Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Was the "Sinful Woman" in the Gospel of Luke a Child Sex Abuse Survivor?
A woman enters the house of Simon, the Pharisee, and washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair while he dines. Her story is told in the Gospel of Luke (7:36-50).
Jesus hears Simon and rebukes him with a parable about two debtors owing money to the creditor. The creditor forgives both debts. Jesus asks Simon which debtor is more grateful. Simon correctly understands that the debtor owing more money is more grateful. The parable is normally understood to illustrate the power of God’s forgiveness of sin. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I think there is an untold story in this Bible passage -- the story of Jesus’ feeling special compassion for the losses and pain endured by abuse survivors.
Many people assume that the sinful woman is a prostitute. Her sin of sex outside marriage makes her unclean and unfit to touch a man, especially a priestly man. Scientific studies show a strong correlation between childhood sexual abuse and prostitution. One study found that adults who were sexually abused as children are almost 28 times as likely to be arrested for prostitution as adults who were not abused. (1) Another qualitative study of female prostitutes found that 63% of participants reported being sexually molested as children. (2)
When adults sexualize their relationships with children, the children often grow up learning that their greatest value to others is through sex. Sometimes the survivors already feel so degraded that deliberately prostituting themselves comes easily. If such a strong correlation between abuse and prostitution exists today in a time of less stringent social condemnations of moral flaws, then a case could be made that in the time of Jesus, a prostitute was even more likely to be an abuse survivor.
Particularly in young children, it has been shown that sexual abuse can cause irreversible, biochemical and structural changes in those portions of the brain governing emotion, memory and the body’s reaction to stress. Medication, therapy, retreats, workshops, conferences and emotional support can help abuse survivors to cope better. However, many survivors never completely recover.
Perhaps Jesus knew what Simon the Pharisee and his own disciples did not know -- that the sinful woman was a sexual abuse survivor, plagued by feelings of guilt and shame, and condemned by a society completely lacking in compassion for her plight. In our own era, many abuse survivors are unable to hold steady jobs up to their level of abilities so crippled are they by depression and low self esteem. Indeed, a few survivors turn to prostitution because they find it difficult to earn a living in other ways.
Why wouldn’t there have been such an interpretation written into the Gospel? Jesus was crucified and gone by the time the Gospels were written down. Moreover, he would likely have kept the woman's painful secret knowing that revealing it would have resulted in more condemnation and judgement of the woman had it been known. Two thousand years ago there were no psychiatrists, no psychologists, no social workers working with and studying people who survived abuse. Understanding of the consequences of childhood sexual abuse simply did not exist.
But I think there is a lesson for today in the story of the "sinful woman". Even today, in more enlightened times, many survivors do not receive support and compassion when they come forward. Can we treat victims of child sex abuse, sexual assault, date rape, domestic violence, clergy abuse and even prostitutes with the same compassion with which Jesus treated the "sinful woman"? They all have untold stories we don't know.
Notes:
1. Widom, Cathy Spatz, “Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse--Later Criminal Consequences.” National Institute of Justice Research in Brief, March 1995.
2. Dalla, Rochelle L., “Exposing the ‘Pretty Woman’ Myth: A Qualitative Examination of the Lives of Female Prostitutes.” Journal of Sex Research, Nov. 2000.
© 2010 Virginia Jones
Virginia Jones was sexually abused at age four by two teenaged boys and raped on a date at age 22. She was baptized Catholic in 2002, by a priest who was removed 11 months later when it was revealed that he had sexually abused children.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Healing the Wounds of Abuse Through Nature Meditations: A Walk By Smith and Bybee Lakes
by Virginia Pickles
I find metaphors for healing all around me. Walking in nature slows me down and gives me time to contemplate and meditate. The beauty of the place and the moment soothe me and uplift me. One of the most inspiring places I love to walk near Portland, Oregon, is Smith and Bybee Lakes.
