BLAME

Part of what makes us human is having a compelling need to apportion blame. The extent of one’s healing depends largely upon where you put that blame.  

What Can We Do With The Blame? 

 1. We could choose to heap the blame and shame upon ourselves  

What torment this option brings! So many precious lives have been ruined or tragically shortened by unfounded or hideously distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Young men and women of high morals can become so brainwashed into wrongly thinking themselves to be ‘trash’ that they end up needlessly cheapening themselves. 

The origin of this tragically false image is understandable. One of the great traumas of sexual abuse is that the innocent are made to feel partners in wickedness. And if it occurred during one’s childhood, the pressures are magnified even more. 

Many powerful psychological forces pressure us to blame ourselves. It would most likely only cause us to shift the blame. Despite initially seeming like welcome relief, shifting the blame ends up like moving a red hot iron from burning our back to burning our stomach. What we most need is an overview to see where the blame game leads. 

An obvious factor in self-blame is that hindsight allows you to see things you might have been able to do to avoid the horrible experience. The key point, however, is that only the offender knew where this was leading. Only afterwards were you able to know how depraved the offender was. You had expected the offender to act as decently and trustworthy as most people do. You were caught off guard and when things escalated you were paralyzed by shock. If you had suffered previous abuse, instead of it making you wiser, it would actually deaden your ability to avoid the situation, due to the crippling psychological force known as learned helplessness. Having once been subjected to a situation in which resistance was useless (a child being overpowered or outwitted by an adult, for example) strongly pressures us to believe that in a similar situation resistance will again achieve nothing. 

Another factor triggering self-blame is that the human body is designed to send pleasure signals to the brain in response to sexual stimulus. This is an unavoidable physiological fact and has nothing to do with morality or with secretly wanting or approving of the offense. Like the other points, this is explained far more convincingly in the links, but we need to move on. 

If the offender were someone emotionally important to you or someone you are dependent upon – a lover or family member, for example – or someone highly respected, such as a community leader, the thought of concluding that that person is depraved can be so devastating that you find it easier to blame yourself than the offender. Children, for instance, need desperately the security of knowing that their parents are good, trustworthy people who will protect, comfort and nurture them. This need can be so intense that they will choose to believe they were at fault rather than face the terrifying reality that they are exposed to continual danger that is utterly beyond their control. 

If you were a child when the offence occurred, additional forces come into play, although they still influence us even as adults. Children are programmed (and perhaps even have an inbuilt tendency) to respect and believe adults. Often their very survival – as well as their rapid development – hinges on it. In what only adults can recognize as a life-or-death situation, it is essential for children to obey immediately. Little children can learn and mature at the required rate only by unquestioning acceptance of what adults teach them. Since child molesters are usually considerably older than their victims, their lies sound authoritative to children. So when adults (or older children) seduce children they not only lack the maturity and intellectual ability to see through the lie, they have a strong, natural urge to trust and obey. 

Abusers often cruelly manipulate the emotions of their victims until tender consciences are shattered by an overwhelming burden of false guilt. An abuser’s insistence upon secrecy not only inflames the conviction that something shamefully wrong is occurring, it forces victims to keep their emotions dangerously bottled up. Yet another oppressively confusing factor is that it is natural for the child to have great respect for the offender, especially if the depraved offender is someone highly regarded in the community, or is close to the family or an authority figure. To a child it can seem unthinkable that such a person could do something so horribly wrong. Forced into this almost intolerable dilemma, it is not surprising that many opt to blame themselves rather than their abuser. 

Once self-blame starts, however, we soon find ourselves imprisoned by a guilt-ridden cycle of self-loathing that simply gets harder and harder to break out of as the years grind on. The most saintly person on the planet has regrets, but once we view ourselves as unforgivable, motivation to keep ourselves pure vanishes in a swamp of hopelessness. 

