I Painted the Light

Sexual abuse affects the Mind, the Body, and the Spirit of a person. It creates devastating blows to the very essence of what makes us a human being. We are a package deal – Mind, Body and Spirit. Our Mind consists of our ego, our personality, and it is damaged by the sexual abuse. Our Body is the physical component of us that is being attacked and violated by our abuser. Our Spirit is our own inner Light, our essence that is our connection with God. That Light is diminished when we have been sexually attacked.

With all of these dents in our Mind, Body, Spirit fields surrounding our Sacred Heart, we begin to feel that we are less than others. We feel less than normal, less worthy, less deserving, less meaningful, less attractive, less smart, less capable, less womanly/manly. In reality, we’re not any of these things, but we feel less than others. And here lies the core of the problem. This feeling of being ‘less than’ shapes all of our behavior, all of our thinking, all of our actions, all of our reactions. We don’t even know that we’re viewing the world and responding to the world from this limited, damaged, albeit incorrect, perspective. We feel inferior, but we have no idea how deep our problem lies and what can make us feel good again. For some who have buried all memories of their abuse, like I did, we don’t even know why we feel different, why we don’t fit in or feel normal.

We go about our lives trying to fill the dents from the outside so that we’re whole and pretty! We try a variety of different behaviors and substances to fill the gaps in our armor, the crinkled rusted dents in our Sacred Heart. We try drugs and alcohol to fill in the dents, like putty on a car or spackling on a piece of drywall. Maybe gambling or shopping will make us feel better…will make us feel important and attractive. Indiscriminate sex and dysfunctional relationships all try to fill the emptiness that we feel inside. We keep trying so hard to fill in the dents in order to feel whole. We’re tired of feeling incomplete and less than everyone else. We just want to feel right.

We may feel the need to over-achieve in order to compensate for our feelings of inadequacy. We work hard to make more money, achieve good grades, make the sale, impress our boss or surpass our neighbors and co-workers. We think that if we are above others, then we are not less than them. We continue to search for things on the OUTSIDE that can fill us – fill the dents, fill the empty feelings, and make us whole. We keep searching for something that will finally make us feel okay about ourselves.

Or sometimes we loathe ourselves so much, we continue the abuse and add more dents to ourselves. We add dents to our Body circle as we perform some type of self-mutilation, practice some form of eating disorder like anorexia, bulimia or gluttony, or attract and stay in relationships that bring us violence and drama. We feel this is all we deserve because we ARE less than others, of course, and this is the best we can do. We take in excessive amounts of alcohol and drugs to both hide the pain and add more dents to our physical bodies. Our self-talk is critical and demeaning as we continue to add dents to the Mind circle. Our Spirit is deflated again and again as we stay in relationships where people put us down and ridicule our behaviors. There are dents from our abusers and even more dents from ourselves. We don’t make healthy choices because we don’t think we’re worth it.

But our true healing from the abuse does not come from the outside. Our true healing must come from the inside. Psychotherapy is a wonderful tool for recovery and I urge you to find a trained counselor to help you navigate these waters. But I found that therapy could only take me so far. It deals mostly with the mind and the emotions. But I wanted to heal all of me, the whole being – the Sacred Heart. I found that I could heal from within, from my own spirit, from my own Light and vibration.

When we look within and acknowledge the Sacred Heart, the very soul of us, we start to grow! We learn to love ourselves and slowly realize that we are perfect inside. The dents are still there but the sexual abuse didn’t hurt my very soul. Most of us, including me, didn’t even know that we had a Sacred Heart – a holy center that is of God.

My outer shell, the Mind, Body, Spirit circles, were banged up pretty bad. There were plenty of dents from the sexual abuse, the verbal abuse, the physical abuse, the bad relationships, the religious teachings, and the self-inflicted blows. But the Spirit within is strong and resilient. Thank God! No matter what happens on the outside or inside of us, no matter what our mind is thinking, the Sacred Heart still resides within us, whole and strong. The Sacred Heart exists within the circles perfect and whole. It’s just that no one has ever told us that it’s there. Our Spirit may be reduced to a tiny spark, but it is always there. The Spirit needs only to feel our hope that there is a Spirit inside and the Spirit starts healing the dents. As our belief grows, the Spirit grows. As the Spirit grows, the dents are popped out from the inside. One by one the slightest dimples start turning back out. The spirit softly pushes out the dents and brings us back to wholeness. One by one, softening the evidence of the abuse, our Spirit is eased into the Light of wonder and the glow of health. As we raise our vibration inside, everything starts operating on a different level. And the true healing begins.

The dents will always have a slight mar on the outer surface of the Sacred Heart. We can never pretend that the abuse didn’t happen and that it has all magically gone away. But we have the power inside our Sacred Heart to reshape us. The Light within is stronger than any dent. It can all be restored by going within and focusing on the Light of the Divine that is within each of us.

The Sacred Heart is your special connection to God, to the one Great Spirit who knows all, heals all, and loves us all. The Sacred Heart is your Divine life force - the very energy or vibration that keeps you alive. When you pass from this life, this life force, your Sacred Heart, goes to another plane. Your body dies but your Sacred Heart lives on forever. And until we recognize that we have this Sacred Heart inside us, we’ll never fully recover from the abuse. Only when we see, truly see, our greatness, our Divine Light within, will we be whole.

As we move towards being whole, we will come to consider ourselves holy. And eventually we’ll see everyone else as holy. Every person has this Sacred Heart, this Divine Light, inside. We begin to feel a peace inside, a feeling of being okay with ourselves and with the world. We stop measuring ourselves against everyone else, because now we know who we really are. As renowned spiritual leader and physician Dr. Deepok Chopra states "Once you know who you really are, being is enough. You feel neither superior to anyone nor inferior to anyone and you have no need for approval because you've awakened to your own infinite worth."