More than two hundred years ago when Lewis and Clark and the Corp of Discovery paddled canoes by here on the Columbia River, there were no levies, no roads, no warehouses, no electrical lines -- just acres and acres of wetland. The Columbia River flooded the seasonal lakes in winter. By September, sun and summer drought left behind swaths of cracked mud along their edges. Fish and Tree Frogs and the Western Painted Pond Turtles thrived in the virgin landscape. Native grasses grew around the shores. Rushes and sedges grew in the shallows. Mule Deer and Pronghorn Antelope came to browse the grasses and brush and to sip water along the shore. Bushtits, Brown Creepers, Robins, Tanagers and many other song birds made homes and raised babies in the branches of the cottonwood and alder trees. Swallows swooped low over the lakes and grasslands. Ducks and geese, Great Blue Herons, egrets and avocets found refuge and fish and frogs and insects to eat in the shallow waters. Bald Eagles and Osprey flapped and flew high above, also watching for fish or frogs to feast on.
I find metaphors for healing all around me. Walking in nature slows me down and gives me time to contemplate and meditate. The beauty of the place and the moment soothe me and uplift me. One of the most inspiring places I love to walk near Portland, Oregon, is Smith and Bybee Lakes.
Life teemed in this pristine landscape. But everything lived in balance. The Bald Eagles never took too many fish. The fish thrived despite the occasional depredations of eagles and herons. Deer and antelope browsed but never enough to denude the shrubs and grasses...
And then the white settlers came. First one family and then another .... building a house here, a house there....and filling in lakes with dirt for farm fields. They brought cattle which devoured the tender native grasses. Weeds from the Old World that evolved tough stems from generations of grazing by cattle, thrived, crowding out native grasses. Still the landscaped teemed with life, even if there were small changes.
As the 20th century loomed, people built houses and roads and burned coal and drove cars that burped fumes from gasoline engines. They shot the deer and antelope and built too many houses, too many fences, and too many roads with too many motor cars for the antelope to survive. They built dams upriver that changed the seasonal ebbs and flows of river water through the wetlands.
As humans thrived and built and consumed, they began to dump their 20th century refuse at Smith and Bybee Lakes: Old automobiles leaking oil, leftover pesticides, plastics, household debris....
The poisons leaked into the water and sickened the fish, the frogs, the turtles, the ducks and the herons. Invasive European grasses and blackberries and starlings choked out the native grasses, shrubs and birds. English Ivy climbed trees, tapping them and sapping life from them.
Smith and Bybee Lakes became a damaged landscaped, barely surviving.
Fortunately some people realized the damage that we humans imposed on the land. They closed the dump and removed the garbage and the toxins. They built water control mechanisms to mimic the pre-dam ebbs and flows of water. Other people came and removed the invasive grasses and ivy and blackberries, and planted native grasses and native blackberries. But these people, volunteers mostly, have to keep coming back to Smith and Bybee Lakes and coming back and coming back to remove the persistent invasive foreign plants. Many native shrubs thrive, but some native grasses are not able to re-establish themselves. They can only survive when carefully tended season after season. The Western Painted Pond Turtle survives, but Smith and Bybee Lakes is one of the few places they survive.
Some damage is permanent. Some losses can never be repaired, but, despite generations of abuse, Smith and Bybee Lakes once again teems with life, and the park provides a place of beauty and peace for ducks and geese and eagles and osprey and songbirds and for us humans too.
Questions for meditation:
How did Smith and Bybee Lakes heal?
What can a victim of abuse learn from the history of Smith and Bybee Lakes?
Which wounds can you heal fully or in part?
Which losses are impossible to restore?
What can a victim of abuse learn from the history of Smith and Bybee Lakes?
Which wounds can you heal fully or in part?
Which losses are impossible to restore?
How do you feel when you are out walking in nature?
Journey alone; journey with friends.
Follow the path through challenges.
Find space for beauty.
Cultivate a sense of wonder.
Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area is located at 5300 North Marine Drive, Portland, OR
Take the exit to Marine Drive West from I-5.
© 2015 Virginia Jones
Friday, April 10, 2015
How I Harmed Myself With My Anger and 9 Ways Gardening Calms Anger
I am a survivor of sex abuse as a child and date rape as a young adult. My whole life has been occupied with coming to terms with these wounds and learning healthy coping skills to heal them. One of the symptoms of abuse that I struggle with is outbursts of anger. One coping skill I am learning to rely on to heal myself is gardening. Gardening lifts me up from seas of sadness and calms me through storms of anger.
