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Laughs and inspiration from the lives of famous people An hilariously helpful look at life’s devastating blows When hit by rejection, it is uplifting to know you are not alone. Let’s begin by exploring this thought and follow it up with other insights to empower you to spring back to effectiveness after a major blow. A teenager’s low popularity convinced her that she was not attractive. She became a top fashion model, hailed by many as the most beautiful woman in the world. All those who had ignored her are now boasting that they had gone to school with Claudia Schiffer! Rejected as too awkward and clumsy to be a ball boy in a Davis Cup tennis match, Stan Smith went on to become the officially ranked number one tennis player in the world (1972-1973). Would-be crime novelist John Creasey received an unbroken succession of 743 rejection slips. Over sixty million of his books have now been published. ‘What will they send me next!’ said Edmund Hillary’s gym instructor of the puny school boy now known as the man who conquered Mount Everest. ‘Balding, skinny, can dance a little,’ they said of Fred Astaire at his first audition.  Beethoven’s music teacher declared him ‘hopeless’ at composing.  Albert Einstein’s parents feared he was sub-normal. Mentally backward Max Raffler loved to paint. Over the years, as his paintings piled ever higher, his sisters would burn them to make room for more. Finally, when an old man, his artistic ability was recognized. The well-meaning sisters had destroyed paintings that would have sold for tens of millions of dollars. It was the dead of night. A shadow slunk down the street. It was Charles with the dickens of a problem. He was off to mail his manuscript, huddling his guilty secret, petrified lest friends find out and ridicule him. The manuscript was rejected. More rejections pierced him before he won the hearts of millions with such classics as  Oliver Twist . As Billy Graham preached, a missionary’s daughter battled an almost uncontrollable urge to run out of the meeting. It was his future wife, and it wasn’t conviction that made her squirm. It was her response to what she considered appalling preaching. Said Professor Erasmus Wilson of Oxford University, ‘I think I may say without contradiction that when the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it, and no more will be heard of it.’ An invitation was extended to witness one of humanity’s most historic moments – the Wright brothers’ first flight in their heavier-than-air machine. Five people turned up. H. B. Warner of Warner Brothers fame scoffed at the notion of ‘talkies.’ No one would want to hear movie actors talk. Television, too, was once written off. It would never appeal to the average American family, pronounced the  New York Times .  To these could be added a gaggle of other instances, too humorous to mention. If only we could laugh in the midst of our trial. Coping with rejection and apparent failure is a serious matter. The tragic death of John Kennedy Toole screams this truth at anyone lucky enough to need an explanation. No publisher would touch Toole’s book. In a vain attempt to kill the pain, he suicided. Posthumously, his book was published. It won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But don’t scoff at the scoffers. In its early stages, virtually every great achievement has seemed pathetically insignificant. The critics Many of us have stifled our life by heeding some misguided critic who implied we were not good enough. Few things in life are certain. But criticism is. Though spineless people-pleasers try hard, no one totally avoids criticism. Being right doesn’t help. Neither does loving everyone, or being perfect. The world crucified the only One with these qualities. Everything he did upset someone. He was criticized even by friends, family and religious leaders. Twenty centuries later, with the advantage of hindsight, he is still slandered. Did you know ???  Most actors wanting the role of Long John Silver are hopelessly inadequate. They have too many legs.  Most people look like ridiculously overdressed, non-Japanese, anorexic sumo wrestlers.  When I was younger I could run faster than Carl Lewis. Over the years my superiority gradually waned, especially after baby Carl learned to walk. I know what you’re thinking: I’ve finally blown a fuse upstairs. Before you start sending get-well cards, however, let me assure you I’m as sane as anyone else here in the psychiatric ward. My point is this:   whether you see yourself as gifted or queer, indispensable or inadequate, depends entirely on the frame of reference you choose. From God’s frame of reference – the life’s work he has chosen for you – no one is as perfectly endowed as you. If that seems like soppy idealism, you have not thought it through. Do so, and it will become a treasured source of strength and inspiration. You could choose any person and fill volumes with what he or she cannot do or is hopeless at, but that’s of no more concern than the fact that a DVD player cannot fly, quench thirst, tie shoelaces, and prevent tooth decay. Besides the endless list of things a DVD player cannot do, many of the things it  can  do, it does poorly. It’s an inferior paperweight, straightedge, and bookend. You could use it as a fly-swatter – once. Such lists miss the critical point: anything skillfully designed is ideally equipped – and usually solely equipped – for the specific and commendable purpose for which it was made. Of course  you cannot do everything. That was never your Designer’s intention. But to imagine that your Creator will not fashion you  with perfection  for your reason for existence, is to accuse your Maker of impotence and incompetence. Face facts: everything God does is impressive. For the exact role that he created you, you are superbly endowed. All you need do is yield to him. Sources Briner, Bob  Lambs Among Wolves  Zondervan Publishing House Grand Rapids Michigan, 1995 Hanks, Kurt and Parry, Jay A.  Wake Up Your Creative Genius  William Kaufmann, Inc., Los Altos, CA, 1983. Health Yourself Newsletter , Nov 1994, p 3 Knight, Peter  Positively No: The Book of Rejection  Unwin Paperbacks, London, 1985. Mackenzie, Norman and Jeanne  Dickens: A Life  Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1979. Norfolk, Donald  Farewell to Fatigue  Michael Joseph, London, 1985. Petersen, William J  Catherine Marshall Had a husband  Living Books, Wheaton, Illinois 1986. Petersen, William J  Martin Luther Had a Wife  Bridge Publishing, Chepstow, UK, 1984. Renwick, A. W.  The Story of the Church  Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, England, 1958. Taylor, Dr. and Mrs. Howard  Biography of James Hudson Taylor  Hodder and Stroughton, Kent, 1965. Tucker, Ruth A  From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions  Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1983. You Can Find Love  With the right approach you can find the perfect lover without risking rejection Rejected by God!  Coping with what seems the ultimate rejection Comfort & Help for those Devastating Times When you Feel Like an Idiot   Coping with One’s Own Foolishness Afraid?  Help and Inspiration When Gripped by Fear How to Boost Self-Esteem Coping with Criticism and Slander   When slanderously criticized, you stand in holy company Revenge!  Satisfying the lust for revenge   Issues That Make Christians Squirm

Coping with Rejection & Cruel Criticism Billy Graham is perhaps the most widely-respected Christian leader in modern times. In a Christian bookshop I found stocks of tracts written solely to denounce him. I think it literally impossible for any famous Christian leader in our times to avoid being virtually idolized by some Christians and maliciously condemned by at least some Christian leaders. I say it with tears: in my webpages I’m reluctant to mention the names of any famous Christians because no matter what famous Christian I name, there will be some devout Christians who will read no further because they regard whoever it is as a traitor to the cause of Christ. I don’t think many Christians have condemned me. I take that as proof of how small time I am. If you are unjustly criticized to the point of scandalous slander, you stand in holy company: Job 30:9 And now their sons mock me in song; I have become a byword among them. Psalms 31:11-13 Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors; I am a dread to my friends – those who see me on the street flee from me. I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. For I hear the slander of many; there is terror on every side; they conspire against me and plot to take my life. Psalms 35:15 But when I stumbled, they gathered in glee; attackers gathered against me when I was unaware. They slandered me without ceasing. Psalms 119:23 Though rulers sit together and slander me, your servant will meditate on your decrees. Isaiah 66:5  . . . “Your brothers who hate you, and exclude you because of my name, have said, ‘Let the LORD be glorified, that we may see your joy!’ Yet they will be put to shame.” Jeremiah 9:4-5 Beware of your friends; do not trust your brothers. For every brother is a deceiver, and every friend a slanderer. Friend deceives friend, and no one speaks the truth. They have taught their tongues to lie; they weary themselves with sinning. Ezekiel 36:3  . . . they ravaged and hounded you from every side so that you became  . . . the object of people’s malicious talk and slander, Matthew 10:22 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. Matthew 10:25 It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household! Luke 7:33-34 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.” 1 Peter 2:23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 1 Corinthians 4:13 when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world. Psalm 27:12  . . . false witnesses have risen up against me, such as breathe out cruelty. Psalm 38:20 They who also render evil for good are adversaries to me, because I follow what is good. Psalm 41:6 If he comes to see me, he speaks falsehood. His heart gathers iniquity to itself. When he goes abroad, he tells it. Psalm 69:12 Those who sit in the gate talk about me. I am the song of the drunkards. Psalm 71:10-11 For my enemies talk about me. . . . saying, “God has forsaken him. Pursue and take him, for no one will rescue him.” Jeremiah 11:19 But I was like a gentle lamb that is led to the slaughter; and I didn’t know that they had devised devices against me, saying, Let us destroy the tree with its fruit, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered. Matthew 5:11 Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Matthew 27:39 Those who passed by blasphemed him, wagging their heads Romans 3:8  . . . we are slanderously reported . . . 1 Corinthians 4:10 We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You have honor, but we have dishonor. A friend, who is well known in some Christian circles, has kindly let me share the following with you. Although he was initially happy for me to name him, upon reflection he decided against it because the pastor mentioned is still living. I was once accused from the pulpit by my pastor of being a demon possessed, homosexual madman who was deceiving the people and sleeping with my mother. I smile about it now because, 21 years later, I know that those events were crucial to my spiritual education. I cannot begin to list all of the very painful yet profound lessons I learned, including that I was no better than that pastor, and that I was not only capable of doing the same thing, I actually wanted to do the same thing back to him. I needed Jesus, and I needed to die to self. I literally could not read the Bible for a year afterward because of all these accusations that had been hurled at me. I’ve been healed. I have actually had a number of pleasant talks with that pastor since. Nevertheless, have you ever heard the saying, “The only bad publicity is no publicity?” I’ve learned over the years to let the skeptics rail and wail all they want, because all they are doing is advertising for me and making me look good. The only ones who listen to these people are those who do not want to believe anyway, and those sitting on the fence see my calm, cool demeanor and the emotional, irrational reaction of my critics, and they see through the veil. Let me quote from my web book Waiting for your Ministry : ‘There was an old stone,’ said the warner, ‘Continually mocked by the Scorner. ‘It was neglected, ‘Despised and rejected, ‘Yet became the head of the corner.’ What do you mean you’ve ‘found better poems in alphabet soup’? Soup-slurper! (The only thing separating me from a brilliant poet is ability.) Many of us have stifled our calling by heeding some misguided critic who implied we were not good enough. Few things in life are certain. For Christians, not even death is guaranteed (2 Kings 2:1,11; 1 Thessalonians 4:17; Hebrews 11:5). But criticism is. Though spineless people-pleasers try hard, no one totally avoids criticism. Being right doesn’t help. Neither does loving everyone, or being perfect. The world crucified the only One with these qualities. Everything he did upset someone. He was criticized even by friends, family and religious leaders. Jesus Criticized Examples Matthew 16:22 Peter took him aside, and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This will never be done to you.” Mark 6:2-4 When the Sabbath had come, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many hearing him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things?” and, “What is the wisdom that is given to this man, that such mighty works come about by his hands? Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” They were offended at him. Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own relatives, and in his own house.” John 7:1-5 After these things, Jesus was walking in Galilee, for he wouldn’t walk in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him. Now the feast of the Jews, the Feast of Booths, was at hand. His brothers therefore said to him, “Depart from here, and go into Judea, that your disciples also may see your works which you do. For no one does anything in secret, and himself seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, reveal yourself to the world.” For even his brothers didn’t believe in him. Matthew 9:11-13 When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are healthy have no need for a physician, but those who are sick do. But you go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Luke 7:37-39 Behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that he was reclining in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of ointment. Standing behind at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears . . . Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “This man, if he were a prophet, would have perceived who and what kind of woman this is who touches him, that she is a sinner.” Luke 5:29-30 Levi made a great feast for him in his house. There was a great crowd of tax collectors and others who were reclining with them. Their scribes and the Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?” Luke 7:34 The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man, and a drunkard; a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Luke 15:2 The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, “This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.” Luke 19:5-7 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” He hurried, came down, and received him joyfully. When they saw it, they all murmured, saying, “He has gone in to lodge with a man who is a sinner.” Luke 6:1-2  . . . His disciples plucked the heads of grain and ate, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said to them, “Why do you do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day?” Luke 6:6-7 It also happened on another Sabbath that he entered into the synagogue and taught. There was a man there, and his right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, that they might find an accusation against him. Luke 13:14 The ruler of the synagogue, being indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the multitude, “There are six days in which men ought to work. Therefore come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day!” Luke 14:1-3 When he went into the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees on a Sabbath to eat bread, they were watching him. Behold, a certain man who had dropsy was in front of him. Jesus, answering, spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” John 5:16 For this cause the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill him, because he did these things on the Sabbath. John 9:14-16 It was a Sabbath when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. . . . Some therefore of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, because he doesn’t keep the Sabbath.” . . . Jesus Accused of being Demon-Possessed and Raving Mad Matthew 9:34 But the Pharisees said, “By the prince of the demons, he casts out demons.” Matthew 10:25  . . . If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul . . . Matthew 12:24 But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, “This man does not cast out demons, except by Beelzebul, the prince of the demons.” Mark 3:21 When his friends heard it, they went out to seize him: for they said, “He is insane.” Mark 3:22 The scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul,” and, “By the prince of the demons he casts out the demons.” Mark 3:30 because they said, “He has an unclean spirit.” Luke 11:15 But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of the demons.” . . . John 7:20 The multitude answered, “You have a demon! Who seeks to kill you?” John 8:48 Then the Jews answered him, “Don’t we say well that you are a Samaritan, and have a demon?” John 8:52 Then the Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets; and you say, ‘If a man keeps my word, he will never taste of death.’” John 10:20-21 Many of them said, “He has a demon, and is insane! Why do you listen to him?” Others said, “These are not the sayings of one possessed by a demon. It isn’t possible for a demon to open the eyes of the blind, is it?” Note how the second half of the last quote seems to indicate that some genuinely believed Jesus was “demon-possessed and is insane”. Twenty centuries later, with the advantage of hindsight, he is still slandered. Our highest ideal is to be like Jesus – like the One accused of being in league with Satan. If you know the pain of being misunderstood, spare a thought for the early Christians. They renounced Roman, Greek and Egyptian gods, called each other brother and sister, and partook of their Lord’s body in communion. As a result they were thought guilty of atheism, incest and cannibalism. John Bunyan, of Pilgrim’s Progress fame, was variously accused of being a witch, a Jesuit, a highwayman, having a mistress, and having whores and several illegitimate children. Whitefield and Wesley, acclaimed leaders of a revival that blazed through Britain and America, were bludgeoned by allegations with the graciousness of a meat-axe. Whitefield’s first sermon was said to have driven fifteen of his hearers insane. Bishop Lavington published a blistering attack upon the Methodists, accusing Whitefield of horrendous sins. It so confused the author of Whitefield’s obituary that he penned two portraits. One was of a saint and the other of a rogue. The revival leaders were blasted from every side. Wesley’s wife broke into her husband’s cabinet and stole correspondence which she doctored to appear he had been unfaithful to her. It poisoned many. Toplady, writer of Rock of Ages , believed her. Even on his death-bed he summoned strength to affirm he still despised Wesley. Young Hudson Taylor, outrageously in love, wrote a letter proposing marriage to a teenage girl in China. Unknown to him, Maria’s feelings were almost as hot. Excitedly, she took the letter to Miss Aldersey, a remarkable and dedicated missionary who deeply cared for her. ‘Mr. Taylor!’ exclaimed Miss Aldersey, ‘That unconnected nobody!’ She pressured shy, inexperienced Maria to rebuff the proposal. Fearing she may not have done enough to destroy the relationship, Miss Aldersey sought out Hudson’s friends to tell them he was ‘fanatical, undependable, diseased in mind and body ... totally worthless’. She even threatened with a lawsuit that ‘uneducated’ ‘unordained’ and ‘uncouth’ excuse for a missionary, while his darling Maria was kept under virtual house arrest, charged with being a maniac, indecent, weak-minded and obstinate. Later, with his China Inland Mission in its vulnerable infancy, the entire work was threatened by the unremitting onslaught of a missionary who thought it his godly duty to oppose the work. Not only did newspapers in Shanghai ruthlessly attack him, Hudson was blamed even in England’s parliament for political strife in China. Equally grave examples could be drawn for the lives of countless thousands of God’s storm troopers. So let’s not waste our lives trying to hide from criticism. If even cowardly yes-men cannot avoid it, the righteous don’t stand a chance. In fact, Jesus said ‘Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you.’ (Luke 6:26) Ministry that impresses heaven and ministry that impresses earth are popularity polls apart. Anyone highly respected by sections of the Christian church will invariably be scorned by other sections of the church. Great men and women of God, however, do not crumble under criticism. It may wound them, but they push on with what they believe is God’s calling. Spurning the way of least resistance and its pseudo peace, they choose what I call the peace de resistance . Disclaimer I don’t like to brag, but I have a certain air about me – especially after eating garlic. Check out a few possibilities before assuming the cause of unpopularity is divine. The Arm-Chair Army Those who share the fragrance of Christ with a putrid world may receive much flak from Christians. It is such a difficult task in the front line that many of us desert our posts and become self-appointed critics of those who remain at the front. Methods that most effectively win new converts will seldom woo long-established Christians. Their needs and tastes are a world apart. So an effective evangelist will probably incur the displeasure of those Christians who want to be the center of attention. When the critics start, determining who is right can be difficult. Christians with the greatest enthusiasm are often the least experienced. Those who have succumbed to pressure and abdicated their responsibility are still likely to know more than those with less experience. Your critics might know more than you do. Their advice could be from God. So it demands prayerful consideration. When Rev. Oldschool gives us a hard time, it’s tempting to stray to greener pastors. We must be cautious. If we cannot find Christians as mature and experienced as our critics who fully support our actions, we are probably the ones who are wrong. (Proverbs 9:8-9; 10:17; 12:1; 13:18; 27:5) Nevertheless, Scripture narrates the tragic consequences of a man of God who mindlessly followed what an old prophet claimed was divine guidance. (1 Kings 13:11-24) Though we should humbly respect our elders in the faith, we each have a personal responsibility to seek God on matters related to ministry and guidance. If the Lord clearly indicates our critics’ opinion is not from him, we must reject it, though without rejecting the critics themselves or spurning their advice on other matters. So love and respect your knockers, but don’t let them stunt a God-given ministry. Another Thought People often let us down. It’s such a source of heart ache. And yet I’ve found one consolation: If people never disappointed me, life would be unbearable. What a miserable freak I’d feel, living on a planet where I’m the only one who makes mistakes! For more encouragement about coping with criticism, see: Handling Rejection: An Hilariously Helpful Look at Life’s Devastating Blows Not The Failure You Thought: Help When You Feel You’ve Failed Breaking Through Barriers to Creativity

Answers to Every Question Find the Help You Need  Quickly The dream of this webpage is to push Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to the extreme of quick access to answers to almost every question anyone could ever ask about Dissociative Identity Disorder. Learning about Dissociative Identity Disorder in general, is best done through entertaining, informative and highly readable articles. I urge you to give them priority. This webpage, however, fills a very different role . It is more like a search engine or encyclopedia devoted to D.I.D., empowering you to quickly locate the information you need about a precise aspect of D.I.D. IMPORTANT: After locating the relevant section of this webpage, getting the maximum benefit is possible only by visiting every link listed there. Since some of the links are to lengthy webpages, this could take more than one session. Ensure you have bookmarked the original section or have some other foolproof way of finding it, so that you don’t miss the other links. When an Alter is Seriously Planning Suicide or Something Dangerous 1. For Immediate Action Early on, alters often do not realize they share their body with you and other parts and so have no idea that harming themselves or any part of you would harm every part of you. This might take some explaining as it might initially be a difficult concept for your alter to grasp, but once grasped it could lessen the danger. When you think the alter might not be present, hide knives, pills, keys, money and other things that could be used to directly harm yourself or to gain access to things that could harm you. Once hidden, the chances are that the alter will not be able to find them. It is not ideal, but it might be possible to temporarily confine this alter within you so that he/she cannot harm you or other alters. Next to God, your greatest source of help is always your alters. So do everything you can to elicit their help in this situation. So as not to freak them, try to keep as calm as possible, but inform all of your alters of the situation. Ask them to be kind and gentle toward the alter who is creating the emergency and help them understand that the alter is deeply hurting and confused and is trying to do his/her best in a situation he/she finds overwhelming, even though in reality things are not nearly as bad as the alter supposes. It is quite likely that some of your alters know of other alters they have not yet told you about, so ask them to spread the word to as many other alters as they can. When you are asleep or oblivious to what is happening, some of your alters are likely to be alert, thus enabling them to be your eyes, ears and hands; waking you and warning you, or otherwise intervening, if the alter is about to do something dangerous. Seek their ideas as to how to deal with the situation. Some alters could be better than you at identifying which alter is the source of this danger and/or be better able to communicate with that alter. They might also know more than you about what is driving the alter to act this way, or be better than you at guessing what it could be, or, through their network, be better at gleaning this information to discover from other alters additional relevant information. Some might be better than you at seeking God and receiving his wisdom and direction. Brief summary of action Find out as much as you can about the troublesome alter, such as why he/she feels this way and then address those issues. All information about the alter has the potential to better understand him/her and so help all of you be better equipped to calm the alter. Can you discover what recent event triggered the alter to consider such drastic action? That could be a vital clue as to what is upsetting the alter and therefore what might be done to calm the situation. Don’t assume that the alter knows even basic things that are obvious to you. Quite possibly, for example, the alter is unaware of what year it is and thinks he/she is back decades ago when you were in great danger. Let the alter know how much safer he/she now is and how much things have changed for the better. Comfort the alter. Boost the alter’s self-esteem. Show that you care not merely for your safety, but for him/her. Ask if he/she feels you have let him/her down. If so, apologize and do all you can to put things right. Help the alter realize that the abuse etc was the abuser’s fault, not this alter’s fault nor that of any other alter. Ascertain lies the abuser has told the alter and then help him/her see through them. Having parts of you isolated from the love, wisdom, comfort and support of the rest of you is a major reason for alters being in horrific pain, so simply encouraging these alters to share and you listening to them and sympathizing with them will significantly lessen their pain. It is especially important that you help them discover that they are greatly treasured by God and that he is safe and longs to be their best friend and that Jesus suffered on the cross to be their alter, taking their pain upon himself. If your attempts to help the alter are insufficient or the alter cannot be identified, you might need to activate an anti-suicide plan. This has four levels, depending on the seriousness of the situation: (1) Break the isolation. Don’t be alone, even if it is only going to a store so that you are around people (unless this itself is triggering for you). (2) Call a friend and speak to him/her without mentioning the suicidal thoughts. (3) Tell the friend you are feeling suicidal. (4) Urgently call a counsellor or a suicide helpline. 