Saturday, July 21, 2018

No Guilt and No Shame

Anything wrong having to do with sex has been "blamed" on women since Moses wrote the books of the Bible, and this "blame game" just exacerbates the issue.  One out of every three women has been or will be attacked on a college campus.  That's a staggering number.  Sexual assault and domestic violence have been on the rise for decades, and nothing has been done.  The sexual assaulters in college are told by the leaders on campus that it is okay and there are no consequences for their attacks against women.

These men leave college to become the sexual harassers of women in management positions and the wife beaters in their families.  We have a society that says all of it is okay, except, talking about it.  Sweep it under the rug and pretend nothing happened.

We have to change the culture.  We have to have a new attitude.  We have to speak up and put a stop to the insanity.

I really believe that the New Testament and Christ addressed the problem of the treatment of women in the Old Testament.  Christ brought a revolutionary message for women to be treated with dignity, respect, and a pathway for healing from guilt and shame regardless of sins of the past, whether they were sins that were put upon women or sins that were committed by women themselves, or both.  There is a lot of depth behind the phrase of Jesus, which says, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone."  Christ recognized that sins about sex that were put 100% on the women for the blame did not happen in a vacuum without men.  When Christ was approached by men, who threw Mary Magdalene in front of Christ and said that she was a prostitute who had sex with married men for money, Christ said to those men, "he who is without sin, cast the first stone."  Nobody cast the first stone.  They dropped their stones and left.  Christ then said to Mary Magdalene, ".....I do not condemn you...."  Christ also cast out the seven demons of Mary Magdalene.  I believe that the "seven demons" is what we call post-traumatic stress disorder and rape trauma syndrome today.  Language 2000 years ago, I suspect, could not communicate these ideas like we do today.  Mary Magdalene was Christ's closest disciple.  For me, the key to salvation is through Christ's message, and the Bible doesn't give us the complete message if we only look at the Old Testament and we forget about the message of Christ with Mary Magdalene.  Christ heals.

The Pain Gets Worse......

There are days when I feel like this blog doesn't make the pain better, even though that is the point of why I started it in the first place.  Sometimes, I feel like it makes the pain worse.

Honestly, I don't think the rapes or the beatings are nearly as bad as dealing with the emotional pain of how people react to what happened to me.  I think the most painful emotions happen when I am met with complete indifference to what has happened to me.  If I try to explain that I was raped or I was beaten, I get a response of indifference like I just said I went to the store or I just watered my plants.  If I don't get indifference, then the other reaction will be that either I deserved it, or, that I'm just being a drama queen looking for attention - that I'm exaggerating - or that I'm just outright lying.

The worst part is that sometimes I think that not only is there indifference to what I say happened to me, I feel like I'm not supposed to even talk about it.  Forget about emotions.  I can't be angry, or hurt, or cry, or scream, or yell, or express anything about what happened at all.  How can I even get to emotions when I can't even talk about it.  I mean, even now, I can't even bring myself to write about what happened to me in my own anonymous blog.  I've written some things, but not everything, because the emotional pain is so unbearable it's too much for me.  Just the events are painful enough, but I can't get past the social barriers of rejection and finger-pointing and blame game.  It's horrible.  Even now, just talking about the subject of talking about what happened, without even getting to what happened, is creating alot of emotional hell for me.

What is also frustrating is that the car accident is on the inside.  If someone breaks a leg, or an arm, or has some physical disfigurement on the outside that people can see, then the reaction of horror and anger and sympathy comes from others because it is tangible.  They can see it.  Even if its a biological virus on the inside, still, its tangible with science.  But, when someone like me is talking about emotional pain, it just doesn't get the same response, or reaction, at all.

I can explain a broken leg, or a broken arm, but how do I explain a broken soul.  How do I explain a broken mind.  How do I explain a permanent hell that exists in me that no matter how much I pray, or meditate, or focus on other things, to wipe that hell away, it never goes away.  It's always there.  The most I am able to do is to just get the volume down to level 1 or 2 instead of level 9 or 10.

Once in a great while, and I mean ONCE in a GREAT WHILE, as in VERY RARELY, I have had a break from that hell and had moments of normalcy recently.  They are very few, and very fleeting.  They don't stay, but, it is nice that at least, I can see them.  So, that gives me hope.

I remember those moments of internal normalcy with such vividness.  Nothing special was going on, but I can remember I was standing in my living room and it was there, and it was so nice.  It would be good if I could somehow repair myself 100% to be at that place all the time.  I don't know if I will get there.  I keep trying, and I don't give up.