Wall of Silence

by Dorey Whittaker

  Dr. Jacobson drew the group’s attention back and continued. “By the following Christmas, I had learned Santa doesn’t exist. It would have been wonderful if I could have had the wisdom to dig deep within me, find that lie I had believed about myself, and pluck it out. Children don’t do that! The lies we tell ourselves as children become the truths we live by as adults. Now, I am going to repeat this because it is so very important: the lies we tell ourselves as children become the truths we live by as adults.

  “If you grew up feeling responsible for all the evil that went on in your home, as an adult, you might be feeling responsible for everything that is going wrong in your life today. While it was probably something other than Santa Claus that confirmed your conclusion to you, something in your life convinced you, I am bad. This lie is crippling you, as it crippled me. This lie resides at the very core of your being and constantly whispers, ‘It is all your fault.’

  “This lie is such a part of how you view yourself that you and I will probably always struggle against it. We need to remind ourselves daily that we are not responsible when others close to us behave badly. We are only responsible for how we behave. I believe this horrible lie that abused children embrace as truth is the reason some women marry abusive men and stay in abusive marriages. They feel like they deserve it because they believe, I am bad.”

  Susan was surprised by the sudden silence that filled the room. No one was looking around.

  It seemed everyone was pondering this powerful concept Dr. Jacobson was presenting. Susan was glad to be sitting in the back row.

  Dr. Jacobson, having noticed Susan’s seat change earlier, waited until Susan looked up and then made eye contact with her. Giving her a reassuring smile, Dr. Jacobson continued. “The second incorrect conclusion I want to address tonight is ‘God just doesn’t love me.’ I know firsthand this is difficult for hurting people to hear, but please understand that if you suffered a harsh, abusive childhood, you probably also came to this incorrect conclusion about God. Most of us did. Please realize that going through life choosing to believe there is no God is vastly different than believing God is out to hurt you. If, as a child, you decided God was your enemy, that formidable enemy still resides in your mind. I would like to help you face that enemy tonight and convince you of the truth that God is not out to hurt you.

  “As a very young girl, I would pray to God each night. I pleaded with Him to change my parents and make my father stop drinking and for the horrifying beatings to stop. I would pray that God would make my mother nice, like my friend’s mother. I prayed for His help for years, but it never came. He obviously didn’t care, so I stopped praying.”

  Tears streamed down Susan’s face. Years of desperate childhood prayers screamed in her head and the pain of realizing they were never going to be answered was as agonizing tonight as the night she, too, had decided to stop praying. Trying to subtly wipe the tears from her face, Susan fought to focus on Dr. Jacobson’s words.

  “With childhood reasoning, I concluded that either God did not exist or God just didn’t love me. If He loved me, why didn’t He help me? If He loved me, why did He let those people hurt me? Why didn’t God love me? As a child, these questions seemed easy to answer: I am not worth it. It matched up with my other lie I had believed about myself: I am bad, so God doesn’t love me.

  “Once a child is convinced of these lies, they feel totally isolated. They feel no connection to their parents and now they feel disconnected from God. You have no doubt heard the saying, ‘There are no atheists in fox-holes.’ Everyone in overwhelming circumstances cries out to God for help. Children who grow up in abusive homes live their lives in foxholes!”

  Susan’s head jerked up in surprise at this poignant description. That’s exactly how it feels. Suddenly the image of herself crouched down, hiding in the closet the night her father almost killed her mother became quite vivid. That closet certainly had been one of her foxholes.

