If You Were Victimized, You Need Not Become the Victimizer Yourself - Resources for Spiritual Recovery
We suffer because we are deny
ourselves love. Our bodies suffer when we deny them love. And other people
suffer when we tempt them to judge or resent us, thereby cutting themselves off
from love.
Love is from God. When we walk in
His Light and find a bond with Him within through a change of heart, we then
experience His love—first His correction, then His forgiveness, followed by His
protection. When we experience His forgiveness, we can forgive others.
We must then also be honest with
people. When you are not truthful with others, you are denying them love.
Why do we deny people love? Here
are some of the reasons.
We do not understand that love
must include truth. So we soften our words, hold our tongue, and try to never
make anyone uncomfortable or feel bad. Thereby we allow them to continue in
error.
We do not have faith in the power
of Truth, and so we want people to be comfortable and experience a little
happiness, without discomforting honesty.
Pain is the number one way to
make people comply. That is why cruelty, deprivation, and punishment are
rampant in this world. Pain is the way that the world gets obedience. It works
in several ways. One way is because cruelty tempts the victim to become
resentful. And when we are resentful, we thereby fall from love and all that is
truly human.
This causes a terrible psychic
pain. This change for the worse, when the soul senses itself falling and
failing, is so painful that it makes the soul cry out for relief.
Chances are it will cry out for
love from the very one that degraded it. Later in life, the pain associated with
the traumatic fall makes the person want to do anything to make the pain go
away.
Thereafter, whenever the victim remembers the
cruelty that first degraded him, the pain makes him want to conform to anyone
stronger in order ease the pain. Unfortunately, the pain can also make him want
to lash out in violence and rage against whoever is weaker and happens to
innocently bring the painful memory to mind.
Change is painful, even change
for the better. The renowned waterfront philosopher Eric Hoffer aptly titled
one of his books The Ordeal of Change.
There is a dying or disintegration of a former way of doing things or of a
former identity, and there is a taking on of a new way with which one is
uncomfortable and unfamiliar.
Most change is for the worse. In
the moment when we are treated cruelly (which can take a thousand forms, and
usually first occurs in the family), and we respond with resentment—we die a
little as the innocent human being we were and we take on a new way, the way of
the cruel beast.
The cruelty can also make us
doubt what is good and true. This doubt also makes for our changing for the
worse, as we become a part of the world which made us doubt, and we give up the
ideals and innocent pursuits of youth to become shallow and ambitious, just
like the ones who tempted us.
The suffering makes us cling to
the new dominant ones for reassurance for the altered thing we are becoming,
and for comfort to assuage the pain.
Every time you react with
resentment or judgment to some cruelty, a change for the worse occurs in you. A
little bit of you dies, and it is replaced by a piece of the new order—the one
behind the cruelty.
But pain can be a good thing when
it is pain from our conscience, making us aware of the fact that something is
wrong. Every tension tells a story: it tells of conflict. It tells of long ago
when you were forced or seduced into doing something that was not in accord
with what you knew was right in your heart.
Every reaction tells a story: it
tells of a faithless, angry response. It may have begun when you were a little
child and someone was pressuring you. Every symptom tells a story. They tell us
that we have been reacting wrongly to the stresses in the environment. They
tell us that we have been prideful, and thus doubly sensitive to the
vicissitudes of life, which we take personally.
Then there is the awareness of
conflict within with an identity that is not us. It causes the pain of seeing
how we are just as impatient as our parents or whoever harmed us. It entered us
in those moments of unconsciousness when we indulged in some illicit and
forbidden thing, which includes hatred.
We are all dying, and in the
process we are slowly becoming the very thing we hate. It is the netherworld
identity that drives us and compels us to cruelties, impatience, and
atrocities. It came from the impatient authorities we once hated, and now in
us, it does unto others what was done to us.
Be glad if you are aware of this
internal conflict. Realize that of yourself, you are powerless against it. But
if you turn from your wrongs, through seeing that they are wrong in the Light
of Truth, and call upon God with helpless regret and a cry for help, then He
answers and deals with the identity.
In absolute terms, there is only
one change for the better—it is the change that occurs when we experience
repentance in the light. We see our wrongs and lament them. We see the lies of
the world and how we were misled. We see our own lack of commitment to what is
right, and thus our weakness that permitted us to be led astray.
We then turn from our wrongs and
begin to live anew as a simple person instead of the hard ambitious resentful
thing we had become.
