A Frightening Seminar To Lead

I have been asked to lead a seminar on sexual abuse at a local church and it frightens me. It has been more than 20 years since I last worked actively with abused children and I honestly wonder what I have to offer. Yet I have dealt with numerous adult women who were victims of sexual abuse and rape and the devastation they suffer still continues to astound me. In the chapter on Darkness in Transformed I touch on it but in a vague and illustrative way only. The darkness rape or sexual abuse brings is perhaps the worst I know. Nearly every woman I have met who came to me for counseling because of profound difficulties in relationships or drug abuse was as a child molested. I can almost sense because of the symptoms I observe as the discussion deepens that a woman has been sexually abused before she begins to hint at it. The numbers of women who have been traumatized, in some cases irreparably by rape or sexual abuse is mulitplying at a frightening rate and I think this is the frontier the church has been most afraid and poorly equiped to enter. Let me illustrate the problem for us. A child is molested at your church by an adult that everyone loves and trusts. The little girl has no mechanism for expressing what happend to her and so she stuffs her morbid re-living of the event into her broken little heart. As she grows into adolescence, her damaged sense of self and her corrupted view of church work in conjuction to create a young woman who is poisoned by guilt (she must have caused the molestation because the man who did it is too nice a Christian to be a bad man) and tries mightily to love a God who did not stop the abuse and lets her remain in constant pain over what happened. Combine that with a deep mistrust of men and an inability to form lasting love relationships outside a very tiny circle of trusted people and you have a splintered psyche that finds almost no solace in prayer, barely if any comfort in marriage and a scrambled love/hate relationship with her own children. I am praying that I can enter into the discussion so that at least a few churches in our area can not only watch for sexual abuse among the kids they see but also be a home for young women (and men) who are breaking apart their own homes because they are so wounded that they perpetuate their pain by not being able to receive or express the love they so desperately long to hold. I hope I can be of help in a small and very limited way...