Anger is one of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Survivors of child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence often suffer from PTSD just as combat veterans do. Anger is a normal part of the healing process, but if we inflict our anger on others, we can also ruin our relationships with friends and family and cause problems for ourselves at work and school. While anger over abuse inspires us to fight for justice, we need to channel and control our anger so we don't harm ourselves or others.
Anger is one of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Survivors of child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence often suffer from PTSD just as combat veterans do. Anger is a normal part of the healing process, but if we inflict our anger on others, we can also ruin our relationships with friends and family and cause problems for ourselves at work and school. While anger over abuse inspires us to fight for justice, we need to channel and control our anger so we don't harm ourselves or others.
People who express anger by raising their voices or criticizing or blaming others for problems often find themselves in high conflict relationships. If we inflict our anger on others in order to get them to do what we want or simply because we have strong emotions, we often leave them feeling abused. Our anger arouses in others feelings of emotional pain, frustration, anxiety, AND anger. If our anger is brief, the pain and anxiety we inflict on others is also brief and easily forgiven. But if our anger goes on and on and on, the damage we do to others and to ourselves and to our relationships increases exponentially.
What do you feel when someone shouts at you or criticizes you? When someone shouts at me for more than a few minutes, I don’t want to be around him. I don’t want to do what he wants me to do. Sometimes I do what he wants because I fear his anger, but that fear kills my love for him. For example, when fear became the dominant emotion I felt in the context of my marriage, I had to leave my husband because I never felt safe around him. Love wasn’t possible anymore.
But my best example for both the problems caused by anger and what to do to calm down is not my former husband, but me.
As a survivor of child sex abuse and rape I never suffered from full PTSD, but I did suffer from an increased susceptibility to anxiety and depression. I also learned to meet the needs of others instead of meeting my own needs. However, I felt angry and frustrated when I was always trying to meet the needs of others while ignoring my own. I especially felt hurt and angry when others seemed not to know or care what my feelings and needs were. When I was finally pushed to the brink, I pushed back with anger. Neither reaction -- giving in to others or expressing anger myself -- solved my problems with other people.
As many survivors do, I married before learning healthy relationship skills. I married a man who gave me lots of flowers, who engaged in intellectual conversations about world affairs and current events, and who shared my love of ethnic cuisines and foreign and art films. Unfortunately he had some flaws. He frequently yelled at me, criticized me, or blamed me for our problems. Moreover he did this from the beginning of our relationship, but I had endured so much emotional abuse from other people that he seemed pleasant in comparison. But over time the lightness of his enormous smile dimmed, and the darkness of his words and tone of voice dominated our interactions. We attended marriage counseling for a year and a half but never managed to solve our relationship problems. So I divorced him. Unfortunately divorce did not end the conflict between us. It simply metamorphosed into new forms, especially the copious e-mails he sent to me demanding parenting schedule changes or criticizing me and accusing me of wrongdoing as a mother. And then my children reached their tweens, the age at which children begin individuating from their parents. If I allowed myself to be provoked into shouting at my children, I risked finding a nasty e-mail from Dad in my inbox criticizing me for being an abusive mother.
So I really had to learn to calm myself down in the midst of multiple storms, to not react to provocation with anger.
At least when coping with my ex-husband, I could turn off the computer and take a break from his e-mails, but if one of my children was angry at me, I had nowhere to go. I had to calm myself down here and now at home while my child was still angry.
If I didn't calm myself down in the present moment, if I allowed myself to get upset and remain upset with one of my children, I did the following things:
1. I wounded my child I at whom I directed my anger.
2. I wounded myself with my anger.
3. I taught my children that tantrumming is a valid relationship skill because I was doing it myself.
4. I gave my ex-husband more fodder for the already copious e-mails he sent to me accusing me of wrongdoing.
5. The various therapists working with our family wondered if my ex's accusations were true because they were at least true when I was provoked.
