Retired clinical psychologist Katherine O’Neill explores what true forgiveness can look like after abuse – and how one client’s journey challenged her understanding of what it means to let go. Through Millie’s story, she discovers that forgiveness is not about excusing what happened, but about finding freedom from the shame and self-blame left behind.
Jesus tells us to forgive, but Jesus had a safe childhood, and Jesus wasn’t a woman. What did He know about the experience of abuse? Would He really expect us to just let it go?
Perhaps it depends what we mean by ‘forgive’. He certainly doesn’t expect us to say that abuse is okay. In Matthew, Jesus warns that anyone who causes a child to stumble would be better off thrown into the sea with a millstone round their neck (Matthew 18:6). So Jesus plainly sees the evil of abuse. Surely He can’t expect the victim, then, to just pretend it didn’t matter? As a therapist, speaking often with survivors of childhood violence or molestation, this was a question I could never quite solve.
I got my answer from Millie, who, in her 40s, was still suffering from her experience of childhood abuse by a relative. She had nightmares. She had endless physical health troubles. And she had a relationship with God.
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Amazingly, Millie wanted to find a way to forgive, and in the end she did.
Amazingly, Millie wanted to find a way to forgive, and in the end she did. ‘I used to be so angry,’ she told me. ‘Until I realized: behind my anger was the belief that the abuse had ruined me. I thought I was worthless. I thought the abuse meant I must be bad. And then God showed me: that wasn’t true.’
In prayer, Millie began to see that she’d been carrying old ideas from childhood, imagining that she must have caused or deserved the abuse, or was responsible for it somehow. The abuser said so. He’d made it her job to keep ‘our secret’ so that her mum wouldn’t be upset or the welfare take her away. Tiny and terrified, she had borne his abuse out of fear that otherwise, he’d abuse her younger sister instead. But she knew what was happening was terribly wrong. Because she was involved in something bad, in her childlike thinking Millie felt as if she were guilty. So she learned to believe that she herself was ‘bad’.
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‘Then I read Psalm 18,’ she told me. ‘There’s a verse there: “He brought me out into a spacious place: He rescued me because He delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19). God delighted in me? Say again?’ Millie was blown away that God could delight in her, and that this delight was her rescue. If God delighted in her, she couldn’t be ‘bad’.
She did not need to blame or shame herself.
She did not need to blame or shame herself. ‘I saw that my shame and self-hatred were just another part of the abuse. Nothing that someone else does to me can make me bad.’ Millie learned she could love herself just as God loved her, and could love, in herself, the hurt child who came to her for comfort. Her tears or anger or intrusive memories didn’t mean she was ‘broken’ or ‘faulty’. They were just a natural response to suffering. The things she had blamed herself for were just a child’s desperate attempts to cope with trauma. She could offer that child her love, straight from God. She found a photo of herself at an age before the abuse started, and pinned it to her mirror. ‘I see now: she was always innocent. There’s nothing to blame her for.’
READ MORE: Estranged but faithful: What the Bible says about difficult parent–child relationships
The abuser became irrelevant. ‘My life isn’t about him or what he did any more,’ she told me. ‘The abuse doesn’t define me. It doesn’t say anything about who I am. It happened to me, but it’s got nothing to do with me.’ For Millie, forgiving didn’t mean condoning abuse or reconciling with the abuser. It meant getting free. The abuse had no more consequences for her because, she told me, ‘What happened isn’t “me”. It’s just historical events. Nothing can take my worth away. God is delighted with me.’
This was Millie’s way to forgiveness. It might not be yours, but what I learned from Millie is that each of us can find a way. If you ask Him how, God will show you.
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