Child Sexual Abuse and Re-victimization
A common area where people are tormented with depression is from being sexually abused as children. Sexual abuse of a child violates the soul and introduces unclean spirits into a child. Such individuals may struggle with gender identity issues that cause depression due to living outside their nature and developmental stage. Those spirits can consist of predatory behavior from the victim and or unknowingly attracting predators later in life for future re-victimization. This can occur due to victims of sexual abuse seeing themselves falsely as having no value after abuse. Due to this, they may entertain relationships or place themselves in harmful situations out of low self-worth or lack of untaught boundaries.
Dissociating and Lack of Critical Thinking
Dissociative behavior is a survival mechanism that allows a child to split mentally from the situation as the abuse continues. Children learn to operate from a fragmented place emotionally since their bodies cannot escape. This behavior continues into adulthood and can cause people not to want to think or process emotions. Critical thinking skills should be modeled to a child as they grow up to guide discerning what is right and wrong. Sexually abused children have a skewed sense of what is right and what is wrong. To process emotions and follow procedural self-talk means to remember past violations. Adults may equate thinking in general with being possibly re-triggered.
When treating victims of such abuse may require providing skill-building on how to think when processing inner and external conflicts critically. It may require helping victims process menial tasks to see how to problem-solve before delving into weightier matters. Victims must be taught to think without ruminating, be present and not be a slave to the past. There may be a tendency to “endure,” shut themselves off from themselves, and escape within their minds. Victims of abuse may not be aware that they are not little children anymore and have the power to leave situations they dislike. Learned helplessness is depressing because it is a powerless position. Dissociating is depressing because a person cannot become grounded in reality and experience the gift of feeling and experiencing being present.
Subtle Abuse
Sexual child abuse does not need to be overt or violent for a child to grow up with psychological issues. The more subtle the sexual abuse, the more confusing a person can become due to the wrongness of the behavior never being brought to their attention by healthy people. Areas of emotional incest, where a child is emotionally taking the role of a spouse for a parent, can also severely damage a child’s psyche and cause depression, among other issues. Children are taught to set their needs aside and meet the adults. This behavior does not teach children how to be comforted; it feeds co-dependency. As adults, this wound manifests through the need to be needed. People offer their savior complex behavior as a trade for being loved. These areas may go unnoticed during therapy since their roots may not be known when abuse is subtle.
Shame Mixed and Hypervigilance
Sexual abuse is rooted in shame and brings confusion into the minds of victims. Treatment for such abuse usually requires healing the mind, emotions, body, and spirit. The book “He Came to Set the Captives Free” by Rebecca Brown extensively explains how deliverance healing is a layered process that may not occur all at once due to the healing required on a cellular level when violations have become a part of someone’s very being. Victims of child abuse and sexual abuse, in general, are oversensitive to being hurt, and healthy gestures may be met with resistance and questioning of intention due to the lack of foundational trust in all things. Hypervigilance does not permit a person to receive good things and pushes out vital interpersonal nutrients that would be helpful in the healing process. The world is perceived as unsafe, and the only way to protect oneself as a prescription is to keep everyone at arm’s length. Such behavior isolates and can cause healthy touch deprivation and depression.
Hatred and Unforgiveness
The personal sin that occurs with abuse victims is that they may harbor unforgiveness, hatred, and thoughts of murder in their hearts. Such feelings held onto can feel justified by the victim because they may confuse “letting go” of hate as releasing the perpetrator from justice. The two things are not mutually exclusive. Another sin that can cause depression is when a victim submits to any form of sexual deviance because of being victimized. Many child molesters were once abused themselves. A person’s unwillingness to allow God to heal these areas early on can feed unhealthy desires to hurt others similarly. Hatred can bleed into disdain for people in general, which opens the door to becoming a perpetrator of abuse. Abusers no longer see the humanity and dignity in their victims and lose touch with reality. Hatred is very dangerous to hold onto because it is a cancer that bleeds into all relationships.
Victimhood and Learned Helplessness
The last wound of being a victim of child abuse is bearing the false burden that it’s one’s fault for the abuse, which makes victimhood their identity. Having the identity of a victim causes learned helplessness behavior and can feed narcissism due to the self-absorption of making the position of victimhood their only narrative. Victims must fall out of agreement with the shame
identity and allow God to give them a new identity rooted in self-esteem, the truth that they are worthy of respect, and not to accept responsibility for being abused. Treating in this area may consist of walking a person step by step into any core belief about themselves and challenging it with reality and truth. In doing this, individuals will learn that the event isn’t necessarily what’s stopping the healing, but rather their decision to hold into thinking distortions that keep them stuck. Depression is rooted in experiences that cultivate dis-ease thinking.
Medication will not address these mental distortions, and talk therapy is only a part of the process. A person dealing with this type of depression also requires skill building to understand their responsibility in the healing process and continue healthy and loving relationships to bring imprinted correction to those previous relationship wounds. Individuals will need to feel confident in having worth. They may require being placed in situations where they can see small wins to undergird the process of addressing larger areas of overcoming. Providing people opportunities to win can help break down the feelings of hopelessness and encourage trying to change. Change for people abused in childhood is traumatic because sameness is a defense to feel safe.
Victimhood of Hopelessness and Refusal to Feel
As mentioned in the earlier reading of this article, the most significant consequence of dissociation is a victim’s inability to feel emotions. Feeling emotions in early life was directly associated with pain and suffering. A coping mechanism to avoid fishing in adulthood is hopefully avoiding being hurt again. Behaviors of self-harm, cutting, burning, etc., are often rooted in a person’s avoidance of feeling emotional pain. This false belief is often subconscious. Avoidance of handling a range of emotions disallows a person to be vulnerable in adulthood, and it also disallows a person to cry. It may not be due to an inability to cry but instead forcing oneself not to shed tears. The belief is, “What is the point of crying, no one heard my tears before!”. This belief system is understandable but works against the interests of a person who wants complete healing.
When cutting oneself off from crying and processing feelings, it tells the Most High you don’t have faith you will be comforted. Such behavior is prideful and stubborn due to bitterness toward God, or a lack of trust that releasing the feelings will be relieved. Psalms extensively writes about how brokenness and that form of surrendering reach heaven. Especially when it’s a brokenness of repentance. Again, repentance is not for being abused (ABUSE IS NOT YOUR FAULT), but for hardening one’s heart, and mind from future attempts at God working to reconcile you back to wholeness. Part of the healing process is being willed to yield vulnerabilities to the Most High and lay them down.
