Have been molested or sexually abused?
I have. I was thirteen and it was by a relative. It happened once, I told, and it never happened again, but I had to live with my molester.
That one incident changed me. It changed something on the inside of me in regard to the way I felt about myself and about men.
For years after my molester was no longer around,
I was angry. So angry, I would think of how I would kill him if I’d ever saw him again.
That one incident changed how I felt about my value as a person. It made me ashamed of myself. It skewed my view toward intimacy and I even began to think I had caused the incident. I went over and over in my mind how I brought it on in some way. As an adult, I began believing the very things that attracted my husband to me, were what had instigated my being molested. Being attractive to my husband began to feel dirty.
In my twenties, after marrying my husband I would relive the incident in my sleep and wake up crying and afraid. It made me afraid of my husband as well. Afraid of his touch. Intimacy was difficult. Just my husbands movement in the bed as I slept would stir up fear and anxiety.
It had been ten years since the incident and I was still trapped reliving it on a daily basis.
Throughout this time, my husband was as patient with me as he could be, but even his patience was wearing thin. He could not understand why something so long ago had such a hold on me. At first I felt like his perspective was insensitive, but the more he talked the more he began to make sense. We talked a lot about the part I was playing in reliving the incident. Why was I still feeling like the scared little girl molested at thirteen? It was because I was choosing to entertain those thoughts.
What we think on is up to us. We have some level of control over the thoughts that enter our minds. I realized I wasn’t setting up boundaries for those thoughts. I also had not went through the process of forgiving my molester. I didn’t think her deserved forgiveness. He had broken something in my spirit that day I thought it was gone forever.
It took some time and maturity in my faith, but I finally forgave him for what he did to me. I understood he had made a choice to do the devils work and God would repay him for that, but I wasn’t going to remain angry, hurt, afraid and bitter. I can’t tell you how much power was restored to me. After a while, I stopped feeling and acting like a victim.
I began restructuring all of the lifestyle choices and thought processes that had been cultivated because of this fear. I stopped parenting out of fear of my children being molested and I stopped being guarded with my husband. It was not an overnight process, but once I decided I wasn’t going to live in the prison of my past, my whole life changed.