It is only natural to act out our self-image, no matter how contrary to reality that self-image is. Many of us are tempted to magnify our own guilt and underrate the guilt of ‘respectable’ people. The reality, however, is that the best of earth’s inhabitants has at some time or another done inexcusable things. Trying to pretend this isn’t so is like trying to ignore cancer. We can’t just sweep under the carpet reasons for blaming ourselves. We must somehow find a highly legitimate way to forgive ourselves. This webpage has answers.

2. We could blame other people

Frankly, anyone initiating sexual interference deserves more than the full weight of the law. Some victims of sexual violation suffer physical pain and others have pleasure inflicted upon them that trigger immense psychological problems, but all of them are victims of an atrocious crime that must be fully avenged.

Since the offender is exceptionally blameworthy, he (or she) is the obvious target of our blame. Other possibilities are people whom we feel should have provided us with more protection.

Blaming people other than oneself is attractive, not only because others (especially the violator) undeniably deserve severe punishment, but also because blaming them seems the only way to help relieve the crushing weight of false guilt on us. The problem, however, is that resentment and bitterness continually infect a hurting person’s inner wound, preventing healing.

It’s as though someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony by preventing your hand from ever healing.  A desire to see someone else suffer ends up perpetuating our own suffering.

The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the temporary relief that resentment offers that we hardly realize it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues.

Despite our fanciful notions, it is unlikely that we could ever see anyone suffer so profoundly as to satisfy our lust for revenge. Moreover, as people keep discovering to their dismay, it is our pain that drives the desire for revenge and, except for Jesus, no one else’s pain cannot lessen our own pain. So the tragedy is that if we get stuck on the revenge path, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution.

We are rightly infuriated at the thought of forgiving an offender, if it means what most of us think it means. Forgiveness carries no hint that the offense does not matter or it is minor, or that the victim is to blame. On the contrary, to forgive is to acknowledge that the offender is at fault. If it were not the offender’s fault, or he/she could not help it, or the offence were somehow excusable, there could be no forgiveness because there would be nothing to forgive.

For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in dragging us down to his despicable level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate. We needlessly stagger through life as a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives. Tragically, sex offenders are often themselves abuse victims with heart-wrenching stories. They failed to resolve their anger and pain and so inflict it on others.

Regardless of how it manifests, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people who are likewise blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible, once we discover the liberating power of letting go of resentment.

We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment’s death-grip.

Yet the offender’s actions can’t be swept under the carpet. What the offender did was blameworthy and deserving of the severest punishment. What you suffered must be avenged and yet the irony is that for you seek this keeps you from healing. This dilemma must be resolved, but how?

3. We could blame God

Again, this option brings a degree of comfort, because it draws our attention away from ourselves, but it keeps the wound open and festering.

Just as by a dangerous trick of the mind the most innocent victims can feel justified in blaming themselves, we can feel justified in blaming God. Such feelings can be strong and yet are as tragically out of touch with reality as a skinny victim of anorexia nervosa feeling convinced that she is fat.

To highlight in a few words the tragedy that keeps so many sufferers of sexual abuse from discovering the key to healing, here’s a tiny story.

A doctor is particularly fond of a little patient of his. All that the little child can focus on, however, is the vaccinations the doctor gave her and the painful stitches in her cuts. To her childish mind, the doctor is not a healer but a torturer. One day the child is strolling along the sidewalk when suddenly she sees the doctor approaching. In her panic she flees across the road and is hit by a car, breaking her leg. Of course, the first on the scene is that dreaded doctor.

In time, her physical pain is overshadowed by the shame of walking with a severe limp. It scars her whole life, making her unpopular at school, later interfering with her marriage prospects, her career opportunities, her self image, and countless other aspects of her life.

All of this inflames her hate for doctors. She spends her life avoiding them and so never discovers that simple surgery would have totally cured her limp.

Like that little child, a misunderstanding causes far too many survivors of sexual abuse to waste their lives resenting and avoiding God. What makes resentment against God so tragic is that if there truly is a caring, supernatural God, then he, like no therapist in the world, would understand and feel your pain and be able to bring you healing.

The God you thought you hated isn’t real. The real God, as contrasted with the monster your imagination might have created, is tender, compassionate, and understanding. This is not an easy concept to grasp, living as we do in a world that is violently opposed to his ways of love and justice.

