Diane Langberg Quotes

I think a look at suffering humanity would lead to the realization that trauma is perhaps the greatest mission field of the twenty-first century.

One of the reasons a survivor finds it so difficult to see herself as a victim is that she has been blamed repeatedly for the abuse: "If you weren't such a whore, this wouldn't have to happen." Each time she is used and trashed, she becomes further convinced of her innate badness. She sees herself participating in forbidden sexual activity and may often get some sense of gratification from it even if she doesn't want to (it is, after all, a form of touch, and our bodies respond without the consent of our wills). This is seen as further proof that the abuse is her fault and well deserved. In her mind, she has become responsible for the actions of her abusers. She believes she is not a victim; she is a loathsome, despicable, worthless human being—if indeed she even qualifies as human. When the abuse has been sadistic in nature...these beliefs are futher entrenched.

The experience of chronic abuse carries within it the gross mislabeling of things. Perpetrators are really "nice daddies." Victims are "evil and seductive" (at the age of three!). Nonprotecting parents are "tired and busy." The survivor makes a giant leap forward when [he or ]she can call abuse by its right name and grasp the concept that what was done was a manifestation of the heart of the perpetrator, not the heart of the victim.

You can do right and still have everything turn out wrong. I am not certain where we got the idea that was not so, given that the one we follow and call God did do everything right and ended up treated with gross injustice.

I fear that we are often sleeping in the garden rather than watching with our Savior because the suffering is not ours.

Pain is the only protest in the human constitution that something is wrong. It is the only thing that raises its voice against existing abuses. If you jump to silence pain, you will fail to find the wound.

To take such a complex creature, on who was meant for God and is destroyed by sin, and attempt to understand how the development of that creature can be affected by hideous trauma is to attempt the impossible.

And so I want us to look at injustice and its polar opposite, justice, which we are told is a requirement of our God for his people. It is not a lofty idea; it is not a suggestion; it is not a liberal cause; and it is not simply for those who are not busy. It is a requirement of the God who is himself Justice.

When God’s work seems to call us to neglect marriage and home, solitude and study, we have traded masters.

When the day comes and people push you toward a goal you believe is good, remember Jesus. The work is not your master; he is.

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.

Incest does not occur in a vacuum... Needless to say, incest is not a function of a healthy home. It is important to note that it is not known how much of the traumatic stress reaction or emotional disturbance is caused by the sexual act of incest and how much is caused by the unhealthy, emotionally deprived, neglect-filled home environment that fosters incestuous activity.

Every time we treat someone with dignity rather than shame, respect rather than disregard, concern rather than exploitation, kindness rather than brutality, and careful attention rather than turning away, we are doing things that are the reverse of trauma and evil.6

Those who are diagnosably narcissistic may be talented, charming, even inspiring, but they lack the capacity for self-awareness and self-evaluation, shunning humility for defensive self-protection. Christian psychologist Diane Langberg says of the narcissist, “He has many gifts but the gift of humility.”1

Have you ever sat with someone unlike you, being grace and truth to them? Have you ever listened, trying to understand what it is like to be them rather than trying to correct them and make them like you? So often we listen just long enough to convince another to be more like us or to instruct them about how to “get over” whatever has happened. It is an egocentric approach. Jesus’s presence with us was not and is not like that. He listened and responded to the individual. Have you ever been struck by the fact that he healed all blind people in unique ways? Let us watch Jesus and see who he was with others who were utterly unlike him. Let us watch and see who he was with “them.

When we hear justifications, excuses, blaming, selfishness, or a focus on the sins of another, we can be sure we do not have true repentance.

Your work in this world is resurrection work.

How easy it is for all of us to deify the gifts God has given rather than the God who gave them!

Sin hidden within a God-ordained structure is hardly success.

The church is to be a place where sheep can safely graze. To fail the sheep is to fail our Lord.

Shepherds serve the sheep best when they serve the Master first.

Oswald Chambers teaches that repentance destroys the lust of self-vindication. Wherever that lust resides, repentance is not true.

The bottom line is that you cannot tell if repentance is genuine for a long, long time. If you think you can you will have not only fooled yourself, but you will risk vulnerable people.

As Christians we love words like forgiveness, redemption, and transformation. The use of such words does not make a transformed soul. Nor are such things accomplished by a few words, tears, and a little time.

Sheep do not eat each other. Wolves eat sheep. Wolves look for isolated sheep, sheep on the fringe, sheep who are suffering. They look for someone who is not likely to speak out and someone easily overpowered.

