This is not a spiritual post for me. Or rather, it is not a religious
thought, at the very least. Faith is something we can have in many
other parts of our lives. We have faith that when we put our garbage
cans at the end of the drive-way, the city officials have done the right
things to bring the garbage truck with employees to cart that garbage
away to the local dump. We have faith that when we leave our children
at school in the morning every week day, we are leaving them in the
hands of the best qualified people to take care of them and enrich their
knowledge base. We have faith that the food we buy from the
supermarket has been handled in a sanitary fashion from where it came
from until we put it on our dinner table to feed our family. We lead
our lives under a significant amount of faith… trusting in other people
and hoping for a positive outcome.
Being a survivor of domestic violence is like a journey back to
faith. As a victim, we have lost that faith. We have had our trust
broken by our abuser and been hurt in one or more ways — emotionally,
physically, financially… We no longer have faith that the system works
as it should. We no longer wake up believing that anything or anyone can
possibly work the way it should. Someone we trusted into our homes,
our lives, and closest of all, our hearts — this person has breeched
everything we held dear to the very foundation of our existence.
As a victim, we now see hurt where there may not be — because we are
forever on the look-out for it. The old adage, once bitten, twice
weary. If someone we judged to be worthy of trust and love could hurt
us so very deeply, then how can we trust ourselves to make that
judgement about anyone else out there — friend, family or service
provider alike. At rock bottom, our belief structure might resemble
something like this: All lawyers are out to get us. All judges are
heartless. All CAS workers are evil. All service providers will breech
our trust. All men are abusers. All women are secretly in cohorts with
those men.
But we know those statements aren’t true. We know
that there are good people out there. We just don’t know how to trust
them. We don’t know how to take things on faith anymore.
Through continued hard work on our own part… slowly, taking baby
steps… it is possible to learn to trust our own judgement again. It is
possible to realize that domestic violence was an act carried out
AGAINST us; that we didn’t ask for it or go seeking it. We can learn to
have faith in other people. We can learn to have faith in the system.
Much of this starts with fellow survivors. Finding a circle of women who
we can trust not to hurt us, because they know what we’ve been through —
they’ve been through similar experiences. They know what it is like to
be delicate. They know how difficult it is to reach out for those bonds
of friendships, to have faith that we are being a good judge of
character and we are going forward into a friendship that will uphold
our dignity.
Here on 1 in Four we want to help make that first step a little bit
easier, offer a little softer approach. We have Forums where you can
connect with fellow survivors and reach out, in faith, that they will
reach back. We invite you to take that first step with us today, so
that when the time comes for the tougher steps — like calling a crisis
line or making your first appointment with a TSW (transitional support
worker) or starting 10 sessions of therapy for sexual assault — you’ll
be just a little bit stronger and you’ll be filled with a little more
faith. Because there are a lot of great signs to show you that faith in
humanity is still a good bet!
(… and while we’re on the subject of ‘faith’ .. I wanted to sneak in a
link to a cute website, if you can get past all the blatant
advertising, www.givesmehope.com has some very lovely story snippets to help make you smile.)
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