Blaming God keeps you from the one Person who fully understands your anguish, who offers perfect comfort, and is able to bring supernatural healing. Resenting God is ultimately as self-destructive as suicide, and as counterproductive as a drowning person fighting off his rescuer.

Hating yourself is a dead end. Hating another person keeps you in pain. And hating God is just another variation on hating another person. In fact, resenting people can be as spiritually suicidal as resenting God. Both forms of resentment build a wall between you and your Healer.

Monkeys are easily trapped by placing food behind a small opening. When they slip their hand in and grab the food, their hand becomes a fist that is bigger than the opening. Refusing to let go, they remain firmly caught until seized by hunters.

For as long as we make a fist at someone (even at ourselves, or at God) we, too, are trapped. While we hold on to our bitterness, we are unable to leave our painful past behind and get on with life.

4. We could find the ULTIMATE scapegoat

For an adequate resolution, someone must take the blame and yet our dilemma is that blaming keeps us bitter. It keeps us locked into the past and reliving it over and over and over. Like spitting into the wind, the blame game keeps flying back at us; soiling us and increasing our discomfort. What we have suffered is so horrific that whoever we choose to blame can never suffer enough to bring us peace. Blaming is like a fistfight that will never end until we decide to stop the fight, and for as long as we keep fighting, we’ll keep getting still more hurt and wounded.

But the blame has to land somewhere. A grave offense has occurred. For justice to be done and your honor restored, someone should suffer big-time. But who could suffer enough to bring you peace?

Were our imaginations to run wild we might say we need a willing scapegoat – someone who could miraculously absorb all blame, and suffer so horrifically and adequately for the offense as to pay the full debt to justice finally and fully extinguish all blame, rendering you fully vindicated, and spotlessly pure.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Or is it?

The term scapegoat actually comes from the Bible. I think you’ll be surprised how much insight this ancient practice gives us into the ultimate resolution of the blame dilemma we face.

To atone for sin, two goats were chosen. The goats were, of course, utterly innocent of any human sin and yet the sins of the entire nation were symbolically placed on them. One of them was sacrificed, paying the ultimate price for the nation’s sins – sins that were essentially average and yet in the final analysis took no less than the death penalty for the blame to be fully resolved and eliminated. One goat – called the scapegoat – stayed alive and, after the death of the other one, was allowed to escape into the desert, symbolically taking the sins away from the people, never to be seen again.

But we need more than symbols. We need the real thing.

So far, this seems irrelevant, but please stay with me for a moment until you begin to see how it can heal you. First, some more background: animal sacrifices, though hopelessly inadequate to resolve our guilt problems, were divinely instituted to point prophetically to the ultimate sacrifice. The sacrifice to end all sacrifices would have to be human, since it is humans who are blameworthy. But to end all blame, the perfect sacrificial victim would, like the goats, have to be utterly blameless. Unless he had absolute moral perfection – like no other human the world has ever seen – he would be suffering merely for his own imperfections, not for what has shattered us. This ultimate sacrifice is the One of whom John the Baptist said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.’

That two goats were needed to atone for the nation’s sins – one dying and then the other released alive – points to the death and the subsequent resurrection of Jesus, both of which were needed to resolve utterly the guilt of humanity’s offenses. Just as Jesus rose to a new life, so he has the power to give us a new life, after fully extinguishing all guilt.

This remains bizarre and irrelevant to your pain unless there actually is a supernatural God who loves you so intensely that humanity’s only true Innocent took upon himself all the blame, letting himself be stripped naked and abused to death so that you could have his peace and purity and rise with him to a new life that begins here and now.

Jesus wants to take upon himself all the guilt, all the horror, and all the shame of your abuse. He wants every trace of filth to be dumped on him until it destroys him – which it did – because in destroying him, its power to touch you is also destroyed.