We forget that anything done in the name of God that does not bear his character through and through is not of him at all. In our forgetting, we are more loyal to the words of humans than to the commandments of God.

When I held my newborn children and grandchildren, I felt as though I was looking at a treasure box packed intentionally by God with gifts to bless his world. Opening those gifts has been one of the great joys of my life. Ignoring the gifts of God in any child, female or male, does great damage to the child. It also greatly impairs the function of the church, because those gifts are given by God for the good of the body of Christ and for the glory of God.

The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is my inspiration. When the dominant note of my life becomes what others need, I will drown. The needs of this world are far beyond my capacity to meet. I do not take my orders from the needs I see, but from my Lord.

The Crucified is the One most traumatized. He has borne the World Trade Center. He has carried the Iraq war, the destruction in Syria, the Rwandan massacres, the AIDS crisis, the poverty of our inner cities, and the abused and trafficked children. He was wounded for the sins of those who perpetrated such horrors. He has carried the griefs and sorrows of the multitudes who have suffered the natural disasters of this world--the earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. And he has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, and our pride. He has been in the darkness. He has known the loss of all things. He has been abandoned by his Father. He has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that he has not known or carried. He has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone because he has been there before us and will go with us. and what he has done for us in Gethsemane and at Calvary he ask us to do as well. We are called to enter into relationships centered on suffering so that we might reveal in flesh and blood the nature of the Crucified One.

Victims are often told they must forgive no matter what. But God does not forgive those who do not speak truth or who demand forgiveness. He is ready to forgive—and that readiness is hard to hold back—but forgiveness is not given until we seek him out, speak truth, and ask him for it.

We are God’s dissidents every time we respond in offices, in communities, in churches, in schools, and in any areas of abuse. We do this as a part of systems, many of them with good and godly aims. We must not go to sleep. We must watch. We must not assume that our family, church, community, country, or organization is always right just because the people in it use the right words. We must never agree to “protect” the name of God by covering ungodliness. In Ephesians 5:11, Paul warns us not to participate in the deeds of darkness but instead to expose them. Understand that you cannot singlehandedly change an entire system; you are not called to do so. Yet we are to speak truth about our systems. This is difficult to do and sometimes quite risky. Just ask Martin Luther King Jr. Ask Martin Luther himself. Ask those in the #MeToo movement. When systems change, it is often little by little and usually at great cost. When you feel overwhelmed, remember this: people are sacred, created in the image of God. Systems are not. They are only worth the people in them and the people they serve. And people are to be treated, whether one or many, the way Jesus Christ treated people.

Words spoken cannot be assumed to be truth, even when they are repeated many times and are believed by many people. They are truth when we see them incarnated. God spoke, God came in the flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory. Jesus showed the Father to us by bringing his character into flesh and blood.

In recent years I have begun to understand that the call of God on my life is a bit unusual. It is a clear call to enter into the fellowship of his sufferings. It is a call to weep with those who weep. We must not forget that we serve a God who weeps, for he never calls us to something we do not first find in him.

Don’t be fooled. Encumbrances can come in pretty packages: acclaim, success, money, grateful people. They can come in compelling packages as well: panic, depression, fear, desperation. However, make no mistake, anything that pulls our eyes from the One who should be our fixed point will result in our going off course.

Pain is the only protest in the human constitution that something is wrong. It is the only thing that raises its voice against existing abuses. If you jump to silence pain, you will fail to find the wound. Pain is the Martin Luther of the human framework; it plasters the wall of the city with the announcement that something is wrong.

When someone tells us that a person we know has sexually or physically abused them, we think, I know that person; it cannot be true. Scripture says that our hearts are utterly deceitful; we don't even know our own hearts. We have a hard time believing that. Scripture says that Jesus trusted no one because he knew what was in all people (John 2:24). We say, "I know that person; we trust them." But Jesus says, "I know them; I do not trust them; I know what they are capable of." He would say that about me, about you. Scripture tells us that God does not judge by appearances but according to righteousness. We judge by what we see and hear, and we assume we know the heart.

A depressed, struggling, hungry system—be it a family, a nation, a church, or an organization—is easy prey for a narcissist. He believes he can deliver the moon, or perhaps believes he is the moon. He seems to bring hope, promise, life, and growth. The faith of the struggling system is placed in him—subtly, not seeing that it is a misplaced hope.

