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Dear Soul Arcanum:
I “divorced” my father when I was in my late 20s because he was a pedophile who refused to acknowledge the harm he’d done to my siblings and me. I pressed criminal charges against him when I was in my early 30s and he went to jail. My brother kept in contact with him until a few years ago when he took a sexploitation trip through Thailand. I’ve been through 12-step programs for incest survivors and have done a lot of inner work. My children know why they don’t have a second grandfather. I consider myself a full survivor but want to know if there are ways to complete the emotional healing process so I don’t carry unfinished karma into my next incarnation. Thank you for the great work you do through your columns. My friends and family appreciate them too.
Moneca
Dear Moneca:
First I have to commend you for all the inner work you’ve already done to heal from the past and empower yourself for the future. I also applaud your foresight, for you are right in assuming that until this experience is fully healed, it will come up again and again for you, if not in this lifetime, then in future lives.
My sense is that you’ve pretty much made peace with this on a personal level; what’s left is to make peace with your father so you can align with a higher level of experience with him in future lives. On the other hand, you may already be at the point where you can look at the blessings that came from this experience and give thanks for the unique journey that has been yours, which is a sign that you’re at peace and ready to move on.
Before those readers who can’t see how such an experience could possibly involve any sort of blessing start sending me hate mail, let me explain. I’m sure this difficult journey made you question life and become a deeper thinker, that it stretched you to find inner strength you didn’t know you had, and that it led you to develop compassion for everyone who suffers abuse. We tend to view painful experiences as curses, but in my experience, the more life stretches our capacity to endure, the stronger and wiser we grow.
There is a key turning point in the spiritual healing process where one who has been abused begins to find compassion for the abuser. Let me share my own experience to demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about.
When I was a teenager, I was stalked and eventually raped by a crazy guy in his twenties. Though I was too young to fully realize it at the time, I have come to understand that our meeting was destined and that we already had a strong but troubled karmic bond.
His mother cut and styled hair out of her home, which is where we first encountered each other – at least, in this lifetime. When I saw him, every hair on my body stood up at attention. There was a sense of instant recognition I’ve come to associate with reuniting with someone from a past life, only this time, the feeling was far from positive. In fact, I was inexplicably terrified.
Since there was no logical reason to feel this way, I pushed the feelings aside. It’s too long a story to go into in detail here, but this guy must have felt something strong too because he began to stalk me. I would be driving home from work and see him in his car, following me. When I left school for the day, he would be in the parking lot, leaning against his car, just staring at me. He began to call me every night. When I tried to shake him off, he began to threaten to harm my little brother or my friends. I had learned that he had a number of friends who were convicted felons, so I decided to take his threats seriously.
He stalked me for months before he managed to get me alone; that’s when the rape occurred. I guess I was naïve, but I was truly shocked at how violent he became. It was following that experience that I took my power back, shed my fear of him, and took a stand by telling him that if he ever contacted me again, I would go to the police. (I know I should have gone to the police anyway, but I was sure my father would kill him if he found out, and I couldn’t bear the thought of my dad spending the rest of his life in prison.)
The turning point in my healing process came when I realized that I would rather be me and be raped by this man than to be him. As I struggled to understand why he had done what he’d done, I realized that his inner world was a really twisted, ugly place. I only had to live with his ugliness for a while; for him, it was a constant and inescapable prison.
As I had karmic encounters with other people from past lives, I also realized that I must have some history with this guy. I don’t know what happened back then, but I came to understand that we were both unconsciously acting out some old patterns. I also realized that if I didn’t want to keep circling this enemy throughout future lives, I would have to consciously change things for the better.
This is where your own story comes in. While I am in no way suggesting you try to find a way to justify what your father did or equating an attack by a stranger with the profound betrayal of a parent, it’s nevertheless true that in order to fully heal and set yourself free from this for all time, you would be wise to try to find compassion for your father.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be him? There is a lot of wisdom in saying to yourself, There but for the grace of God go I. While people like to tell themselves that they could never be as selfish or cruel as the individuals they most despise, in my view, that sort of thinking is a good way to be born as just such an individual because walking some miles in their shoes may the only way to develop compassion and understanding for them.
On my own quest for healing, it occurred to me that I may have hurt this man really badly at some point. As I pondered the karma between us, I also imagined him being raped or abused in a future lifetime in order to learn some compassion, and that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps this was why I had been attacked – to develop greater kindness and compassion than I had embodied in the past. (To better understand karmic relationships and why we reincarnate with the same people over and over again, you might want to explore the research of Michael Newton, Ph.D.)
If finding compassion for your dad proves too difficult, hypnotherapy may be just what you’re looking for. A gifted therapist can guide you in hearing your higher self so you can determine what needs to be done next in your healing process, help you heal and release any issues that are still sore spots for you, and empower you to move past any beliefs that could be preventing you from fully resolving all of this. For example, if you believe it’s not safe to forgive because you could be hurt again, working with a hypnotherapist can help you reprogram your belief system so you can bless yourself with greater peace and healing.
You will know that you have completed the healing process when you can give thanks for the wisdom, strength, compassion and other benefits you received from this experience, and when you can feel compassion for your father and sincerely hope he finds his way to the same peace you hunger for in your own heart.
Soul Arcanum