6. If I allowed myself to get angry and stay angry, I had a harder time stopping my own bad behavior and doing the right thing by my children and by myself. Anger creates a feedback mechanism. When you get angry, your body releases the hormone adrenaline into your system, which keeps your heart beating at a rapid pace and your blood pressure elevated. This reaction is called "fight or flight". The “fight or flight” reaction evolved to keep us strong and alert when our distant ancestors had to fight off lions and bears and wolves or warring tribes of other humans. It is not an effective way to feel when coping with a badly behaved child or a badly behaved ex-spouse. You don't want to treat a child the way a distant ancestor might have treated a lion or bear or wolf. A survival instinct from our distant past when applied to a child in the present day is abuse. So stifle it. Or be kind to yourself and find a gentler way of expressing the concept. Tell yourself to find healthier, more effective ways of coping with your feelings.
One of the ways I learned to cope with the "fight or flight" instinct more effectively was to garden when I felt anxious or angry.
When I garden, I accomplish the following:
1. I calm myself with the physical movement of raking leaves or shoveling dirt.
2. When I respond calmly to the child who displays anger at me, I demonstrate for her an effective and healthy way of coping with stress.
3. I stay close to the house so I can monitor the feelings and behaviors of my upset child. I am able to be present if my child needs me for any reason or if there is an emergency.
4. I complete badly needed work. As a single mother, I am always behind on virtually everything. The grass, even though we don't have much grass anymore, still needs mowing. The weeds still need pulling. Our tiny lawn still needs edging. Oh, and when the blueberries and strawberries are bearing fruit, they always need picking.
5. The freshly picked berries taste good with whipped cream or in pies or smoothies and provide another resource for calming stress -- comfort food.
6. I feel better psychologically because my yard is clean and neat.
7. My children love the fruits and flowers in Mom's yard.
8. My yard, filled with colorful flowers, abundant fruits and edible herbs, and a small but tidy lawn, becomes a place to come and sit and heal because it is a beautiful place to just be.
9. Oh, and when I am able to respond to anger with calmness and compassion, I demonstrate to the therapists and the judge working with our family that I am not the problem in the high conflict relationship I have with my ex-husband.
9. Oh, and when I am able to respond to anger with calmness and compassion, I demonstrate to the therapists and the judge working with our family that I am not the problem in the high conflict relationship I have with my ex-husband.
Here are some photos of my garden to inspire you:
Native yellow violet and Labrador Violet
Labrador Violets and Hyacinth
Ornamental Buttercup
Starflower and Grape Hyacinth
Violets and Stonecrop on a boulder wall.
A bowl of berries from my garden. Just a little washing and whipped cream, and
I have some comfort food.
Some other ways of calming yourself down in the moment of anger or conflict include: House cleaning, journaling, singing, dancing to music, drawing or painting or sculpting, talking to a trusted friend or family member or two or three, taking long, hot baths with scented epsom salts and candles, and that great standby -- eating chocolate or other comfort foods such as whipped cream and berries.
Can you think of some fun, healthy, and productive ways of calming yourself down?
@ 2015 Virginia Jones.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
What Happens When Marketing Executives Spend Their Spare Time Combatting Abuse?
Theresa's Fund and its offspring, domesticshelters.org, are what happens when marketing executives decide to spend their spare time combatting abuse.
Google domesticshelters.org and you will find it has not only a website, but a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a Pinterest account, and an Instagram account. Peruse the website, and you will find that they also have a You Tube account. The domesticshelters.org, the Facebook page, and the Twitter are all updated regularly with thoughtful articles about abuse. The website also includes a data base of domestic violence shelters and related services around the country and information domestic violence victims need to know to keep themselves safe.
This media outreach to survivors, advocates, and the community at large, is the brain child of two content marketing executives -- Preston V. McMurry Jr. and his son, Chris McMurry.
According to the website of the Content Marketing Institute. (http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/), "Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."
This appears to be exactly what domesticshelters.org is doing, except that the services the website offers are mostly free of charge.