Scripture says our hearts are deceived in incomprehensible ways. So often the church is naïve about deception and its workings in our lives. That leads to “I’m sorry,” being a sufficient response to hideous abuse and stopping outward behavior a sure sign of repentance. Repentance means to have another mind about something. It is not merely words and tears and promises, but an intensely god-ward sorrow that results in lasting transformation exhibited repeatedly over time.

No system—family, church, community, or institution—is truly God’s work unless it is full of truth and love. Toleration of sin, pretense, disease, crookedness, or deviation from the truth means the system is in fact not the work of God, no matter the words used to describe it. I fear we have a tendency to submit ourselves to some command or idea of men—of the past, of tradition, of a systemic culture—and in so doing refuse to listen to and obey the living and ever-present God.

If you have not accepted death or endings as a reality, your own included, the loss you are confronting in another will become a threat to you and you will react wrongly. I believe that one of the reasons we so often criticize another’s process or rush them along is because we have not yet really accepted the reality, the finality of trauma, endings, or death ourselves. We want to make it less of a threat, to minimize it, and so we end up minimizing the griever’s loss. Surely, it cannot be that bad.

Repentance is not verbal only. It is always demonstrated consistently in a life over time. And true repentance is a process that requires time and more time to be made evident. When humans are caught in sin, they will say anything to make it better, including using biblical language to keep life running normally, especially when there is a lot at stake. The self-deception of the one who is exposed works overtime in an attempt to deceive his/her questioners, who also have the capacity to be deceived and sometimes in considering the potential outcomes conclude that deception is the better alternative than messy, exposed truth.

It seems we do not believe what we teach. If we did, we would know that an abuser is a slave and cannot simply stop. We would understand that the narcotic of self-deception has become so powerful in his life that he not only cannot stop lying; he does not even know when he is and has lost his capacity to tell truth from lies, good from evil. We would know that habituated sin has roots and tentacles and has long done damage to the soul so it is not easily routed out. And we would know that exposure, consequences, and treatment are necessary if there is ever to be freedom from the cancer that has sent tentacles throughout his life.

We seem to set up what I call “forced choices” and argue among ourselves. Is healing in the counseling office or the local church? Are we dealing with pathology or sin? Do you follow psychology or theology? Let me tell you something: the choice itself is a fallacy. Cannot the work of God occur in both the counseling office and the local church? And ought they not to work together? Are we not dealing with both pathology and sin? The fallenness of this world is surely so pervasive that it wears many faces. Pathology and sin can occur separately and/ or together in the physical realm. Why not in the realm of our thinking, feeling, and willing?

If people worked harder, were more responsible, were not lazy, or simply thought differently, they would not be victims of injustice. We end up holding children morally responsible for sexual abuse, victims are blamed for rape, and battered wives own their husband’s violence. Our egocentricity says to us, “You have experienced these things because you have ”—not been responsible; not loved your spouse well; not made moral choices, etc. We do the same for poverty and lack of jobs. Implicit is the idea that if they did what we did, made similar choices to ours, or behaved well, then injustice would not be present in their lives. If someone is downtrodden or oppressed, it is probably their fault.

Listen to some words: Today Christianity stands at the head of this country. . . . I pledge that I will never tie myself to those who want to destroy Christianity. . . . We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit—we want to burn out all the recent immoral development in literature, theater, the arts and in the press. . . . In short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess the past . . . few years.2 Take these words at face value. Do they resonate with you? Here is what one listener said upon hearing them: “This . . . puts in words everything I have been searching for, for years. It is the first time someone gave form to what I want.”3 I suspect many would say the same. There are thousands of people who, upon hearing these words spoken, would cheer and agree and say amen. The words are Adolph Hitler’s, and the listener was someone in the audience who made that comment to Joseph Goebbels in 1933. Goebbels was Hitler’s minister of propaganda and clearly a very good one. Hitler’s words sound like they are inspired by Christian faith and morality. Listeners assumed a certain kind of person stood behind them. But Hitler’s words masked the deception behind them so that those listening, without knowing the character of the man, heard what they longed for but what never came to fruition. What did come was the extermination of millions, the destruction of countries, and evil that has affected generations. The words were said to manipulate the audience whose longings the Third Reich understood well. Hitler deliberately deceived the people and drew them in, calling forth loyalty and service. And he got it, not just from the general population but also from the German church. Words full of promises that cloaked great evil were tailored for a vulnerable culture.

