childhood trauma
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I would love to hear from you! A Jewel: Do you believe God holds all of us accountable or do you see His love like milk toast? If your image of God’s love does not include judgment how can there be ultimate justice? Don’t hear what I am not saying. I did not say God…
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Childhood was a house where I learned the weight of footsteps. I knew who was coming by the complaint of the floor. I knew when to become small. The wallpaper kept its little flowers. Morning arrived, offensively ordinary. I was sexually abused. I write it plainly because I spent years making a thicket of language…
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Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Anyone who has tried to heal a family wound knows how inconveniently alive the past can be. We bury it, and it comes down to breakfast. We forbid it to speak, and discover that our children have learned its language.Long before we had scientific names…
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For a long time, I thought peace would arrive as a feeling. I imagined that healing would eventually make me calm. My body would stop bracing. My mind would become quiet. I would wake up one morning and discover that the internal weather had finally cleared. It seemed reasonable. If I could understand myself well…
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There are two rather foolish ways of raising a child in a dangerous world. The first is to tell him that there is no danger. The second is to tell him that danger is everywhere. The first produces innocence without wisdom. The second produces fear without peace. Neither is particularly useful. We have become strangely…
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Some families pass down money. Mine passed down fear. Addiction. Violence. Abuse. Broken marriages. Children who became victims. Adults who became victimizers. People who disappeared into drugs. People who hurt children. People who spent their lives trying to survive what had been done to them. For a long time, I thought this was simply what…
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Every family has a door nobody talks about. It may be painted over. It may be hidden behind a bookcase. Everyone may insist there is nothing behind it. But the children know. They know by the way certain names are spoken. By the sudden silence at dinner. By the joke that isn’t really a joke.…
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Come into my home with me today, join me in my prayer life, and my daily reading. Welcome! A Jewel: “An Unintended Quandary” That is a subtitle in the book, “Experience Jesus. Really” by John Eldredge. The paragraph begins: The Christian community in the developed world – particularly in the West — has accidentally fallen…
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Recovery from childhood abuse is a long, winding, badly paved road. There are stretches where you think, I’m finally getting somewhere. Then suddenly you hit a pothole you didn’t know existed. A memory surfaces. A feeling you buried twenty years ago walks into the room without knocking. And then comes the part nobody talks about…
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Somewhere along the way, we started believing that everything depended on us. Our healing. Our children. Our marriages. Our homes. Our futures. We clutch at them until our hands ache, convinced that if we loosen our grip for even a moment, the whole world will come apart. It is a curious form of pride disguised…