Heath Lambert: One of the most horrifying realities about childhood abuse, whether that abuse is the kind of physical violence or sexual violence or even verbal violence, is that those children grow up to be adults and often they continue to struggle with the aftermath of their abuse into adulthood and they don’t know how to respond to it. And that poses a problem of how do counselors respond to adults who are experiencing the pain of abuse that has lingered from childhood? I want to respond to this on the podcast this week, but I also want to be very clear about something. The purpose of Truth in Love is not to handle any one topic in a comprehensive way. We are happy to deal with big and controversial issues on the podcast, but it’s never our intention in a podcast that’s about ten minutes or so to deal with all the issues that come up on those topics in a comprehensive way. What we want to do is address them in a limited way and then point you to other resources for further consideration. That’s really important for me to mention on this podcast because counseling adults who were victims of childhood abuse is a complex and a very individualized enterprise. It would be impossible in an eight or a ten or a fifteen-minute podcast to deal with all of the very specific and complicated issues that are going to come up in the aftermath of something like that. What I want to do is ask you to consider a few things and then encourage you that as you are helping people with this issue you need to understand their situation very carefully and you need to go, and you need to learn as much about those issues as possible in order to give them the best care that you can.
As we talk about this in a very limited way on the podcast this week, I want to let you know what some of the temptations that I have seen on the part of adults who are victimized as children. I’ve seen a couple of really common temptations be to be embittered and angry and then to be overwhelmed with ongoing sorrow. The embitterment can happen with people, they look back at what happened to them in childhood and what is underlined is how unjust and wrong the treatment was. And we want to underline that any kind of abuse is wrong and sinful mistreatment of another human being made in the image of God, but people become embittered and angry when they look back at that and the injustice of it is heightened and their response to that becomes complicated with bitterness and anger. We can think of an example of a parent who would be holding their child and they remember back to when they were being held by their parent and mistreated and they cannot imagine doing to their child what was done to them, and they wonder how in the world their parent could have done it to them, and it can make them bitter and angry. Sorrow happens in the same way. You look back and you feel the tremendous sense of loss that you experienced and what was taken away from you in the childhood abuse and you realize there’s no way to get it back and that leads to profound feelings of sorrow. So, there are temptations, others that we could talk about, but there are temptations to be bitter and angry and there are temptations to be sorrowful.
I want to point you to two ideas this week that could help you respond to those. The first idea is the one of trust. And in particular, the one of trusting in God. Romans 12:19 says, “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord.” There is in this verse a command and a promise. The command is don’t be vengeful. Don’t, in an angry, sinful response, come up with a plan to pay back and that command is based on a promise and the promise is, “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’ says the Lord.” This is fascinating. God gives the command to us not to exact vengeance because He is the One who intends to. What this means is we have a powerful tool in letting go of bitterness, anger, and sorrow by trusting that the Lord who knows and sees the abuse that has happened will repay and will repay in His justice. It’s not something that we have to take on ourselves because God Himself will do it. And so, we don’t have to have an angry, embittered response to our abusers. We can love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us knowing that we can trust the Lord in His justice to repay as that is necessary.
A second response that helps us as we are thinking about how to help the adults who have been victimized in abuse as children is a text in 2 Corinthians 1:3-6. It says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. But if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; or if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer;” Just like Romans 12 is teaching us to trust God, this is a text that helps us to teach victims of childhood abuse to serve others. It’s a fascinating text that tells us the reason for pain is so that we can receive God’s comfort in the aftermath of the pain. God wants us to know His comfort and it says the reason He gives us His comfort in the aftermath of the pain is that we could turn around and with the same comfort we receive from Him in the aftermath of our pain we could extend comfort to others in the aftermath of their pain. Here’s what this means. It means that as you think back on what happened to you in childhood, as terrible as it might have been, and as you walk with someone else who has terrible things that happened to them in childhood, one purpose for those terrible things was for the person who experienced that pain to receive God’s comfort. And as someone who has received that comfort to go and extend that comfort to others who have experienced similar pain.
One hard reality of childhood abuse even in adulthood is that there’s nothing we can do to make it go away. We can’t go back and undo the horrible things that have happened, but we can receive God’s comfort in the aftermath of it and we can devote ourselves to the kind of service of pouring into other people’s lives who are experiencing the same kind of pain so that they would know the comfort that we ourselves have received. As we grow in love and in care for those who were victimized in childhood and have now grown up to be adults, there’s a lot of things we need to know, there are a lot of things we need to do, but one great place to start is to help them to trust God and His ability to repay in His justice all that was done and a second place to go is to help them serve others by overflowing the comfort they have received from the Lord into the lives of others.
To read ACBC’s Statement on Abuse and Biblical Counseling visit our Committed to Care website.
