Courage, Dear Heart

“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ” (C.S. Lewis). I used to absolutely hate it when people told me to “just trust in God.” Didn’t they know what I was going through? Couldn’t they see that this was absolutely impossible for me? Life used to seem that way – impossible – all the time. I didn’t see a way out, and I couldn’t trust anyone , least of all God. It wasn’t that I hated Him, or blamed Him for the things I was going through; I could often be grateful for the times He never left me. I was grateful…but trust was a different thing entirely. When I began dating the worst abuser, all of my walls went up. He taught me that I could trust no one around me – no one except for him . And I did trust him, for a while. He had groomed me to believe that he was the only one who would never leave (so long as I did everything he wanted), and eventually, in accordance with his wishes, I shut

“As a child, I never imagined that all of the real monsters in the world would be humans” (Mobeen Hakeem). The last few weeks, I have been very exhausted. It doesn’t have much to do with the insomnia, though that certainly isn’t helping; rather, I have felt very emotionally and spiritually apathetic. It feels as if I am reverting back to when I was dating my abusers, and decided that being “dead inside” was better than any of the painful emotions I was experiencing. One of the ways that the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has affected me the most is through dissociation. Dissociating from trauma isn't always a negative way to cope, particularly during the trauma itself. During the worst pits of abuse, and the heights of the torture, I survived through dissociating myself from the pain I was experiencing. It helped me in a lot of ways, but unfortunately, I grew very used to the feeling of apathy – the feeling of having those huge walls up all around me...walls that no