2. Important Help and More Details Regardless of how aware you are of it, you have suffered horrific things. So it understandable that parts of you could be hurting so much that they feel suicidal. The fact that you are still alive, however, proves that you are a survivor and an overcomer. And things will get better. You have commenced a healing journey. It will be bumpy at times but you are on the way to peace and fulfilment. Nevertheless, parts of you are almost certainly unaware of these positives and know only of the times when things were horrific. Some are also driven to drastic measures because they mistakenly think their abuser will do even worse things to you if they don’t do things that hurt or harm you; not realizing that the abuser no longer has (or perhaps never had) the power to carry out his/her threats. Continually informing your alters of these positive things will do much to calm them. Self-esteem is a key issue. It is not uncommon for alters to have such abysmal self-esteem that they do not even think they are human. If they think of themselves as not part of the human race, they will be less motivated to display (or even think themselves capable of) the kindness, gentleness and so on that humans are capable of. Instead, they are more likely to act like animals, machines, demons or whatever being treated cruelly has led them to think of themselves as being. How they see themselves will also greatly influence their ability to believe that they are capable of being loved and valued by God and anyone other than abusers. Helping them realize that they are of great value to you and to God and capable of achieving great things will obviously increase their desire to live. Before you better understood Dissociative Identity Disorder you probably contributed to the alter’s low self-esteem by despising him/her or trying to suppress or ignore him/her, thereby treating the alter as if he/she is nothing or unimportant. If so, you should begin to undo the damage by apologizing to him/her and show that you have totally changed your attitude. Resolving the issue of blame is also critically important. We humans are strongly driven to assign blame. Alters who blame themselves (a mistaken view often strongly reinforced by abusers) are likely to have little desire to live and/or low self-esteem and little hope of achieving anything worthwhile in life. It is also common for alters to blame other alters. They are usually not aware that this is a form of self-blame, but it could drive them to want to hurt or kill a part of you. If they blame God, this will cut themselves off from their Healer and the ultimate source of love and wisdom that they desperately need. For invaluable help with resolving the blame issue (regardless of who is blamed). To children, abusers are typically seen as sources of authoritative truth. This makes alters highly vulnerable to accepting the abuser’s lies and values. They might, for instance, have been taught that they have given their lives to Satan and so cannot have God’s love and acceptance, or that Jesus approved of them being abused. Helping alters see through the lies can be very important. As already alluded to, until confirmed, do not assume the misguided alter knows even the most basic things. The alter might, for example, be terrified of an abuser’s punishment; oblivious to the fact that the abuser no longer has any access to you. The alter might have no idea of good things that have happened to you over the years and of how much you now have to live for and how that there is more reason for hope than there was when you were a child. Gently correcting any such misunderstanding could do much to diffuse the situation. Some of the following suggestions are extreme and might not necessarily work but desperate times call for desperate measures. If you would be safest in your house and an alter wants to leave it to do something dangerous, you could consider deadlocking yourself into your room or house and hiding the key from the alter. The problem is that you might later switch alters and be unable to remember where the key is when it is genuinely important for you to leave. You would need to prepare for this possibility. Perhaps you could leave a spare key with a friend or you could tell the friend where the key is hidden and in an emergency you could contact him/her so that he/she can relay this information to you. Another possibility is to use a combination lock or keypad to lock yourself in and tell your friend what the number sequence is. Or store the vital information in a password protected file. Of course, this depends on you being able to remember at least some things. If the main danger is during a certain time period (such as nights) another possibility might be to arrange for a friend to email you or phone you with the information after that period has lapsed. In emergencies, taking a large but safe dose of sleeping pills might knock out not just you but the alter who could do something dangerous at night. For further help see: Suicide: A Compassionate Bible-Based Search for Answers There’s Hope! A Sane Guide to Finding Hope When There is No Hope Additional help continues below for several sections. Evil Alters Some alters enforce the values of the abuser simply because it was once the only way to protect the entire system from being severely punished by the abuser and they are not aware that they are no longer subject to the abuser. Certain alters go even further and take on the abuser’s entire identity so that they actually believe that they are that person. It is not unusual for some alters to crave sex – sometimes even grossly perverse sex – even though other alters sharing the same body hate and/or fear it. Still other alters might be convinced they are forever bound to the devil. Despite the slanderous lies they might have been taught about him, however, Jesus is safe and he can completely rescue every such alter and break the power of every vow or deal made with evil. Because Jesus is not an abuser, he will not force any of us to be good but he is powerfully able and eager to save all who want it, no matter what they did or committed themselves to in the past. The stark truth that few people face is that without Christ, even the most saintly of us is hopelessly evil. None of us, however, need remain without Christ, and with him we can become pure and good and able to be an immense blessing. God’s Word is emphatic that we all belonged to the kingdom of darkness and were slaves to evil but slaves can be bought and sold, and Jesus has bought you by paying the ultimate price of his own life. Because Jesus is not an abuser, however, he gives you the choice: by submitting to Jesus you can be free of evil and rule over it or, if you prefer, you can break his heart and choose to let evil forces dominate you. For help with learning how to be free from demons and powerful evil forces, see: Spiritual Warfare: Turning Spiritual Attack into Victory Demons: You can Beat Them For more help, keep reading below for several sections. Alters Hurting Other Alters Until you gain a deep understanding of alters, you might think it madness to always think the best of them. Nevertheless, the Christlike attitude of striving to see them in the best possible light will end up bringing rich rewards. It might well seem as if a particular alter is your worst possible enemy. Despite appearances, however, alters actually try their best to be helpful. The tragedy is that they have been left terribly misinformed as to what actually helps. Having been cut off from critical information that you have gained by maturing, they have had no alternative but to accept as truth atrocious lies told them by abusers in an attempt to intimidate, manipulate and confuse them. A common reason for alters hurting other alters is that they are desperately trying to protect you, or other alters, from the abuser’s wrath or punishment by enforcing rules set by your former abuser. Their goal is not to hurt you but to spare you from being exposed to the abuser’s wrath and punishment. Obviously, what motivates this behavior is the alter believing that the abuser can still enforce his/her threats. If this belief is no longer valid, gently explain this to the alter. The alter might need a fair bit of proof. Showing the alter today’s date would be a good start. Alters physically hurting you could simply be a form of self-harm. An alter might cruelly treat another because he/she blames the abuse on an alter being weak or duped when, in actual fact, anyone of that age or in that situation would have been overpowered or tricked. An example is an alter too young to know it was wrong who was seduced by an abuser who was gentle. This lulled the alter into having no qualms about the advances of another abuser, but this other abuser turned out to be terrifyingly aggressive. The actions of the accused alter are excusable but the alter who wants revenge needs to understand that we all stand guilty in the eyes of God and need mercy, not justice, and that God is eager to forgive the angry alter of all his/her sins as well as the alter who is being blamed. Forgiving others becomes much easier when a person discovers that God forgives him/her. So work on helping the alter see how much God has forgiven him/her and has also forgiven the other alter. A less common reason for an alter being malevolent is that the alter’s self-awareness has been so twisted that he/she has been tricked into thinking he or she is literally the abuser you once had. They act like a former abuser because they actually believe they are that abuser. For still more help, keep reading below. Angry, Nasty, or Terrifying Alters Pouring unconditional love upon a particularly obnoxious and dangerous alter until he/she changes into your loyal, trusted friend is one of the most rewarding things you can ever do. Once you commit yourself to loving the alter with Christlike persistence, the astounding transformation can occur remarkably quickly. There is nothing more disconcerting – and dangerous – than having an enemy inside you. The only satisfactory way to end this alarming predicament is to win your enemy’s loyalty and friendship. Despising him/her or trying to use force will only increase his/her hate for you and turn the alter even more against you. Any enemy within can be won over, however, because: 1. Even the most hardened alter is secretly desperate for your love and approval. 2. He/she is a part of you. Being a part of you means that he/she can see things your way if he/she has all the information you have and if you have all the information he/she has. This exchange takes place by calmly talking to each other. Gaining all the information the alter has is not only critical to your full healing by filling in gaps in your knowledge about your past suffering, it alerts you to any misinformation the alter has been fed, so that you can gently help him/her know the liberating truth. It will also help you understand him/her and so find him easier to love. Moreover – as explained below – without this critical information, you might be unknowingly doing foolish or dangerous things that are justifiably alarming and antagonizing the alter. We can only be certain of making wise and safe decisions if we have all the facts, and some of the critical information you need to make safe decisions is locked inside this alter. Alters who are currently wreaking havoc and seem your greatest enemies are the very ones you will most benefit from befriending. Your unconditional, Christlike love for them will end up melting their love-starved, terror-driven hearts, transforming them into your greatest allies, most valuable assets and best friends. Being kind, gentle, patient, considerate, compassionate and understanding toward them is your opportunity not only for peace and healing but for spiritual growth. It turns out that the better you understand what seem to be particularly obnoxious alters, the easier they are to love. They are worthy of immense compassion as they have been cruelly mistreated and misunderstood and they are actually doing his/her best in the midst of having been isolated, flooded with misinformation and cut off from every source of help. Moreover, they spared you much pain and trauma by bearing it instead of you. Alters are typically so love-starved that they are quite quick to forgive if they at last see in you a change of heart but until then they might have very legitimate reasons for being furious with you. You might, for example, have thought you were acting very spiritual and “fighting the flesh” when you were actually perpetuating an alter’s abuse. Solitary confinement is renowned for being a cruel punishment, and yet by suppressing or ignoring an alter, you could have forced him/her into the equivalent of solitary confinement, not just for days or weeks or even months, but possibly for years. This is an alter who was already reeling in emotional pain and trauma, which was further intensified to almost intolerable levels by no-one believing him/her, or even offering a listening ear. Moreover, as bad as it would be to treat an adult this way, this alter, having been cut off from your understanding, has been left with nothing more to help him/her bear the torment than the intellectual and emotional resources of a child, and without your understanding of God. And the pain you might have unknowingly inflicted on an alter could even extend way beyond this. Consider this scenario: A mature woman suffered horrific abuse from her father throughout her childhood but her host – the alter who is most often in control – is so much in denial that she is barely aware of what happened. Her father now lives quite a distance away and she decides to visit him and stay with him for a few days. A terrified alter who is aware of the immense danger tries desperately to warn the host not to go but the host not only dismisses the alter’s concerns as ridiculous, she shuts out the alter’s protests so effectively that she hardly remembers them. “In any case,” she assures herself, “I’m an adult now and can protect myself.” The first night she is in her father’s house, he enters her bedroom and somehow triggers the host so that she loses control of her body. This forces the other alter to alone consciously suffer the horrors that follow. The host does not regain consciousness until the next day and remains oblivious of what happened. Can you understand the alter being furious with the host over her foolish disregard of the warning? The above is just one of thousands of possible variations on this theme but it illustrates how an alter’s intense resentment of you might be far more justified than you realize, and how you could be in serious danger until you regard this alter not as an insufferable nuisance but as a friend who alone has the potential to spare you much suffering. Other possible reasons for alters being furious at other alters might not be accurate but could seem equally real to the alter. For example, an alter might think a child was abused because the child did not fight the adult abuser hard enough. This, of course, is a failure to consider just how much stronger than the child the abuser was. Another possibility is that a little alter who knew no better was seduced by an abuser who was gentle and this lulled the alter into having no qualms about the advances of another abuser, but this other abuser turned out to be terrifyingly aggressive. God is love. So none of us should even try to pretend to ourselves that we have begun to be godly unless we are truly loving. A key facet of love is that it bends over backward to see other people in the best possible light. Love does not judge. It forever strives to give people the benefit of the doubt. It chooses to believe the best of a person. In the words of 1 Corinthians 13, love believes all things (verse 7) and “it keeps no record of wrongs” (verse 5, NIV). God loves his enemies. This is so fundamental and it is critical to our salvation because each of us has at one time been God’s enemy. Over and over the Bible says we, who so desperately need God’s forgiveness, are to do our utmost to forgive others. So for many vital spiritual reasons – to say nothing about it being essential for your own healing and emotional well-being – you need to be loving and forgiving and understanding. This process of being like God must begin with your attitude toward your alters, including those parts of you that currently infuriate you or seem to endanger you. This involves all of the fruit of the Spirit – being kind, gentle, patient, compassionate, and so on. We need to start living such Scriptures as: Proverbs 15:1 A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Romans 12:17-19,21 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. . . . If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. 1 Peter 3:9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. Despite it often seeming impossible (until alters reveal precisely what is motivating them) alters can genuinely believe they are helping you, even when doing things that appal you. In fact, there are several different ways in which this can come about. Keeping Dangerous Alters out of Harm’s Way As much as possible, alters must not be restrained, but gently reasoned with and shown so much love and tenderness that they want to please you. You and your alters (including this one) have already suffered far too much bullying. Every part of you desperately needs love and kindness and understanding. However , sometimes an alter is not just annoying or embarrassing, but highly dangerous. This could necessitate temporarily restraining the alter so that he/she cannot take over the body or hurt other alters. Just as it is possible to use one’s powerful imagination to create a safe internal place for an alter, one can fit strong external locks to keep the alter there. Confining dangerous alters to a place where they cannot cause harm is an extension of the individual places of retreat described in A Safe Haven for Alters to Retreat to. I use the word prison because it might help some people who think in those terms to find this section, but even though the alter is likely to initially object to being briefly restrained, I consider the term so misleading as to be inappropriate. It should not to be thought of as a prison, nor a punishment. It is very temporary protective custody in a place that is made as comfortable and cozy as possible. It is a place to heal that will also keep other alters safe. It should be the nicest, happiest place possible under the circumstances. It might, for example, be a fairly large area with lots of beautiful, entertaining things inside, surrounded by plate glass walls allowing the alter to see and hear the rest of the internal world. The glass should be one way, however, so that only authorized alters only see and hear the one inside by pressing a button. This is for the protection of vulnerable alters outside the protected zone. There are several dangers with confining any alter, however: The alter might be forgotten about, either because the alter who put the alter there goes into hiding, taking the knowledge with him/her, or simply because once the situation is stabilized one feels less pressured to deal with the matter. The alter is already angry and the main reason why he/she remains such a danger is that he/she has been cut off from the rest of you. It is not in your interest to perpetuate or even inflame this. You need every alter. Because of these issues: Confinement should be avoided if at all possible. It should be a very temporary arrangement. Other alters should be informed about this alter so that he/she is not forgotten. Alters who are emotionally strong enough to do so, need to speak with the alter as often as possible, helping him/her come up to speed with current circumstances (how much safer life is now than it used to be, etc) and helping the alter learn about Jesus – that he is stronger than evil and wants to remove all guilt and to be the alter’s best friend, and so on. Not only is it critical that the confined alter not be forgotten, but working toward removing the need for confinement must be top priority so that the alter is there for a minimum time – typically only a day or so. Usually, the alter has been duped into thinking that hurting other alters is a regrettable necessity, but with your help, within a day or so the alter should calm down and realize there is no need to hurt others and that all promiscuous or dangerous behavior must cease. Release the alter as soon as you are sure that he/she is no longer a danger to himself/herself or to others and that the alter understands the importance of not taking over the body without the permission of alters who are more experienced in safely relating to the outside world. The alter is not to be released, however, until all the other alters agree that it is safe to do so. This is to stop the alter inside from tricking an inexperienced alter into releasing him/her prematurely. Some sort of compromise will need to be worked out if some alters remain scared of this alter even though he/she is now safe. Anti-Christian Alters Jesus treasured you and gave his life for you long before you ever became a Christian. Now it’s your turn to follow his lead by loving your alter and believing in him/her now, even before that alter discovers that Jesus is the most wonderful friend and not the hateful enemy he/she has been tricked into believing Jesus to be. The alter will be much easier to love after he/she changed but what glory is there for you in that? “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them” (Luke 6:32). Moreover, the alter is unlikely to change unless you love him/her before he/she changes. In my section about journaling, I wrote: Don’t censor language or anger or even blasphemies that offend your Christian sensitivities. Understand that rather than trying to force alters to act as if they were Christian, the most powerful thing you can do spiritually is to tap the depths of their depravity so that eventually you can gently lift them up to Jesus. Your mission must be to help them fall in love with Jesus so that they end up so spiritually transformed that they want to delight God. Trying to suppress or force or manipulate them will only hinder their spiritual advancement and, ultimately, your own. And for you to lead them to Jesus, you must first get to know and understand them and win their trust. And this is what journaling is all about. Include in your journal lots of questions you would like answered about God, your past, about why you do certain things, and so on. Also include regular indications that you would like alters’ feedback and contributions. Don’t think that an anti-Christian alter could keep you out of heaven. If you were to die still having some parts of you opposed to Jesus, those fractured parts of you would instantly heal and by doing so they would gain your understanding of, and love for, Christ. For encouragement, see “I Kept Trying to Force God to Reject Me” . Although not specifically mentioned in the testimony, this friend of mine has D.I.D. and much of his repeated rejection of God was initiated by his alters, but God remained steadfastly faithful. Inappropriate Sexual Cravings or Behavior It is not unusual for some alters to crave sex – sometimes even quite perverted sex – even though other alters sharing the same body hate and/or fear it. Often people/alters crave sexual encounters only because they crave love and approval and have been brainwashed by their abuser’s lies that they cannot receive love and approval any other way. Precious parts of you have been starved of love. As it says in Proverbs 27:7 “. . . to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet.” Abusers exploit children who have been starved of unconditional love and they do all they can to crush their self-esteem until they think they are of no value except as sex objects. Through word and/or action, they are forced to the devastating conclusion that they could never be loved and that they have no alternative but settle for the attention received by degrading themselves sexually. Abusers do all they can to confuse the notions of love and sex, making them think that sexual abuse and exploitation is love. Parts of you have been cut off from your insight that has enabled you to see through these lies. So these parts need you to gently, patiently and lovingly explain the truth to them. And both in lessening sexual cravings and in skyrocketing self-esteem, they will immensely benefit from discovering how loved of God they are. For help with this, see: You Can Find Love: What Your Fantasies Reveal Receiving a Personal Revelation of God’s Love for You (and all the links there.) Sex addicts might convince themselves that they love sex but don’t take this at face value. Many years ago, when the dangers of smoking were less publicized, psychologists brought together a group of smokers. They asked the smokers to describe how much they liked smoking and then subjected them to a strong presentation on the dangers of smoking. A follow-up study revealed that those who kept on smoking despite increased awareness of the danger, claimed to enjoy smoking more than ever. People who think they are hopeless slaves to a particular sin or habit typically do their best to fool themselves into thinking they are enjoying their bondage. So the first step in helping these alters is to teach them that God is able and willing to set them free from any bondage. Help them realize that God loves them and longs to heal them and that his healing is a far better and safer alternative to sex. Inappropriate sexual cravings or behavior could be a form of self-harm or (especially in the case of masturbation) it might be an attempt to dull the pain by mixing traumatic memories with pleasure. Viewing porn might likewise be an attempt to desensitize oneself. Both self-harm and attempts at desensitization are understandable and are likely to have been driven by desperation. Nevertheless, such behavior is likely to traumatize certain other alters. You might be consciously unaware of what it is doing to them but ultimately, if one part of you suffers it ends up adversely affecting you all. The other important issue is that such behavior corrupts a person and is sexually damaging. For example, the mixing of perversion (such as violence) with pleasure further perverts one’s sexuality. You have already suffered greatly because of a pervert, so let that motivate you to not in any way become one yourself, even if the perversion is not acted out with anyone. It is tempting to fall into defeatism by telling yourself that you are already ruined, but this is a lie. If you give God a chance, your ability to heal is amazing. Moreover, God forgives and cleanses. He sees you as being purer than the purest virgin (if that virgin has not been cleansed from her sin). Dissociative Identity Disorder Explained When people suffer something so horrible that their mind recoils from the very thought of it, we can understand their mind trying to suppress all memory of the event. A simple blocking of the past would not work, however, if a person were continually reminded of the trauma by, for example, the trauma being repeated every few days. When the trauma is on-going, the mind has to employ a more sophisticated approach to maintaining sanity by giving itself as big a reprieve as possible whenever the trauma is not occurring. The mind divides itself so that part of it is kept unaware of the bad times. That way, whenever the bad times are not occurring, part of the mind can function without being oppressed by an awareness of the horrors that occurred yesterday nor by the paralyzing fear that the horrors might be repeated tomorrow. Additional sources of trauma can cause further fragmenting of the mind. The advantage of fragmentation is that the mind-crippling task of trying to cope with an awareness of everything at once is broken down into smaller, though still highly challenging, pieces. It is not only memories that are divided up, but with them go other intellectual abilities as well. Some abilities can be replicated in another part of the brain, just like right-handed people can further develop the side of their brain that controls their left hand so that they can write with their left hand almost as well as with their right. Not all abilities are replicated, however. Some parts of the person end up with skills that other parts do not have. As a result, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder are usually more skilled than they realize until they become fully aware of all their other parts. Previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, the newer term sounds like gobbledygook but it is actually more meaningful than it first seems. If you were suffering, you might make it more tolerable by seeking to lessen your awareness of your current situation and imagining you were somewhere nice. This is called dissociation and although it would not stop all pain, it is likely to genuinely help. Instead of thinking of yourself as being somewhere else, an alternative is to think of yourself as being someone else – someone who is never subjected to this distress. That is called taking on a dissociative identity . This would become an obvious choice if, for example, you were a little child singled out for severe beatings simply because of who you are – the child of an abusive parent. This coping mechanism becomes a disorder – a disadvantage rather than an advantage – if part of you got trapped in that dissociative state and could not return to normality even when external circumstances become normal. Becoming permanently disconnected from part of yourself would not be because of an inadequacy in you but because of the severity and prolonged nature of the trauma you suffered and because it began in your formative years. On-going disconnection could occur if, for example, you remained too scared to let yourself remember what happened when you were in that dissociated state. Being unable to access unpleasant memories might superficially seem desirable but it is likely to keep you from ever healing from those memories. How could anyone resolve a problem that he refuses to think about? To live in denial is to let a problem grow. Moreover, you would probably lose not only access to certain memories but to skills you had developed while you were in that state and to certain intellectual potential that this part of you has. So remaining disconnected would prevent you from being as consistently skilled as you have the potential to be and keep you from accessing the full extent of your intellectual capacity. If you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, healing involves reconnecting with those parts of you that had become disconnected from you. False healing occurs if a person is still disconnected but mistakenly supposes nothing is missing, simply because the person has lost all awareness of disconnected parts. As a child’s brain grows it becomes increasingly rigid and the ability to compartmentalize itself through Dissociative Identity Disorder is lost if the process is not initiated by around about seven years of age. If someone learns the technique when young, however, the person can continue further compartmentalizing his/her brain later in life. Far from being freaks, people with D.I.D. have, from an early age, stumbled upon an ingenious mental strategy for coping with situations that are almost beyond human endurance. It is an emergency response to an extreme situation, however. There are significant disadvantages to remaining fragmented, such as the inability to simultaneously draw upon one’s full intellectual resources to solve problems and heal from trauma. Not as Weird as You Think An older term for Dissociative Identity Disorder is Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Regardless of name, its existence has been recognized by researchers at least as early as the 1800s. Explaining Dissociative Identity Disorder to Alters Through no fault of your own you suffered something very traumatic. It is probably your first memory. This was so upsetting that it caused a temporary form of amnesia. With this type of memory loss you don’t forget all of the past, only part of it. In fact, you recall some of the past so vividly that it seems to be much more recent than it actually is. It’s rather like being Rip Van Winkle, who slept for years and when he woke up what seemed like yesterday was actually many years ago and the world had moved on without him being aware of it. It might be, for instance, that today’s date is much later than you suppose. What year do you think this is? I can show you a calendar or newspaper to prove to you the correct date if you wish. You probably also lost memory of your life before the trauma. Even if you have a good memory