‘But Jesus had nothing to do with what I suffered,’ you object, ‘He was innocent.’ Yes, Jesus was innocent. In fact, the intensity of his innocence and purity is like the white that shows up as gray every other thing that we ever thought was white. Relative to him, the purest of virgins, the kindest, most saintly person is sin-stained. And yet, Christ was stripped naked, publicly exposed, humiliated, savagely beaten and his body cruelly violated until finally he died. He did that for you and me.

At first thought it seems inconceivable that an innocent man allowing himself to be tortured to death could heal someone nearly two thousand years later. You deserve an explanation. There are three difficulties in trying to explain the most significant event in all human history, however.

First, explanations are lifeless. Sitting through a lecture about the psychology of being in love, for instance, is very different to being hit by a tidal wave of head-over-heels love. The realm of God consists not of talk, but power (1 Corinthians 4:20). We need a life-changing connection to the infinite power of Almighty God, not some quaint philosophy or feel-good story.

The second difficulty is that Jesus and what he has accomplished is so unique that there is nothing in our experience that can provide an adequate comparison.

Third, even a summary of an attempted explanation would be so long as to test your patience. I want to rush you to the benefits. So I will touch just a few highlights in The key to supernatural healing.

The benefits

In his cold, rational assessment of the atrocities he had committed earlier in his life, one of Christianity’s most revered holy people – the apostle Paul – concluded that he was the greatest of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). Nevertheless, he discovered the secret of a squeaky clean conscience. This rendered him spiritually invincible, in that he was resistant to temptations to judge others harshly because he saw himself as having been equally as worthy of hell as those who tortured him and tried to kill him. He never had to try to defend his past because he knew he was as bad as anyone could get, and yet he enjoyed the wonder of knowing his conscience was as pure as crystal. What Paul enjoyed is available to everyone who realizes he/she deserves hell and that Jesus died to personally absorb all blame for the offenses that have touched us and to give us Jesus’ innocence.

Jesus always takes the side of those who refuse to look down on others, but instead focus on their own need for forgiveness. Here’s just one example. Jesus said:

Luke 18:10-14 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Through Christ, anyone can be made a chaste virgin, no matter how sordid, perverse or horrific his or her past has been. From the perspective of the perfection of God’s standards, a divinely forgiven prostitute is infinitely purer than anyone who has not come to Christ for cleansing, even if that Christless person feels spotlessly clean and is the purest virgin who has never even heard of sex.

The uniqueness of Jesus and his suffering makes possible a spiritual exchange whereby he takes from you every speck of humiliation and failure and sin, and puts it on himself. In exchange you take upon yourself Christ’s moral perfection. He gets your sin and shame and God’s anger – that’s what killed him – and you get his holiness and honor and God’s smile of approval.

Even without being subjected to deliberate emotional torture, the trauma of sexual abuse is so horrific as to grossly distort one’s self-image, often making a person feel more morally debased than other people. Reeling under the horror of what has happened, it is natural to feel compelled to keep replaying the events over and over in one’s mind, endlessly interrogating oneself, trying to ascertain the extent of one’s guilt or innocence. What if I hadn’t done that? Or what if I had done this? Nagging doubts persist, and so the dreaded cycle grinds on and on.

The great relief that Christ brings is that he has so powerfully dealt with real guilt that even if people plagued with unbearable false guilt were actually a thousand times more evil than they imagine, Christ would still long to purify them and make them as if they had never sinned.

Irrespective of whether the guilt is real or just a nightmare, God longs for you to enjoy the exquisite peace of knowing that through spiritual union with Christ, you have the exquisitely flawless purity of God himself. One of the things that makes this purity so liberating is that we no longer have to agonize over humanly unanswerable questions, trying to determine the degree of our real or imagined guilt in past events. The matter can finally rest in peace. Christ’s death ended the matter. Whatever the measure of our guilt (from zero to a hundred percent), Christ fully absorbed it within himself. It died when he died. Our innocence is restored the moment we trust Jesus to bring about the spiritual exchange of our imperfections for his holiness and our shame for the eternal honor that is his.