After a chronic illness is diagnosed, everyone comes around the sick person. But years later it is easy to forget or say surely it is not that bad; it must be in his head. But over time he will watch his life eroded by the disease as it eats away at his body and his capacities. He will struggle with depression. His grief will be relentless. He will grieve his inability to do what his heart longs to do. He may eventually go from a full-orbed life to a bed. If he takes medication, he will suffer from side effects that will debilitate him in additional ways. His sleep will suffer, he will endure pain, and the daily care of his body will absorb more and more of his energy. This could last for decades. What will such a man need from you? How will you handle all of his emotions? Can you allow him to grieve, weep, and ask questions? Can you endure with him what he has no choice to endure? You will get tired of his illness and his limitations—so will he. You can leave; he cannot. Many will leave or forget. Grief does not come in neat packages.

The Crucified is the One most traumatized. He has borne the World Trade Center. He has carried the Iraq war, the destruction in Syria, the Rwandan massacres, the AIDS crisis, the poverty of our inner cities, and the abused and trafficked children. He was wounded for the sins of those who perpetrated such horrors. He has carried the griefs and sorrows of the multitudes who have suffered the natural disasters of this world--the earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. And he has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, and our pride. He has been in the darkness. He has known the loss of all things. He has been abandoned by his Father. He has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that he has not known or carried. He has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone because he has been there before us and will go with u. and what he has done for us in Gethsemane and at Calvary he ask us to do as well. We are called to enter into relationships centered on suffering so that we might reveal in flesh and blood the nature of the Crucified One.

No system that carries oppression, silencing, dehumanizing, violence, abuse, and corruption within is healthy, no matter how godly the goals of that system may be. Tolerance of such things, out of fear, disbelief, or self-deception, will not protect the system from the disease that will kill it if left untreated.

The trashing, demeaning, humiliating, and labeling of other believers is horrifying and grieves God. A call to truth, which we must issue, is always to be done with gentleness, humility, and dignity, for we are calling one made in God’s image. Opinions are not to govern character, no matter how strongly we hold them. Issues are not to govern character no matter how biblical they are. Character is to be rooted and grounded in likeness to Christ so that when we express our thoughts, we manifest his character and none other.

You will be doing God’s work for him—not working for clients or for ourselves. It is easy to think it is for the sufferers—their burdens, their suffering. But if the work is done for them, then it is also governed by them. Whether they are pleased, less afraid, happy, etc. determines success. But some pain cannot be gotten rid of, some people have wrong goals, and some will not be pleased no matter what. If you work for them, you will be in bondage to their whims. It is also easy to work for yourself. Counseling can lead to feeling important, wise, or needed. It can also allow you to run into the pain of others to avoid your own. If we engage for ourselves, it can easily lead us to feed on the sheep and use them to make ourselves feel better. It is God’s work, and our offering is to him who is pleased by obedience, not success or importance.

You cannot sit with depression, abuse, strife, fear, etc. and not be shaped by it. We will catch the soul diseases of others. We read more and more in literature about secondary traumatic stress disorder. It is the nature of human beings to be impacted by what they sit with. If I habitually reflect trauma or sit with trauma, I will bear the image of trauma in my person. We see this even in the person of Jesus, who though he was perfect, bears in his person the image of our sin and suffering. If it was true of him, how much more so for us who are sinners ourselves!

Another danger is that of sitting with garbage so long that you lose the ability to recognize it for what it is. You get numb. You’ve seen so many bad things that a little bit of bad doesn’t seem bad anymore. And then you become blind to your own garbage. The hideous result is that instead of helping make beauty out of garbage, we simply mix our garbage with the garbage of others.

Thinking he is coming to feed them, they do not see that they are going to be food for him. Thinking he is coming to bring hope and change and growth to them, they fail to see that if they do not deliver such goods to him, he will be enraged and lay the blame at their feet—accusing them of not wanting to do right, not being submissive to God, not having enough understanding—and so they have become the obstacle to all the greatness or good he could have brought.

Sometimes the system itself protects them, colluding with them regarding their specialness. For example, in response to a pedophile, church leadership might say, “He is so gifted in ministry; surely you would not want to destroy such potential.” The profound lack of empathy (in the narcissist or the system), let alone repentance, is unsettling, frightening. It renders others and the impact on them invisible, erased, which is a form of death. When the system itself has caught the disease, it is inclined to cover up such things as clergy sexual abuse or pedophilia because it will “damage” the church or organization to expose it.

