Forgiveness

My thoughts on forgiveness... specifically forgiving an abuser. Its true that forgiveness is necessary, but its at the top of a long flight of stairs. You can't just skip 20 flights of stairs. You have to walk up each step. Sometimes you can run up them, and sometimes you can skip one or two stairs, but you can't skip 20 flights. If you try, you'll fall down farther and harder and have to start lower than if you just walked up them. When people say, "Just Forgive," and other things like that, they are forgetting that it is a process and it takes time.

In the case of child sexual abuse, that abuse has truly changed our lives forever. We can never go back to the innocence of a child. We can never go back to the time when we didn't have sexual feelings. Our bodies were not ready for what the abuser did to us. So, even when we do forgive our abuser, we will still have to deal with things that a person who has never been abused can ever understand.

We can heal completely, and forgiveness is a part of that healing, but again it is a process. We can't skip up a flight of stairs. We have to progress step by step. Its so slow! It frustrates us as much (or more) than everyone watching us. We wish we could skip ahead too, but when you push us to do that, you just push us back. We fall, and then we have to deal with getting back up, and walking up the stairs we have already walked on once.

Please, be patient as we try to forgive and heal our lives.