St John of the cross wrote the “the dark night of the soul”
One stanza reads

"Where then hast Thou hidden
O my Beloved,
Leaving me alone
In the tears of my grief?"

I was raised in this church.

Taught that faith was a happy thing.

And it was.

My parents and teachers taught me to have faith in people, trust them.

They trusted my fifth grade teacher.

He was president of the teachers union and went to the Methodist church where he taught Sunday school.

My parents had faith in him,

He said that he would tutor me, help me,

evil can be very persuasive.

After years of my teacher abusing me,

the light of Gods love dimmed and was almost extinguished.

One of the effects of abuse is a disconnect between your spirit and your body.

It’s as if your soul goes to sleep to protect itself from harm.

In an abusive situation, you become merged with your abuser.

The boundary between you becomes blurred
and if lasts long enough,
disappears.

This is why there is so much guilt felt by the victim.

When the people who care for them learn of the abuse and they react by saying, “He is a monster, he is evil”

They do not understand that you have merged with your abuser, you are one with him.

So that you hear “you are a monster” and “you are evil”

The path is dark and at times God seems to be very far away.

The abuse causes confusion in all of your relationships

"Where then hast Thou hidden
O my Beloved,
Leaving me alone
In the tears of my grief?"

What I thought was a close relationship to God was only superficial.

I had all the words and knew the service yes;

yet deep down I was angry with God but did not know it.

Then I started on the path of healing.

Through serious reflection and reliving the mental trauma of years past

I began to see that I was angry with God and the church.

I stopped going and made many excuses as to why.

Looking deep within myself I realized that I had entered what is called “the Dark night of the soul.”

St John of the cross wrote of it in the early 1500’s

He described a path to a true union with God.

Without Gods light, I felt as if I were evil,

yet I wanted God to remove all of my faults.
I Wanted Him to cleanse me of all of the evil done to me and by me.

If God were to wave his hand and make everything OK then I would become arrogant

with pride feeling omnipotent.

The reality is one has to travel the path and lose the light of God before reaching true union with him.

Modern psychiatry has confirmed what St John wrote in the 1500’s.

That these steps are absolutely necessary to achieve peace.

This journey is on no map,

no points A, B, C to connect.

All boundaries and time had been blurred and distorted by the abuse.

The following trials are not in any order or time frame.

Every step was painful and had its own pace.

But we can never get over our abuse we can only get through it.

While in the midst of my journey I wrote this,

How terrible the pain of Knowing
To know something that once was lost, to feel old feelings long gone away,
They say its good to know, but at what cost?
How terrible the pain of knowing.


I became angry at my own imperfections and sought to become a saint in a day.

Overcoming the thought that it was my fault that the abuse happened,

I then felt that only I was innocent and holy,

and I could not live with the fact that my abuser was locked in the cycle of abuse and possibly lost forever,

That my parents were touched by the evil and lost their innocence by the knowledge of the evil done to me.

This roller coaster of emotions was a necessary step on the path back to Gods light and Love

Then came righteous anger at those who have done evil.

This anger is all consuming, but necessary to go through.

When we go through this anger and finally let it go, you are freed from it.

When entering into the dark night all of these thoughts and feelings are placed in reasonable order and perspective.

This night strengthens and purifies the love that is God but in the beginning you feel abandoned by Him.

Then when all seems lost and the light of God cannot be seen or felt,

and we have shed our wants and forgiven those who have done us harm and let go of our desires,

God shines his light on us and in us
so that we know him and are finally at peace.

In this blissful night
Secretly, no man seeing me,
I seeing nothing,
With no other light or guide
But that which burned in my heart.
And it led me
Surer than the light of the noonday.

Going through the dark night is a terrifying thing to do for a victim of abuse.

Regaining control is an important part of a victim’s journey.

I did not give up control of my childhood voluntarily
it was taken from me.
Control is the abusers main weapon.

But to let God’s light back in to my soul, I needed to have faith and to let go of the facades that were built to protect me as a child.

The facades have outlived their usefulness and the adult now has another hurdle to overcome.

Why give up control again?

Because you have too.

The abuse was in the physical realm.

The relationship with God is in the spiritual.

When deep into the dark night you loose sight of both the spiritual and physical, positive and negative, good and evil.

You are utterly alone.

Nothingness, a forlornness, nakedness, and emptiness

But then when all was lost.

God filled me with light and life.
All of the old questions,

Do I blame God?,

my parents?

Or my abuser became irrelevant

there now is nothing between the Love of God and myself.

Everything that happened to me, led me to the dark night.

Without them I would never have gotten there.

Now, through the night I know myself,

I know God

and I know the world around me.

All is light.

I'm so tired.
I don't know how to get off the roller coaster.
Increasingly, my inner self is at odds with my 'reality'.
Life goes on.