Today I am going to allow myself to be a bit more raw and vulnerable than normally. I want to talk about a kind of harm that survivors regularly receive from people in our lives that we should be able to look to for love and support. I seem to always find myself, and likely many of you, bumping up against people who think they can “help” me by teaching me to “forgive as God forgives.”

If you have ever pushed a survivor to leap directly to forgiveness don’t feel too bad. It is a learned response. It is a trap because all of us have been taught it, and as a result we don’t stop and think of the harm it causes.
Forgiveness is wonderful! Forgiveness and forgiving in the right place and the right time is amazing. However, the problem is that forgiveness was never meant to replace caring for victims or those hurt. Sexual violence is trauma. Sexual violence revisits the survivor in body and spirit for days, months and years. Survivors need real care and support. Medical care, emotional care and spiritual care! Far too many seek to skip past triage of the victims and move straight to forgiveness.

Imagine for a moment that I suffer from a different wound of body and soul. Imagine instead of being abused by a drunken pedophile, I was hit by a drunk driver. No one would ever consider it appropriate to jump right over the triage questions (“Are you okay?”, “How can I help?”), and push their belief that “if only I was better at forgiving, if only I understood forgiveness as they do, if only I were different, if only I were strong enough to overcome all evil”, then my car would not have been damaged by the drunk driver nor my bones would have been broken.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have been told “ if you could just learn how to truly forgive, if you would pray for guidance, if you would read specific scriptures” the speaker directed me to read and consider, that if I were different, if I were better, if I were more holy… or a million other things, implying I was the primary cause of “the problem”. If I were just more, then none of this would have happened, or, even if it did, I could still experience healing, if only I would choose to forgive then I would be whole! And if I am still not whole it could only mean that I chose not to be. Is it any wonder that I spent so much of my life believing that I was sin?

If you cannot understand what I am feeling right now then you are truly a lucky and blessed person. Please just trust me and know that there are many others who will read this and know exactly how I feel. No matter who you are, please make the commitment to not engage in the blame and shame game that is so common. Sexual violence lives in the shadows. Predators find safety and are supported in victim blaming “dialogue”. Let us all, each and every one of us, refuse to provide predators a place to hide!