Scottish Catholic Observer

US author Dawn Eden was visiting Scotland last week, on a very important mission. She was speaking in Aberdeen and Glasgow about her book My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, which details how the lives of the saints have given her hope and aided her journey of spiritual healing after childhood sexual abuse. Her path to Catholicism is not a conventional one, having being raised as a Jew and being a former rock journalist, but as a victim of childhood abuse herself her book has helped thousands of people all over the world.

On the invitation of Bishop Hugh Gilbert of Aberdeen, she spoke across the diocese including in Fort Augustus, where revelations of sexual abuse at a former Benedictine school there had left deep wounds.

“This whole trip has been so blessed,” she said. “Everyone has been so friendly. Since writing My Peace I Give You, I have felt this is my missionary work, and it is a real joy to me.”

Ms Eden said that her talk in Fort Augustus had been particularly well attended, given the smallness of the parish.

“I’ve spoken before in a parish where there had been abuse, in Abbeville, Louisiana, and you might think people would be more talkative about abuse and the fallout from it, but that’s not what I found,” she said. “In fact, people at such a parish tend to be less talkative about it, in my experience—perhaps because the wound is so great. People have different compensatory strategies, and sometimes they respond by internalising the pain. But thankfully those who came to my Fort Augustus talk were very attentive and very interested, and many of them chatted with me afterwards, although for the most part they did not discuss any abuse that they or their loved ones might have suffered.  I did get a beautiful email the day after my talk from a man who said he was a survivor of abuse at the Fort Augustus school. He said he was too shy to approach me at the talk but wanted to thank me for what I had said.”

Ms Eden also said she had told everyone who knew anyone who had been exposed to any form of abuse to contact the Church’s safeguarding office.

“I met with Tina Campbell, the national safeguarding officer [for the Scottish Church], who I was very impressed with,” she said. “So I was honestly able to say to people I was very confident that the safeguarding offices could help connect them with the help they need.”

The author’s desire to help people who had been victims of childhood sexual abuse comes from her own experiences, and her own experience of Faith.

“In December 2010, I was beginning to experience a deeper level of personal healing from my own wounds, and I had it in the back of my mind to write something about recovering from childhood sexual abuse,” she said. “But I was not comfortable with how to do it. As a survivor myself, I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder—including occasional flashbacks and anxiety—which can be triggered be reading about abuse, and I didn’t want to risk causing such triggers for anyone else. Since I was just beginning to find healing, I didn’t have a method to offer that would be helpful for them and not just for me.”

What changed for her was when she read the story of the Blessed Laura Vicuña.

“My abuse took place after my parents’ divorce, when my mother’s home had become a sexually porous environment,” she explained. “I was not shielded from adults’ nudity or graphic sex talk—which itself is a kind of sexual abuse when inflicted upon a child—and neither was I protected from my mother’s boyfriend, who molested me. Blessed Laura likewise was not safe in her own home: her abuser was the live-in boyfriend of her widowed mother. That man was a violent drunk who harassed Laura for years, beginning when she was eight years old. I didn’t know there was a Blessed in the church with a story like that; it seemed so modern, given how many children today grow up without a father at home.”

Ms Eden said she realised that ‘if other people could read stories of saints who suffered abuse like they have, how healing that could be.’

“Because the deepest wound is that of misplaced guilt,” she said. “I’ve spent the last two years speaking about My Peace I Give You, and have yet to meet a victim who didn’t blame himself or herself—wrongly—for the evil perpetrated upon him in childhood.”

The abuse of children also damages the child’s ability to trust, which is a scar they can carry through their whole life, Ms Eden said—unless they actively seek help from a good spiritual director and, if needed, a good therapist.

“God ordained that every child is supposed to grow up in a protective matrix of family, and abuse ruptures that,” she said. “And that rupture can happen even if the abuse is outside the home, by a teacher, or a priest or religious. Because if the child, having suffered abuse, feels that misplaced guilt, it is going to affect their ability to have the kind of vulnerability that is healthy—the kind that is necessary if we are to be open to the gift of another person in friendship or marriage. And the parent may have a hard time coming to terms with the abuse, which in turn can make things worse for the child.”

In her own life she experienced that at the age of five.

“My first experience of abuse was committed by a janitor at a Jewish temple, just after my parents separated,” she said. “I remember very clearly when I finally had the courage to say to my mother after it happened, ‘Al and I have a secret and I’m not supposed to tell you.’ Her first response was “Why did you let him do that to you?’ I was only 5 years old, but my mother’s reaction left a sense of guilt embedded in me that I somehow was responsible. Once I internalised that misplaced self-blame, that made me more vulnerable, so it was easy for other predators to note I was insecure and cause further abuse.”

Coming back from that trauma, she is hopeful that her experience can inspire others.

“Even reading this article, some people might realise that their problem is not that they’re merely neurotic or or depressed, but actually that they have traumatic memories they haven’t yet processed, and they need to seek help,” she said. “It’s important to know our wounds do not separate us from Christ. Rather it is through our wounds that we are able to draw closer to him. Our Lord himself is wounded; he has chosen to retain his wounds in heaven, and they are now glorified. When I unite my own wounded heart to Jesus’ wounded and glorified heart, then my wounds become the cracks that let his light in.”

If there is one thing she hopes from  someone who reads her book after being abused, it is that ‘they would know they are not alone, they are not forgotten and have more friends in heaven than they realise.’

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