means nothing more awful than that your conscience has remained intact. It means that you’re still with us.
So the first thing is to just accept as okay and healthy whatever anger or ill-will you harbor for your brother. Be okay with it. Let it be.
Once allowed its free expression, that anger begins to abate a little. And that will open up for you the peace necessary for getting down to the question that is central to your “sending away” all of your anger and ill-will toward your brother: the question you must answer if you are to ever, in the realest sense, “forgive” him.
And that is the question of why what happened to you did.
Why did your brother hurt you so? It’s in finding the answer to that question that your salvation—which is to say your enduring peace of mind—lies.
Well, there can be only two causes for your brother’s evil actions: nature or nurture. The boy was either born evil, or he learned evil.
He’s either innately, profoundly, organically dysfunctional—he was simply born with some really messed-up wiring in his brain—or somewhere along the line he was treated so terribly that then his wiring went bad. Then he became just like a pit bull whose owner has beaten it into becoming an attack dog.
I’m voting that what’s almost always true in these matters is also true in this case: that when he was young, your brother was also sexually abused. It’s almost a certainty that he did to you what was first done to him.
It happens all the time. Kids process by acting out. They have no other way of processing. They simply get imprinted upon—and then act accordingly.
That your brother was abused as he abused you would explain (as nothing else could) your parents’ abysmal response to you wanting to discuss that abuse. Pointing to your brother means pointing through him, straight at them.
Which isn’t going to work for them, of course. Which is why they reverted back to trying to make you feel guilty for the guilt that remains theirs.
Ultimately you can forgive your brother, because ultimately he’s not morally culpable for what he did.
He wasn’t then, that is. But today he is. As an adult, your brother needs to take so seriously his past offenses against you that today he finds himself compelled to go through whatever he must in order to reconcile himself to himself, and to you.
If he’s serious about doing that, then his tone, and the things he says, will show you beyond a doubt that he is.
But if you get from him anything less than that, stay away. If your brother does not make completely clear to you that he is in that contrite, repentant, truly healing space, do not let him in any way near you. He must first—and for as long, and in as many ways as it takes—show you that he’s willing to be anything but defensive: that he is as broken as you are by what he was led to do to you.
When he comes to you, and begs for forgiveness, and is clearly open to really talking about what really happened—and when above all he makes clear to you that he understands that the real transgressors in your lives were and are your father and mother—then you can talk to him.
But if all he’s doing is asking your parents if they’ll get you to talk to him?
That’s not conviction of sin. That’s damage repair. That’s just him taking care of him. Which is as typical as typical gets.
Open up a Gmail account you can shut down whenever you want; tell your parents and your brother that they are fee to contact you there and in no other way; ignore from them any emails that aren’t positively ringing with the unmistakable tone of true contrition.
You don’t belong to them anymore. You belong to you; you belong to the God who saved you; and you belong to those of us out here who, like you, finally decided to claim for ourselves an identity grown and nurtured in the ground of truth, not lies.
![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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I just came across this tonight… how I wish I’d come across it years ago. Decades ago. I am a survivor of sibling abuse as well – my brother beat and molested me for several years. My parents knew all along because I told them but because my mother insisted it was “normal family experimentation” (oh, and she’s a counselor, BTW, so she had that clout in addition to being a parent), it all got swept under the rug. Confronting them by letter several years ago and disclosing it to the rest of the family got me branded as a liar, harassed, and cyberstalked.
I thought I had forgiven them when I was a young adult. I thought it was all behind me and we could all move on as a family. The problem is they never apologized, in fact they tried to say there was nothing wrong with it, later said it never happened at all. What I thought was forgiveness was really denial mixed in with fear of rejection if I brought up the elephant in the room.
Outside of the confrontation, and a couple of conversations with my terminally ill father, I haven’t talked to them in over a decade… the longer time goes by the more I’m okay with that. It grieved me at first to see that they were never willing to come to me with any apology, any remorse… but as time has gone by I’ve seen that’s how it always was. It also grieved me when my extended family dismissed me and never tried to look for me on their own, but when I’ve seen that they never really invested any time in me outside of family gatherings or visits, that tells me more than enough.
I had a therapist who said you can’t forgive if it isn’t there. This is so true. Those words helped me stop putting pressure on myself to do so… I’ve probably been one of my worst enemies in this department. I’ve had others put pressure on me and shame me for not forgiving or not reconciling, but the greatest shame I’ve felt was from within. I was so used to being a “nice girl,” conditioned to never speak up or stand up to anyone because to do so meant violent consequences, that it horrified me to realize I could not forgive these people.