We are full of longings, you and I. We were created for God, which means we were created to live with his greatness, his infinity, his glory. We were meant to know him and walk with him and converse with the sovereign Lord of all things, seen and unseen. And here we are broken, dying, and scrambling around in the dirt still looking for glory. And you know how we got here? We got here because something material and finite looked good and we believed the lie that it would make us like God. Not much has changed, has it? Do you think there was a bit of grandiosity in that original reach?

Leadership without the above characteristics is not Christlike leadership no matter what a word master says. Christ has shown us the way; he has exemplified such leadership in the flesh for us so we do not have to be seduced. We are complicit with ungodliness when we turn a blind eye, support and protect existing perversions, or are compliant with narcissistic leadership in the name of success or anything else. Such leadership is described by Jesus in John 17:19: “For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.” In other words, “I am made holy; I am obedient to God so that the sheep that follow me may also come to bear his likeness.

Learn to sit with pain without immediately injecting a narcotic—into your client or yourself. Do not fear pain. When you sit with overwhelming pain it will frighten you, and you will want to alleviate it quickly so both people in the room can feel better. Be careful. Pain is the only protest in the human constitution that something is wrong. It is the only thing that raises its voice against existing abuses. If you jump to silence pain, you will fail to find the wound. Pain is a signal; it indicates danger.

Saakvitne and Pearlman, in their workbook, Transforming the Pain, define vicarious traumatization as the “transformation of the therapist’s inner experience as a result of empathic engagement with another’s trauma” (i.e., it gets in).3 Secondary traumatization is an occupational hazard, an inescapable effect of trauma work. It is not viewed as something our clients do to us, but rather as a human consequence of knowing, caring, and facing the reality of trauma.

We must not neglect the workers who desperately need our love, our ears, our time, and our care. We must not neglect ourselves. An army that does not actively care for its soldiers is foolish, for its ranks will soon dwindle—or end up with soldiers that are a danger to themselves or others. We need to care for each other. When we do not care for the workers in the Ground Zeros of this world, they become the victims of the very tragedies they have gone to heal. We are some of those workers.

To live in the real Garbage City is to be impacted by the garbage. When you live with garbage and work with garbage, you start to smell like garbage. If you are there long enough, that smell permeates everything, and even if you walk away from the garbage, somehow it is still with you. There is a professional term for that in our field. It is called Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder or “compassion fatigue.” The process of attending to the garbage that is in this world and in our work can result in harmful biopsychosocial effects not unlike those experienced by our clients. To sit with sin and suffering with any empathy at all is to become vulnerable to the emotional and spiritual effects of vicarious traumatization.

In fact, fragilities and weakness do not necessarily remove our power at all. They do, however, make us more likely to use power destructively. The weaker and needier we feel, the more dangerous we are in a position of power because we are far more likely to neglect or use the sheep under our care to feed ourselves. Those who feel powerless or inadequate often abuse power.

Whenever power is used in a way that wounds the vulnerable, trust is exploited and abuse has occurred. The word abuse basically means to use wrongly or to mistreat. When a person with power uses another for his own ends, abuse has occurred. The shepherd has used the sheep for food.

We as human beings have a seemingly unlimited capacity to hide truths that are painful to us. We have an uncanny ability to suppress knowing what we know. We do so by, at least initially, twisting the truth just a shade. The most powerful lie of all is the lie that contains a likeness to the truth in some way. As a result self-deception can be the root of terrible evil. Self-deception is not the worst thing that you can do, but it is the means by which we do the most terrible things.1

The problem of course is that sin will hurt us; it will lead to death. Once we begin removing our taste for good and our power to hate evil, then we only habituate that which causes our death.

and so the truth-teller is sent away, discredited and unprotected. You see, often we think our positions, places, institutions, and organizations are worth more protection than truth because if we stand with truth—or even exploring the possible truth of something—we risk the loss of what we hold dear. We do not, in fact, believe that sin is the worst thing in the world. And in that we are just as deluded as the one we are hearing about or sitting across from in our office.

But a failure to love because it renders you vulnerable will rob you of laughter, companionship, accomplishments together, and oneness of heart. The love between good friends is a thing of beauty and wonder. It’s also risky because it increases your capacity for being wounded. In fact, the more people you love, the more vulnerable to wounding you become. Even if all those relationships go well, some people you love will likely die before you do, and your vulnerability will result in great grief.

