Sarah Nyhan

“Without going into dramatic and gross detail, I’ll summarize my childhood in as few words as I have.”

That right there tells me enough. The way you put that.

What would God say? Would God say to use as few words as possible? I challenge you to show me that verse. To explain that modality.

As if intellectual understanding is all we need. Don’t we wish it was that easy. 

Are you doing to yourself exactly what was done to you? Were your needs invalidated when you were a child? Did you learn quite well to make your wants and desires so small that you would at least be tolerated? Or not actively punished. For being what I would expect a psychologist to say is a perfectly normal child?

Why must we abandon ourselves just because they did? I mean I get it that that’s all we learned. But does that mean we are doomed to follow suit?

The pain is the way. The pain is the door to the other side. Where I can have compassion for the ones who hurt me. While also not invalidating my anger. My sadness. My grief. My unquenched desires for all that was very, completely normal to want.

Are you telling me that if a little girl was standing right in front of you reeling in pain that you would tell her to stop being dramatic and gross? If so, we gotta a big problem. 

Maybe you did. Maybe you don’t want to face that. I don’t know. 

But at least the intellectual should say there’s a way through and forward all this – and it probably isn’t denial. It probably isn’t hiding away in our minds while trying to murder our hearts. That’s what they did. 

We adapted for survival. We had to. There was no other choice. 

But dramatic and gross? 

Is that what the psychologist thinks as the patient is sitting there wrestling with even finding words to describe what happened? Much less process how to get through it. How to EVENTUALLY move on. How to maybe even master whatever happened. Thrive. And share to help others.

How is that wrong?

Dramatic and gross? Is that how God feels about what happened to you? That you are just dramatic and gross?

I don’t say this for anyone else. I say all this for me. For the grrrl who feels so much trepidation when even considering speaking. Who has been told over and over and over and over to shut up. To stop being so “emotional”. Rejected constantly when I try to discuss these things.

No, that’s how they treated me. 
But I don’t have to do that to myself.

I can define my own values.
I can decide what’s good and right for me.
I have to eventually make peace with myself.
With my choices.

And stop dancing for everyone else’s fickle approval. Let them pull all the puppet strings so they can keep on avoiding their healing. 

Dramatic and gross, eh?

That’s a really hard line.

It strikes me that the problem the religious zealots had with Jesus was that He called God His Father. They said, “Oh no you don’t. You look just like us. There’s no way.”

I’m not adopted. Because I was never separated. I was God’s kid before I landed in my parents’ home. I was God’s kid before I was even my own.

It’s fine if everyone else wants to minimize and dismiss. Like I said, I’m no longer in the business of saving anyone. I trust God completely to work out what everyone else thinks and does. 

But I am not going to abandon myself just because everyone else did. Even if preachers and potential employers and psychologists abandon me and themselves because I keep going on. 

I’m going to speak. In as many words as I want. Not even in response. Just because that’s what I do.

I think my words have value. I think I have value. I think expressing what I went through, all the details, is exactly what I need most sometimes. Especially to those that understand. And for those that also need a voice.

Not going to waste a bit of this healing. While also not making it my entire personality. 

But even if I did. If that’s what it took for awhile. To get to the other side.

At some point I realized Jesus wasn’t asking me to believe in Him. Jesus maybe has all this time been asking me to believe in myself.