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We were without
doubt guided to your website by the Holy Mother. In my early childhood (from 5yrs old)
I was some five years in foster home and suffered almost daily violent physical,
psychological, racial and emotional abuse. I was also sexually molested by a male colleague
of my foster father and feared for my life on that day. I buried this for over forty years
only to wake up in November 2016 with my life “over the cliff” in a moderate/severe
emotional breakdown.
I converted to Catholicism some 11 years ago having traveled a spiritual journey initially
in Pentecostalism and then through various denominations until Christ guided me to the His
true Church and all the riches therein.
My wife and I have always followed a traditional and mystical Catholic pathway, and so your
encouragement to to pursue a mystical path of healing was welcome and necessary. I also
kept a devotion to Our Lady Undoer of Knots for some four months initially. Whilst the
encouragement (via your site) on that mystical path was necessary, much of the psychoanalytical
explanations brought light to so much confusion.
I am now some nine months on the pathway of recovery and back to work after seven months away.
It has bothered me that even in this tenth month of recovery I do still have daily issues
(anxiety/desolation) which are uncomfortable but manageable through turning to the cross,
surrender and resignation to God’s Will, and devotion to the Holy Mother. Can I suppose
that issues even after ten months would not be uncommon and probably expected? How much I
would like to reach that place where these daily issues have passed; however, the spiritual
growth through this dark time has been the great reward.
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 ow that you have awakened to the truth of your
childhood trauma, the memories of that abuse will, in the future, always be a part of your
psychological experience. That is, those memories can be hidden but they cannot be erased.
Furthermore, whenever those memories come to your mind, there will be
temptations for you to savor thoughts of
hatred and anger, despite the fact that you can consciously tell
yourself that acting on those temptations would be a sin. Because the
temptations are a natural aspect of our humanity, and because the understanding of the need to
resist sin is an aspect of the spirit, you will find yourself in a conflict between the flesh
and the spirit, as Saint Paul described in his letter to the Galatians (5:17). It will be a
conflict between serving God and serving your own satisfaction. In psychoanalytic
language, this sort of psychological conflict can be called a snarl, or a knot, in your
unconscious mind.
So, whether you like it or not, these sorts of
temptations will occur throughout the remainder of your life. Your memories of abuse will
want to send you into anger, anxiety, and
doubt. You will want to harbor anger at your abusers,
you will feel anxious about the future, and you will even
doubt whether God cares about you. It can be emotional torment at
times. Only through healing psychoanalytic work will the pain be alleviated, and only through
desire and prayer can the work be sustained; only through
trust in God’s justice and providence will the
anger and anxiety be contained, but even then, because the memories of the abuse cannot be
erased, temptations to anger and anxiety will always be a threat.
Although many persons fall prey to
defenses of sexuality, drugs, alcohol, or food to numb the
emotional pain, the only healthy remedy is to encounter and feel the pain through psychoanalytic
work and then have a willingness to sit calmly and quietly before God in prayer
with all your emotional pain. Feel the pain—but feel it without anger. Admit that you cannot
make others act as you would like them to act. Admit your helplessness
before God. Admit that without God you are nothing. Admit that only God can protect you. Feel
the nothingness and accept it. Accept that only in your helplessness and nothingness will you
ever receive a mission from God to do anything meaningful.
In essence, this sitting with the pain and
giving it to God is a way of fighting a battle against
evil with no weapons other than your love for God. And what a gift
it was that through Our Lady it has been revealed to you that this healing process is not a
matter of cutting away the pain and getting rid of it but
is instead a matter of untying the knots of your unconscious through psychoanalytic
exploration and steadfast, quiet prayer and
trust in God.
So even though these daily issues will never pass
in this life, the joy is that in fighting them in every moment you
stay intimately close to God through Our Lady Undoer of Knots.
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