up until the present, there are probably many years of childhood memories that you are currently cut off from. You are presently conscious of an important, irreplaceable part of you, but there is more to you than you are presently aware of. You have memories that you cannot currently access because the trauma you suffered caused you to become disconnected from the rest of yourself. You disconnected in a courageous attempt to protect the rest of you from dealing with the upsetting experience you suffered, but since that event the rest of you has gained information and skills that will comfort you and allow you to heal. Though you have fractured, this brokenness can be restored. Other parts of you can tell you things about you that you currently don’t know. Better still, those memories and skills you have temporarily lost will become your very own when you reconnect with the rest of you. Other parts of you might seem like other people but they share your body. This disconnectedness has previously caused isolated parts of you to have little awareness of you, or little understanding of who you are. This lack of understanding could have caused them to treat you with less love and respect than you deserve. If so, this is most unfortunate, and they probably already regret their mistake and as they get to know you they will certainly regret any hurt they have caused. Helping Younger Alters Understand You know that something very scary happened to you. It was such a shock that it is as if a part of you fell into a deep sleep, like sometimes happens when someone has been hit hard on the head. You are now awake, of course, but while you were sleeping another part of you stayed awake each day and kept growing. You were asleep for so long that what seems like yesterday was actually years ago. Things that you have feared have gone forever and you are now very safe. You are now as strong as a grownup, and God – who can do anything – has become your best friend. He loves you so much and if you let him he’ll take away your pain and make you happy. I can tell you some of the good things that have happened since you were asleep, but there is something even better. In time, you will be able to join up with the part of you that stayed awake so that all that has happened while you were sleeping will become your memories and you will be as smart as a grown up and good at all the things the awake part of you learned while growing up. See also: The Patchwork Quilt: A book for children about Dissociative Identity Disorder by J.D. Clark Who am I? It is distressing but not unusual for people with D.I.D. to suddenly not know who they are. If you are feeling this way now and have found yourself here, is very likely that there is more to you than you realize – that there are parts of you that you have not yet connected with who are more experienced and very capable and have been looking after you. It is also very possible that very many years have passed without your awareness and that you are now safer than you dare dream. The Surprising Power of Journaling Keeping a journal is an excellent way to make contact with alters and to come to grips with deep issues in one’s life. Let’s begin with a list of the benefits: Like working on a jigsaw, a journal can bring together all possible clues about forgotten events and what might be troubling you. Moreover, even without the memory problems commonly associated with D.I.D., some clues – such as fleeting thoughts and dreams – are, by their very nature, quickly forgotten unless almost instantly written down. A journal is insurance against losing valuable information. At almost any moment, the host or other alters might suddenly be triggered or overwhelmed and retreat to some inaccessible place deep within, taking their knowledge with them. This means that unless you are quite advanced in your healing you can alarmingly lose all memory of things you would never expect to forget until that part of you resurfaces. Of course, included in what could possibly be lost for who knows how long is all the information you have been painstakingly accumulating about alters and clues about your past. Alters themselves might end up reading and contributing to your journal. A journal might even move beyond rare entries by an elusive alter to becoming like a message pad, allowing you to communicate back and forth with one or more alters. Such communication might involve a time delay and this delay can sometimes be advantageous. Let me explain: “When alters are with me, I am overwhelmed with severe anxiety, sadness and turmoil,” complained a woman when detailing why she was making so little progress in speaking with her alters. “What you feel at such times is a normal consequence of Dissociative Identity Disorder,” I replied sympathetically. “When alters are close, you feel their emotions and these dear parts of you are currently in such inner pain, fear and confusion as to be almost brain-numbing for anyone hit by the full intensity of these feelings. It’s no wonder that you find yourself unable to communicate at such times. One of the things making journaling so helpful is that it can let an alter express herself/himself and then withdraw, allowing you to later read the alter’s words and respond with a helpful message to the alter when you are more clear-headed.” Let’s move on to some helpful tips about journaling. Keep your journal private. You might at some time choose to share a small extract with a therapist, but essentially it is for your eyes only. Even if you trust your partner, you might later discover a part who has not reached this level of trust. Secrecy inspires honesty. And God loves honesty. He is not afraid of truth nor surprised about your deepest doubts and concerns. So let go of inhibitions and pour out your heart – your feelings, your fears, frustrations, suspicions, childhood memories, how you feel about family members, and so on. Whether it comes in drips or gushes, don’t evaluate its accuracy or in any way analyze it – you can do that another time. Abandon attempts to correct it grammatically. Just let it flow. Don’t even censor language or anger or even blasphemies that offend your Christian sensitivities. Understand that rather than trying to force alters to act as if they were Christian, the most powerful thing you can do spiritually is to tap the depths of their depravity so that eventually you can gently lift them up to Jesus. Your mission must be to help them fall in love with Jesus so that they end up so spiritually transformed that they want to delight God. Trying to suppress or force or manipulate them will only hinder their spiritual advancement and, ultimately, your own. And for you to lead them to Jesus, you must first get to know and understand them and win their trust. And this is what journaling is all about. Dreams and flashbacks can be exceedingly unpleasant, so don’t waste them. They contain valuable information, so record them. The obvious place for this is in your journal. Writing them out and thinking about them when relaxed and fully conscious can help remove some of their terror and might possibly prove beneficial, should the dream recur. The practice also provides a good opportunity to ask alters about the dream or flashback – what does it mean to them, how do they feel about it, and so on. Dreams can sometimes be like flashbacks – accurate memories of past events that you may or may not be aware happened. Alternatively, some dreams are the mind trying to come to terms with things that have been bothering you. Sometimes you were not even conscious that these matters were bothering you. Both of these types of dreams can be valuable in giving you insight into what some of your alters might be coping with. However, some dreams can actually be alters seeking to communicate with you, either by symbolically revealing how they feel or by sharing accurate memories. Additionally, some dreams are alters trying to come to terms with things by imagining themselves in various scenarios. Include in your journal lots of questions you would like answered about God, your past, about why you do certain things, and so on. Also include regular indications that you would like alters’ feedback and contributions. Different alters are likely to be active at different times of the day or night and can be triggered by different events into hiding or becoming active. To make the most of this, try to journal at various times of the day and night and maintain this practice over a long period, preferably indefinitely. Keep the journal handy throughout the day, and especially by your bed at night. If you are reluctant to take it to work, that’s not too critical because shy alters are more likely to be active at other times. However, some thoughts could come to you when you are at work that are worth jotting down so that you can copy it into your journal later. Every now and then, read through all you have written. Even if you get no response, try discussing their content with alters. Some entries might use different (often more child-like) spelling and grammar to what you would normally use, or the content might surprise you. If handwritten, you might notice a different handwriting style. It might take months for anything significant to appear but keep it up. Try to make a copy of what you journal and store the copy elsewhere because it is quite possible that at some point an alter might destroy it in a cleaning spree or a moment of panic. Possibilities for creating a copy include photocopying, scanning or typing it into a computer and putting a copy on a USB (thumb) drive. Retain copies of such things as emails that you send, and treat them as additional sources of information. If you already have writings from the past – even if it is just such things as old e-mails to friends or counsellors – treasure them. They can end up being valuable sources of information. In the hope that the message eventually gets through to relevant alters, your journal should be interspersed with several entries emphatically stating the current calendar year. Merely writing today’s date is unlikely to suffice. For example, a number beginning with 20 might not even seem like a date to an alter used to seeing years starting with 19. Learning that it is many years later than he or she had supposed is likely to be such mind-boggling information for an alter as to stagger belief. You should therefore include instructions as to how this can be verified, such as where a calendar is located. You might also paste in your journal a portion of a newspaper that mentions the date, and so on. Since, unknown to you, an alter could be terrified of a former abuser’s threats, list in your journal every reason why it is now safe to tell. Reasons might include the fact that you now have an adult body, that you are no longer financially dependent on your parents and you live independently, that some people (name them) from your past have died or are now feeble or live a long way from you or they do not know your present address or you have not seen them for a certain number of years (be specific). Provide as much proof as you can, such as an obituary or photo of a grave if the person is dead. Remember that people you are currently convinced were safe, might have actually terrified your alters. Another important message to include is that unless they give you their permission, you will not blab anything that alters reveal. If they cannot trust you to maintain their confidentiality, do not expect to hear from them. Yes, it might be nice if you could pass on the information to a counsellor/therapist but you will never get any more information to pass on if you betray them. By all means, after they reveal themselves, try to persuade them to give permission, but say nothing until they agree. In addition to recording the above matters in several places in your journal, keep reminding yourself (preferably out loud at times) of these facts, especially at times when you feel on edge. One of the times that you do this an alter could be listening for whom this information will remove the pressure to keep secrets from you. List in your journal good things that have happened and how things have improved since they were last out and keep reminding yourself of these things from time to time. A shared journal is important but, in addition, reserving journals for the private use of individual alters can also be beneficial. Another friend of mine with Dissociative Identity Disorder writes: We offer a drawing pad/journal/notebook to alters that they can keep private from the rest of us if they wish. We have a basket of journals. Sometimes we share but we never read without permission. Often alters who had been asleep for years journal a lot privately for the first bit before they start really sharing with us in other ways. It’s kind of like learning you can trust the others by making sure they keep their promises in not reading what you write. About the Host The host is that part of a person who most often relates to the outside world. This is not necessarily the same part throughout a person’s life. A crisis might cause a host to go deep inside for many years, forcing another alter to fill the role. It is tempting to think of the host as the ‘real person’ but a person is actually the sum of all of his/her parts, including alters that are as yet unknown. The host is often thought of as the most mature and capable part of a person but this is only because other parts have not yet had the opportunity to fully develop and reveal their abilities. It is also tempting to think of the host as the most important part of a person but this is inaccurate. It is much more helpful to regard each part as irreplaceable and worthy of equal love and attention. In fact, as a baby usually receives more attention than other members of a family and might grow up to be more capable and ‘important’ than other members, so it is with alters. Who are Alters? Alters are often called personalities . Therapists commonly refer to each disconnected part of a person that has its own consciousness as an alternate personality , though they can also refer to them as alter egos or alter identities . These terms are usually shortened to alter (spelled with an e). In some ways, this term is unfortunate because it sounds like alt a r , which has scary connotations for some whose trauma had religious (often satanic) overtones. Some people use the term insider but this, too, is confusing because any of these parts has the potential to relate to the outside world. Sometimes they are referred to as dissociated parts . Alters might not necessarily believe they have all the abilities of a full human. Some might even be convinced they are an animal or an object or a headless body or a ghost or whatever. Nevertheless, all alters have the potential to discover they are able to have a full range of human emotions and do everything we associate with humans. Alters deserve to be regarded as fully human, and this is important for their healing. Why You Desperately Need Every Alter Without your every alter, you might survive but you cannot thrive . Every alter is a precious, irreplaceable part of you, no matter how obnoxious and useless some alters might seem before they heal. As babies are initially weak and helpless and require huge amounts of care but they grow up to develop amazing abilities and can become enormously helpful and a huge support, so it is with alters, even if they currently seem useless and nothing but trouble. Each alter is unique and a vital part of your intellectual capacity. You can never find full healing, reach your full potential and achieve your maximum without every one of them. Alters can be angry, hateful, dangerous, anti-God, addicted to sin, sabotage much of the good you do and/or deeply embarrass you, but, with your help, every one of them can discover God’s love and become good, kind, loving and supportive. In Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), one man, instead of developing and increasing what had been entrusted to him, buried it. Your loving Lord understands the enormous pressures you have been under and there was a time when you had little option other than keeping your alters buried. Now, however, he wants you to keep pushing forward in healing until not one of your alters is buried but each is allowed to fully develop and become an active part of your daily life. Only by this can you reach your full potential and achieve the maximum for God’s glory, for your fulfilment and for the sake of all of those you will be able to bless with your enhanced abilities and wholeness. To understand how an apparently useless or undesirable alter can become an astounding blessing to you and bring you great peace and achievement Despising/Hating your Alters or the Fact that you have D.I.D. People (hosts) who are just becoming aware they have D.I.D. are often tempted to feel superior to their alters and regard them as little more than nuisances. A friend of mine, who is himself a host, beautifully corrects this mistaken notion: In my system, I’m the “host”. By that I mean I’m the one my alters laid their lives on the line to protect. I’m the one for whom my alters gave up so much in order to keep safe. I’m the one they held above the water, while they drowned, as it were. They gave up living in this life and held on to agonizingly painful experiences and situations so that I could survive and move on, while for years they were locked away in the dark haunted by those experiences without contact with the outside world. I owe them everything, and each time I communicate with any of them I do my best to treat them with the same respect that I would treat someone who lost their legs diving under a truck to save the life of one of my children. Yes, they can be very angry. Yes, they can be annoying, controlling, distracting, painful to live with, but so might someone dealing with the consequences of having lost their legs saving my child. Regardless of that anger, I would happily immerse myself in it to give them one ounce of relief, especially after what they went through for me. It’s the least I could do. The exciting thing is that I’ve found that as I treat them with respect and let them know that their needs are important to me by working with them on getting those needs met and allowing them time to just be themselves in a safe environment where they aren’t judged, they heal. They start to realize that those situations they held deep inside themselves have now past, and that they are now safe. As they are cared for, they start to use their skills to contribute meaningfully to our family – the whole person of whom I am a part. For example, I have an alter called Do, who is very fast at getting things done. He now helps when we have limited time to get things done really quickly. This morning he came out to help me get my kids ready for swimming lessons. He managed to get them completely dressed, bags packed, everything in under eight minutes. Normally that would take me around an hour. In another webpage, I wrote: Do you suppose you would receive God’s approving smile if you heartlessly abandoned a deeply hurting child who was solely your responsibility and you let that little one suffer endlessly, not only refusing to comfort him/her but also preventing anyone else from emotionally supporting the child? Would you be able to stand before your eternal Judge and brazenly excuse your mistreatment by claiming the child is yours and therefore you can treat him/her however you wish? Of course not. Being your own child would merely magnify, not diminish, your responsibility. If this is true for your offspring – someone whose genes are only fifty percent yours – your responsibility would, if anything, be even graver if the child you let languish in needless pain and ignorance is your inner child. To close your heart, defiantly saying, “It’s part of me, so I can do anything I like with it,” is highly offensive to the God to whom we must all one day give account. The above is a quote from The Spiritual & Practical Reasons Why One Must Love One’s Alters . I suggest you read the entire webpage. Lies When an Alter Tells Lies 1. When ‘Lies’ Aren’t Lies Dissociative Identity Disorder occurs because a person feels a great need to keep upsetting truths and memories from his/her consciousness. There are times when this is an important survival technique but when it remains in place long after the emergency has passed, instead of sparing oneself pain, it ends up perpetuating pain. When an alter reveals something one does not want to face, an obvious way to maintain what one sub-consciously presumes is protective self-deception is to try to convince oneself that the alter is lying. It is likely to seem untrue because one has been ‘protected’ from so much information that would confirm the new fragment of truth. Furthermore, a clever way the mind often employs to help dull the impact of a traumatic experience is for one alter to store memories of only the facts about an event, and for a different alter to store memories of the deep emotions (such as fear, anger and emotional pain) generated by the event. One set of memories without the other feels unreal – it feels like a lie. 2. When they Truly are Lie s Sometimes alters feel the need to avoid a terrifying situation by deceiving abusers so that the abusers back off. [A biblical example of this need is when David pretended to be insane to avoid being killed by a heathen king (1 Samuel 21:10-15; Psalm 34, title).] Such deception is most effective when a person not only acts the part, but literally believes it. Some alters have this power. It is well known, for instance, that certain alters end up convincing themselves that they are the opposite sex, or an animal, or a stuffed toy, or a headless body, or their abuser, and so on. For example, as his personal experiment to see what he was capable of, a friend of mine asked an alter who had this ability to pretend he had a certain phobia. Immediately, my friend felt as if he were in his forties (he was nothing close to that age) with thinning hair and much shorter than he really was, and he felt real fear of something that had never before scared him. I had expected that someone with this ability could pass any lie detector. I later learned that many years ago this man had felt the need to fool a psychiatrist by telling him atrocious lies for two full days. He not only succeeded, he literally passed a lie detector test. Lies Abusers Tell – the Frequent Source of Alters’ Torment & Strange Behavior You cannot find peace and wholeness while parts of you are tormented by guilt or shame or inferiority, or enslaved by destructive habits or evil, or are misguided, worried, hurting, frightened, angry, or filled with hate or bitterness. Ultimately, the extent to which you are at peace depends on how much your alters are at peace, and what keeps alters distressed is that truths that would set their minds at rest have been cruelly kept from them. Much of an alter’s current distress centers less on the actual abuse than on being cruelly tricked into believing lies that, long after the abuse has ended, continue to make the alter feel condemned, hopeless, frightened and/or isolated. Most of the misinformation has been deliberately and maliciously inflicted on the alters by the abuser, and repeatedly reinforced by him/her until the abuser’s lies seem undeniable truth. This process – virtually a form of brainwashing – is made easier by abusers accessing children rather than adults. Con artists prove how easily adults can be deceived but children are exceptionally vulnerable and almost instinctively accept as truth whatever an adult says, and even more so when terrorized. Consider how many little children are certain that Santa Claus is real. Little ones who don’t believe in him are not smarter; they simply were not told about him by believable authority figures or they encountered someone who exposed the lie. If older people have authoritatively insisted that it is true and little children hear nothing to the contrary, they will inevitably believe what they are told, whether it be about Santa Claus, or that sexual abuse is normal or that the abuse was their fault or that the police will put them in jail if they tell the abuser’s secret, or any of a vast number of other bald-faced lies. This is an unavoidable part of being a child. Children have to be quick to believe what they are told because their very survival hinges on believing warnings given by adults, and their intellectual development hinges on quickly absorbing vast amounts of information. It would take them excessively long to mature if they had to critically assess the accuracy of every bit of information they gain and, in any case, they start off not having the intellectual skills to do so. This uncritical acceptance of what older children or adults tell them normally works brilliantly because they are surrounded by loving, trustworthy people. It turns to tragedy, however, if an evil person gains access to a child. Even more tragic, instead of being allowed to learn and mature, alters end up cut off from the parts of them that gain the knowledge and maturity and relationship with God to see through the lies. The truth sets us free, but to know what truths an alter needs we must first discover which untruths are tormenting that particular alter. This involves talking with the alter but it will speed up the process of discovery for you to know what torturous, slanderous lies alters are typically tricked into believing. The Danger of Alters Not Knowing that Past Abuse has Ended Such things as vivid flashbacks and inner pain can make events that ceased years ago seem like just minutes ago. Moreover, alters have often been buried deep inside a person, causing them to have little or no awareness of external events and so leaving them unaware of the passage of time and changed circumstances. Until alters realize that an abuser can no longer hurt them, they will not only suffer needless fear but might do damaging things, such as continue to enforce on you or your alters the oppressive rules that the abuser used to insist on. They will believe they are sparing you severe punishment by doing this. They might even return to the abuser and submit to his/her abuse; not knowing that they can now resist him/her. Moreover. they might be so afraid of the expected return of an abuser that they could engage in self-harm or even seek to kill themselves and, unintentionally, you as well. It will initially be a shock for alters to discover that years have passed and so much has changed without their awareness. The shock is likely to initially be so mindboggling that the alter’s strong feelings of bewilderment and confusion are likely to wash over you as well; temporarily overwhelming you. Nevertheless, after the initial shock, the alter’s relief that life is now safer and better than when they had been abused will make the short-lived bewilderment very worthwhile. Alters usually adjust quite quickly to the startling news (typically one to three days) and then the benefits will begin to flow. Moreover, they can be told in a way that will minimize the shock and in a way that helps them quickly realize what a good thing it is. Before giving the alter specific details of current circumstances, begin by assuring the alter that things are much better than he/she realizes. Tell him/her that he/she mercifully, but safely, lost consciousness for quite a while and that during that time good things have happened: his/her body has grown strong and that other parts of him/her remained active and learned many things and were able to leave the abuser. Explain that he/she has not missed out on the good things that happened but all the good memories of experiences and things learned will end up being restored to him/her and will all be as real as if he/she had personally experienced them because he/she shares the same brain and body as those who had the experiences. Even the contents of the above paragraph will be mind-boggling to the alter and he/she will probably need a little break to ponder the implications. When you feel the alter is ready for more, show him/her around your current home and the district where you live (if this is different to where you lived when the alter lived when he/she was abused). Tell the alter all the good things that have happened to you since he/she was abused and explain why you are now safer than you used to be. When he/she seems ready, tell him/her the current year. If need be, use calendars, newspapers and so on to confirm it. Explain how long ago it was when he/she last hurt you and, if relevant, how much older and weaker the abuser now is and how far away the abuser is. If the abuser does not know where you live, you will obviously pass on that information to the alter. It is important, however, to only tell the alter the truth. Alters need to know they can totally trust what you tell them. Lying would end up creating serious trust issues and sabotaging your healing. Think of everything that could contribute to the alter feeling safe and explain it to him/her. An example is that the alter now lives in the body that has grown up, making you physically stronger, smarter, no longer dependent upon an abuser and more likely to be believed by police. All of these things mean you have more power over the abuser than previously and would make the abuser afraid of you. Another factor is that the abuser is quite likely to only want to abuse children and would now consider you too old to abuse. (Do not, however, let the alter feel rejected or of no use because of this, but explain how valuable and useful he/she really is and how much God, you and others love and respect him/her.) If necessary for further proof, take the alter to a real mirror (as distinguished from an internal or imaginary one) and show him/her the body he/she now has. Be cautious about this, however, because it could cause more shock, especially if he/she believes he/she is the opposite sex. If the alter does not realize his/her real gender, this matter will eventually need to be addressed but this information is usually not critical for him/her feeling safer and it is less traumatic if startling revelations occur gradually rather than piled on top of each other. Abusers are desperate to terrify their victims into never reporting them to authorities, so they might use ridiculous threats – such as claiming to have supernatural powers – to cause the alter to think he/she could never escape the abuser’s awareness and punishment. Find out anything the alter fears and do all you can to provide convincing proof that those fears are groundless. Also, assure the alter of your love and respect for him/her and that you will protect him/her. Alters Afraid to Change or Reluctant to An alter who sees his/her entire reason for existence is to protect you from being punished by an abuser who can no longer hurt you is just one example of alters who need to change their role as you heal. This loss of purpose can be most upsetting for an alter, causing him/her to feel useless. Such an alter needs lots of encouragement and your help in receiving from God an awareness that he/she is of great value for who he/she is rather than merely for what he/she does. He/she also needs to receive from God a new role and a new sense of purpose. Healing involves change, but it is a positive change. Help alters understand that there is such a thing as a positive change – that things really can get better. This webpage might help: There’s Hope! A Sane Guide to Finding Hope When There is No Hope . Letting Jesus Support & Guide you Through a Crisis Even though no one in the universe comes close to being as safe, competent and dependable as Jesus, I fully understand the tragedy of having enormous difficulty trusting him. Fearing Jesus is like a shivering child fearing the warm rays of the sun; as tragic as someone dying of starvation because he needlessly fears that the beautiful meals prepared for him are laced with poison. As stated in Christian Index of Help for Dissociative Identity Disorder: I’ve been privileged to have had large numbers of people with Dissociative Identity Disorder share their hearts and seek my help. Over and over I have seen that what I share in the links below really works and I give Jesus all the honor because I believe it is he who has dropped into my heart most of the understanding I have gained. I beg you, however, not to limit your healing by neglecting to continually look to Jesus to give you his personal guidance and insight. Jesus alone – and most certainly not my writings – is the source of all knowledge, wisdom and power. And he alone is available every moment of every day of every year. And whereas, despite doing our utmost, the best of us fail at times, only the real Jesus is the absolutely perfect friend and counsellor. No one can equal him when it comes to being utterly approachable and safe and flawlessly kind, gentle, understanding, patient and dependable. Fears & Concerns About God As stated earlier in this webpage: Even though no one in the universe comes close to being as safe, competent and dependable as Jesus, I fully understand the tragedy of having enormous difficulty trusting him. Fearing Jesus is like a shivering child fearing the warm rays of the sun; as tragic as someone dying of starvation because he needlessly fears that the beautiful meals prepared for him are laced with poison. Trust is exceptionally difficult for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The very fact that they have D.I.D. means that at least one key person in their lives has proved appallingly untrustworthy. The saying, “Once bitten, twice shy,” applies with devastating force. Having suffered so immensely raises to intense levels the fear of a repeat. Fearing that humans could let you down is understandable because the best of us are weak and fallible. God is neither. And he is not sexual. Tragically, however, fear spreads like a cancer. The very thing that can protect you from dangerous people can end up keeping you from someone safe who can provide the support you desperately need. Never is this more so than when fear hinders us from trusting God. Doubts about God’s trustworthiness might be inflamed by the tendency of fear to spread from real danger to genuinely safe situations, but I refuse to sidestep the reality of other significant factors: 1. The mistaken belief that the mere fact that bad things happening in the past mean that God approved of them happening or that he let you down. For help with this, see: Why I Hate the Myth of a Cruel Christian God Where Was God When You Suffered Unspeakable Horrors? 