It is so easy to get caught up in the externals and believe that their destruction would be the worst thing that could happen. When someone comes forward and exposes sin sometimes the first response is to silence the truth-teller and to be concerned about how the truth will damage the marriage, the church, or the institution. The governing force becomes protecting the form at all costs, even if its substance is rotten. Yet our God responded to the Israelites when they were continuously disobedient to him by destroying the forms so the substance could be exposed and cleansed and eventually transformed. He hates evil and nothing is valuable enough to protect it over and above dealing with that evil.

Trauma produces lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition, and memory. Sometimes traumatic events separate these normally integrated functions from one another so that what usually functions as a unit becomes disjointed. For example, a traumatized person may demonstrate strong feeling with no clear memory of the events or clear memory without emotion. Trauma often results in disrupted cognitive and emotional processes.

Our systems, our countries, our faith groups, our tribes, and our organizations are not the kingdom of God. He resides in the hearts of his people, who are called to love and obey him even when our structures, institutions, and systems fall down around us.

But one by one, light breaks through and change comes.

When the day comes and people push you toward a goal you believe is good, remember Jesus. The work is not your master; he is. The goal must be his goal, achieved in his way. The timing must be his. And you must be wholly his. Do not be owned by the goals of service but by the Master alone. Leaders, followers, and systems can all easily deceive us, whether they are secular or part of Christendom. But people and systems are both known by their fruit.

We must be careful in our thinking to separate out death from grief. If we do not, we will seriously misunderstand what it is like for us to live in this dying world, and we will respond inappropriately to the grief of others.

many humans, precious ones created to bear the image of God in this world, are chronically living in situations that are making them sick. They live with constantly high cortisol levels, which we know makes our bodies sick. The circumstances make their brains sick, their emotions twisted, their sense of self shattered, and for many, their souls damaged. I daresay we prefer those who come to us post-trauma, but the truth of the matter is that there are millions of precious people who never get to live post-trauma.

What we have has been gifted to us to use as stewards of his glory on this earth. We are not to use that power to feed our egos, demand our rights from others, build our own little external kingdoms, and establish our reputations. It has been given to us so that the world might see something of the glory of God in the flesh—full of grace and truth. That glory is evidenced in humility, love, sacrifice, and death to anything that is not like Jesus Christ.

Deception of others is inevitably preceded by deception of the self.

Whenever sin is exposed, it creates a crisis and crises do two things: they reveal character and they are also what we might call “separating” times. A crisis reveals character because in the moments of crisis we do what we have been practicing. We display what we have habituated. We demonstrate what or who we live in obedience to.

Fragilities and weakness do not necessarily remove our power. They do, however, make us more likely to use our power destructively.

people in power who are compelled by their own anxieties, fears, and weaknesses, all too often abuse the power they have been entrusted with.

The restriction is full of love and grace. Abusers need that grace extended to them. They have spent years playing in the street of deception, evil and abuse damaging both their victims and themselves. To say to the abuser, “No, you cannot stay in the pulpit; no, you cannot simply transfer to a different ministry” is not an assault on their dignity; it is not an accusation; it is not even a failure to trust (though not trusting them is wise)—it is a keen awareness that their sensibility to sin has been so deadened that they cannot see clearly and are in great danger of further destroying their own soul, not to mention other vulnerable sheep. Of course, we need to protect the vulnerable—our God calls us to that, but we are also protecting the abuser from his own habituated sin and deadness.

Thirdly, repentance of habituated sin is never immediate. It is not possible for it to be immediate. Discernment of good and evil, conscience, or any desire to obey God have all been trampled and killed. Such things are not awakened and strong and consistent simply because someone has been caught. Repentance is not seen in tears; it is not seen in words; it is not seen in emotion. Repentance is long, slow, consistent change over an extended period of time because it is from the heart outward. Heart change is supernatural work.

Dissociation is another thinking process that is often used for coping with chronic abuse. It is a defensive adaptation that allows the child to remove itself from the abuse. The child wants to believe the abuse did not occur so she looks for ways to keep it a secret from herself. When the body is trapped in unbearable circumstances, the mind leaves by way of imaginative and trance-like states.

There are essentially no files in the brain of a child where the whole of their abusive experience can be put and understood. Think about it—you are a five-year-old girl and you live in a house where you are chronically neglected, beaten, and raped. To absorb the memory—the sensations (voice, smells, pain), the visual, the cognitive twisting, and the emotional aspects—of all that at once would likely lead to insanity. If you cannot escape physically, then one possible coping mechanism is to divide the parts of the experience and store them separately in your mind, even to the point of rendering them inaccessible—hence amnesia. So the abuse from certain ages, the abuse in certain places, the emotional responses, etc. are all filed separately in the computer of the brain.