With the help of several different support venues, I’m realizing I am under no obligation. Christ said to forgive IF someone repents (Luke 17:3). If is such a small word but it holds SO much power in that statement. Other statements in Scripture support this – God takes forgiveness seriously. He does not want cheap grace.
I’ve come a long way thanks to therapy, EMDR, support groups, friends who “get it,” etc. But the scars still remain, and some days they hurt terribly. I think lately they have because this is the month that marks when I cut off contact, and as with many anniversaries there are reminders and triggers. There is that child inside me who still howls with outrage and pain. That’s when I let the tears come.
That’s also when reading responses like John’s to Lynn do so much good. Thank you, sir.
Thank you too, Lynn, for sharing your story. You have my support and you are truly brave for having told. I hope in the time that’s passed since then that you are doing better and that you have managed to kick your family’s guilt tripping to the curb.
I have not read all the posting because they are very lengthily bu
God doesn’t forgive people if they don’t repent. We don’t have to, either. “Getting over it and moving on and not being bitter” is not forgiveness. It is “getting over it and moving on and not being bitter.” The two are not the same. We have redefined forgiveness to the point where it is useless. Our forgiveness needs to mirror that of Christs — when the person repents, they are forgiven. Not before that. This woman does not need to forgive this person. She shouldn’t — he’ll take it as “amnesty,” that is, believing he did nothing wrong. Don’t enable these people.
YES, Ellie! Exactly. Perfectly said.
This post really hits home for me! I was sexually abused as a child and beat by two men that I know of, possibly more can’t remember at the age of 3 and 4. It really traumatized me both Spiritually, emotionally and physically. I never was able to press charges but they were both eventually arrested for abusing other children! I was adopted by a Christian family, my brother and I. Well, years went by and by the age of 8, my adopted brother and his friend approached me one day after I came out of the bathroom. They were about 12 or 13 years old odd enough. My brother told me to show my privates to him and he would show me his. He even had me touch his penis. There was never any penetration but I did feel uncomfortable. He told me not to tell so I didn’t and as time passed I forced myself to forget that it happened. I also was touched and fondled by my cousin while pretending to be asleep. Most of my life I have had such low confidence in myself and to this day I am starting to feel acceptable about being raped. That’s how used to it I have gotten. I have probablly been raped at least 25-30 seperate times in all my life including unwanted sexual advances. Really the most traumatizing to me was the two men who killed my Spirit litterally when I was a toddler. To those of you who say people can just get over this kind of horrific trauma, I beg to differ. You try having a big male penis shoved into a pebble size vagina as a toddler. It hurts badly! I had to dissociate just to deal with the pain. That trauma and fear of men and abandonment never leaves. It took my adopted family a year to get me not to scream and run behind a couch whenever someone came to the door. Anyway, I started working through alot of the issues of abuse as a teenagar in high school. I was going through a Sexual Abuse workbook with my therapist. I had written down about my brother and my adopted mother found it. She told the whole family my accusation. They had a meeting about me outside. No one cared to talk to me about it! When they came back inside they never said another word about it. I felt kinda awkward around everyone and they were thinking of sending me back to the adoption place since I was making accusations against one of there own. It really made me feel unloved, unworthy and even more bad than before they had found out. I felt so tore up I nearly tried to kill myself but my dad told me if I ever did kill myself he would spit on my grave. I really had no one to talk to. They were Christian people but didn’t seem to care about me or being touched at all. I agree in experimentation and all but when you’re uncomfortable with something, it goes beyond experimentation. To this day, they don’t want me to talk about it or my life story including any of them. They want me only to bring up the positives in my life. Whenever I bring anything up that is negative that happened they either say that was in the past or don’t believe it happened or remember! I guess I just need closure! I am trying to be a good Christian woman. I feel like I’ve tried to show them I love them, cleaned the house all the time for them without wanting anything in return but love and acknowledgement! I guess the old saying is true: blood is thicker than anything. If I was there child, they would overlook abuse, doing drugs and adultery other things they did but for some reason they all hate me! Am I over reacting? What is the real reason most adopted families decide on there own child over a child they chose to love? My only blood brother died when I was 12 years old and ever since then, I’ve felt completely alone! I know I have God but how could he allow a toddler of 3 who hadn’t done a thing wrong and was just beginning to discover who she was, be hurt so badly? What could I have done to make so many people in this world hate me so? I still get so depressed I find myself struggling to think of a reason to live! Abuse is like killing internally eating you up inside out…a slow and painful death till you are nothing more than a rotting corpse!!!!
Thank you for an intelligent, wonderful response. You are awesome!
Yes, Michael (above) I think forgetting serious crimes like this can set you up to be a victim again; we must always stay aware.
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