Nothing is more frightening than silence. Fear keeps us paralyzed. To break silence is to do the bravest thing possible.
Breaking silence is cathartic–it allows you to get your negative feelings out from where they are locked within you. Of course, it’s not enough to express those feelings but it’s a necessary first step to deal with them. Talk to a trusted friend, to your minister, or to a counselor. The things that must be said to break the silence are answers to these questions: 1. What happened? 2. When did it happen? Where did it happen?
This step is so hard but I promise you, you will begin to feel relief the moment you are able to break free from the silence. When I finally determined to free myself from my silence, I sat for a full hour before I could utter a single word. An hour! I had forty years of silence to overcome; forty years of shame, guilt, and self-blame of being molested at eight years of age by my adopted father, a well-known minister in my home town. But as soon as I was able to speak that first word, the pressure began to ease. My face was aflame in shame because I had blamed myself for forty years, but my heart was lighter as soon as I began to speak.
In breaking your silence, there’s something else important here. It’s the grieving process. I strongly recommend that we go through this because some of us have shackles of unforgiveness that may be traumatic. Give yourself time to grieve. When we don’t, we often suppress the trauma deep into our psyche where we rehearse it as I did for forty years. Eventually my trauma turned to destructive behavior like anger, hate, low self-esteem, fear, and even thoughts of ending my life.
In the Journey: Forgiveness, Restorative Justice and Reconciliation, authors Stephanie Hixon and Thomas Porter, remind us of the importance of grieving to heal: “We cannot heal what we cannot feel. We need time to feel our pain and loss and all the emotions and tears that surround them. As we mourn and grieve we start the journey of healing the wound…This journey has many rhythms–whether weeping and wailing with dancers and shouts or tending to details of burial rites, or prayerfully writing out our hearts in our journal, or exercising vigorously to release rage and pain–these and many more are expressions of lament and mourning.”
Be courageous today and move into Step 2: Identify your experience…Break your Silence. I look forward to sharing Step 3 of our Forgiveness Journey with you next time. Thanks for joining the Forgiveness Journey.