2. One of the malicious tricks in abusers’ arsenals is to claim that they have God’s blessing in what they do. This is made even worse when in order to protect themselves from being exposed as abusers they assume the cover of being a respectable person – and one of the best ways of doing that is to pretend to be Christians – and they are typically devious enough to fool most people. Abusers often make the ridiculous claim to their victims that their abuse is an expression of love. People who have been exposed to this lie as children can end up needlessly terrified of love. Likewise, those exposed to the lie that God approved of the abuser’s crimes can cause people to end up needlessly terrified of God. 3. Some abusers – especially in the case of Satanic Ritual Abuse – can actually get someone to dress up to look like Jesus and pretend to be him while abusing a child. A traumatized little child would not be able to see through the deceit and would end up terrified of Jesus. When What Seems to be God, Jesus or an Angel is Fake The real God is:          Moral and good          Non-sexual          Gentle, Kind and Patient          Consistent, faithful and trustworthy          Forgiving and patient          Totally consistent with the Bible Here are three quite different examples of how people can mistake something else for God or Jesus: 1. A woman was most perplexed when what she believed to be God speaking to her was sometimes inconsistent with Scripture or displayed less than divine wisdom. In fact, it was so disturbing that it began to shake her faith in God. It turned out to be an alter who had been frustrated by the way the host kept ignoring her. Sometimes the alter actually had greater wisdom than the host and could have spared the host much heartache but the host kept ignoring and suppressing the alter. The alter perceptively worked out that she would be respected and her advice and requests followed if she gave the impression that it was not her voice but God’s. The host told me, “In 99% of cases this alter had given me the right answers. She knew where to find my things when I had lost them and she woke me up in the mornings. She had helped me through the years to make so many wonderful decisions. Realizing that it was an alter restored my fellowship with God. I explained to my parts that they would never have to pretend to be God again in order for me to hear them and I asked them to please help me identify them when they speak.” The obvious solution to such a situation is to get to know the alter and come to an agreement whereby the host agrees to take very seriously all that the alter suggests and carefully weigh up all the alter’s reasons and the alter is allowed as much freedom to do as she pleases as the host is able to manage. In return, the alter agrees never again to pretend to be God. 2. Abusers have been known to dress up to look like Jesus and claim to be Jesus while he abuses a terrified little child. 3. Abusers, by the very nature of the evil things they do, open themselves up to the demonic and sometimes they deliberately implant demons into their victims in order to make them more compliant. Demons are nothing for Christians to be afraid of but they are very deceptive and will pretend to be friends etc. See Imaginary Friends ((although not stated there, the person involved had D.I.D.). They can just as easily pretend to be God or Jesus or angels from God. Blame No matter who you blame – God, yourself, your abuser or those who didn’t protect you from abuse, assigning blame ends up being like twisting a knife inside you. But someone must take the blame. Once you find that person you will finally be free. For powerful help with this, see Do-It-Yourself Healing . Jesus, the Alter’s Alter To quote from my webpage Healing and Wholeness for Alters : Jesus: th e Perfect Alter An alter told one of Jake’s alters: You exist as a separate part of Jake because Jake was pushed beyond human endurance. Then you come along like a lifeboat. You were loaded up with pain and set to sail. So was I. It wasn’t our fault. This almost exactly describes the role of a scapegoat. The term “scapegoat” has entered everyday speech via the Old Testament. It has surprisingly much to tell us. Once a year, to atone for sin, two goats were chosen. One of them was sacrificed, paying the ultimate price for the nation’s sins. Of course, most of the nation’s sins were essentially average and yet, in the final analysis, each sin took no less than the death penalty for the blame to be fully resolved and extinguished. The remaining goat – called the scapegoat – stayed alive. Like the other goat, it was utterly innocent of any human sin, but after the sacrificial death of the other one, the sins of the entire nation were symbolically placed on its head and it was driven into the desert, symbolically taking the sins away from the people, never to be seen again (Leviticus 16:5-22). Animal sacrifices, though hopelessly inadequate to resolve our guilt problems, were divinely instituted to point prophetically to the one sacrifice that can meet our souls’ deepest needs. 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 – a human sacrifice would be worthless. Since anyone who sins deserves to die, if any of us were to volunteer as a sacrifice we would only be suffering what we ourselves deserve, not suffering for the sins of others. The only perfect sacrifice is the One of whom John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” The entire Old Testament sacrificial system was ordained by God to prepare his people for the Savior of the world so that they would understand what our Lord achieved by dying on the cross. He is the embodiment and fulfilment of the whole Jewish sacrificial system. So when God instituted the use of a scapegoat, he was helping his people understand Jesus, who is the ultimate scapegoat. That two goats were needed to atone for the nation’s sins – one dying and then the other released alive – points not only to the removal of our sins but to the death and the subsequent resurrection of Jesus. Not just Jesus’ death but also his resurrection were needed to resolve utterly the guilt and eternal consequences 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 of our blame and shame. 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 breathtakingly new life that begins here and now. I am frequently deeply moved by the selfless, sacrificial way in which alters voluntarily take hurts and rejection upon themselves in order to protect the rest of the person. Like the perfect alter, Jesus wants to take upon himself all the guilt, all the horror, and all the shame you have ever suffered. He wants every trace of filth and pain and rejection to be dumped on him until it kills him, because in killing him, its power to hurt you is also killed. If you were living in ancient Israel, it would not just be your sin that was symbolically placed on the scapegoat, but the sins of the entire nation. Even more astounding, the sins of the entire world were actually placed on Jesus when he agonized on the cross. This is significant. Usually, alters hurt, not because of their own sin, nor even the sin of their host, but because of the sins of an abuser or some other cruel person. There is no need even to work out exactly who is at fault and to what degree, however, because all the sin and all the blame and shame were put on the ultimate Scapegoat. Alters do the best they can but no alter can totally remove all blame, shame and pain. The host still feels some of it. And even if an alter could perfectly achieve full peace for the host, what about the alter? What can be done to relieve the alter’s own suffering? We have noted that the pain an alter bears is almost never the alter’s fault. The source of the hurt is the sins of others, and he/she bears the pain, sacrificing his/her own well-being for the sake of the host. This is Jesus’ role. Being God, he – and he alone – can do it to perfection. And he does it for all of humanity. For an alter to hold on to the pain is to suffer unnecessarily (which would break God’s heart) and to render Jesus’ torturous death a waste, as far as both the alter and host is concerned. Dumping pain upon an innocent alter is an act of desperation that can keep a person alive until he/she finds God’s perfect remedy: Jesus. Asking an alter to bear pain is at best an emergency measure only. Like putting chewing gum on a leaking fuel tank, as a tiny aircraft is in flight, it could save someone temporarily, but something more effective needs to be done as soon as possible. It is vital that alters be relieved of their pain as quickly as possible, both for their sake and so that their hosts can receive full healing. Jesus is the alter par excellence; literally the alter’s alter. For both the host and all alters, Jesus bore all the horrific consequences of sin, completely removing all the blame, pain and shame, destroying it all by his own death, so that none of it could ever come back to hurt the host or any of the alters. Please don’t let familiarity with the following Scripture rob you of its full impact. Read slowly and prayerfully what it says of Jesus, the perfect alter: Isaiah 53:3-6  He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. Jesus took upon himself full punishment for every sin that has ever been committed. He was betrayed, disowned, spat on, stripped naked, made a public spectacle of, shamed, laughed at, degraded, slapped, punched, flayed alive, spiritually cursed (Galatians 3:13), rejected by his people and by God (Mark 15:34), tortured to death for you. He bore your rejection, your heartache, your humiliation. For you, he took the pain, the shame and the blame. God’s plan has always been that we offload our pain on to him, not upon an alter. 1 Peter 5:7  Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. Psalms 55:22  Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you . . . When alters were formed, the host did not understand the implications of this truth, but now it can be explained to alters so that they can be relieved of all their torment by handing over to the Lord their pain, distress, and secrets, letting the Lord of glory, who lovingly volunteered to be humanity’s scapegoat, bear it all on the cross and annihilate it with his own death. Then alters can be free to enjoy life and can help hurting parts of their host, not by personally bearing hurts and secrets, but by encouraging fellow alters to lay all their pains and burdensome secrets upon the crucified Lord and rise in the triumphant new life of our resurrected Lord. The Most Effective Way to Heal Fast All alters desperately need Jesus. They are usually tormented by guilt and shame and feel so worthless that it is not uncommon for some to even be convinced that they are evil. Jesus’ whole reason for coming to earth was to resolve these stupendous needs in a way far beyond what anyone in the universe – and most certainly more than any counsellor – could ever achieve. He, alone, as the utterly Innocent One, took upon himself all our guilt; suffering our full punishment and then cleansing us utterly and granting us his moral perfection, purity, goodness and exalted status with God, the Holy Judge of heaven and earth. Obviously, these truths should be explained more simply and in more detail, but it is imperative that alters be made aware of them. Alters also usually need someone to mother and father them, but because they are now in an adult body this is rarely possible, nor is it usually safe to seek it from anyone other than Jesus for this role as it could expose both alter and host to ridicule or abuse, or to devastation if the mother/father figure needed to leave at some later stage. Only Jesus is utterly safe in giving hugs, tucking alters into bed and so on, and fully understands the best way to help at every stage of healing, and offers the total security of never getting sick or burned out, changing, moving away, or dying. And no one understands any of us like Jesus does, nor has his wisdom. Moreover, Jesus fervently loves alters with total selflessness without any sexual overtones and longs to comfort and heal them. There is a critical blockage to receiving Jesus’ help, however. Because Jesus is not an abuser, he will not force himself upon alters, no matter how much he yearns to help and knows they need him. A further hindrance is that alters often have such distorted ideas about Jesus (confusing him with abusers, for example, or believing lies people have said about him) that they can be terrified of him. So the greatest of all things that anyone can do for alters is to reassure them of how gentle, kind, caring, patient, understanding and comforting Jesus is and how much he wants to take their pain upon himself – bearing their guilt, fear and inner pain as the alter’s Alter – and be their devoted friend and have lots of safe fun with them. (Yes, because play is important to every young alter he longs to play with them in a way that builds them up intellectually and in self-esteem and shows them great respect.) Encourage alters to dialog with Jesus. Assure them that he will respect whatever boundaries they put up and that he will wait for as long as it takes for them to be sure that they are safe with him. Jesus is the perfect counsellor and the ultimate healer. Once they commence talking with Jesus, the door to wondrous things has opened. Jesus loves you so much that he longs for you to let him be as much an integral part of you as any of your alters. Because Jesus is not an abuser, he will never force himself on you but he would love to be invited into the inner circle of your alters. For example, when you have alter meetings, he would love to be there; not to dominate but to listen, share and vote just like them. See also: Fearing Jesus & Healing from Sex Abuse or D.I.D. Thinking of Oneself as Bad/Evil/Unforgivable Seeing yourself as spiritually or morally ruined, evil or unforgivable is a deadly misconception that you dare not tolerate. If allowed to continue unchallenged it will be a source of unspeakable torment, and it will cripple you psychologically, spiritually and, potentially, even morally. It is better to sleep with a rattlesnake in your bed then suppress, tolerate or even entertain this deadly lie. It sucks the life out of a person and can drive one to desperate measures and even suicide. There is no need to let this ruin your life. You must fight this lie with everything you have until it is utterly eradicated from your thinking. This deception is so damaging and needless that I have poured years of agonizing effort into amassing a huge mountain of help for people ensnared by this hideous self-image. To my frustration, however, I cannot read and absorb all that help for you. Forced to leave that responsibility to you, I can only get down on my knees and beg you to keep prayerfully reading all that I have provided on this subject until you find full relief. Even then, I expect you will repeatedly find yourself needing to revisit my writings and read still more of all I have on the subject. As I have written: The enemy of our souls is the master deceiver because that is all he can do. The devil cannot change reality. He cannot change the fact that God loves you with all of his unlimited love and that Christ died for the sins of the entire world, which has to include every sin you have ever committed. So all he can do is mess with your feelings, hoping that you will start to believe them rather than believe in the cleansing and forgiving power of Christ and the love of God. Even if you feel you are beyond God’s forgiveness, that feeling is a lie from hell as serious as claiming that Christ did not die for the sins of the world. Until you realize that false feelings will continue no matter how devoted you are to Christ, you’ll be so vulnerable to false feelings that the tempter will keep piling them on more than ever. None of us ever gets to the point where we are no longer tempted. Unwanted thoughts and feelings would only slightly taper off if the tempter has tried so often without ruffling your feathers that he begins to believe that such an attack will never succeed with you and is a complete waste of his time. If he got mileage out of that approach in the past, he will take a lot of convincing. Satan is a sore loser. Once he finds something that shakes us up he keeps trying it over and over relentlessly until he is absolutely convinced that his tactics will never again work with you. When, finally, he seems to leave, it is only to bide his time for a surprise attack. His persistence is so very unpleasant. The positive side, however, is that this will make you stronger and stronger as you keep resisting his lies. It is tragically common for alters to be riddled with guilt because: 1. Abusers typically try to ease their own guilty conscience by blaming their victims, rather than accept responsibility for their own actions. 2. Abusers falsely accuse their victims (and often reinforce it with cruel punishment) to try to break their victims. 3. Abusers hope that overwhelming their victims with false guilt will undermine their desire to report the abuse to anyone. The more that victims imagine it is all their fault, the less likely they are to report the crime. It usually works because children have a particularly sensitive conscience and usually accept as truth whatever older people tell them. A further source of torment, is that it is not uncommon for abuse victims to feel moments of pleasure. This can end up even more confusing and devastating than pain and can lead to a needlessly tortured conscience. Since abuse victims are no more sinful than the rest of humanity, it is tempting to be content just to explain how they have been cruelly tricked into blaming themselves. It would be tragic to stop there, however, because Jesus has the ultimate remedy not just to false guilt but to the real guilt that, deep down, we know we all have. Through him, even the most sexually perverse person on the planet can be made purer than the most innocent of virgins who has yet to experience Jesus’ cleansing. So I beg you to help each of your alters enjoy this by introducing them to the pages listed at The Ultimate Cure for Guilt . I suggest you start at the first and as you complete reading each page, click the Next Page link at the end of the text. Addictions & D.I.D . Addictions can take many forms, including an addition to over-eating, self-harm, sex, and so on. Beating an addiction is agonizingly difficult for anyone, and even more so when one is battling inner pain, but Dissociative Identity Disorder makes it still more complicated and sometimes impossible. No matter how much the host – the person most often in charge of the body – is determined to break an addiction, it can range from unusually difficult to literally impossible until certain alters are discovered and helped to see the wisdom of ending the habit. There are a number of different ways in which the resolve of even the strongest-willed host can be sabotaged. Let me explain: A person’s alters usually vary in their powers. Most people with D.I.D. have certain alters who have the power to forcibly take over the body and do things that are totally contrary to the host’s wishes. The host might be aware of what is happening (called co-consciousness) but is quite powerless to stop it, or the host might lose consciousness and have no idea what happens when the other alter is in control. In some cases, this could happen on and off for years, with the host having no idea he/she is living a double life. Certain alters have a different power. They can remain completely hidden from the host and, without taking over the body, can force the host to do his/her bidding by giving the host an irresistible urge to do something that the host would normally vehemently not want. This would seem to be demonic, except that such alters can give their heart to Jesus and not only completely cease misusing their powers this way but become genuinely committed to acting godly. On the other extreme, some alters unknowingly sabotage attempts to break addictions simply because they are not even aware of the host’s desire to break a habit. This is yet another reason why it is so important to keep alters informed of one’s plans and of one’s reasons for decisions. There can be all sorts of unexpected reasons for an alter sabotaging a host’s resolve to break an addiction. Here’s one of countless examples: one alter felt compelled to smoke continually, not because of an addiction to nicotine but for self-protection. She believed that at any moment an abuser could suddenly appear and that her only hope of protecting herself was to have a lighted cigarette in her hand to use as a weapon. She believed that holding something like a cigarette lighter would not work because of the slight delay in producing a flame, and that having a lighted cigarette without smoking it would also fail because the cigarette would extinguish. And holding an obvious weapon such as a knife would be socially unacceptable. Once you understand the reasons behind the alter’s actions, you can then work on resolving the matter. For instance, with an alter who is terrified about not having a lit cigarette in her hand, everything would change upon the alter being informed that the abuser has moved on and is no longer a threat to her. (Until they are befriended and told about current reality, most alters are denied such basic information.) Once this is sorted, it is then that the inevitable addiction to nicotine must be fought, just as people without D.I.D. must. For much encouragement and help with this final stage, see: Life’s Mysteries Explained: Why Overcoming Sin Can be Such a Battle Becoming a Winner! Supernatural Power to Break Free  (and the pages it leads to) Feeling Angry (General) If you have times when you feel angry but have no idea why you feel that way, it could be because a part of you (an alter) is so angry that his/her feelings are washing over you. Anger is at times simply a desperate attempt to express deep pain. Part of the abuse that is common for people with D.I.D. to have been subjected is to have not been allowed to express feelings of grief and pain by crying. Abusers often hurt their victims even more if they scream in pain or shed tears. Traumatized people are often desperate to be seen as being tough in the hope that this might cause would-be abusers to back off. To be angry is often thought of as being tough, whereas screaming or shedding tears is often viewed as being weak. This fallacy is sometimes even perpetuated in western Christian circles. In Real Christians Grieve   this fallacy is exploded. So anger could be more an expression of pain and grief, or an attempt to harden oneself against more hurt, or an attempt to protect oneself by scaring off people. Nevertheless, what one feels is often genuine anger at the injustice one has suffered. Such anger is a key part of the healing process and nothing to be ashamed of. Whether the anger is directed toward yourself, or to another part of you, or toward God or another person, or it just seems a random feeling, it is an opportunity to deepen your healing. For most of my life, I had no idea that getting in touch with one’s anger is an essential part of the healing and forgiving journey. I explain my discovery in a fairly short but important webpage: Why to Truly Forgive Hinges on Getting in Touch with Your Anger . I beg you to read it, and the links at the end of the page. Most of us are so anxious to forgive as quickly as possible and not let the sun go down on our anger that we end up merely stuffing anger deeper inside rather than resolving it. We suppose we are taking the godly path when we are actually taking the cowardly path of not admitting to ourselves just how atrociously we have been sinned against. Being disconnected from the anger seething inside us tricks us into thinking the matter has been resolved and this has the unfortunate effect of short-circuiting the entire healing and forgiving process. The exciting thing about making this discovery is that it opens the way to more peace and healing than you have ever known. Getting in touch with one’s anger is so critical that rather than being hard on yourself or criticizing alters for their anger, seek to sympathize with any parts of you that are angry and endeavor to understand why they feel this way. Remember that you are so deeply loved of God that he himself is furious that someone has broken his heart and his laws by hurting you. God offers forgiveness not because sins are minor or hardly matter but because they are so atrocious that none of us could survive God’s wrath unless he forgives. He tolerates sin only because he is giving the sinner a chance to repent before Judgment Day and if God had not extended that tolerance to us over and over and over we would be in hell right now. Anyone who has mistreated you who is not genuinely filled with remorse before Judgment Day for every sin will end up bitterly regretting his/her actions for all eternity. Self-harm is typically an expression of anger that is turned inward. Also see: Do-It-Yourself Healing: Free, Effective Therapy Christian, Be Angry! Hate, and Anger at Injustice Anger at What One has Suffered Suppressing anger is neither Christian nor healing. What is needed is not stifling one’s anger but resolving one’s anger. I have never encountered anyone with Dissociative Identity Disorder who has not suffered horrific injustice that makes even God angry. In fact, God is so angry at what was done to you that the only solution was for him pour out all this wrath upon himself (that’s what the cross is all about) and anyone not truly regretting his/her offenses will regret their actions for all eternity in hell. One way or another, the injustice you have suffered will be avenged. Forgiveness in no way means excusing or minimizing the gravity of an offense. It does not mean blaming oneself for the offender’s actions or saying he/she could not help it or that it was not so bad. Nor does it mean tempting the person to re-offend. The offender might need to be removed from sources of temptation by not being allowed access to children and perhaps even by you having little contact with the offender. Surprisingly, a loving heart might even require one to seek the person’s imprisonment. Forgiveness means letting go of ill will and wanting God’s best for the person. God’s best is that each of us truly regrets our sin and never re-offend. Coping with the Loss of a Counsellor/Support Person There is no side-stepping the fact that losing a counsellor or support person is a devastating blow and I feel deeply for anyone suffering this. Nevertheless, the greatest friend, counsellor and therapist in the universe is still faithfully available to you every moment of every day of every year. I spent years daily helping the woman who ended up being my wife and throughout that time I continually told her that she did not need me. “If God chose to use me, that was fine,” I told her. “But if I messed up or burned out or whatever, God could at any moment send her a replacement. Or he could choose to do all the counselling and support himself, which would be far superior to anything any human could do.” You can even choose a superb Christian therapist/counsellor and still end up deeply hurt, if due to unforeseen circumstances (sickness or whatever) the therapist/counsellor ends up having to leave you in a year or so before you are fully healed. This is quite a possibility because full healing usually takes several years and counsellors are typically so compassionate and needed so much that they are often in danger of over-extending themselves and burning out. This is one of several reasons why it is important to try to avoid emotional attachment and/or dependence upon a specific counsellor, but despite the best intentions it often happens and if the counsellor is forced to leave at a critical time in your healing, it can be quite a blow. . . . If you have lost someone who has been a key person in your healing journey, there are several reasons why it feels excessively devastating: 1. Past abuse has crushed your self-esteem, causing you to feel far more hopeless, incapable and unlovable than you really are. In reality, you are a survivor; someone who has overcome enormous odds and you have Almighty God on your side. 2. Chances are that some event in your past caused you to feel abandoned and losing this special person can trigger those same feelings of abandonment even though this person’s actions might in reality not be nearly as bad as what you suffered in the past and things are not nearly as serious because now you have far more maturity and security. 