Dear God,
I have tried to believe in you. I really have. I desperately want you to be there. If you aren’t there, it would be difficult for me to have the hope I need to keep going, to push through the darkest days of recovery and life in general.
But I’m going to be honest with you. I haven’t had the kind of life which encourages undying faith. With inescapable trauma plaguing my entire childhood, creating painful patterns in my adulthood, it didn’t promote a general appreciation for the beauty that is life. I know I innately have it. But it is so marred in trauma, I can’t see it.
And I’ll be even more honest, the people didn’t help very much. When I was growing up, religion was used against me all the time. My abusers made it clear that I was to honor my father and mother. They used guilt, so much guilt, to keep me under their control. They let me know that God likes girls who fall in line, do as their told and never speak up. They let me know God believes men are more important than women, even that women are here for the benefit and pleasure of men. They quoted the Bible just to prove they were right. Honestly, I didn’t understand who wrote the Bible until I was older. I always thought you did. I didn’t know that men did.
And I’ll be honest again. Other people weren’t much better. They told me that I should just believe in you and everything would be okay. They told me to pray and things would work out. They told me prayer would fix everything. But it never fixed anything. And they never took any action. They never did anything to help me, save me or change my circumstances. So I thought I wasn’t praying right. Or maybe, even worse, you weren’t interested in what I had to say. Maybe it worked for everyone but me.
So when I grew up, I have to admit, I wasn’t too convinced you were on my side. I mean, I couldn’t see how you had been on my side. Maybe you were. Maybe you kept me alive. But honestly, that didn’t seem like a huge favor at the time. And when those abusive patterns continued, even after my desperate attempts to escape and live a better life, it didn’t help our relationship. Honestly, you were equated to my abusers in my unconscious mind. I just thought your goal was to continue the pain and punishment. It was the only way I could explain those patterns. At the time, I didn’t know what else could be causing them.
But then in recovery, things started to make more sense. The memories started coming back and I saw the source of the patterns. I started to understand you differently, and I desperately wanted to believe in you, in a different version of you than my abusers and religion had shown me. But honestly, there were still so many mixed messages. I felt hope, but my inner parts were sharing hopelessness. I felt empowered to change my life, but my inner parts were sharing powerlessness. I felt tiny snippets of joy, but the despair and grief from my inner parts was overwhelming. I could stand in nature on a beautiful day and feel suicidal. How could you do that? How could you be responsible for a world like that?
And honestly, the pain in the world is a little hard to cope with too. Even if I was healed completely from my trauma, walking through this place can take its toll. There is darkness around every corner. There is pain in everyone and many are acting directly from that pain. It is a struggle to have a relationship with you knowing about all the pain. And my awareness has been a blessing and a curse. I see the pain of others more clearly because of it.
But I keep trying to see you in the world, in my life, in me. You are a different God than the one used against me or preached at me. You are the one I have chosen. You are the one who meets my understanding and my expectations. Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know that answer. How could I know? But I do know it is my right to see you as I need to see you. It isn’t blasphemous. It isn’t sinful. It is the same personal choice I never knew I could have in my life. But I have extended it to you. Honestly, it is the only relationship I can have with you. It is the only one that will work. My understanding of you has to be on my terms.
And honestly, I think you get that. In my life, most haven’t. And maybe that is what keeps me going. Maybe it keeps me hoping that you really are there, that you really are different from the others. Of course, I don’t know anything for sure about you, or much else for that matter. But without some version of you, it is difficult to walk through this world seeing the pain in the human race. Without some version of you, it is difficult to see the good with so many bad experiences in the past. So I will commit to keep trying. And I have the strange feeling you are committed even when I hate you, yell at you and question your very existence.
And that will have to do for now.
We will have to make that work.
Love,
Elisabeth
This letter is not intended to promote a particular spiritual or religious viewpoint. It is meant to promote the opposite. It is important that we embrace the unseen in whatever form helps us to heal. And this letter explains my personal experience.
Written By Elisabeth Corey, MSW
Dear God was originally published @ Beating Trauma and has been syndicated with permission.
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I can so relate to Elizabeth’s story, even though mine took a little different direction. I grew up with a narcissistic mother who refused to let me express any emotions. The only thing I had going for me that she couldn’t take away was my intelligence.
To escape her and a non-involved dad, I left home and married at 15…to a man who was exactly like one part of my mom. They both could never accept me as I was, but continually tried to make me into the image they wanted. After almost 15 years and three sons later, I left that marriage and two years later went from the frying pan into the fire. This man was very controlling and expected me to provide for us financially. Never mind that we had a young son and I had become completely deaf in my mid-30s. I had no idea what a computer was,and I had no training for anything else. No one would hire me because I couldn’t hear on the telephone. (This was before the ADA was enacted).
The only thing I had was God. For whatever reason, He kept inserting himself into my life to show me His love (through other people) and how He would take care of me and my son.
There were several things I learned. He knows far better than I what is in my future and guides my life accordingly. Did I rebel? Of course, but I got tired of painting myself into a corner with no way out, or so I thought.
That marriage ended after 17 years. My sons are grown and have become wonderful young men, good husbands and fathers (others’ opinion in addition to my own). The move also took my son away from his father’s influence, who was trying to turn him against me.
Several years later I re-married in Maryland and had a lifestyle I never could have imagined. Ten years later I let my husband talk me into moving to Texas, my native state. His reasoning was that if he died first, I would already by near friends and family. His real reason became apparent three months after we moved: with only two hours notice, he went back to Delaware (where we had been living) to be with a woman he had worked with.
I was devastated because neither I, nor my friends, nor his friends had seen it coming. I sat in my swing for hours talking to God. There was a Bible verse I hung on to, Heb. 11:1. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I prayed so earnestly that my husband would return because I just knew it was not God’s will that he left. Over two months I came to realize that my faith had been in an outcome, not in God. I also had to learn to be a happy Texan again.
Seven years later I married yet again to a man who was my first boyfriend in Junior High. His wife had died quite suddenly 16 years earlier. Until we met a years and a half previously, we had not seen each other in 57 years. He’s the man I should have married the first time…but we both were very different people then.
God wasn’t finished me yet, though. In 2009 I graduated from Univ. of Texas at Arlington with a Master of Social Work. Again, my schooling and support was completely free from the State, which could not have happened had I remained in Delaware.
I can’t count the number of times I had been through exactly what the client sitting in front of me was experiencing. My client evaluations showed I was empathetic and really understood where they were coming from.
As I said earlier, God knew so much better than I what I needed and wanted. I just had to learn to listen to Him.