Domesticshelters.org is the creation of Chris McMurry who was inspired to fight abuse and family violence by his father, Preston (Pres) V. McMurry Jr.. Pres founded Theresa's Fund to support organizations combatting family violence and named it after his late wife, Donna, who was born Theresa in a mountain top village in Italy. Theresa was raped, burned with red hot pokers, and beaten so badly that both her hips and eardrums broke -- all by age 4. She was so badly abused that she was removed from her parents care and adopted out to an American family. She remembered none of the abuse but suffered psychological consequences anyway. A loving and devoted wife and devoted stepmother to Pres' children from a previous marriage, she still struggled with touch and with the ability to trust enough to remain married. She and Pres attended weekly therapy for ten years, but ten years of therapy did not make a dent in Donna’s ability to receive intimacy. So Pres took her to Italy on the advice of their therapist with the hope of finding out more about the childhood that her mind had repressed so completely. During an otherwise enchanting trip to Italy, they saw the remains of the home where Donna was born and abused, met the neighbor who sometimes sheltered her, and became reacquainted with the older half sister who still loved her, and others who knew her and what happened to her. Unfortunately, facing the past was so challenging that her emotional trauma caused her to leave Pres. He was so heart broken over losing his lovely wife that suicide seemed like a reasonable answer to his pain. Fortunately he followed an epiphany instead and founded Theresa's Fund to provide funding for organizations combatting family violence. Pres named his foundation after Donna, who was given the name Theresa by her Italian birth parents.
To learn more about the story of Pres and Donna Theresa and how she inspired him to found Theresa's Fund, read the following three blogs that tell their story:
In the last 23 years Theresa's Fund has raised and donated more than $49,000,000.00 to support shelters and advocacy non-profits combatting abuse in Arizona. Pres McMurry has also donated his marketing and fund raising know how to organizations outside of Arizona.
The McMurrys developed their marketing and advertising skills from their business careers. Preston Jr. founded McMurry Inc. and Chris served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the company for many years. McMurry Inc. was recently bought by a Wall Street investment firm, leaving Pres and Chris with much more free time on their hands. Chris chose to occupy his time by walking in his father's footsteps and creating domesticshelters.org -- the website and data base of domestic violence shelters and advocates across the United States.
On the home page of domesticshelters.org you will find a tab across the top of the page labeled "Find domestic violence help, shelter near you". If you type in your address or zip code to that space, a list of domestic violence services near you will appear.
Above this you will find a tab labeled "RESOURCES". It includes the growing list of articles all sorted by topic, and as well as new, first-of-its-kind Statistics area that offers Domestic Violence help statistics by state and by topic.
Above this you will find a tab labeled "RESOURCES". It includes the growing list of articles all sorted by topic, and as well as new, first-of-its-kind Statistics area that offers Domestic Violence help statistics by state and by topic.
Below that are two tabs with activated links. One labeled "Be Safe" takes you to a set of instructions on how to keep your web browsing private in case you are still living with an abusive person who doesn't want to let go of controlling you.
To the right is a tab labeled "Be Smart" with lots of articles on different aspects of the abuse issue. These include links to an article about an organization that helps women experiencing domestic violence while living overseas, an article on safety for undocumented immigrants who are victims of abuse, an article for male victims of domestic violence and the unique stigmas they face, and an article on how men can help stop rape.
At the bottom right of the page is “Domestic Violence FAQ” which includes articles on the most important basic information for domestic violence survivors: How to get a Personal Protection Order, A Deadly Cycle, and Abusive Red Flags Everyone Should Know.
At the bottom right you can find links to domesticshelters.org social media including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Bottom left includes links for contacting domesticshelters.org as well as ways to advertise your organization and services on the site. Any organization can be listed for free. Domesticshelters.org charges organizations nominal fees of $10 and $20 a month for more detailed listings of their services. As any non-profit employee knows, only so much can be done by volunteers. However, while Pres and Chris donate their services mostly for free, there are other bills the organization has to pay. Web hosting services are not free, and non-profits have to pay rent and utility bills just like the rest of us.
None-the-less, Theresa’s Fund and domesticshelters.org provide valuable services for victims, family members, other supporters and advocates as well as the community and the country. They plan to expand their listings to overseas resources in the coming year.
© 2015 Virginia Jones
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