3. As explained below, you are likely to have bonded in a psychologically unhealthy way with this person and as unpleasant as the breaking of the bond is, it could well end up being a good thing and release you to heal more. Counsellors should keep a little aloof. Since the reasons for this are not immediately obvious, I need to provide a fuller explanation. It is of critical importance to your healing that every part of you bond with, and become dependent upon, Jesus and each other. Unfortunately, even though it can seem to initially help, getting too close to a counsellor, or to anyone else, can detract from this critical bonding or even undermine it. How awful it would be if someone wanted to heal her marriage and took her husband to a counsellor and then her husband fell in love with the counsellor! To heal a marriage the goal must be for a husband and wife to bond with each other, and certainly not with a counsellor. Likewise, for healing of Dissociative Identity Disorder, the goal is for all of a person’s parts to bond with each other, not with a counsellor. You obviously need to bond with any children and/or marriage partner that you have, but not even these relationships must be allowed to detract from your relationship with Jesus and with every part of you. Counsellors should not let little alters call them Dad or Mum or hug them. It is very tempting to break this rule because, in the short term, it seems loving and effective. The serious problem, however, is that it can create too strong a bond that, in addition to the issue already mentioned, would prove devastating if ever the counsellor suffered from burnout, illness, needed to move away, or whatever. Counsellors who make the mistake of getting too close usually have a good heart and, even if they have been doing it for years, are too inexperienced to realize the dangers. Not only is it unprofessional to hug counselees, it is often a sign of lacking the training and understanding that professionals have. Do not presume that the counsellor’s gender will protect you from inappropriate bonding. Young, love-starved alters can bond exceedingly deeply and very quickly to either gender. Moreover, people with D.I.D. have usually been sexually wounded and often have alters who are unsure of their own gender and/or are attracted to the same gender as their body. You might not be currently aware of any alter within you with such vulnerabilities but you probably have alters you have not yet met. People with Dissociative Identity Disorder can quickly develop unhealthily powerful attachments to those who show them kindness, and what initially feels good and speeds their recovery can end up sabotaging their healing. Until they heal, people with D.I.D. might have many casual friends but deep inside they are tortured by extreme loneliness and intense yearning for acceptance, further compounded by the belief that anyone discovering the full truth about their past would reject them. They feel haunted by dark, tormenting secrets that they keep suppressing from everyone (and even from themselves). To release that fearful pressure and isolation by sharing their secrets and find warm acceptance is such a relief that it powerfully bonds a person with whoever the secrets are shared. This, combined with the false but strong deception that virtually no one would accept them if they truly knew them, typically causes people with Dissociative Identity Disorder to feel strongly attached to, and dependent upon, a counsellor or whoever they open up to. To understand the power of the forces at work, remember that parts of the person are literally like little children desperate for a parent’s love and approval, others are like older children yearning for a best friend and still others are like teens pining for romantic love. It is not at all unusual for some to be sexually attracted to someone of the same gender as their own body. And all these different alters can believe they have found in the one counsellor (or friend they have opened up to) all the love and acceptance they have been starved of all their lives. Almost overwhelmingly powerful forces combine, not only on a conscious level, but on a subconscious level. Little children typically think their parents infallible, and starry-eyed lovers are blinded to faults in the person they idolize. People who are hurting are exceptionally sensitive. Alters can take the tiniest thing as a huge personal insult. Bring all these components together and the result is such intense emotions that if you and your alters bond exclusively to one person, then even temporarily losing access to this person can feel not just like being orphaned but being widowed, and like being betrayed by your best friend, all at the one time. What makes these attachments so dangerous is that no one but God can guarantee never to die or get sick or need a break. It also puts enormous pressure on the person who is the object of this dependence. Becoming so crucial to another’s healing and well-being can easily so overload a helper that he or she cracks under the demands placed on him or her. Moreover, it makes the person with Dissociative Identity Disorder dangerously vulnerable to exploitation if the one they depend so highly upon has the slightest moral weakness. It is for very good reason that it is considered not just unwise but highly unethical for a counsellor to have a romantic relationship with someone he or she is helping. Doing so is enough to get professionals deregistered because it is well established that people who are emotionally wounded are highly vulnerable and can so easily end up feeling emotionally attached to anyone offering them support. This is further exasperated by the fact that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder usually need prolonged help. Anyone recovering from Dissociative Identity Disorder needs to be in a position where the most significant person in their recovery could at any moment die or be forced by circumstances to withdraw without it undermining much of the progress made. An alter wrote to me, saying: My host’s husband left her alone with all her outside children to raise all by herself. He told her, “You need too much.” We don’t want you to go away from us like he did because we need too much because that made our host cry and cry and cry and throw up until she almost died. We don't want to make that happen to her again. I replied: Precious Friend, I understand your needs. They are very deep, intense and critically important. I feel for you and long to be used of God to help you have all these needs met. But although humans can facilitate, your needs are so great that it is critical for your well-being and for other people that you don’t look to other people to meet your needs. You actually need someone who is available 24/7 and who can guarantee not to burn out or die. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to more heartbreak – and you have already suffered far too much of that. I will do my best, but the only safe and totally effective way to meet your needs is through Jesus and through each part of you loving, understanding and supporting every other part of you. As you understand, it is not fair on yourself, or on any counsellor, to look to a counsellor as if he were a substitute husband who pledges to be with you till death and gives you priority over everyone else who needs him. I know you don’t think this is what you are asking but it is so easy to slip into this degree of dependence without realizing it. Nor is it safe for you, or fair on any husband, for you to unconsciously make a husband into a substitute mother and father for your every alter, even though your alters desperately need it. This does not mean that your needs cannot be met but they must be met through Jesus and through you loving and supporting each part of you. My role must not be primary, but must be to help you discover how to have your needs met by Jesus and by yourself. Since only God is immortal, infallible and unchangeable, alters need to learn as quickly as possible to keep availing themselves of human help while at the same time shifting their dependence as much as they can from humans to God. For this reason, I have established a DID group, an important goal of which is that members bond to the group rather than to myself or any individual in the group. Other people are an important part of the healing process but alters are best helped by looking primarily to God and their host for nurturing, approval, parenting and so on. I’m always keen to find the good in every tragedy because we have a God who has promised to bring good out of all things (Romans 8:28). That most certainly does not mean that God causes all things but that he loves us too much and is too powerful not to weave anti-God tragedies that break God’s heart into the things that end up blessing us. When it is Unspiritual to Refuse Human Help In the first part of God, Counsellors & Inner Healing Kathy bravely shares her discovery that she had been hindering her healing by trusting counsellors more than she had been trusting God. However, the same webpage tells of another trauma-surviving friend who discovered that she had been guilty of the opposite danger – potentially dishonoring God and missing out on healing by refusing human help. Protector Alters Protector alters courageously do their utmost to protect certain other alters from harm. Often a significant part of this protection is their insistence that alters do not reveal themselves to people and, in some cases, not to the host or some other alters. Unfortunately, protector alters’ perception of harm is typically distorted by the trauma they have suffered and/or is out of date. This means that even though they have the best intentions, they can unknowingly delay healing until they are gently helped to see the value of giving more freedom of expression to the alters they care for. Protector alters might be scared, but they act strong and usually interact with the outside world more than those they seek to protect. As a result, they often win the respect and admiration of other alters, thus causing them to believe a protector’s evaluation of danger. I regard all alters as equally valuable, just as I regard a baby as just as precious as an adult, even though the baby has not yet developed to its full potential. Nevertheless, it is often initially necessary to give priority to helping the protector because until you win his/her confidence you will be denied access to other alters. Seeming to Go Backward or Feeling Worse, Rather than Better I explain below how things seeming to be getting worse is usually an illusion. It is tempting, nevertheless, to give up at such times. So to encourage you to persist with healing, it seems best to start with this quote from my writings: If you suspect you could have Dissociative Identity Disorder, then finding, comforting and supporting your every alter and organizing them into a tightly knit team working in unity toward a common goal should be a higher priority to you than your marriage, your children, your job, your ministry and even your relationship with God. Why? Precisely because each of those other responsibilities is so important and each of them is profoundly impacted by how harmoniously and effectively your alters pull together. What could happen if parts of you are able to take over your body without your knowledge? Ponder the possibilities if those parts are allowed to remain cut off from your knowledge of morality or even from the knowledge that you are married. Consider even the legal implications of a sexualized alter in an adult body who believes she is a young teen getting involved with a boy her own age. Every aspect of your life and future will suffer if you are disorganized inside, and everything you touch will thrive if you are exquisitely functioning within. Progressing on the healing journey involves enjoying significant breakthroughs interspersed by times when you feel you are going backward. The main reason for this is that it is normal for alters who have little awareness of current circumstances to gradually become aware of healing that other alters have been enjoying and to be inspired to reveal themselves so that they, too, can heal. Because they have been largely out of the loop, however, they will know little of what you have learned of D.I.D. and they will need you to start almost from scratch in teaching them things that to you are now basic. Moreover, they will have their own pain, memories and issues that will need healing. Until they heal, when these alters come to the fore, their pain and ignorance might feel so strong that it temporarily overwhelms your own peace and understanding. For example, you might temporarily lose memory of all that you have learned about D.I.D. At such times it will be tempting to wish those parts of you had remained buried, but they will heal and their healing will bring you more peace and wholeness than ever. You can easily reach the point where it seems there are too many alters to cope with, but as one alter heals he/she will become your ally and will help carry the load for you and assist you in comforting, and guiding the healing of other alters. When the going gets tough (and it inevitably will) it is tempting to revert to burying things and living in denial. For more he lp, see: The Healing Benefits of Alters Acting Less Mature Bad Memories, Flashbacks & Nightmares In Positive Confession? Or Living in Denial?   (a webpage I urge you to read in its entirety) I write: Whether it be credit card debt, early signs of cancer or past trauma, problems are never solved by ignoring them. Putting a crisis out of your mind might give you temporary peace but the problem will only worsen and you will inevitably end up wishing you had faced it earlier. If you have a full bladder and you ignore the urge to empty it, the uncomfortable feeling will go away in a while. In time, the discomfort will return, reminding you of the need to take action. You can ignore it again and it will fade away. Keep ignoring it, however, and the pain will keep returning with increasing frequency and intensity until you either take decisive action or you embarrass yourself. Inner wounds caused by past trauma act the same way. The memory and/or associated pain will make its presence felt but you can ignore it and it will go away. Eventually, the memories and/or inner pain will come back and, if ignored, they will keep returning with increasing frequency and intensity, because ignoring a problem merely gives it time to grow worse. Nightmares, flashbacks and/or inner pain are your mind dutifully alerting you to matters you must face before they become even more serious. It is warning you that, despite your attempts to move on, you are still being crippled by past trauma. Most likely, your lack of recovery is because you have left past events languishing in the dark – where things always seem scarier – instead of devoting sufficient effort to prayerfully re-examining them in the reassuring light of God’s truth. For instance, lurking in the murky depths of your consciousness could be the fear that ugly incidents in the past indicate that God abandoned you and that he is not good and trustworthy, or that because of those unfortunate events God sees you as untrustworthy or unforgivable, or that you see yourself that way. If so, these are not merely events in the past; they are fears and lies that hold you back right now and will continue to do so until you identify the lies that haunt you and you explode them with God’s truth. In The Surprising Power of Journaling I write: Dreams and flashbacks can be exceedingly unpleasant, so don’t waste them. They contain valuable information, so record them. The obvious place for this is in your journal. Writing them out and thinking about them when relaxed and fully conscious can help remove some of their terror and might possibly prove beneficial, should the dream recur. The practice also provides a good opportunity to ask alters about the dream or flashback – what does it mean to them, how do they feel about it, and so on. Dreams can sometimes be like flashbacks – accurate memories of past events that you may or may not be aware happened. Alternatively, some dreams are the mind trying to come to terms with things that have been bothering you. Sometimes you were not even conscious that these matters were bothering you. Both of these types of dreams can be valuable in giving you insight into what some of your alters might be coping with. However, some dreams can actually be alters seeking to communicate with you, either by symbolically revealing how they feel or by sharing accurate memories. Additionally, some dreams are alters trying to come to terms with things by imagining themselves in various scenarios. A woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder approached me with this prayer request: I want to heal without recalling all of the memories. I understand exactly where this dear woman is coming from. Bad memories can terrify us. The problem, however, is that it is our refusal to face those memories that causes Dissociative Identity Disorder. Remaining unaware of what part of us is doing (or has done) is at the very heart of D.I.D. With D.I.D., a part of you keeps upsetting information from the rest of you by maintaining exclusive access to part of your brain. The unfortunate downside is that this prevents you from accessing your full intellectual capacity. That’s an exceedingly high price to pay. Moreover, it means that a precious, irreplaceable part of you will continue needlessly reeling in pain because the more mature part of you does not know what the distressing memory is and so cannot resolve it by such things as convincing the part that is hurting that the danger is now over, that the awful thing was the abuser’s fault, and so on. The dire consequences of not remembering are not something this dear woman would want. Whilst emotionally very understandable, her prayer request to be continually cut off from certain memories is like praying, “Lord, I don’t ever want to be separated from my children but I want nothing more to do with them.” Some things are logical impossibilities – absurdities that not even God can do. All guilt, fear and torment associated with memories need to end but this is not the same as losing those memories. What this woman has not yet grasped is that her continued inability to remember unpleasant events would be a tragedy, not a blessing. There are several aspects to this, so it will take a few paragraphs to explain. To run from memories would be to cave into false feelings of shame, fear or inability to cope. It would be to languish in needless defeat. That’s not God’s plan for you. Christ took all your shame, blame and pain, bearing it all in his own naked, tortured body so that you can lift your head high. Through Christ, you are a winner; not one who runs away, but a hero clothed with divine majesty in God’s royal family. Our walk with Christ is about love, adventure and glory. It’s not about escapism, wasting one’s life and trashing opportunities for greatness. It has no partnership with cowardice and the eternal regret it brings. We might think of ourselves as born failures but through Christ we are transformed; born anew for achievement, heroism and honor. The Almighty has astounding faith in what you can do empowered by him. You are called to jettison shame, defeatism and self-indulgence to enter into holy union with the all-powerful Conqueror and, thus endowed, to reign with him in regal splendor: 2 Timothy 2:12  If we suffer, we shall also reign with him . . . (KJV). Romans 8:17   . . . we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. Revelation 3:2  To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. Don’t dare dishonor the Lord of glory by thinking this is beyond you. For Christ, who has invested the last drop of his blood into ensuring your success, impossibilities are playthings. You are one with the Almighty Lord. You are in him and he is in you; melded together in the most thrilling of unions. Furthermore, even if full healing without recovery of memories were neither irrational, nor a needless defeat, it would render much of your past agony a useless waste. You are passionately loved of God; the darling of his heart. He is far too devoted to you to want you to undergo such a tragic loss. Instead, his plan is to transform your past suffering into something that exalts you to eternal heights of glory like nothing else could ever achieve. His goal is not to destroy your memories but to heal your memories so that they no longer distress you and so that your past suffering becomes something uniquely valuable. Remembering your past will not only enable you to better comprehend the love of God but will equip you with the ability to minister with unique experience and conviction to other hurting people. This is the path to eternal glory. Astoundingly, not even the Eternal Son of God, the Infinite Lord of Glory, could be granted the authority to fulfil the exalted role of Ultimate High Priest without his familiarity with, and memory of, his own suffering. Someone who finds study highly taxing devotes year after arduous year to medical studies. Finally. he qualifies as a doctor. Now all the hard work is behind him and at last, he can truly help people, save lives and reap all the benefits of his study. Can you imagine him rendering all his efforts a useless waste by praying to forget everything he has learned? We don’t need more self-proclaimed experts who trample on other people’s feelings; arrogant theorizers exposing themselves to the wrath of God by ignorantly thinking they are helping when they are devastating people who are already writhing in inner agony. The world is filled with – in fact, has had its fill of – such people. What are as rare as diamonds, however, are people who truly understand; people whose advice does not come from a book or vain imagination but from genuine experience; leaders who, like Jesus, can say, “I’ve been there – follow me.” You’ve endured what it takes to qualify as one of those rare and valued people who truly know. Now, with almost all the sweat and tears behind you, will you throw it all away by praying to forget it all? The great apostle Paul seems to have suffered no loss of memory when reeling off the precise number and ways in which he was tortured: 2 Corinthians 11:24-25  Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea . . . In fact, he seems to have seen his suffering as something to boast about: 2 Corinthians 11:23, 12:1  Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. . . . I must go on boasting. . . . You might long to keep suppressed from your consciousness horrific memories and/or awareness of your current emotional reaction (such as fear, pain or shame) associated with those memories. Disturbingly, however, for as long as a part of you has memories and/or emotional reactions that you have no access to, you are unable to access that part of your brain in which those memories and emotions are stored. Of particular concern is that for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, alters (sometimes called personalities or insiders) have not just memories and emotions but other intellectual abilities. So if you have an alter you have little interaction with, those parts of your brain that you have lost access to almost certainly hold not only memories and emotions but valuable skills and intellectual abilities. Healing of Memories Memories are healed not by trying to cause them to disappear but by discovering why you still find them upsetting. Of course, the event was extremely upsetting at the time but what is preventing you from simply feeling relief and joy that it is now all over? A huge factor is likely to be that part of you is believing some lie about the event, such as thinking the event could recur at any moment or that it means you are forever defiled or unlovable or useless or that God does not care what happens to you. Find out what the lie or lies are and then prayerfully begin addressing them until God’s truth sets you free. It is particularly beneficial to ask God to show you his perspective on this event. Why is Healing so Important? Healing from Dissociative Identity Disorder is a very long process demanding much courage and effort. But there are many profound reasons why we need to persist with it and there are astounding benefits from doing so. No one, no matter how capable, can be sure of making smart and safe decisions without knowing all the relevant facts. Whether you realize it or not, there are facts that will remain hidden from you unless you connect with every alter that is currently hidden inside you. No one knows how vital these facts are to your welfare until all your alters reveal themselves and fully share all they know. I have met very many people who have ended up exceedingly sorry they had not tried harder and much earlier to get to know their every alter. They could have been spared much heartache. It is with great reluctance that I alert you to the magnitude of the very real dangers of not connecting with all your alters. You have more than enough stress without me adding to it, but it would be irresponsible of me not to warn you of what could be at stake. Picture several infants and young children who have access to guns they do not know are loaded. You are unable to physically touch the children or the guns. So you cannot prevent them from pointing the guns at family members and strangers and playing with the trigger. All you can do is coax and train them to leave the guns alone. It is no exaggeration to say it is equally as dangerous not to do everything you can to discover and interact with every one of your alters. It is not at all that your alters are evil; they simply lack your understanding. Now that you know this, however, to remain wilfully ignorant and not seek out every last one of your alters is irresponsible and would render you accountable for any disasters that result. Alters are ordinary people (frequently little children) cut off from vital information and subjected to mind-numbingly horrific situations. Think of normal little children who have been fed lies and are beside themselves with pain, terror, confusion and hopelessness. These darlings have not only been cut off from almost all that you know about life and God but have been tricked, groomed, manipulated and even brainwashed by someone terrifyingly evil. Despite having surprisingly good intentions, such confused and traumatized alters could unwittingly cause you enormous distress. Until connections with alters are made, D.I.D. can, for some people, render battling certain temptations almost impossibly difficult. Once alters receive the benefits of your insights, however, having Dissociative Identity Disorder suddenly becomes an asset in fighting temptation – an advantage that average people can only dream about. I even know of several devout women, each of whom had no idea she was having an affair or even more physically dangerous sexual liaisons for years, until eventually discovering the shattering truth. Similar situations can involve child abuse, squandering money, chemical abuse, self-harm, overeating and bulimia. Some devout Christians have alters they know nothing about who literally worship Satan or befriend demons. Some alters can be committed to ensuring a person fails at everything he or she attempts. When alters are befriended, however, Dissociative Identity Disorder not only ceases to be a disadvantage, it becomes a significant spiritual advantage. It is hard to conceive of a more tortured existence than that of an alter living in an adult body and yet trapped in the years of childhood. When treated kindly and wisely, alters can find total relief, but unless they receive the attention and comfort they deserve, their pain will never end this side of the grave. Moreover, unless people with alters learn how to avoid making things worse, they will almost inevitably create still more sources of suffering for their already severely traumatized alters. People with Dissociative Identity Disorder can quickly develop unhealthily powerful attachments to those who show them kindness, and what initially feels good and speeds their recovery can end up sabotaging their healing. Until they heal, people with D.I.D. might have many casual friends but deep inside they are tortured by extreme loneliness and intense yearning for acceptance, further compounded by the belief that anyone discovering the full truth about their past would reject them. They feel haunted by dark, tormenting secrets that they keep suppressing from everyone (and even from themselves). To release that fearful pressure and isolation by sharing their secrets and find warm acceptance is such a relief that it powerfully bonds a person with whoever the secrets are shared. This, combined with the false but strong deception that virtually no one would accept them if they truly knew them, typically causes people with Dissociative Identity Disorder to feel strongly attached to, and dependent upon, a counsellor or whoever they open up to. To understand the power of the forces at work, remember that parts of the person are literally like little children desperate for a parent’s love and approval, others are like older children yearning for a best friend and still others are like teens pining for romantic love. It is not at all unusual for some to be sexually attracted to someone of the same gender as their own body. And all these different alters can believe they have found in the one counsellor (or friend they have opened up to) all the love and acceptance they have been starved of all their lives. Almost overwhelmingly powerful forces combine, not only on a conscious level, but on a subconscious level. Little children typically think their parents infallible, and starry-eyed lovers are blinded to faults in the person they idolize. People who are hurting are exceptionally sensitive. Alters can take the tiniest thing as a huge personal insult. Bring all these components together and the result is such intense emotions that if you and your alters bond exclusively to one person, then even temporarily losing access to this person can feel not just like being orphaned but being widowed, and like being betrayed by your best friend, all at the one time. What makes these attachments so dangerous is that no one but God can guarantee never to die or get sick or need a break. It also puts enormous pressure on the person who is the object of this dependence. Becoming so crucial to another’s healing and well-being can easily so overload a helper that he or she cracks under the demands placed on him or her. Moreover, it makes the person with Dissociative Identity Disorder dangerously vulnerable to exploitation if the one they depend so highly upon has the slightest moral weakness. It is for very good reason that it is considered not just unwise but highly unethical for a counsellor to have a romantic relationship with someone he or she is helping. Doing so is enough to get professionals deregistered because it is well established that people who are emotionally wounded are highly vulnerable and can so easily end up feeling emotionally attached to anyone offering them support. This is further exasperated by the fact that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder usually need prolonged help. Anyone recovering from Dissociative Identity Disorder needs to be in a position where the most significant person in their recovery could at any moment die or be forced by circumstances to withdraw without it undermining much of the progress made. An alter wrote to me, saying: My host’s husband left her alone with all her outside children to raise all by herself. He told her, “You need too much.” We don’t want you to go away from us like he did because we need too much because that made our host cry and cry and cry and throw up until she almost died. We don't want to make that happen to her again. I replied: Precious Friend, I understand your needs. They are very deep, intense and critically important. I feel for you and long to be used of God to help you have all these needs met. But although humans can facilitate, your needs are so great that it is critical for your well-being and for other people that you don’t look to other people to meet your needs. You actually need someone who is available 24/7 and who can guarantee not to burn out or die. