Being a victim of childhood atrocities means that shame will be a permanent, compelling presence in your life.  Shame is central to the things that the victim unwillingly participated in and cannot ever forget.  Shame is present in the habits of self-pity, self-justification, and self-absorption that are hallmarks of adult-victim life.  Shame is most powerful not in what was done to the victim but in what victim does to herself and to the people she loves most: her partner, her family, her best friends, her colleagues, and her children and dependents. Humiliation begins when the crime occurs, but it’s chiefly debilitating because humiliation accelerates throughout adulthood.

I am nearly breathless with terror when I see the things I do to the living things in my life.  Shame, though, is not a sign of God’s hatred for me, but the opposite.  Shame is a sign of God’s presence and its utter, inherent incompatibility with the evil in me.  When I engage in behavior that is below me, when I act on my compulsion to express contempt for myself and for other living things, I am ashamed.

Shame is vehement, dominant, and un-ignorable.  It’s convenient to assume God is standing there pointing an accusatory finger in gleeful rejection of me.  The rejection I feel is my own self-hatred.  The shame I feel is the truth, that God’s the only real and permanent other in this and in all worlds, and God wants me as a daughter, wants me enough to subject Itself to inconceivable humiliation so that redemption is an option.

I can either acknowledge that God loves me and that I hate me, or I can continue to tell myself the story that my wicked behavior towards myself and others is “just” because…(Fill in the blank.).

Dabbling is what everyone does.  But if real recovery is the intention, God provides the vehicle for that process. Prayer is that vehicle.  There will be daily duress in a victim’s life because of the woundedness.  Prayer allows for the use of a higher power to override the insidious instinct to annihilate the soul in the service of the self. Use it when you feel shame.  Use it multiple times a day.  Cultivate a habit of drawing near to God by talking to God whether you feel it is doing anything or not, whether it feels like talking to nothing or to the ceiling, keep showing up and you will find that you scramble through the day with fewer and fewer shame moments.

The self would like there to be a “cure” for the agony of victimhood.  There isn’t.  There’s nothing that will eradicate the daily, hourly need for the love of God, for the mercy, tolerance, and passion of God.  Manna was not given from heaven to be stored, but to be used daily.

I have an app on my phone called “Prayminder” (https://prayminder.com/).  Six or seven times a day I am prompted to pray.  It takes like 30 seconds and everything in me resists it every time.  But using that app to access God’s presence is like pouring healing over the open wound that is me.  Over a long period of time I can see unmistakable patterns of change that show me I’m not dabbling and that Love is really committed to me.  It’s the tool to use to overcome choices that will otherwise drown me in shame and cycle me back through self-destructive pain.  Prayer is constructive; prayer changes me; prayer accesses God’s service to me and overrides the tyranny of the self and its endless quest to dominate me.