And we who are her friends will know this; we who choose to become her comforters, will learn the general pattern of the process, the purposes of each aspect of grief so that we might name her wounds and companion her sorrows till grief has brought her back to life and wholly to us again.

Oppression, injustice, cruelty, and abuse are not of God. Those who are righteous will not be oppressive or abusive. They will not use others for wrong purposes. They will not use others for themselves, they will not say insulting things, and they will not tread others underfoot. God is not abusive, and we who name his name are not to be abusive either. God condemns abuse. He speaks out against it and he protects the abused.

Why, when confronted with violence or abuse in a home, have we often placed the burden on the victim to justify her actions, to somehow prove that she did not “make” him do it, rather than on the abuser to confess his sins and demonstrate change? We have frequently overemphasized the response of the abused to the exclusion of confronting the behavior of the abuser. Are we afraid he will turn his anger on us? Do we fear confrontation? Do we fear we will be accused of not holding the marriage covenant sacred? Do we really think protecting a home full of sin is keeping that sacred covenant? Do we fear standing with the oppressed?

Godliness is not evidenced by gifting or words alone but by spiritual maturity—a consistent demonstration in one’s character of Christlikeness. There have been some immature leaders in the Christian world that achieved power and status because of their gifts rather than because of their maturity. When someone is particularly gifted verbally and theologically, it is easy for us to assume maturity. The ability to articulate theological truths well does not necessarily mean that one is an obedient servant of God.

When someone thinks verbal repentance and a few tears are all that is necessary for restoration to leadership or marriage, the addiction to deceit remains alive and well. One of the evidences of true repentance is an awareness of this, humility that acknowledges the inadvisability of trusting oneself, and a true, consistent desire to understand and make restitution for impact. We do a great disservice to those who have been living habitually deceived when we do not understand this. We will, in fact, fail to call them to stand in the painful but healing truth of God’s assessment of a deceived heart.

Someone who has practiced deception cannot change immediately because the sin patterns are so habituated and hidden even from themselves. Anyone who engages in abusive behavior has practiced self-deception. They have practiced avoiding the truth. To think that someone can practice a sin pattern for years and simply say “I am sorry” and be all better is to fail to see sin as our God does.

The poison is systemic. My thinking, my judgments, my inclinations, my desires, and my volition have all been in bondage to the poison of sin. I have habituated injecting the narcotic of deception in order to call sin good or permissible. True repentance is consistent change demonstrated over time and is shown to be real when the cup is bumped again and again and something new spills out indicating a new pattern. It is not evidenced in an intense emotional moment when the stakes are high and we have an audience. It means being more concerned for the offended one rather than the self. It requires an understanding of the impact of our sin and a zeal for restitution. It means the exquisite pain of beginning to recognize that God himself has been assaulted by our sin. It means owning responsibility for the breakdown of trust, and knowing that much time will pass before it can be renewed.

Que vivamos en lugares oscuros e iluminemos con la luz de Cristo los abusos a nuestro alrededor, incluso si suceden en nuestros círculos. Que podamos hablar con los que aplastan a los pequeños de Dios o despojan a las personas en sus iglesias.

La explotación de la persona vulnerable nos habla del explotador, no de la víctima de esa explotación.

Dios no lo creó para que viviera en silencio. Sabemos por la Palabra de Dios, tanto la escrita como la viva, que la naturaleza de Dios es hablar. A usted y a mí nos crearon a la imagen de un Dios que habla. Ser hecho a la imagen de Dios es tener una voz y expresarnos mediante ella.

Si ha experimentado abuso sexual, entiende esto muy bien. La mayoría de los sobrevivientes llega a un lugar en la vida, es posible que no sea hasta la adultez, en el que se sienten compelidos a hablar. A menudo lo que los impulsa es que descubren que no logran tolerar más las consecuencias destructivas del abuso. Así que el sobreviviente se decide a contar. Y, sin embargo, existe una gran barrera para hacerlo. No se encuentran las palabras. «Es mucho más difícil de lo que pensaba». «De todas formas no lo va a creer». «No lo puedo decir porque parecerá real y me va a consumir».