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to more heartbreak – and you have already suffered far too much of that. I will do my best, but the only safe and totally effective way to meet your needs is through Jesus and through each part of you loving, understanding and supporting every other part of you. As you understand, it is not fair on yourself, or on any counsellor, to look to a counsellor as if he were a substitute husband who pledges to be with you till death and gives you priority over everyone else who needs him. I know you don’t think this is what you are asking but it is so easy to slip into this degree of dependence without realizing it. Nor is it safe for you, or fair on any husband, for you to unconsciously make a husband into a substitute mother and father for your every alter, even though your alters desperately need it. This does not mean that your needs cannot be met but they must be met through Jesus and through you loving and supporting each part of you. My role must not be primary, but must be to help you discover how to have your needs met by Jesus and by yourself. Since only God is immortal, infallible and unchangeable, alters need to learn as quickly as possible to keep availing themselves of human help while at the same time shifting their dependence as much as they can from humans to God. For this reason, I have established a DID group, an important goal of which is that members bond to the group rather than to myself or any individual in the group. Other people are an important part of the healing process but alters are best helped by looking primarily to God and their host for nurturing, approval, parenting and so on. I’m always keen to find the good in every tragedy because we have a God who has promised to bring good out of all things (Romans 8:28). That most certainly does not mean that God causes all things but that he loves us too much and is too powerful not to weave anti-God tragedies that break God’s heart into the things that end up blessing us. Seeming to Go Backward or Feeling Worse, Rather than Better   I explain below how things seeming to be getting worse is usually an illusion. It is tempting, nevertheless, to give up at such times. So to encourage you to persist with healing, it seems best to start with this quote from my writings:   If you suspect you could have Dissociative Identity Disorder, then finding, comforting and supporting your every alter and organizing them into a tightly knit team working in unity toward a common goal should be a higher priority to you than your marriage, your children, your job, your ministry and even your relationship with God. Why? Precisely because each of those other responsibilities is so important and each of them is profoundly impacted by how harmoniously and effectively your alters pull together. What could happen if parts of you are able to take over your body without your knowledge? Ponder the possibilities if those parts are allowed to remain cut off from your knowledge of morality or even from the knowledge that you are married. Consider even the legal implications of a sexualized alter in an adult body who believes she is a young teen getting involved with a boy her own age.   Every aspect of your life and future will suffer if you are disorganized inside, and everything you touch will thrive if you are exquisitely functioning within.   Progressing on the healing journey involves enjoying significant breakthroughs interspersed by times when you feel you are going backward. The main reason for this is that it is normal for alters who have little awareness of current circumstances to gradually become aware of healing that other alters have been enjoying and to be inspired to reveal themselves so that they, too, can heal. Because they have been largely out of the loop, however, they will know little of what you have learned of D.I.D. and they will need you to start almost from scratch in teaching them things that to you are now basic. Moreover, they will have their own pain, memories and issues that will need healing.   Until they heal, when these alters come to the fore, their pain and ignorance might feel so strong that it temporarily overwhelms your own peace and understanding. For example, you might temporarily lose memory of all that you have learned about D.I.D. At such times it will be tempting to wish those parts of you had remained buried, but they will heal and their healing will bring you more peace and wholeness than ever.   You can easily reach the point where it seems there are too many alters to cope with, but as one alter heals he/she will become your ally and will help carry the load for you and assist you in comforting, and guiding the healing of other alters.   When the going gets tough (and it inevitably will) it is tempting to revert to burying things and living in denial. For more help, see: The Healing Benefits of Alters Acting Less Mature How to Heal For healing from Sex Abuse, see Comfort, Understanding & Healing for Abuse Survivors . Triggers – When Something Upsets you More than One would Expect If a particular sound, sight, smell, place or person makes you feel uneasy or even alarmed every time you are exposed to it, the thing causing that response is often called a trigger. It is because there is a superficial similarity between the trigger and something that was present when you had an unpleasant past experience. A trigger might cause a vague feeling or something much more vivid – perhaps even a flashback or body memory – or it might cause an alter to suddenly appear or disappear. Regardless of whether it causes a memory to consciously surface, however, it alerts you to the fact that something from your past needs healing. A trigger occurs when there is something in a situation that bears a superficial similarity to past trauma and suddenly it is as if one were back in the traumatic situation. A popularly known example is a soldier returning to the safety of home, ducking for cover at the sound of a car backfiring. What people find triggering differs according to the exact nature of their past trauma and things their mind associates with that upsetting event. For one person it might, for instance, be someone using the same aftershave as a former abuser. The connection only has to be vague. For someone afraid of snakes, for example, an eel could trigger a panic attack. When one is triggered, taking note of one’s surroundings is often helpful if it helps remind oneself that one is in the second decade of the twenty-first century and not back when the abuse originally happened, or if it confirms that the geographical location is different to that when the trauma took place. Looking in a mirror might significantly help by reminding you that you are an adult and not the helpless child you were when the original trauma happened. When a trigger occurs, try to take some deep, slow breaths and calm yourself. Though unpleasant, triggers can cause forgotten memories to surface, and so end up assisting healing. Being triggered by something that did not previously upset one might even indicate that a new alter has surfaced and getting to know and reassure that alter will greatly promote healing. Like the conscious surfacing of unpleasant memories, triggers are unpleasant but can open the way to further advancement on the healing journey, especially if you start investigating the cause of the trigger. Think and pray and journal and ask alters about it until you learn what event in your past caused the trigger. Then commence work on healing that memory. The following is a general explanation about the formation of triggers. I suffered migraines as a teen and was prescribed pills to take at the onset of migraines. The pills looked remarkably like M&M; candy. I had to chew it and doing so would instantly make me feel like vomiting. They had no positive effect on the migraines, so I soon stopped taking them. From then on, however, if I ever saw M&Ms; – and especially if I thought of eating one – I would feel nauseous. Through slowly deliberately exposing myself to them I eventually trained myself not to have that reaction, but until then, M&Ms; were a trigger for me. My mind told me that M&Ms; were chemically very different from the medication but the superficial similarity between the two provoked an uncontrollable reaction within me as if I were back in time with an on-coming migraine, reacting to that medication. Everyone – even animals – can have peculiar triggers that reflect past experiences. You might have heard of Pavlov’s dogs. Knowing that dogs salivate when eating, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist conducted an experiment in which a bell sounded every time the dogs were about to be fed. Before long, the connection between the bell and eating grew so strong in the dogs’ brains that when the bell sounded, the dogs would salivate even if there were no food. Healing from Inner Pain Abusers inevitably tell their victims all sorts of hurtful, deeply damaging things when victims are too young to recognize them as lies. Older alters can greatly help by finding out what lies are upsetting each younger alter and gently helping each one see through whatever lies are causing problems. For help with this, see Exposing Lies that Abusers Tell . Another very upsetting cause of distress stems from it being common for alters to have been deeply buried for years and so have little awareness of the passage of time or changing circumstances since they were abused. Again, a counsellor, or more experienced alter, can help by checking for this and informing alters of all the good things that have happened since they were last regularly in touch with the outside world. Examples are that they are safer because the body is now older, stronger and more able to defend the alters, that the abuser no longer has access to them, and so on. Simply sharing pleasant memories the alters missed out on can help dispel the pessimism and defeatism that comes from thinking that only bad things ever happen to them. Trials, Discouragement When Things Get Tough  and keep following the main link at the end of each page. Help When You Feel You’ve Failed Hope When There Seems No Hope The Positive Benefits of D.I.D.: Does Multiple Personality Disorder Create a Superior Brain? Negativity – Little Hope for a Bright Future It is most important that alters share bad memories with each other but it is also critical to healing that they share good memories, achievements and good things that have happened in their lives. Moreover, they need to keep reminding themselves, and each other, of these good things. Unless alters tell each other about the good things they have experienced, some alters will never know. Here’s a dramatic example of the distressing implications of being kept ignorant about good things: An alter believed that a critical part of his body had been permanently severed. He believed it had been chopped off because his father had grabbed an axe and angrily said he would chop it off. Just before the axe fell, the terrified alter fled inside and another alter took over. It turned out that the threat was never carried out but the alter was sure that it would happen and never knew the good news until very many years later when another alter finally told him. Even sharing mildly good things is important because without it alters are left with a twisted view of their past and predict their future on the basis of this misinformation. It will seem to them that perhaps 98% of their lives has been continual horrors when it was really perhaps only 1%. This is such an important subject that I have made it into a separate webpage: There’s Hope! A Sane  Guide to Finding Hope When There is No Hope . Please read it. For still more help in overcoming a damagingly negative view of one’s future, see: Nothing to Live For God’s Anti-Depressant God isn’t Fair? When Abilities or Alters Vanish: When Alters Die, Disappear or Go Missing Alters can go deep into hiding or they can go to be with God for a while but alters cannot die without the entire person also dying. Nevertheless, just as some alters convince themselves that they are not human, some can convince themselves that they are dead, even though they are aware that they are still thinking. They might think it is safer or less painful to be dead (and so be afraid to admit to themselves that they are alive) or mistakenly think their abuser killed them. Helping those who prefer to think they are dead is similar to helping those who think they are the opposite sex or less than human. Basically, it is helping them realize that it is now safe to be who they really are. Alters could see another alter kill himself/herself and that alter might never have been seen since. Since alters cannot die while the body is still alive, this is not as alarming as it seems. What actually happened was that the alter suddenly felt so unable to cope that he/she went deep into hiding, thus forcing another alter to take his/her place. At the time, however, it can be quite traumatic for two reasons: 1.  The situation that caused the alter to disappear or ‘die’ must itself have been very distressing. 2.  Alters who vanish leave the other alters not only without their companionship and protection but without all the knowledge and skills they had accumulated. If you suddenly lose abilities it is probably because an alter who has that knowledge or skill has withdrawn. A likely cause is that the alter feels overwhelmed due to physical, mental or emotional exhaustion, or something happened to frighten the alter. (Often this is just because an event has a superficial similarity to a past trauma, such as meeting someone who uses the same cologne as a previous abuser.) When it is an alter who is usually out, however, the loss is likely to be very disconcerting because much valuable information is stored exclusively with the alter. (For this reason, it is important to encourage alters to share their skills and information and train up each other.) The positive side, however, is that it forces other alters to assume greater responsibility. This can help them develop and gain confidence and sometimes it can give you the opportunity to meet (and hence help) alters you have never met before. Encourage alters (especially new ones) to understand that they are very important and needed. Keep reminding yourselves of the motto, “Stronger together.” One cannot know how long an alter will remain out of contact. Often it is not long. A way to shorten the time is every now and then say out loud (in case the alter happens to be listening) that you need the alter and give reasons why it is safe for the alter to be out. Simply being kind and supportive to the alters who are out might entice the alter out as he or she sees that alters who talk to you are well treated. Recently surfaced alters are easily overwhelmed because so much in the way of current events and circumstances is new and unexpected. Often they just withdraw in order to think things through and soon come out again. Sometimes people mistake alters going into hiding with integration but integration does not mean losing contact with one’s alters. A Safe Internal Haven for Alters to Retreat to Young alters need a safe place where they can play and act like children, and develop as a result, without outside people thinking them weird. Alters – even hosts – can sometimes temporarily become too overwhelmed by external events to be able to remain in contact with the outside world. It is far from ideal for any alter to withdraw but sometimes alters can feel unable to stay out and so retreat for a while in order to recover. If they just disappear, some alters are likely to feel alarmed as to what happened to the alter and those who are forced to take over in the alter’s absence are likely to flounder in the outside world without critically-needed information known only to the alter who has disappeared. This loss of information might, for example, cause them to lose their job or leave them without necessary money because they are unable to access their bank account. Furthermore, the alter who has gone will have no way of knowing when it is safe to come out again. These serious problems with withdrawing can be resolved by using one’s powerful imagination to create a safe, beautiful haven inside that is spacious and peaceful and filled with fun things to do. You can create your own variations but I’ll provide an example of how it might work. What makes this haven safe is that on the outside it is a fortress that can be entered only by alters who know the exact password and whose fingerprint (or whatever) is recognized by the uncrackable security system. Inside it is light and spacious. It could have trees, meadows, waterfalls, flowers, birds and cute animals to play with or ride as well as playground equipment for little alters. It is a place where alters can chat with each other and with Jesus and have fun together. Within this wonderful place are still more fortresses. These are retreats. Each alter has one. On the outside they look just like a row of solid iron doors, each of which has the name of a different alter, indicating to whom it belongs, and below that is a sign that either says Vacant  or Occupied . The impenetrable door will open only to the voice and fingerprint of the alter whose name is on the outside. On the inside it is beautiful and amazingly spacious, decked out with whatever the alter decides will make him/her the most relaxed and comfortable. Whenever the owner enters, the Vacant  sign on the door changes to Occupied . That way, if ever an alter retreats, alters who are allowed in the Safe Haven can go to the doors, see the one with the alter’s name on it, and if it says Occupied  they will know where the alter is, although they will not be able to go inside. Everyone knows that an alter inside his/her retreat needs to be left alone until he/she is ready to come out. On the solid door, however, is an intercom that allows alters to speak to the one inside. The one inside cannot switch off the intercom, but alters respect the desire of the one inside to be left alone and they keep communication to a minimum. They use the intercom primarily just to reassure the alter and also to inform him/her as to when things in the external world have become safer. When absolutely necessary, alters will also use the intercom to seek critically-needed information that is required for those left in charge to perform important tasks in the outside world. Therapist/Counsellor/Human Support Don’t settle for anyone less than the best. Jesus is by far the greatest friend, counsellor and healer anyone could ever have. You need no one else. Often, however, like Naaman’s healing being dependent upon humbling himself by washing seven times in the dirty Jordan (2 Kings 5:10-14), God asks us to humble ourselves by seeking human help. The Lord likes involving his loved ones in his work, not because he needs them, but simply because he delights in giving them the honor. On the other hand, we must never dethrone God and put a human in his place. It is dangerously easy to become as dependent upon a human as a junkie is on heroin. This not only dishonors God, it degrades us; turning us into leeches sucking the life out of people and eroding our relationship with the most beautiful Person in the universe. We need to counter this tendency by continually reminding ourselves that our only need is God, not people. At any moment, God can raise up a replacement for any person or take over and do it all himself. Even without any formal training, friends and loved ones are capable of being an immense support, if they are gentle, non-judgmental and accepting of D.I.D. I urge them to read How to Comfort the Hurting and the pages it leads to. Christian counsellors with little knowledge of D.I.D. can also be of great value, provided they are willing to learn and they do not seek to undermine your belief that you have D.I.D. or mistake alters for demons. Secular counsellors can be of some value. Your choice of counsellor, however, and even who you choose to let know that you have D.I.D.  is critically important; demanding much wisdom and prayer.   Trust Issues   To quote from Fear: Help & Cure   One of the greatest ways to honor God is to trust him and it is something we need to continually work on. Thankfully, however, our wonderful Lord understands better than we do that trusting him is so much harder for those whose trust has been violated by key people in their life – especially if it happened repeatedly during their tender, most impressionable years.   Simply having more fear or doubt than other Christians you know is not an acceptable reason for despising oneself. The devil is the Christian’s accuser (Revelation 12:10). Trying to make you feel bad about yourself is part of his job description. So let’s not put him out of a job by doing it for him.   Dependency – Too Attached to Someone It is not emotionally healthy for anyone to have to keep secrets from everyone. We all need good friends, even though we should first thoroughly check out who is safe to share confidences with .   However, having been cruelly isolated and starved of any kindness makes many alters desperate to be understood, cared for, and protected. This makes them highly vulnerable to forming abnormally strong attachments to anyone who seems to offer compassion. It might, for instance, be a kind, motherly person, a counsellor, or a pastor. Little alters are often so desperate for someone acting like a proper father or mother – rather than the cold or even abusive parents they had while growing up – that they are keen to treat as a mother or father almost anyone who shows them basic kindness.   The danger of these emotional pressures is that it opens alters up to exploitation by anyone who has less than the highest standards. Some alters have been taught by their abusers that love equals sex or that sex is the only way they can ever get even a crude, inadequate substitute for love. Pressured by their desperate emotional needs and the training their abusers forced on them, some alters are even seductive. The heart-rending desperation of these love-starved alters is proof of the truth of Proverbs 27:7 that to the hungry even what is bitter seems sweet. Unfortunately, even if the host is strongly heterosexual or opposed to any thought of sex, that does not, of itself, mean that none of his/her alters is capable of forming sexual attachments with someone, even if that person is the same gender. Even if the host is going to marry someone, it is not good for little alters to regard that person as a father or mother, as it could give the relationship incestuous overtones.   Besides the possibility of a confused alter being seductive, predators are skilled at detecting vulnerable people who have been subjected to these pressures in the past and they actively seek out such people with a view to exploiting them sexually.   It is extremely hard to be certain that someone is totally safe. Suppose, however, that you were to form a strong attachment with an exceptionally good, safe person: it will still almost certainly weaken the bond alters should be forming with each other and with Jesus. In order to heal from one’s fracturedness, one’s alters need to bond with oneself and one’s other alters. Some alters will end up skilled at mothering little alters and it will be a satisfying relationship both for those giving the care and those receiving it. More importantly, it will forge a strong connection between those parts of the person engaging in this and the result will do much to repair the person’s fracturedness. In addition, in order to heal from their deep emotional and spiritual wounds, alters need to bond with Jesus. He alone is the perfect Father. Few people are as safe for the little alters of an adult to play with as Jesus and no one understands them as well as he does.   Another serious issue with strong attachments is that the more intense the relationship, the more likely it is that the carer will burn out. Someone’s highest intentions are not enough to keep a person from burning out, nor from his/her situation changing so that the relationship needs to change. A major consideration is that someone with D.I.D. is likely to be needy for years longer than the carer expects and that any change in the relationship can be devastating to someone with D.I.D.   Someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder wrote to me saying a leader in her church told her that he could treat her as a father. She was a mature, independent person. Fathering such a person takes little time and effort, and I’m sure that was what he envisioned. Parenting a child, however, is an enormously time-consuming, lifelong commitment. This is not what he was offering but it would be taken that way by young alters and so would almost certainly end in heartbreak if they went down that path.   Professional therapists are trained to maintain an emotional distance from their clients (and often will not, for example, hug them) and they have codes to ensure this is maintained. It can seem a little cold but there are good, time-proven reasons for this. I long for you not to be one of the many who end up learning the hard way the importance of applying this to other non-marital relationships as well.   It is normal for abuse survivors to find it difficult to trust anyone. Unfortunately, this further intensifies the tendency to form strong bonds, once trust is gained. Rather than having less intense relationships with several people, when it comes to people they are willing to open up to, it tends to be all or nothing, with the result that the needy person feels highly dependent upon one person. This is a concern, given the fact that anyone with D.I.D. is likely to be needy for many years and not even the best carers can guarantee never to die, get sick, burn out or eventually need to move on. Jesus, on the other hand, has no such limitations. When Alters Can’t Speak   Alters who are unable to talk, are likely to understand at least some of what you say and the mere act of talking to them could help them learn to speak. Chances are that you can also communicate with each other through thoughts, mental images and/or feelings. Additionally, you can communicate through gifts, facial expressions, hugs and so on. (You can hug or hold an alter’s hand by strongly visualizing doing it, but be cautious at first in case the alter fears physical contact.) Sometimes you might even be able to communicate by writing notes to each other.   We can comfort babies who are too young to talk by holding them, singing to them, safely playing with them, feeding them and so on. You can use the same methods with alters who were formed as babies and have never had the chance to grow. Just as babies grow and learn to speak, however, so will baby alters, once you begin interacting with them, and this can happen quicker than with real babies..   Sometimes it is not because of their age that alters do not speak but because their abusers made them very timid. Alters might, for example, have a history of being told to shut up or being misunderstood when they tried to communicate and being punished accordingly. Another possibility is that not speaking is consistent with their self-image, such as thinking of themselves as being non-human.   Another possible reason for alters not speaking is that they have been threatened by their abusers never to speak about their abuse and they have not only believed the threats but have taken them to the extreme of not talking at all. Obviously, in this case, they need repeated assurance that it is safe to talk with you and that old threats cannot materialize.   Yet another possibility is that another alter might be threatening this alter into silence. Usually, this is because the alter issuing the gag order still believes threats issued by the abuser if alters talk. Alternatively, the alter doing the silencing might think life will get too complicated if another alter reveals himself/herself. In these cases, the answer lies not in trying to get the silenced alter to disobey the other alter (and so making that alter mad at you) but in helping the alter doing the silencing to understand that it is safe for other alters to talk with you. This might also encourage the alter to let other alters you are unaware of to reveal themselves. When  Some  Alters Seem to have a Physical Disability   It is possible for some alters to seem to have a physical disability, when the same person’s other alters do not. It can be as mild as an alter who needs reading glasses or walks with a limp or is tone deaf to when another does not, or as severe as one alter being totally blind or deaf.     There are different possible reasons for this. 1.      A disability that you grew out of   For example, a friend of mine has an alter formed as an adult who is not surefooted and often falls when walking on uneven surfaces. Her younger alters are much more confident and capable walking on rugged terrain. Ironically, however, one of the alters more capable at walking, walks with a limp. Today this person still has a lump on her knee but it causes her no inconvenience. It is due to a painful condition that sometimes occurs in children but ceases to be a problem as they grow up (Osgood–Schlatter disease). Obviously, the alter who limps was formed at the time in the person’s life when the disease was active and she has vivid memories of the pain and of how she used to have to walk to minimize that pain.   