  Speaking as gently as she could, Dr. Jacobson suggested, “Children who live in homes with so much hatred and abuse always blame themselves. They naturally begin to believe something they are doing provokes this behavior in those around them, so God is punishing them. Then when that abuse reaches the unthinkable, God becomes the unthinkable. What are children to do when their world is in utter chaos and they believe they have nowhere to go for help and protection? What are they to do when they are convinced even God hates them? Most simply hate God right back. Others decide that a God like that simply should not exist, so in their mind He doesn’t. As little children, they have no way of comprehending that the god they are hating isn’t God, only their warped conception of Him. They don’t understand He does love them and cares deeply about what is happening to them. If we are to dispel the lie that God is our enemy, don’t we have to understand the concept of who God says He is? Once we understand this truth, we no longer need to think of Him as our enemy. We can then be free to seek Him out and get to know Him. In this freedom, childhood lies cannot survive. Ladies, please don’t leave here tonight still thinking you have to go through life fighting against an enemy as big as God.”

  Susan’s initial resistance to this subject began to melt. This woman’s logic, compounded by her own painful childhood, made Susan willing to listen. She didn’t want to keep feeling as though God hated her.

  Dr. Jacobson continued. “I would like to share how those questions were answered for me. Almost all religions teach that we have a choice. We can choose to love God, or we can choose to hate God. This choice is called ‘free will.’ It is a gift from God to mankind, because He does not want us to be robots, following after Him without any alternatives. He would experience no pleasure from forced obedience. We all enjoy and, I dare say, cherish our free will. I know I do. We would never want God to take that gift away from us. One night when I was in my late twenties, I was going through a very difficult time. I was at my wit’s end and felt completely alone. As I had done many times before, I began praying, but not as others pray. My prayers were angry accusations toward God. I would challenge Him, if He was a God of love, to answer me and show me just how much He loved me.”

  Susan smiled as she clutched her purse, knowing those very words were written on her piece of paper.

  “Ladies, without getting melodramatic, all I can tell you is, in the most calm and quiet manner, a thought, or voice if you will, came into my mind. It said, ‘Stephanie, you’re tying my hands.’

  “Now, I personally don’t believe God talks to us out loud, but I am certain that was God. He was talking to me, and I wanted to talk to Him. I sensed no anger, only a pleading for me to try to understand. So with more respect than my previous questions had been offered, I closed my eyes and asked, ‘How am I tying your hands? How can I tie the hands of God?’

  “Now you are certainly free to believe or not believe this but in that same sweet, calm manner I heard this: ‘In one hand, I have given you free will. It is a gift to all mankind, and I cannot take back a gift I have given. With my other hand, you are demanding I prove my love for you by taking away another person’s free will. Stephanie, your parents had choices. They chose to be angry and hate-filled. Every time they made that choice, I mourned. I mourned for them, and I mourned for you.

  ‘I am God, but man chooses the path he will walk. I am here and I do love you. I could not stop them from hurting you, Stephanie, but if you will let me, I can heal that hurt, and replace your hate and anger with love. Stephanie, you too have a free will and a choice.’ ”

  As Dr. Jacobson paused, the silence in that room was almost deafening. No one spoke or looked around. Susan had heard some preachers talk about free will but never like this. Mulling it over, Susan realized she, too, had free will, which meant she could freewill God away if she wanted to.

  As this thought crossed her mind, she heard Dr. Jacobson say almost the same thing and she turned to listen.

  “That night I realized I had the power to accept God. I could now set aside the co
ncept that God was my enemy. He wasn’t responsible for and didn’t want my suffering at the hands of abusive parents. I knew then I had uncovered a huge lie I had told myself. God did not hate me, and He had not put me in that family to punish me. That night was a crossroads for me. The lie was now exposed, and I needed to choose which path I was going to walk: a path devoid of God, no longer my enemy but not my friend, or a path that allowed me to get to know this God I had spent my whole life mistrusting? It was my choice.

  “I knew I was being offered something wonderful that night. Not some mystic erasing of my past to give me a different childhood, but rather a healing of my soul. Somehow I knew that if I continued to shake my fist in God’s face, I was going to remain angry, bitter, and lost. I knew that night I needed to choose healing. I couldn’t stay in that place of isolation any longer. If there really was a God who loved me, I knew I wanted to get to know Him.