Le aseguro que a pesar de que las palabras sean inadecuadas para describir o captar el sufrimiento del abuso sexual, aun en su insuficiencia le ayudarán a liberarse. Y aunque parezca que hablar solo le causará lo que teme y que dé la impresión de ser tan grande que lo va a consumir, la experiencia de luchar con el silencio usando palabras, en su tiempo, disminuirá el tamaño de lo que teme. Hablar es abrir la puerta y dejar que entre un rayo de luz. Sí, esa luz va a exponer lo que es aterrador y feo. No obstante, esa luz también lo capacitará para ver el camino de salida. Hablar es decir la verdad. Sí, esa verdad lo enfrentará a pensamientos y sentimientos que ha tratado con todas sus fuerzas de olvidar. Aun así, la verdad también obrará para darle liberación.

animo a que hable, a que le dé voz a la verdad de su vida. En realidad, es algo muy difícil de hacer. Sin embargo, va a encontrar libertad si lo hace. Nuestro Dios es un Dios de verdad y de luz. Cuando se habla la verdad, se exponen las mentiras. Cuando se permite que la luz brille, la oscuridad desaparece. La narración de su historia no es un ejercicio que no tiene valor. Es un medio que lleva a un fin. El simple hecho de contar su historia no traerá la sanidad. Sin embargo, al darle voz a la verdad en su vida, para que la luz de Dios brille en todos los lugares, le traerá la sanidad.

menudo animo a mis pacientes a que en forma continuada le pidan a Dios que exponga lo que es verdad a medida que continuamos, ya sea en cuanto a la extensión de la herida, sus formas de lidiar con esta, la percepción que tienen de sí mismos o sus creencias en cuanto a Dios. El Señor siempre contesta una oración que pide la verdad, aunque quizá tome tiempo, pues su naturaleza es revelar la verdad.

Quiero recordarle de nuevo la verdad de este asunto. El abuso sexual es una perversidad, una maldad y esta daña a los seres humanos. En nuestros incontables esfuerzos por hacer que las cosas se logren manejar, tendemos a disminuir su importancia o a no tomar en serio algunos acontecimientos terribles. Al mismo tiempo, necesitamos que se nos recuerde a menudo que la perversidad, la maldad y sus daños resultantes no son el fin de la historia. Hay esperanza.

Los niños dependen de los adultos para que les enseñen sobre sus relaciones. Los adultos que cuidan a los niños les enseñan a conducirse en sus relaciones. Es de estos adultos que los niños aprenden a preocuparse por los demás, a comer en la mesa, a desarrollar intimidad, a comunicarse, a no interrumpir, a no robar. Lo que esos adultos dicen, y tal vez más importante lo que hacen, les enseña a los niños de forma continua. ¿Y qué aprende un ser humano dependiente, sin muchos conocimientos, dócil, cuando papá le pega a mamá, cuando los niños tienen que comer en el piso, cuando el tío viola a sobrinas y sobrinos, y cuando maldecir es el lenguaje de elección?

Sin embargo, en su mayor parte, la intensidad emocional asociada con el trauma es tan poderosa que abruma cualquier capacidad para albergar sentimientos. Yo tenía una paciente que solía decir que sus sentimientos eran «demasiado grandes» para su cuerpo. El nivel de intensidad a que llegaban era simplemente intolerable.

Uno de los resultados más viles del abuso sexual es que engaña y confunde a sus víctimas, así como a los perpetradores o testigos silenciosos. Amortigua la habilidad de discernir el bien del mal. Confunde la mente de modo que la verdad y la mentira se mezclan. Los tentáculos de sus mentiras se extienden a través de generaciones. Las Escrituras nos dicen que Dios nos llamó a la verdad. Él es verdad y nosotros debemos buscar la verdad. A todos nos han enseñado, en forma directa o indirecta, cosas que han estado entrelazadas con mentiras. Vivimos nuestras vidas basados en esas mentiras hasta que Dios usa algún medio para exponerlas y enseñarnos su verdad. Si ha crecido en un hogar o en un sistema familiar lleno de mentiras y engaño, es probable que el impacto fuera profundo. La Biblia también nos dice que Dios es luz. El resultado de su luz en nuestras vidas es bondad, justicia y verdad (Efesios 5:8-9). Cualquier cosa, no importa dónde la encontremos, que no lleve tal fruto, no es de Dios. Más importante aun, las mentiras, el engaño y el mal no nos llegan de personas que «no lo pudieron evitar», o «no sabían la diferencia», o «no nos quisieron herir», o «estaban un poco ebrias», o cualquier otra cosa que decidamos llamarlo. Jesús nos dice que las mentiras, el engaño y el mal nos llegan del enemigo de nuestras almas, el padre de mentiras.