By: Shane James O’Neill
Sexual Abuse
I’ve experienced sexual abuse and I’ve sat with too many friends after their own abuse.
I hate that stuff man.
One in particular stands out. The sexual abuse incident happened to a childhood best friend and it went to court. Well, it was reported the day it happened, and then four years later it finally got to court.
From 8th grade till my senior year of high school, that story echoed in my every experience and was the emotion behind everything I felt. So angry, so raw, so very sad. And I wasn’t even the victim…
I got subpoenaed and was required to testify. And then… we lost. She lost.
Sitting with Abuse
Sitting with people as they revisit their sexual abuse is a heart-rending experience — literally, like the heart is being twisted up in a grip of pain.
During my first few experiences of being confided in, I felt useless. What do you do with pain that you can’t take away?
Often times, we just want to make it all better, but we know we can’t. We feel useless the more we hear and the more we try.
So, we try to make it better for ourselves by changing the topic or, worse yet, by avoiding that person. Abuse is immersive, once you go through abuse it can change the feel of every other experience. One event can change the feel of every event. And being around someone with that kind of pain can be “off-putting”.
My uncle once told me when I was young to approach everyone assuming they have pain somewhere.
Sitting with and being around people who have abuse in their past means they have pain in their present, and that can be a “drain” on our own lives. So, we often avoid them and run away from their pain, because we don’t know what to do with it. I’ve done that plenty.
I think, more often than not, we don’t sit with people in their pain because we don’t want to feel useless, and we don’t want to look at our own pain.
After you practice sitting with people in those fragile, intimate moments, the useless feeling starts to go away. You begin to realize that listening, wearing compassion, and just caring actually makes you useful. You gotta be ok with their pain, and you gotta be ok with the pain it will stir up inside of you.
How about another example?
Selling Her Body
I have one childhood friend that I love with all of my heart. At one point she was addicted to heroin, and she used her body to pay for that addiction. After months with no sign of her, she came home. I was there that night. She was wearing a hoodie and she curled up on the couch I was sitting on. She put her head on my lap and then she wept.
For hours, she wept all the tears from only God knows how many men, from how many experiences, from how much shame.
She just wept.
She was strung out, smelled awful, and she cried because she was finally safe to let her soul groan.
The apostle Paul uses that word, groan — “all of creation groans… and we groan… waiting for redemption.”
I’m not sure I knew what he meant till then. Tears are the words of a person’s soul. Tears of joy are the soul’s way of celebrating. And tears of pain are the soul’s way of groaning.
She felt safe with me. Which puts me in a predicament as the writer, because I don’t have words to communicate my own tears in that moment (or in this current moment), nor words to communicate the honor I still feel because I was someone safe for her. She came home to find someone safe and I got to be that safe.
Men had been using her for pleasure, and I was a man who wouldn’t.
For a little while, I got to be her home.
Sexual Abuse and Self-Abuse
We think that pleasure isn’t harming us. We use porn and hooking up as a right, a commodity to consume.
But the greater the pleasure the greater the gift, and the more intentionally that pleasure/gift needs to be used.
Narcotics are a remarkable gift that allows for painlessness during surgery. When narcotics are abused, well, we’ve all been touched by our current opioid crisis.
Likewise, sex is the greatest physical pleasure two people can know with one another. Sex is a remarkable gift. With it we create covenant and new life. And when sex is abused, it creates soul-fracturing trauma.
Abuse is defined as the misuse of a thing. When sex is misused, we experience that abuse — whether others do it to us or we do it to ourselves by misusing that gift.
It’s interesting to think of watching porn as self-abuse — the misuse of pleasure. But we all feel the effects of that abuse upon us. We abuse our morals, our imaginations, our reasoning, our longings, and our relationships. We indoctrinate ourselves to objectify humans — those we don’t know and those dear to us.
Did you know that porn creates grey matter in your brain? It literally makes us dumber — messes with our memory, breaks neural pathways, increases cortisol levels, which elevates anxiety and depression. In short, this self-abuse stabs every part of us, from soul to body to relationships.
Related: Mental Health, Loneliness, and Porn
A country that practices self-abuse, that’s what we are. Gosh, that doesn’t feel good to write. It’s a heavy thing on its own, but more so because I’m not exempt. Daily, I experience the effects of sexual misappropriation, the repercussions of my own self-abuse.
But instead of abusers and self-abusers… what if we were instead safe and a home for the weary people all around us?
What if we were safe?
Becoming Safe
Maybe I wasn’t safe for my friend.
Of course, I didn’t touch her, save for my own tears falling upon her hoodie as she lay coiled upon the couch, wet with her own tears. But porn and pleasure were a part of my life at that point. Maybe Jesus let me know what being safe felt like, like a gift that you grow into, a gift that makes you better.
I haven’t stopped wanting to be safe since that day. It’s deep in my bones, crying out from my marrow, and groans from within my soul.
It’s hard for me to imagine someone reading this and not wanting to be safe for someone like my friend, as she lay broken and beat. I reckon you want to be safe.
But we can’t be safe for the abused until we stop self-abusing. I think you know that. Even if the people around you don’t know about your lust, you do. And that lust, that hungry motivation for pleasure, makes you unsafe. It makes me unsafe.
So maybe we gain a different vision for our lives, a different vision for the people around us. Maybe, we begin approaching people knowing they have pain somewhere. And maybe, we begin to interact with our own pain.
If we can learn to be safe for ourselves then we can begin to be safe for those around us.
The One Who is Safe
At the bottom of it all, that’s my fascination with Jesus, and that’s why He gets my allegiance. He’s always safe. He knows it all and He’s still so gentle with me.
Jesus is The One who loves the woman who loved too many men. He is The One who was hope for the bleeding woman. Jesus is The One who let the a love-less women anoint His feet with her racking tears. He is the Safe One.
To follow after the Jesus Way is to let purity wash you so you can love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you aren’t loving yourself rightly (or allowing yourself to be loved by Him rightly) then how can you rightly love?
If you aren’t safe for yourself, how can you be safe for them?
Let’s groan, not from pleasure but from the pain we avoid and with the people we avoid. Let’s practice being safe.
Grace and peace, Reader. May God bless you as you go on your way. May He show you His Way, His gentleness, and the compassion etched upon His face. In His affection, may you find the safety you seek in vain from porn and pleasure — in the affection of The One who is gentle and meek, yet all powerful. And, as a reflection of the heavens, may you become a haven for those around you.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for Proven Men Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.