Either faith is big enough to accommodate problems like mine or God’s not real.  Faith can’t be precious, polite, or dainty.  Faith is not an accessory nor is it a hobby.  Either it’s everything or don’t waste your time.  If God is, then there should be a way to use God to help ourselves.

To recover, begin using God, and I mean choosing, exercising choice to unseat your self.

Once you’ve begun the lifelong process of looking at what happened so that you can stop demanding that others look at what happened to you, you can also begin the secondary process of un-selfing.

The soul, as the piece of me that is also God, cannot be wounded, offended, trespassed.  My soul cannot want, need, or require. My soul is perfect.  By definition it lacks nothing.

The problem with mortal life is that the soul is saddled with a self.  The self is heartily offended by what happened.  The self needs, wants, demands, and the less I attend to God, the bigger the torment the self is as it claws and fights its way through every day, inflating to the size of any room it’s in.  In cases where there is a debilitating personal history the self has lots of power.  The self can pretty much run the show using legitimate injuries and lots of pain in the life of any victim.

The self must be eradicated.

It is the self that absorbed, in my case, the trespasses of my childhood.  My mother cannot rape my soul.  She did however, trespass my self.

No one has access to your identity containing soul.  It was my self that my mother compromised, my mother attacked my self and its understanding of its own power, its authority.  My self is profoundly offended by what happened.

The primary task of any faith is the removal of this impediment of self.  Ultimate liberty and joy are the direct consequence of utter selflessness.

The most important thing I can share here on this site about recovery is this:  the wound you feel is to your self, not to your soul.  Remove the self and you will also remove the wound.

The self will fight, for your entire mortal life, for the right to be your enslaving master.  It will wedge itself into your mind as the sole proprietor of your identity and claim that if you dare to let it go, with its infinite needs and violence, that if you have the audacity let it go, you will become nothing, will be capable of expressing nothing, will be allowing God to rape you.  It’s a lie.  The self only lies.  The self is our cross.  It is the thing we cannot escape in this mortal life.

The self assiduously impedes identity. The self poisons all.

God can be understood in an infinite number of ways, however, primarily, God is love.  This statement is too cliched to be meaningful.  So, the next thing to understand is that love is our un-self.  Love is what drives us to do irrational, brave, human things.  Love overrides reason, will, and the pride that enslave us.  Love is the antithesis, the antivenom that will incapacitate the self.  The more you access love, the more you will deprive the self of the hate, fear, indignation, conceit, delusion, greed, and hunger that it thrives upon.

To access love, use God. Pray.  All the time.  Wrap your life around activities that are true.  Fight as hard as you can to be truthful at your own fiscal, social, and emotional expense.  Humility is the opposite of humiliation.  Humiliation is the daily bread of the self.  Shame is a constant experience in a selfish life.  In the un-selfish life there is humility and dignity, not shame and humiliation.

The hallmark of a true believer is not morality.  The hallmark of a believer is marked humanity.  God’s intention, speaking through whatever lens you use to know God, is always the same, to get us to embrace our humanity, our vulnerability, our empathy, our passion and compassion, to give us the luxury of courage to express the truth of our heart openly.

Morality is worthless because it is unattainable and the sole property of God.  Morality is perfection, the unapproachable, inhuman perfection of God, the quality of God that makes God unknowable, lethal to a person.  But in Jesus, and in I’m sure other versions of faith, God’s intent is to expose Itself, to reveal the way in, that is, by meekly and unworthily accepting charity and mercy.  We need redemption.  So we need our humanity, all of it, to unseat the self; we need to be aware of what we love and to express our true selves as much as we can all the time.

The number of immoral things I think and do in an hour’s time is astonishing.  Wicked things were done to me, yes, and I’ve done mean, hideous, premeditated things too, not rape, but, you know, mean things.  My faith has not cleansed me from my predisposition to do bad.  My faith has shown me the way out of my mistakes, that is, to devalue the self, to consciously acknowledge my guilt, and to trust God when God says, “I know you and I forgive you.”

Every part of the redemption process is about getting out from under the spell of self, about giving the self no authority, about ceding no rights to the self, and about embracing love and trusting that this lifeline will be enough.  The smaller the self, the smaller your wound.  Heaven, the place where there is no self, is the place where your wound ceases to exist.