  “Like many of you in this group, I grew up in a home filled with hate and anger. No matter what you did to survive that home, if you have not dealt with your past, you are also filled with hate and anger. No one is more sympathetic to your rage than those of us who have also been there, but that rage is a poison that will consume you. You must choose to let it go. Love and hate cannot dwell together. Before you can welcome love into your life, you must let go of the hate. Ladies, the very act of child abuse screams that you had no choice! Yes, as a child, you had no choice and those who hurt you tried to convince you that you would never again have a choice. But today, as an adult, you can choose to end it. You can choose to live your life as a victim, allowing those who hurt you to continue to control your life today, or you can choose to do what you were unable to do as a child: let God help you release yourself from their grip and walk away. You are free to walk a path that does not include God, but I’m here to tell you that God can be trusted, and God does love you.”

  Susan sat through Dr. Jacobson’s talk almost forgetting anyone else was present. In some strange way, she knew God was trying to tell her something. It was as if God was using this woman to answer the challenges she had written down that very afternoon, the challenges she was still clutching in her purse. She knew Dr. Jacobson was right, and from somewhere deep within her, Susan began to quietly plead with God to help her.

  Dr. Jacobson then asked the group to close their eyes and silently remember a time in their childhood when they felt the most alone. Susan pictured herself in that closet the night her father almost killed her mother. She hated remembering that night, but as much as she tried to think of something else, her mind kept going back to that closet. She heard the speaker’s gentle voice saying to everyone in the room, “Remember, wherever your memory has taken you right now, God was there! Because He gave man free will, He could not stop whatever happened to you there in your memory place. But God was there crying for you. You were not alone!”

  With her eyes still closed, Susan thought about her mother and father. They had a choice to do good or evil because God had also given them a free will. For the first time, Susan began imagining that horrible night from God’s perspective. She thought about how He must have suffered as He watched this man who had chosen to live his life so filled with hate there never was any room for Him. If God had tried to reach her mother and father at different times in their lives, she wondered when and how? Of course she had no way of knowing, but she knew they had obviously turned Him away, and her life was the result.

  All of a sudden, Susan pictured that little girl huddled in the closet, so terrified she couldn’t breathe. Closing her eyes even tighter, Susan began to pray, asking God to hold that little girl, to love her, to make her feel safe. And then, without concern about anyone watching her, Susan allowed herself to cry. For the first time in her life, she allowed her damaged emotions to rise to the surface. Susan began crying for that little girl. It was as if the tears were going deep down to where she had stored that memory, flushing out her lies and pain. She also knew that somehow, God’s tears were blending with hers, and she felt as if He were wrapping His strong arms around her. A wonderful, warm feeling of peace enveloped her. She was choosing to let go of her anger, and she knew God did care what happened to her.

  That night, as she climbed into bed, Susan quietly looked up and for the first time prayed, “God, I don’t fully understand this freewill business very well, but I know you have given that gift to me, too, so I am asking you to help me. Please help me.”

  With that, Susan fell asleep, but that night it wasn’t a sleep of escape. She finally knew God did care; she didn’t have to fear Him, and she didn’t have to feel all alone. That night, Susan experienced her first really sweet and peaceful sleep.

  Chapter 7

  A noise brought Susan back to the present, and she turned to see Scott standing in the kitchen. “Susan, aren’t you coming out back for dessert? Your ice cream has already melted.”

  Embarrassed at getting caught daydreaming, she quickly moved past him and headed out to the back yard. As Scott walked next to her, she thought about the remarkable difference in her perspective on life since that retreat weekend. An “enemy” named God no longer tormented her soul. She no longer felt God was “out to get her,” and she had spent the past two years finally getting to know Him.

  When everyone finished dessert, Carol Anne collected the dishes and headed for the kitchen while Susan and Scott sat at the table chatting. Mr. Thomas climbed out of the pool and casually wandered over to the table to visit with Susan. Realizing his dad was going to discuss the subject of a job for Susan, Scott excused himself and joined his mother in the pool.

