The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

On the second Saturday of January 2008, at Ascesnion Catholic Church a parish staffed by Franciscan priests, Steve Fearing found support for healing and reconciliation from Compassionate Gathering, our mixed group of clergy abuse survivors and other Catholics.  Steve, a slight man with curly, gray hair, was abused during his early teens by a Franciscan priest.  Until he came to Compassionate Gathering, Steve struggled mostly alone to heal himself.    Gatherings are held almost every month and often included the Franciscan pastor of Ascension, Fr. Armando Lopez.  In January 2008, Gathering participants discussed the Sackcloth Penance Patch, a way ordinary Catholics can apologize to survivors of clergy abuse.  We composed a letter to send to other parishes to tell them about the Patch.  Everyone’s input was elicited.  Fr. Armando, who was present, acted as a co-equal with Steve and other survivors and parishioners. On the second Saturday ...

Therapy or therapeutic settings can also heal flaws in our judicial system. The judicial system largely does not allow survivors of abuse who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to actually suffer it in public during trials concerning abuse.  Church leaders and lawyers for churches in clergy abuse lawsuits as well as lawyers for abusive spouses in contested divorces often portray survivors as unstable people making false accusations. But abuse makes one unstable.  Even people not suffering from symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder tend to feel angry when they hear themselves being lied about in court.  Add in a little PTSD and you get an angry and upset witness who does a lousy job by court standards of explaining their experiences. This is the reason I prefer working with therapists.  Judges only see us for short periods of time, and a good attorney can be really skilled at confusing the truth in two or three hours.  Therapists see us o...

I have had to learn a lot after coming to terms with child sex abuse and date rape at age 42.  Actually it tool me another three years before I realized just how much I was harmed by abuse.  I went back to my journal and read what I wrote the day after I was raped.  I had reread many pages in my diary, but not that one, and it was a shocker.  I wrote about how dirty I felt afterwards.  My words were filled with pain and anger at myself, at the two young men who raped me and at all men. I won't share more of my story right now. Healing has been a slow process guided by a therapist and then by learning Compassionate Listening as taught by The Compassionate Listening Project and then by reading about Non-Violent Communication and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. This is going to be an evolving blog, so check back to read more later. These are some of the things I learned along the way. 1.  The first step in healing is coming to terms with what happen...

I was sexually abused around 1963 by two teenaged boys in my neighborhood when I was four years old.  My mother, who was also sexually abused as a child by someone in her neighborhood, struggled with depression and rotated in and out of mental hospitals until Ronald Reagan cut the budget for most of them.  She was too wrapped up in her pain to notice that I was gone.  And it was the days when people were much more relaxed about allowing their children to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. I did not understand what the boys did to me, but I knew it was bad because I had at least been told that these were my private parts.  I knew, whatever it was they did to me, they weren't supposed to do it to me. When I was six I told my mother what the boys did to me. She said, "That's were babies come from," but she didn't do anything. Her nonchalant response gave me the message that what happened to me was not significant. This is a short book list Begin by com...