Healing from Sexual Abuse:

by Grantley Morris

Sexual abuse survivors are worthy not only of deep compassion but, almost without exception, they have won my admiration. They are truly survivors, and in my eyes heroes, and I am saddened that few see themselves in that light. This webpage is not about empathizing with survivors, however. I have other pages in which that is the focus. This one grapples with the tough issues on which healing hinges.

1. We could choose to heap the blame and shame upon ourselves

What torment this option brings! So many precious lives have been ruined or tragically shortened by unfounded or hideously distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Young men and women of high morals can become so brainwashed into wrongly thinking themselves to be ‘trash’ that they end up needlessly cheapening themselves.

The origin of this tragically false image is understandable. One of the great traumas of sexual abuse is that the innocent are made to feel partners in wickedness. And if it occurred during one’s childhood, the pressures are magnified even more.

An obvious factor in self-blame is that hindsight allows you to see things you might have been able to do to avoid the horrible experience. The key point, however, is that only the offender knew where this was leading. Only afterwards were you able to know how depraved the offender was. You had expected the offender to act as decently and trustworthy as most people do. You were caught off guard and when things escalated you were paralyzed by shock. If you had suffered previous abuse, instead of it making you wiser, it would actually deaden your ability to avoid the situation, due to the crippling psychological force known as learned helplessness. Having once been subjected to a situation in which resistance was useless (a child being overpowered or outwitted by an adult, for example) strongly pressures us to believe that in a similar situation resistance will again achieve nothing.

Another factor triggering self-blame is that the human body is designed to send pleasure signals to the brain in response to sexual stimulus. This is an unavoidable physiological fact and has nothing to do with morality or with secretly wanting or approving of the offense. Like the other points, this is explained far more convincingly in the links, but we need to move on.

If the offender were someone emotionally important to you or someone you are dependent upon – a lover or family member, for example – or someone highly respected, such as a community leader, the thought of concluding that that person is depraved can be so devastating that you find it easier to blame yourself than blame the offender. Children, for instance, need desperately the security of knowing that their parents are good, trustworthy people who will protect, comfort and nurture them. This need can be so intense that they will choose to believe they were at fault rather than face the terrifying reality that they are exposed to continual danger that is utterly beyond their control.

If you were a child when the offence occurred, additional forces come into play, although they still influence us even as adults. Children are programmed (and perhaps even have an inbuilt tendency) to respect and believe adults. Often their very survival – as well as their rapid development – hinges on it. In what only adults can recognize as a life-or-death situation, it is essential for children to obey immediately. Little children can learn and mature at the required rate only by unquestioning acceptance of what adults teach them. Since child molesters are usually considerably older than their victims, their lies sound authoritative to children. So when adults (or older children) seduce children they not only lack the maturity and intellectual ability to realize that it is wrong, they have a strong, natural urge to trust and obey.

Abusers often cruelly manipulate the emotions of their victims until tender consciences are shattered by an overwhelming burden of false guilt. An abuser’s insistence upon secrecy not only inflames the conviction that something shamefully wrong is occurring, it forces victims to keep their emotions dangerously bottled up.

Once self-blame starts, however, we soon find ourselves imprisoned by a guilt-ridden cycle of self-loathing that simply gets harder and harder to break out of as the years grind on. The most saintly person on the planet has regrets, but once we view ourselves as unforgivable, motivation to keep ourselves pure vanishes in a swamp of hopelessness.

It is only natural to act out our self-image, no matter how contrary to reality that self-image is. Many of us are tempted to magnify our own guilt and underrate the guilt of ‘respectable’ people. The reality, however, is that the best of earth’s inhabitants has at some time or another done inexcusable things. Trying to pretend this isn’t so is like trying to ignore cancer. We can’t simply ignore reasons for blaming ourselves. We must somehow find a highly legitimate way to forgive ourselves. This webpage has answers.

We have listed powerful psychological forces pressure that us to blame ourselves. I delve into some of them in greater depth in links at the end of this page, but exploring them immediately would be counterproductive. It would most likely only cause us to shift the blame. Despite initially seeming like welcome relief, shifting the blame ends up like moving a red hot iron from burning our back to burning our stomach. What we most need is an overview to see where the blame game leads.