  Bill Thomas carefully considered what his son had said earlier. Not just what he said but also how he had said it. He knew Scott was falling in love with this girl, and he really couldn’t blame him. During most of Susan’s high school years, she was like family. Scott hadn’t been around during that time, but Bill and Caroline had come to love Susan as a daughter. He knew more about Susan’s childhood than he ever let on. After that day in second grade when he drove her home, and seeing the terror in her eyes and hearing the boy next door talk about her father, Bill had asked around town about Chuck Miller. The man was known for his violent temper and the police had been to their house on numerous occasions. Bill tried to get the police to protect the girl way back then, but no one could do anything about Chuck Miller until he went “too far.” The problem was, too far was usually too late for most women and children.

  Bill felt helpless and wished he could do something for her, so when Carol Anne met Susan again in high school and started bringing her home every weekend, he was grateful. He felt that, at least, he was able to provide a safe place for her to come when things at home got too tough.

  Bill took a sip of coffee and asked Susan what her plans were for the fall. When she mentioned she would need to find a better part-time job, he very casually said, “Why don’t you come to the office on Monday and fill out an application? We have a position that might be what you’re looking for.”

  Susan beamed with excitement as she thanked him for this opportunity. Scott, resting against the side of the pool, smiled at how wonderfully his dad had handled that.

  ***

  Susan had an interview scheduled for the following week at Thomas & Associates. Mr. Thomas had asked his office manager, Mrs. Randal, to create an assistant’s position so she could have some much-needed help. He mentioned Susan as a possibility but clearly left the final decision to hire her with Mrs. Randal. She interviewed Susan on Wednesday, and Thursday morning Susan started work.

  Life was exciting, and Susan threw herself into her new job. She spent as much time as possible at the office the first two weeks. She wanted to learn quickly to ensure Mrs. Randal would have no regrets about her decision. Susan’s community college classes began two weeks later. Keeping up with her job responsibilities and study requirements left her little time to miss Carol Anne.

  One week after college started, Susan and her mother were
given notice to vacate their home. Because of the expense of her father’s trial, he had demanded the house be sold. If her mother failed to comply, he threatened he would take care of her when he got out of jail. Unable to afford the house and the attorney’s fees on her salary, her mother sold the house to an investor and used the entire amount of equity to pay Chuck’s attorney. They were allowed to occupy the house as renters for a while, but now the investors wanted them to move so the house could be renovated and sold.

  Faced with relocating, Susan plotted a risky scheme and approached her mother. “I’m earning more money now and am able to help out more with the rent. There’s a very nice apartment building downtown that is within walking distance to both our jobs. It would be nice not to have to take the city bus to work. If they have an opening, I’m sure we can afford it.”

  Marjorie gave her usual glare to anything Susan suggested. While nervously waiting for her mother’s response, Susan weighed the words she had used. I didn’t mention Thomas & Associates, so that shouldn’t send her off the deep end. She certainly has no way of knowing Scott, “one of the Thomas clan,” as she puts it, lives in that building. So, if she explodes, it’s simply because she hates anything and everything I suggest. I know I won’t be able to keep Scott’s presence in the building a secret forever, but I don’t care. It’ll be worth it.

  A sudden change came over Marjorie’s face. “It would be nice not to have to take the city bus to work, but an apartment building? I hate having people living right on top of me. I need my space, but I suppose we can go take a look.”

  Within the week they had signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment in Scott’s building. Susan made sure Scott understood he was never welcome to stop by their apartment, but as she knew would happen, her mother ran into Scott about two weeks later and exploded in Susan’s face for “tricking” her. Marjorie’s anger was only softened by her love of the apartment, but regardless of the wisdom of this choice, she was determined to make Susan pay for tricking her like this.