In time, the physical pain is overshadowed by the shame of walking with a severe limp. It scares her whole life, making her unpopular at school, later interfering with her marriage prospects, her career opportunities, her self image, and countless other aspects of her life.

The incident inflames her hate for doctors. She spends her life avoiding them and so never discovers that simple surgery would have totally cured her limp.
 
 

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

It is understandable how this false image comes about. 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 particularly enormous. Since child molesters are usually considerably older than their victims, their lies sound authoritative to children. Abusers often manipulate emotions until tender consciences are shattered by an overwhelming burden of false guilt. The insistence upon secrecy not only inflames the conviction that something shamefully wrong is occurring, it forces victims to keep their emotions dangerously bottled up. Also, when the depraved offender is someone highly regarded in the community, or is close to the family or an authority figure it is natural for the child to have great respect for the person. To a child it can seem unthinkable that such a person could do something so horribly wrong. Forced into this almost intolerable situation, it is not surprising that many opt to blame themselves rather than their abuser.

2. We could blame other people

Blaming people other than oneself is attractive not only because they (especially the abuser) deserve severe punishment, but because it helps relieve the crushing weight of false guilt that sometimes seems the only other option. The problem, however, is that resentment and bitterness continually infect a hurting person’s inner wound, preventing healing.

It’s as though someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony by preventing your hand from ever healing. A desire to see someone else suffer ends up perpetuating our own suffering.

The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the welcome relief resentment offers that we hardly realize it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues.

It is unlikely that we will ever see the person suffer so much as to satisfy our lust for revenge. So if we follow this track, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution.

For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in lowering us to his abysmal level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate, staggering through life a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives. (In fact, sex offenders are often themselves abuse victims with heart-wrenching stories. They failed to resolve their anger and pain. Female suffers of abuse often grow up thinking that the typical male is a heartless, sex-crazed beast. Consider the implications of a male victim of sexual abuse gripped by such a thought. He concludes that because he is male he must act that way. Regardless of gender, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible.)

We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment's death-grip.

I often hike in wilderness areas infested with snakes so venomous that without specialized medical treatment I would have only a couple of hours to live after being bitten. Suppose a snake bit me, then slid out of sight. I would be a fool to squander precious time angrily trying to find and execute vengeance on the snake. First priority must be to seek medical attention.

There is no question that sexual abusers deserve severe punishment. For your own survival, however, focus on healing, not revenge.

3. We could blame God

The God you thought you hated isn’t real. The real God, as contrasted with the monster your imagination might have created, is tender, compassionate, and understanding. This is not an easy concept to grasp, living as we do in a world that is in rebellion against God, violently opposed to his ways of love and justice. (This is examined in greater depth in links mentioned later in this webpage.)

Just as by a dangerous trick of the mind the most innocent rape victims can feel justified in blaming themselves, we can feel justified in blaming God. Such feelings are as tragically out of touch with reality as a skinny victim of anorexia nervosa feeling convinced that she is fat.

Moreover, blaming God keeps you from the one Person who fully understands your anguish, who offers perfect comfort, and is able to bring supernatural healing. Resenting God is ultimately as self-destructive as suicide and as counterproductive as a drowning person fighting off his rescuer.

Hating yourself is a dead end. Hating another person keeps you in pain. And hating God is just another variation on hating another person. In fact, resenting people can be as spiritually suicidal as resenting God. Both forms of resentment build a wall between you and your Healer.
 

Monkeys are easily trapped by placing food behind a small opening. When they slip their hand in and grab the food, their hand becomes a fist that is bigger than the opening. Refusing to let go, they remain firmly caught until seized by hunters.

For as long as we make a fist at someone (even at ourselves, or at God) we, too, are trapped. While we hold on to our bitterness, we are unable to leave our painful past behind and get on with life.

4. We could choose to lay all the pain, blame and shame upon Yeshua

‘But Yeshua had nothing to do with it,’ you object, ‘He was innocent.’ Yes, Yeshua was innocent. In fact the intensity of his innocence and purity is like the white that shows up as gray every other thing that we ever thought was white. Relative to him, the purest of virgins, the kindest, most saintly person is sin-stained. And yet, Messiah was stripped naked, savagely beaten, bruised, tortured, publicly exposed, mocked, humiliated, his body cruelly violated until finally he died. He did that for you and me.

  At first thought it seems inconceivable that an innocent man allowing himself to be tortured to death could heal someone nearly two thousand years later. You deserve an explanation. There are three difficulties in trying to explain the most significant event in all human history, however. First, explanations are lifeless. Sitting through a lecture about the psychology of being in love, for instance, is very different to being hit by a tidal wave of head-over-heels love. The Lord declares in his Word that the realm of God consists not of talk, but power (1 Corinthians 4:20). What we are seeking is a life-changing connection to the infinite power of Almighty God, not some quaint philosophy or feel-good story. The second difficulty is that Yeshua and what he has accomplished is so unique that there is nothing in our experience that can rovide an adequate comparison. Third, even a summary of an attempted explanation would be so long as to test your patience. I want to rush you to the benefits. So I will touch just a few highlights in The key to supernatural healing.