Every valid reason for questions about guilt churning through your mind was laid to rest when Jesus’ mutilated corpse was placed in the tomb. And you gain a brand new and holy life when by faith you identify with the crucified Lord who in holiness burst through the tomb to live forevermore.

The extent to which we feel the need to blame ourselves or someone else, indicates how much we are robbing ourselves by holding on to the our pain; refusing to let the supernatural God resolve the issues. Our need to assign blame, also measures how much we have yet to fully absorb the fact that Jesus died for the sins of the entire world.

To truly believe that Jesus died for the sins of the world, is to believe he took the full blame – having paid the ultimate price of the death penalty – for every sin that has ever been committed. You will therefore believe there is no blame left over to assign to anyone . By his horrific torture he bore full punishment for it all.

To limit our understanding of what Jesus’ suffering achieved is to strangle the source of our very life, both now and eternally. On the other hand, allowing the full implications to explode within us is the most liberating experience any human can have.

Suppose a woman let doctors treat some of her ailments but refused to let them examine the lump on her breast. That is like letting Jesus treat some of our problems, but insisting on dealing with the critical blame issue ourselves. In the final analysis, to stop blaming and let Jesus take all the blame is the only workable option.

Forgiving someone who has hurt us does not mean shifting blame from the other party to ourselves or trying to minimize the horrific gravity of the offense. That would not facilitate healing. Christian forgiving transfers all blame to the cross. We find it so hard to let go and entrust the blame and justice issues to Jesus. Nevertheless, our peace and healing hinges on us letting go and letting Jesus bear that blame so that it ends up dead and buried with him and you can rise with him to a new life.

Moreover, as a consequence of Christ taking our shame, we become spiritually united with Almighty God. That opens up amazing possibilities, even miracles.

By miracles I mean sudden, dramatic healing of the wounds of sexual abuse, rather than a more gradual recovery. Whether it is sudden or slow, the healing is still from God and almost always the slow healing does us the most good spiritually.

If miracles could be guaranteed, they would be labeled natural events, not miracles, even though the same God is as much behind the painting of this evening’s sunset as he is behind the most spectacular, instantaneous healing of the wounds of sexual abuse. I cannot guarantee the speed of healing. Nevertheless, there is mind-boggling power in prayers to the God of the universe, through Jesus (the only One by whom anyone can gain access to the God of gods).

The overview so far provided is too brief to make much sense, but see if the following expresses your feelings.

Like so many other people, I’ve wrestled with the issue of blame, and nothing I’ve tried has brought me peace. I need a new approach.

I need a revelation of how real and powerful Jesus is and how his undeserved abuse can bring me supernatural healing.

Of course, God is not human, and yet having had my trust violated by a human has made it hard for me to love and trust anyone – even God. Cold logic might say there is no reason to fear that God might act like a sinful, fallible human, but what I’ve suffered seems so overwhelming that it clouds my perception of everything.

Living, as I do, in a world crammed with people who pretend to love, just to get their selfish way, or even well-meaning people who unintentionally end up hurting others, it is hard to believe that God is so different. If, however, he is morally perfect, and filled with genuine love untainted by the slightest trace of human selfishness, then he truly is trustworthy. If God has infinite knowledge and wisdom, he must understand me even better than I understand myself. And if he really is love – not lust – then he will be patient and understanding as I try to reach out to him.

To be healed and freed from this oppressive burden of blame, I need to stop blaming myself and/or blaming others and/or blaming God. But this seems beyond me. I need divine help. And blame must go somewhere. Grave offenses have occurred. Justice must be done.

If God is truly a good God and a God of justice, then satisfying the need for justice must be an even bigger issue with him than with me – and it is huge with me. At the same time, being both faultlessly good and loving, he must want offenders to change and long to forgive them. Meeting all these requirements is simply too much for any human. I need God’s help to trust him to do it – and do it well. I need to hand all blame over to Jesus, not because he deserves it but because if he somehow died for the sins of the entire world, he must want to take this burden from me.

Every journey must start somewhere. And we can’t do it alone. We need divine help. Involving God is comforting, not the slightest scary, but it can seem scary because few of us realize how gentle and understanding God is.