I am reminded of a dog I once read about. As a pup one of its legs was caught in the steel jaws of a rabbit trap. The dog fully recovered but whenever the dog was frightened it would revert to limping for a little while. This is not exactly the same as the situation described above but it is another possible variation.   2.      An alter who feels safer with a disability   In Alters Thinking They’re the Opposite Sex it is explained that it is common for alters to convince themselves that they are the opposite sex and that a common cause is that they believe that if they were the opposite sex they would be treated better and perhaps no longer subjected to sexual abuse. What motivates a distorted self-image is that alters are desperate to give themselves some respite from the constant terror of believing they will again be abused. Some alters even convince themselves they are dogs because their observations tell them that dogs are better treated than they are. It is quite possible that some observation might lead an alter to believe he/she would be safer and/or better treated if he/she had a disability. For example, one person with D.I.D. has an alter who is apparently deaf. Certain family members suffered deafness. Perhaps one or more of those in the family who were deaf had been treated more kindly than the alter.   A variation on this is if a deaf person were the abuser and the alter is an Introject Alter i.e. an alter who believes he/she is the abuser. (This is similar in that it is safer to be the abuser than to be the victim.)   Another possibility is an alter who discovered that if he/she displayed certain symptoms, such as a seizure, he/she would be hospitalized or for some other reason be granted time-out from abuse.   Yet another possibility is an alter who yearns to not hear abuse or see abuse and so convinces himself/herself that he/she cannot hear or see.   In such cases, the first step is to help the alter realize that he/she is now safe, and so there are now no advantages in having a disability. 3. Conversion Disorder   According to Wikipedia, “A conversion disorder causes patients to suffer from neurological symptoms, such as numbness, blindness, paralysis, or fits without a definable organic cause. It is thought that symptoms arise in response to stressful situations affecting a patient's mental health. . . . The term ‘conversion’ has its origins in Freud’s doctrine that anxiety is ‘converted’ into physical symptoms”. Since (until they begin to heal) some alters keep certain stresses exclusively to themselves and/or cope with trauma in an individual way, it would not be surprising if some alters suffer from Conversion Disorder, whereas others are quite free from it.   4. The Complicated Causes of Sickness   Alters vary as to how in touch they are with what their current physical body is feeling.   There is more to illness than the mere exposure to germs. One dramatic demonstration of this is found in the tragic lives of Siamese twins, Masha and Dasha, who were born in 1950 and taken from their mother from birth (she was told they had died) and subjected to years of experiments by Soviet medical authorities. They shared the one bladder, lower intestine and reproductive system. Of their three legs, two were functional. Masha controlled one. Dasha controlled the other. Yet though they shared organs and the same disease-carrying blood, they contracted illnesses separately. When one was stricken with measles, for instance, the other was perfectly well. One’s mind plays a significant role in physical illness.   If I Tell Anyone About What Happened to Me, I’ll Never Be Believed Now that you live in a more mature body, you are more likely to be regarded as a credible witness. What you suffered might be so rare that average people don’t understand it, and should not be trusted with such information without first thoroughly checking out their attitude to such things without hinting that it applies to you. Nevertheless, there are people who have suffered similar things to what happened to you and they and their counsellors would believe you. God knows exactly what happened and in the life to come, if not before, all will be revealed.   Jennifer Haynes’ alters were not only accepted in court as alters, they testified in court and secured the conviction of their abuser, who received a very heavy sentence.   Nevertheless, there are risks in telling people that you have D.I.D. “Useless” Alters   Alters can seem too young or too traumatized or dysfunctional or too opposed to you to be anything but a burden. Nevertheless, alters can heal and grow and change dramatically and sometimes remarkably quickly.   The more annoying or useless an alter seems, the more astounded you will be when you see what an invaluable friend and magnificent person the alter becomes as he/she heals and reaches his/her stupendous, but once-hidden, potential.   Alters are like your children who might start off as helpless, crying babies who take up your time and ruin your sleep but when they grow up you will be forever proud of them. They will grow into highly capable, talented and loyal friends who will faithfully serve you and enrich your life beyond your fondest hopes. When the transformation is complete you will discover that every alter is priceless and irreplaceable. You would not part with any of them if offered millions of dollars.   God wants you to love others as you love yourself (Mark 12:31-34; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8); doing for them what we wish they would do for us (Matthew 7:12). How would you like to be spurned and considered of no value or treated as if you were not even human or a liar? Haven’t you already received far too much such treatment in your life? Isn’t it time to break that cycle?   How do you wish you had been treated as you were growing up? Treat your alters like that.   “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38). As you do it for them, you will find you are doing it for yourself because they are an inseparable part of you.   You were robbed of so much love and kindness and fun and enjoyment of God in your formative years. By giving your alters your loving attention and helping them enjoy the childish fun and other things you missed out on, you are restoring yourself and filling a huge void within you.   You are called to be like Jesus and follow his example. He is the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind and even though it’s the end of a tiring day, he trudges up and down hills, looking everywhere for a single sheep who did not have the sense to stay with the rest of the flock. And when he finds the sheep, he does not reprimand it; he rejoices. Moreover, he takes that heavy, nuisance of a sheep, and lifts it up, putting it on his shoulders and lugs it all the way back to the other sheep; delighted that he has found the one that had been lost (Luke 15:4-6). That’s how God longs for you to treat your alters.   Consider the parable of the talents. Our eternal loss or endless reward hinges on how much we have ignored or developed whatever has been entrusted into our care (Matthew 25:15-30). You might think you have higher obligations to your work, your family, and so on, than to your alters. The more you help your alters, however, the more effectively you will be able to nurture your family and the more you will thrive in your employment. Loss of Time   An alter could take over your body and when you next become aware of things, hours or even days could have passed. Sometimes this is because something happened that alarmed you and rather than face it you uncontrollably withdrew from conscious interaction with the world; forcing other parts of you to take over. Often this is not because of any real danger but because something happened that caused you to panic because it bore some superficial similarity to a traumatic experience you once suffered.   Another possible reason for losing time is simply because an alter took over – perhaps because he/she believed she could better handle that particular situation or perhaps simply because he/she wanted “body-time”.   Sickness – Extra Complications When You Have D.I.D.   D.I.D. adds many complications to being physically ill, including:   You could have alters who are terrified of doctors and/or hospitals.   You could switch to alters who are so disconnected that they are unable to feel your physical pain or are unaware of doctor’s instructions and so they could unknowingly worsen injuries or illnesses you are recovering from. This is one of many reasons why it is important to keep all of your alters as informed as possible about current events and to help them realize that all of you share the same body, which makes it critical for them to be cautious and treat the body well even when they feel no pain, etc.   Being sick can be a terrifying thing to traumatized alters because it means you are temporarily less strong and able to defend yourself. Some could even be determined to hide their temporary vulnerability by pushing themselves harder than ever. These alters need to be continually reassured that they are safe.   At any time you could switch to an alter who is unaware that you have already taken your medication and so can overdose. This makes it important to keep a written record of how much medication has been taken and when. Pill boxes organized by time or days would be very helpful, although it might be good to keep a note next to it as to what day it is.   Some alters can believe that they deserve to be punished and so sabotage healing as a form of Self-Harm. For help with this, see Deserve to be Punished ? No! You Can be Happy & Resist Sickness.   Parts of you could have little or no desire to live. This has considerable health implications, such as no desire to treat an illness. You might even need to hide the medication to prevent an alter from deliberately overdosing. These parts of you need your help to see that life will improve as you continue to heal from past traumas and that these alters have much to offer this needy world. (For example, there is always a desperate shortage of people who understand D.I.D. and can support those who have it.)   Little alters need matters like menstruation explained to them lest they needlessly panic, assuming they are in more danger than they are.   A number of people with D.I.D. have reported having different reactions to the same medication, depending upon which alter is out.   Wikipedia states, “ almost all  physical illness have mental factors that determine their onset, presentation, maintenance, susceptibility to treatment, and resolution.”   Says Robert C. Bransfield, M.D., “ All diseases have a psychic [mind] and somatic  [body] component , however, either component may be more dominant in different disease states.” (In each quote, the emphasis is mine.)   This intimate interaction between one’s mind and physical illness makes it highly likely that suffering years of inner turmoil and stress will adversely affect one’s physical health – perhaps seriously so – and that the sooner you can help each of your alters relax and find peace, the healthier you are likely to be.   New Alters – Creating New Alters   If you experience new trauma, new alters might be formed but the trauma would usually have to be severe. Often what happens is simply that an alter comes forward that you have not previously been aware of. Some alters see their role as keeping in the background until a crisis and sometimes alters are forced into taking leading roles when other alters who usually predominate vacate their usual position because they need a break for some reason.   Demons   A few alters, because of their tragically low self-esteem created by their abusers, might mistakenly think they are demons, and some uninformed people might sometimes mistake highly confused alters for demons simply because some alters have been tricked into doing bad things. Nevertheless, alters are never demons, and even when confused alters do bad things, it does not prove demons are involved. Moreover, even in rare instances where demons trick alters, this can be easily rectified.   For true Christians, demons are nothing more than a harmless nuisance. Just as everyone – even the best Christian – is tempted, everyone has dealings with demons. In fact, although we often talk of the devil tempting us, it is almost always his underlings – demons – since the devil does not have God’s unique power of omnipresence (able to be everywhere at once).   Not even the weakest Christian need fear the strongest demon. It’s as if all Christians have guns loaded with live ammunition and demons are weaklings with nothing more than blanks in their weapons. If a Christian imagined his/her gun is unloaded and that the demons’ guns are loaded, the Christian might cower, not use his/her weapon, and let demons order him/her around, but doing so would be as ridiculously needless as being scared of a butterfly.   It is very traumatic for an alter and can significantly impede healing if he or she is mistaken for a demon. One must be very careful not to make this mistake and it is very easily done as some alters can initially seem very evil.   If you really are confronting demons, you need to know that if we let them, demons can be a nuisance but to the weakest Christian who understands, they are less of a concern than pesky flies. Just hold on to Jesus, stubbornly stand your ground and, as Jesus’ ambassador, keep ordering them to leave. Keep refusing to take no for an answer and these cowardly trespassers will slink off. For help, see: Susan’s Secret: Helping Alters Realize their Spiritual Power   Spiritual Warfare: Turning Spiritual Attack into Victory   Demons: You  can Beat Them   Porn/Masturbation   It is common for those who have suffered sex abuse to engage in masturbation and/or viewing porn in an attempt to help them cope. Sometimes it can actually be a form of self-harm and even when it is not, the result is a bit like self-harm in that it is a desperate attempt to cope with the inner pain that has serious downsides. For example, some alters might do this without understanding that it re-traumatizes one or more other alters.   Baby Alters   Baby alters might not be able to speak but, like real babies, they are likely to understand more of what you say than they might be able to repeat and they can still be comforted. They might communicate with you through thoughts or feelings or memories. You might feel very inadequate when it comes to comforting a baby but do your best. In time you might discover an alter who is quite good at it and perhaps even enjoys it.   Baby alters will eventually learn to speak and will grow up. It can happen far faster than for a real baby. All that is needed is for the alter to learn how to access other alters’ skills. As your healing progresses your alters will become quite proficient in doing this.   Anything that could comfort a real baby, such as singing or playing lullabies, holding the baby, giving it toys and/or a special blanket, feeding it, and so on, is likely to help a baby alter. Some people even need to temporarily wear diapers, drink formula milk out of a bottle and/or use a pacifier in order to help baby alters feel safe and comforted and to give them some body-time in order to grow up. When a baby alter is out, you might find yourself unable to walk or control your bladder. I can understand you not wanting to go down that path but you will truly end up benefitting from it.   Gender Issues: Alters who Think They are the Opposite Sex   It is common for some alters to think they are the opposite sex because it helps them feel safer. Their experience gave them the impression that they would have been less vulnerable to abuse if they had been the opposite sex. Another possible reason for some alters convincing themselves they are the opposite sex is because they were sexually abused by someone of the same gender, and regarding themselves as the opposite sex to their abuser removed some of their inner conflict over the horrors they were forced to endure.   Sometimes, alters thinking they are the opposite sex is of little consequence to the rest of the person. If so, this matter might be safely left on the backburner if there are more pressing issues that need to be addressed. It would be helpful to prepare them, however, by helping them understand that it is now safe and good to be the same gender as your physical body.   Feelings/Emotions that Seem to Come from Nowhere & How to Cope with Them   Unexpected feelings that do not match your current circumstances or mood seem puzzling to those who do not understand Dissociative Identity Disorder but is actually a common feature of D.I.D.   Feelings that puzzle you could possibly be because something just happened that reminds you of a past event that strongly impacted you, but most likely it is because it reminds another part of you (an alter). Or it could simply be because an alter who has strong feelings and is usually deep inside is now closer to the surface of your consciousness and that alter’s emotions are washing over you.   The feelings can be highly distressing and so overwhelming that you cannot think straight. If you can manage it, however, this is a superb opportunity for you to make contact with this part of you and for you to get to know him/her and offer comfort and reassurance.   If you feel fear, tell yourself (preferably out loud), how much safer you now are than when you were younger and all the reasons why there is no need to fear. Since the alter is so close that his/her feelings are impacting you, there is a good chance that the alter will hear what you say.   Do similar things if other negative emotions are involved.   If it feels appropriate with a distressed alter, ask if it would be okay if you gave him/her a safe hug. If the answer seems to be yes then, even if you have no idea what the alter looks like, strongly imagine yourself giving the alter a reassuring hug. Also, ask the alter why he/she feels this way.   For as long as the alter is present, keep continuing to establish a rapport with the alter. For example, if the opportunity presents itself ask if the alter has a name and ask if he/she knows how old he/she is.   You might not seem to achieve much the first time but every such instance increases the likelihood of you being able to help and befriend this part of you and further your healing. Part 2 here

They were beasts, not men, who violated your innocence. They stripped you of your decency. They invaded your body; shaming you, humiliating you. Terror gripped you by the throat. Stark naked, bleeding, pinned like a bug on display they exposed you to the world. Relentlessly they reviled and defiled you. You longed for mercy. No one so much as lifted an eyebrow for you. To them it was a game. They had robbed you not only of every thread of clothing and respectability, but of your very humanity. You were sport, a plaything, a bit of fun before being tossed away. You existed only to be gawked at, jeered at, spat on. With bloodcurdling callousness they continued to desecrate your person with vile, inhuman, despicable acts. Where was God in the midst of all this horror? If those savaging you were beasts, you were a gentle, innocent dove. Within you was not a shadow of lust or bitterness or spite. You knew only how to be tender and caring. You let them do their worst, absorbing all the evil and returning kindness for hate. Your only retaliation was to want the best for those who wanted you dead. They sank their vicious fangs into you and ripped you apart. And where was God? No one had understood you. You had been betrayed by one who should have shielded you; abandoned by those closest to you; falsely accused by those whose duty it is to protect the innocent. Abusing their God-given authority, those revered as model citizens pronounced themselves righteous and declared you guilty. No one defended your innocence. They all turned away, or pointed the finger, or spat on you. Just hours ago – yet it seems forever – you sparkled with purity. The transparency of your innocence gleamed like exquisite glass; a work of priceless beauty. Your every move made the sun dance. No grubby hand had ever touched your perfection. Not the tiniest speck of humanity’s grime had ever stained you. Then they arose in fury and vandalized you; crushing you, smashing you, shattering you. You were ruined. Yet in senseless rage they continued their assault, mercilessly pounding all those broken pieces to dust. Your perfection, your value, your beauty were lost forever. Once you were priceless, now trash; once cherished, now fit only to be thrown away. Yet, as you reeled in torturous agony, you who with one breath could vaporize the planet, gasped, “Father, forgive them.” But where was God? Like a never-ending tornado, searing pain raged through every jangled nerve of your mutilated body. Your desirability gone, like a rose ripped apart; your priceless innocence, like crystal shattered beyond repair; your reputation, like the purest mountain stream reduced to putrid sludge, you cried in desperation to your only Hope, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Bleak silence stabbed your heart. Your pain rocketed to inconceivable levels. Abused by those you loved, deserted by those who meant everything to you, but abandoned by God? Treated by your eternal Father as if your hate-crazed torturers were innocent and you were the vilest sinner! The God who hates evil with terrifying fury, did nothing. With agonizing slowness your torturers began to choke the remaining life from you. You thought of the God who had abandoned you to unspeakable horrors; the God who had turned his back on you; the God who had failed to give the slightest comfort as you suffered alone. Yet still you trusted his love and wisdom. He had deserted you in death and yet you committed yourself to him for all eternity. “Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.” They thrust a spear up you – ripping you all the way to your heart. They dragged you away, a hideous corpse. Once so fresh, now you stink. Once pristine; now polluted. Once unique; now extinct. Once so honored; now they turn from you in disgust. Day after day, the God you had trusted left your body to rot. Suddenly the Almighty showed his hand. Now the world would see what he had always planned. The impossible happened: you sprang to life! Tears turned to triumph; grief erupted into joy; hideous wounds transmuted into marks of honor. You again sparkled with purity. Just moments before, you had been like the finest art vandalized beyond recognition. Then the Master Artist, tears in his eyes, lovingly labored on his ruined treasure until each stroke of the vandal became a source of new splendor. The final masterpiece is even more spectacular than ever before – so breathtaking that heaven and earth can only gaze in awe at your loveliness. Radiant with holy glory, renewed to perfection, you rose not just to the innocence and matchless honor that had eternally been yours, but to new and even greater honor. Now you are not only the One through whom we were made, but the One through whom everyone who lets you is restored to the sinless perfection of your purity and to your honor and eternal destiny. Oh, astounding God! Truly, you are the Lord of the happy ending; the Master of the surprise twist to the tale, startling the universe by transforming disaster into triumph and grief into endless joy. You are the God of the unexpected; with the flick of a finger flipping meaninglessness into meaning, as effortlessly as flipping a hideous tangle of threads to reveal the most stunning tapestry on the other side. Who could have guessed that what seemed ugly chaos was but a necessary side of a work of breathtaking perfection? Oh, keep me from the stupidity of judging your work before reaching the other side! Just when everyone is sure of the inevitable outcome, you flabbergast us with your genius by bringing victory from nowhere; bliss out of pain; beauty out of filth. In the twinkling of an eye, the defeated win, the oppressed rule, the despised are honored, hopeless losers are hailed as champions. Truly, you are the God of the impossible. Like precious gold from rocks mercilessly thrown into intolerable heat, you tenderly draw exquisite good out of the vicious fires of senseless evil. The unveiling of your feats leaves all creation awestruck. One day all will be revealed. Suddenly, everyone who in ignorant fury has raged against you will be speechless. All who have arrogantly shaken their fists will fall on their faces, loathing themselves for their foolish accusations. Every complaining voice will be hushed, then erupt in thunderous praise, rejoicing in the stupendous power, genius and goodness of the magnificent Lord. In you, infinite love meets infinite knowledge, and infinite intelligence meets infinite goodness. To say that makes you utterly trustworthy is like saying the universe might be big enough for me. Oh, how much we miss when we can barely see your beauty through eyes clouded with self-pity or self-preoccupation! You are perfection personified; adorable in every conceivable way. Everything good and beautiful has its source in you. You are beyond everything I could ever wish for. To call you warm and virtuous is to call the ocean a drop of water. You are the standard by which the loftiest human attempts at virtue are measured and found wanting. Alongside you, the most heartwarming human acts of kindness fall to the ground, suddenly seeming shallow and clouded by mixed motives. To perfect the beautiful surprise you have planned for each of your loved ones, you cleverly conceal critical parts of what to us is a puzzle. Until the final piece clicks into place, few of us will ever guess the mind-boggling extent to which everything you do brims with tender compassion, loving power, and awesome wisdom. Everything is working toward the culmination of the spectacular surprise that only you in your boundless love, power and genius could create. May I trust your loving tenderness and breath-taking goodness right now, before the full unveiling of your plans, so that I will not be ashamed of my mistrust when the perfection of your eternal purposes finally materializes. If beautiful works of art often look ugly in the early stage of their creation; if a house undergoing major renovations can seem a disaster zone until the work is finished; if in the midst of life-saving surgery, an injured person has more gaping wounds than before the operation, I cannot expect to appreciate the grandeur of what you are doing in my life until your work in me is complete. Father God, how horrifically you suffered – knowing your Son’s pain as intimately as only the all-knowing Lord could know, and yet still persisting with the plan to rescue me that you and your Innocent had agreed on. You are the ultimate in passionate caring, unstoppable love and selfless compassion. There is no pain you would spare yourself, no extremes you would not go to, so that I could have your very best. Precious Jesus, the very thought of the horrors you would suffer had sickened you with mind-numbing dread. Divine holiness would be desecrated by filthiness. You, who had eternally known exquisite intimacy and union with the Father, would be emotionally ripped from the Father’s heart and subjected to all the wrath the Almighty had stored up against all of sinful humanity. The divine, eternal oneness would be smashed. Your whole being recoiled, wanting to flee in panic-stricken terror and revulsion. How you longed for there to be some other way to meet humanity’s deepest needs! But there was none. So in a spine-chilling act of sheer willpower you mustered your every speck of determination, forcing yourself to endure unthinkable agonies. You chose this because you knew that forever you would look back on your torment and exult in the knowledge that your every millisecond of agony was worth it. You knew your God would waste not a single tear but would achieve from your ordeal infinite good in so many lives. You thrilled in the certainty that your agony would end up filling your undeserving, undesirable, self-centered loved ones with immeasurable joy for all eternity. Mighty Lord – more innocent than a baby, more powerful than a billion nuclear bombs, more aware of every consequence than the combined intellects of every being in the universe – in every way your sacrificial love is without equal. Others have suffered injustice and been overpowered, but you volunteered and refused to escape. Others did not know what they were getting into; you knew precisely what would happen. Others have been robbed of great riches, but you deliberately came down from heaven to lose more than anyone has ever lost. You delighted your haters by acting weak and vulnerable, when with a flicker of an eyelid you could have reduced them to ash. You fulfilled their joy by letting them vomit their hate over you. You let them expel on you their sadistic lust to inflict pain; filling them with glee as you let them trample you under their feet, grinding you into the dust of death. Humanity is blighted with people who sacrifice their lives to kill and maim – even in the name of peace. You sacrificed your life to heal and restore, risking everything to forgive those who hate you. You willingly suffered what you did not deserve so that we might not suffer what we deserve. Such is your exorbitant love that you chose physical torture, because it hurt you even more, just to see me, your loved one, doomed to the eternal consequences of my own sin. With you, I’m completely out of my depth. I’m a microbe overwhelmed by the Niagara of your love. As a newborn is unable to appreciate its mother’s love, so your love for me soars far beyond my comprehension. How can I adequately thank you? How can I return to you the enormity of your love? What can I give you that isn’t already yours? My love for you is no virtue. To be head-over-heels in love with you is nothing but the inevitable response to glimpsing your beauty, goodness, wisdom, love and all your other qualities that take my breath away. The most I’ve done is let you inspire me to wrench my eyes off worldly distractions long enough to begin to know you. No one ever suffers alone. You feel the pain of every individual that has ever lived. Even an ordinary, hardhearted, self-centered human recognizes that it affects a person profoundly to know that a loved one is hurting. A mother can be more distraught by her darling’s suffering than the child itself. The more aware we are of someone’s suffering, and the more we love that person, the more their pain hurts us. Your feelings for us, however, soar far beyond that of humanity’s most sensitive person. No human can approach the mind-boggling magnitude of your love for us, nor the intensity of your awareness of our every distress and most hidden hurt. You are inconceivable tenderness and acute awareness exploded to infinity. The result is a sensitivity way beyond my powers of imagination. You can’t help but take it personally when anyone even mildly hurts someone. Your heart breaks even at sins that initially seem to hurt no one. If any sin were the harmless fun we imagine it to be, it would not be sin at all, and you would approve of it. It is the very nature of sin that it ends up hurting people. Our dilemma is that we are so eager to sin that we claim almost anything short of a chain saw massacre ‘doesn’t hurt anyone.’ Sin is so terrifyingly deceptive and subtle that it sometimes takes centuries before finally manifesting itself as perhaps genetic abnormalities or environmental disasters. We are so eager to sin that we forget that the guidance you give us is always the product of your super-intelligence and selfless love for us. Follow the chain reaction for long enough, and any deviation we take from your guidance will eventually produce such a tragedy that you reel in grief over how much people will end up hurt. Even if the offender hurt only himself, that would be enough to break your heart. Both by the infinite depth of your feelings for suffering humanity and by what you endured on the cross, all suffering falls on you. And as if the intensity of this agony were not already beyond human comprehension, the unthinkable happens – your pain doubles as people who mean everything to you have the hide to blame you for the suffering induced by anti-God acts that hurt not just them but you. As the Source of everything good, you should forever be adored by hearts overwhelmed with gratitude. You give and give and give. Yet you, who hate human suffering with a terrifying passion, end up the focus of the venom and anger of misguided people who blame the one Person who alone is truly innocent. An animal might bite the hand that feeds it, a child might lash out at its mother’s concern for its safety, someone attempting suicide might fight off his rescuer, but nothing comes close to the appalling way you are treated. No one is nearly so deserving of love, thanks and honor as you are, but is anyone more hated or resented or rejected? The One most worthy of adoration, receives the most abuse! I don’t wish to grieve you by speaking unkindly of your loved ones – all of humanity – but it is time we faced the reality of the pain you silently bear. We are well aware that you alone have infinite knowledge and that we have nothing like your mental capacity to grapple with the facts. We recognize that we are not perfect, which means that, relative to you, we are riddled with selfishness, corrupted by evil and blinded by hypocrisy. And yet we have treacherously tried to shift the blame by accusing the one person in our lives who is pure, perfect and selfless! You gave us the power of speech and we use it to curse you! Everything we have ever enjoyed comes from you, and we have the hide to turn you into a dartboard, spearing your heart with insults and false accusations. Your holiness is indescribable. You are terrifyingly perfect, overwhelmingly superior, incomparably just, impeccably good, irreproachably and unapproachably moral, extravagantly compassionate. You are justice personified. You are the Source of morality; the Exalted One; the most generous Person in the universe. We are mean-spirited, defiled and in every way inferior to you. And we dare to judge our Judge! And you dare to keep offering forgiveness. I am shattered to realize that our reason for raging against you is that you choose to rule the universe by love, rather than by tyrannical force. We resist your holy ways, gleefully exploiting for our own selfishness the freedom of choice you have privileged us with. We insist you must allow us to be selfish – sin against others – but how dare you let others sin against us! Like spoilt brats, we would blow our stack if you prevented us from indulging in our favorite sins, and yet we blast you if you treat certain other people the same way by not stopping them from engaging in their preferred sins. We don’t want you interfering in our lives, but we fill with hypocritical rage at you for not interfering in other people’s lives and stopping them when their selfishness inconveniences us. How our shameful double standards break your heart! If you ruled with an iron fist, we would lose all choice, and all chance of gaining honor by making right decisions, but the world would be flawless. Everything would work with the sterile, mechanical precision of a divinely operated machine. Nothing would bring you shame or pain. Instead, you have entrusted us with the ability to love, and for that we need the power of choice – something that by its very nature can be used for immense good or abused for horrific evil. You choose to be driven by love. That, it seems to me, must be the riskiest, most painful, but most rewarding of all options. To deeply love someone means you could have everything else in the universe, and yet without that person’s love you would still be heartbroken. To love is to make oneself so vulnerable that even having unlimited power could not help. There are obviously things that not even omnipotence can do. It cannot, for example, produce a five-sided triangle, because to be a triangle it must have exactly three sides. Neither could omnipotence force a person to love someone, because to be genuine, love must be utterly unforced. There are innumerable possibilities open to omnipotence to try to induce love in a person. You could choose from an enormous range of deceits, threats, bribes, drugs, brainwashing, illusions or genetic programming. Each possibility, however, would not only be of questionable morality but anything it manufactured within a person would be a sham, not love. Someone of infinite power and ability could easily delude a person into imagining he is in love, or could compel someone to act as if he were in love, but the result would be fake. Even with unlimited power, there is little anyone could do to spark genuine love in a person, other than be loving and wait for a response. We would be appalled if a man kidnapped a woman and raped and enslaved her because he claims he loves her, wants her as his wife and is convinced he can make her happy. It would be an immoral abuse of power, regardless of whether he used physical force or threats – in which case she would be conscious of the violation of her rights – or if he used drugs or hypnotism so that she is unaware that what is happening is against her will. We don’t have to be divine to understand that real love respects the desires of the beloved, no matter how much it clashes with the lover’s personal yearnings, and no matter how certain he is that the person would benefit from lifelong intimacy with him. But rather than us spend ten seconds considering that maybe the all-knowing God is doing the right thing, we lash out at you. Nothing wounds like hate-filled curses hurled at a person by someone he loves. No one loves like you love those who rage against you, so no one hurts like you. Perfect One, what they did to you on the cross is no worse than the way they have always hated you. A mere glimpse of the pain we cause you fills my eyes with tears, but in reality my heart is as hard as ice and my insight is but a clouded pinprick. If all earth’s oceans were tears and every grain of sand an eye; if every day since creation were an eon of time in which to mourn, it would not suffice to grieve the appalling treatment you receive from those you love. We abuse your love and your patience by dishing out to you the grossest of all injustices, when our every heartbeat depends on you. The extent to which you have been misunderstood by those who mean more to you than every galaxy in the universe must surely be the greatest of all tragedies. And yet, because of your staggering love for us, the same people who so deeply hurt you, bring you unsurpassable joy the moment they begin to change their attitude toward you. I reel at the dangerous predicament of people too blinded by hypocritical rage over their own hurt to see the terrifying implications of the reality that they themselves have hurt people. Can’t they see that their very presence in a perfect world would ruin its perfection? No matter how morally superior they imagine themselves to be, their selfishness – just like mine – would soon begin hurting people. Don’t they know that as the Perfect Judge you must be fearsomely impartial? You love humanity so fervently that even the most minor cause of human suffering infuriates you. The time is hurtling toward this planet when they will get their wish, but they don’t understand that this is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. You will indeed produce a perfect world by destroying every cause of suffering. What breaks your heart is that each of your loved ones is, in fact, a cause of suffering. Each of us has lied or cheated or stolen or slandered or been selfish and by so doing we have hurt people – contributed to human suffering. Oh, mighty Judge, stay your hand just a little longer! These poor people are too focused on the sins of others to see their desperate predicament. Their only hope is if, before it is too late, they avail themselves of the spiritual transformation made possible only by you suffering in their place. I beg you, give them a little longer to want to be rid of every trace of selfishness and seek you for the only transformation that would enable them to enter a perfect world in the next life without ruining it. Each moment you suppress your explosive yearning to remove every cause of human pain, is yet another moment in which people have the chance to yield to you before it is too late to avoid the eternal consequences. If only your loved ones understood that the very reason for them thinking ill of you – your temporary tolerance of evil – is dramatic proof of your loving goodness and mercy! Your present tolerance of sins you hate is the only reason any of us has so far avoided instant banishment to hell. (And if it can be unpleasant living in a world where both good and evil abound, how intolerable it would be in a place where only evil exists.) The unavoidable reality is that removal of all evil from earth necessitates the eternal removal of every source of suffering that has not sought spiritual transformation through you. If some people can’t see it, I can. I willingly choose to be subjected to earthly suffering if the delay in the eradication of all evil gives billions of people more time to come to their senses before that fateful Day of Reckoning. I dare not imagine I could endure what you endured when you sacrificed everything for sinful humanity. Nevertheless, despite my yearning for an evil-free world, I would rather embrace significant suffering than for billions to be without another chance to avoid their fate. The very thing that exposes me to suffering – the presence of imperfect people on this planet – props open the door of salvation for multitudes. In this extremely limited and indirect sense, my exposure to suffering plays a role in people’s eternal salvation. What a staggering thought! Present pleasures are but the pathetic shadow of the endless delights reserved for everyone who yields to your love. The eternal surprises you have for me will literally be out of this world. That makes them incomparably superior to anything I could hope for down here. Staying on a planet where evil exists makes it inevitable that life will sometimes be nearly intolerable. To use your own words, ‘In the world you will have tribulation’ (John 16:33). Here, unlike most people, I have no special loved ones. Except when I’m worshipping you – and sometimes even then – my mood swings seem to wobble from medium to mild depression, further lowering my ability to enjoy anything down here. Nevertheless, I still crave the privilege of living behind enemy lines in a dangerous, anti-God world of pain, suffering, death and tragedy. How could I make a vast difference to people’s lives in a world that is already perfect? How could heaven’s perfections approach the exciting opportunities and challenges of living in a hostile world, where I can be used of you to totally reverse people’s eternal destinies? This dark planet is the place for daring exploits. This is where heroes are made. This is where I can win honor for you, my Lord. Not only do you have a God-sized empathy beyond my comprehension, but you, the Innocent One, suffered on the cross for every anti-God action that has ever inflicted hurt. And there is yet another way in which all suffering finds its culmination in you. Through you, every hurting person can find meaning in their suffering. How I love you for transforming being victimized into the most meaningful act in the universe! Let me briefly remind myself of just how meaningful and beneficial your earthly suffering was. For you, defeat led to honor; shame led to being revered as holy; powerlessness led to the loving way to rule the universe. Your repulsive wounds healed into medals of valor. Your suffering became the reason that millions so adore you that they would give their lives for you. Becoming an object of shame catapulted you to being revered by all generations. You became sin-sick, so that I might be healed of my every spiritual wound. By letting yourself be treated as filth, you made it legal for me, the soiled one, to be so completely purified that now I am treated by the Holy Lord as spotlessly perfect. You sank to the depths so that I, drowning in a cesspool of my own filth, would be raised above even angels to the status of divine royalty, empowering me to rule the universe with you from the very throne of God. Your torment split history in two, creating an entirely new spiritual era. It terminated the Old Testament law and the spiritual distinction between Jew and non-Jew. It released the torrent of the Holy Spirit upon all humanity, sweeping over all subsequent generations, regardless of race, age, gender or social standing. Even more significantly, all divine interaction with humanity – even for all generations prior to your suffering – hinged on the certainty that you would be tortured for their sins. Your trauma gained spiritual, mental and physical benefits for all eternity for multiplied millions of people of all eras and cultures. Not only has the mix of heaven’s inhabitants and leadership structure been transformed by what you endured, but even sub-human creation will benefit (Romans 8:19-22). And not only the physical realm, but the entire spirit world has been revolutionized by what seemed like just another vicious attack on a hapless victim. By becoming the devil’s plaything, you defeated and sealed the fate of the Evil One and each of his millions of demons. Whether they supposed their motives to be good or unashamedly bad, millions throughout history have tried using violence to defeat evil or bring happiness. You succeeded where everyone else failed, and you did it not by violence, but by suffering violence. You became the victor by becoming the victim. You achieved the impossible, and you did it not by a sword in the hand but by a sword in the side. Suffering humiliation and senseless violence empowered you to identify with us and to minister to our otherwise incurable needs. Similarly, through your triumph, what we have suffered at the hands of evil people or powers can become invaluable, both in gaining for us the rightful authority and ability to minister to other hurting people and by achieving for us eternal honor. Just as Father God ensured none of your tears were wasted, so enormous good can be achieved through our tears. All we need do is follow your lead in your attitude to suffering and to those who have inflicted it, and by entrusting our pain to God’s resolution, just as you did. I wonder if I could be engrossed for all eternity, forever plumbing new depths in all that you achieved when you yielded your innocence to sadists, letting injustice crush the life out of you, as you became our scapegoat. The senseless cruelty that ended your life achieved infinitely more than the combined lifetime efforts of every human who has ever existed. Your ill-treatment by thugs had such immense meaning that through it, all meaningless suffering inflicted by anti-God forces can suddenly brim with meaning. If you turned torment into triumph, and suffering indignities into the flight path to greatness, so can I. I can do it, because everything you did, you did for me. You died so that I could be born of God – born with divine genes so that all your achievements are now within my reach. By becoming one of us, you proved that traumas that should destroy us will end up exalting us. We need only let you empower us to follow your example, especially in: trusting God to bring good from the senseless acts of anti-God behavior that have hurt us, forgiving those who deserve annihilation for the godless way they have treated us. You enable us to achieve this humanly impossible level of trust and forgiveness, not merely by showing us how it is done, but through doing it for us by living inside us. You wait only for us to let you do it for us. Continued......

(CONTINUED) The Problem of Pain and Evil Christian Insights into Martyrdom and Persecution Why do the innocent suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? Accidents, tragedies, environmental disasters, crime, war, sickness, famine . . . Part 2: Best understood after reading Part 1 This takes the form of a conversation with Jesus In everything desirable, Lord Jesus, no one comes anywhere near you. No coach has ever gloried in his athlete’s success, no father has longed to lavish his children with gifts, no lover has delighted in his beloved’s pleasure, like you long to thrill and fulfill your loved ones with endless joys. I want to participate in your miracles, reveling in your supernatural power. Since delighting in the gift, honors the giver – and no one deserves thanks and honor like you – I want to thrill with inexpressible joy over your every gift. Surely this is a vital part of loving you and letting you have your beautiful way with me. And yet is that all there is to life? It sometimes feels as if there is a missing element. For years I’ve had the occasional precious moment of intimacy with you in which I’ve felt a peculiar warmth about the possibility of suffering for you. This feeling bewilders me. I’m frustratingly ordinary. I can only stare wide-eyed at those who talk of visions and hearing regularly from you. I long to know you and love you like you deserve, instead of the vague way that I currently do. Relative to what I crave, it’s as if I see you through the darkest welding goggles, feel you through a paper bag, and hear you through insulation bats in a disco. I’ve grown used to you dropping thoughts into my mind that rocket my understanding heavenwards with thrilling new insights. But this time, by giving me this peculiarly positive feeling toward suffering, you seem to have rather sneakily bypassed my tiny brain by giving me wondrous feelings that have left me mystified. (How delightfully unpredictable you are! Your beautiful character is so reassuringly constant, but your methods are too wonderful for me; bubbling with such superior intelligence that often they take me by surprise.) Facts, not feelings, usually move me. But as my Lord you have every right to burst my emotional straitjacket and intellectual pride. This is just what seems to happen on these occasions. I bless you for feelings apparently from you that outpace my thinking. These positive feelings toward hardship are delightful but they seem so otherworldly and so out of touch with my normal human reaction to hardship that I feel the need to dissect and analyze the feelings to try to come to grips with them rationally. Among many Christians I admire, using one’s mind gets bad press. I would be labeled ‘unspiritual’ the moment they hear the word ‘analyze’. Is this your view? Certainly, it would be foolishly wrong to reject anything just because I can’t make sense of it. Yet you made us intelligent beings with an inherent need to process events mentally. Good things can get horribly twisted, but everything about the way you originally made us is good. So I ask you to both illuminate me and to bring my thinking into submission to you. I rejoice in your right to utterly baffle me by acting in your unfathomable genius. I adore you for having none of my limitations. Your intellectual superiority warms my heart, making me wonderfully secure and guaranteeing that I could never be bored with you. And I love the way it settles arguments between us. Life became so much simpler when I discovered that you are always right! When all is revealed I’ll have plenty of regrets about my own decisions, but I’ll celebrate forever the perfection of your decisions. So I joyfully yield to your right to mystify me, and I welcome the opportunity it affords me to grow in faith. Rather than merely be mystified, however, I would love to grasp enough understanding of your wisdom to be able to marvel at it. I know that one day I will see clearly the brilliance of your decisions and then I’ll be in awe. Nevertheless, I crave the joy of admiring as much of your wisdom as I can down here. You yourself said the most important commandment is to love you with every part of our being, and you specifically nominated loving you with our mind as well as our heart (Matthew 22:37). So, Lord, here goes . . . The first thing that sets my mind reeling about viewing suffering favorably is that I have no reason to suppose I’m even as brave as Peter, the Christ-denying disciple whose confidence in his devotion proved unfounded. You know I’m a born coward. Rather than nod in agreement, however, you seem to dismiss my concerns with the retort, ‘You’ve been born again.’ What a tangle of conflicting emotions that reply sets off within me! Among the hundreds of millions of your adoring children, you must have literally millions who have done more than me to prove their love for you. Yes, I continually embrace emotional pain for your sake. For nearly all my adult life I have steadfastly refused to even pray for any legitimate way to reduce the pain, if doing so would reduce your glory. Nevertheless, I’m suddenly ashamed of the pettiness of my ordeal when I consider the excruciating torment of your agony on the cross. My trial is more an unpleasant ache than registering high on the torture scale. Self-pity might keep me feeling like a martyr but I have no right to claim familiarity with severe suffering. With my love for you largely unproved, I am just a bag of wind; an armchair hero. Yet still, spasmodically, positive feelings about suffering come upon me . . . I worry that I could get things out of balance and disappoint you by missing earthly pleasures you have lovingly planned for me. Similarly, I fear that seeing suffering in a favorable light might get out of hand by weakening me in my fight against evil. What if I go to the extreme of passively submitting to spiritual attacks from the Evil One, instead of rising up in your blood-bought authority and fighting off the attacks? I would be devastated if I fell into the foolishness of not only suffering needless deprivation or attack, but of spoiling your longing to bless me. Yet, despite these concerns, the positive feelings continue to come . . . My initial, bumbling attempt to analyze what I feel during those holy moments is that I seem to become a little like a rescue worker so desperate to save lives that while the emergency exists, his own safety and comfort mean almost nothing to him. It’s more wonderful than that, however. What comes upon me is more like the feeling of a thrill-seeking adventurer who delights in danger and hardship, because he knows this is what creates both the excitement and the opportunity to be hailed a hero. During labor, a woman might be adamant that never again will she expose herself to the pain of childbirth, and yet later she could find herself longing to have another baby. It’s as if when I am caught up in your presence I undergo a similar, though perhaps less dramatic, shift in perspective toward pain and hardship. In my more somber moments I sometimes wonder why you do not always intervene to prevent Christians from suffering, but when I sense your presence is this special way, I see things differently. I recall a cartoon in which a man of the cloth playing golf hit a hole in one. A little annoyed, he prayed, ‘Lord, please let me do it by myself!’ Except perhaps for games, I want to do everything in partnership with you, never entirely alone. Nevertheless, in almost everything there comes a point where too much divine intervention would spoil things for us. The chance for glory would fizzle if you removed every difficulty. In your loving wisdom, you give your children the perfect mix of challenge and removal of problems. And does the relative ease in my life show me in a bad light? I feel uncomfortable reading what the Bible expects of normal Christians. I don’t fit. By New Testament standards I’m abnormal. Over and over your Word says such things as: 2 Timothy 3:12 In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted 1 Peter 4:12 Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. (13) But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. 1 Peter 2:20 . . . if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. Matthew 24:9 Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. Luke 6:26 Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets. Romans 8:35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? (36) As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” (37) No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Philippians 1:29 For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him 2 Corinthians 12:10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Matthew 13:21 But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. 2 Timothy 1:8 . . . join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God And that’s just a fraction of such Scriptures. I see New Testament Christians rejoicing that they were counted worthy to be flogged for you and I wonder if my soft life implies I am unworthy. Are you babying me; treating me like a spiritual weakling who cannot be trusted in the real world – the world that is hostile to you? And that raises another concern. Why do non-Christians in the Western World seem to tolerate us? You said, ‘If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also’ (John 15:20). Does their indifference imply we have misrepresented you? Have we toned down your message until it becomes something your enemies can tolerate? During those times when I feel particularly close to you, I seem so captivated by your magnificence that I’m caught up into hero worship. I find myself longing to be like you. And in the back of my mind is the consciousness that perhaps the most distinctive of all the special things about you is that you turned suffering into a unique opportunity to achieve immense good. You not only preached ‘turn the other cheek,’ you did it, and through that affliction you achieved things of incomprehensible worth. I’m embarrassed to even mention my strange, intermittent attraction to imitating you in the way you embraced suffering. A little child pretending to be a brain surgeon would seem to have a better chance. What you accomplished through suffering is both unique and as high above me as the stars. Yet, no matter ridiculous it is, I sometimes can’t stop myself warming to the thought of emulating, in some tiny way, what you achieved through suffering. The rational side of me almost despised my emotions for being so stupid until I recalled that you yourself spoke of taking up one’s cross and following you. Surely that’s talking about suffering that in some way mimics your own suffering. This concept can’t be as offbeat as I had thought. I’ve no idea what Paul was referring to when he wrote, ‘I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions . . .’ (Colossians 1:24). If that were not part of your perfect Word I’d have thought it almost blasphemy to imply that in any sense there is anything less than complete about your suffering for us. How could anything I suffer contribute to the immensity of what you achieve through suffering? Surely I could do no better than a two-year-old delighting in helping his hero – a muscly he-man – lift weights. Nevertheless, during these precious, intimate times you give me, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if you could somehow give me a slice of the action. Since it so greatly affects my thinking on this matter, it’s time I faced up to one of my weaknesses. I have almost concluded that you suffered down here so that we can avoid suffering down here. At first glance, the logic behind this theory is compelling. Moreover, it seems backed by the thrilling reality that you often intervene to deliver your children from sickness, hardship and disaster. I praise you for everyone you have raised up to inspire your people to receive astounding answers to prayer. I delight in the innumerable times you miraculously intervene in people’s lives with physical blessings and I long to see you glorified in this way in a far greater measure than ever before. I have discovered an unsettling thing about truth, however: it is usually complex, and humans often fall into confusion by our tendency to oversimplify. Without even realizing what we are doing, we tend to constrict our expectations of you by building an entire theory around what turns out to be a portion of your truth, rather than your full revelation. What confuses us is that even a mere sliver of your truth is usually exciting, whereas the full truth can initially seem bewildering. We fail to realize that the full truth, when accurately understood, is more wonderful still, because it displays even more of your perfect ways. Tragically, we fall so in love with our theories that we barely notice we have manipulated some of your Word to try to squeeze your revelation into the straightjacket of our presumptions. I shudder at my vulnerability to this tendency. I desperately need to think more like you, Lord, or I’ll keep getting it wrong. You tell us not to be afraid; we are worth more than many sparrows and even the hairs on our head are numbered. And in the same breath you mention that we could be flogged and killed for your sake! (Matthew 10:17-39) I wonder how much I misread in your Word simply because your holy, eternal perspective is so different to mine. Again I make my oft-repeated plea: please alert me to my own blind spots. We are so inspired by the exploits listed in the first half of the Faith Chapter – faith-powered deliverances from impossible situations – that our blinkers are firmly in place by the time we reach the second half – faith-powered endurance of horrific situations: Hebrews 11:35 . . . Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. (36) Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. (37) They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – (38) the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. (39) These were all commended for their faith . . . Just when it seems obvious where the chapter is heading, it slams into reverse. The apparent contradiction sends me reeling. Clearly, there are two types of faith miracles – miraculous escape and miraculous endurance – and either type can get one into Heaven’s Hall of Fame. The full, biblical truth on any subject seems like a dozen tennis balls, all of which I must hold if I am to really do things your way. I can keep a few of them in my arms but as I try to grasp still more, the ones I had been holding begin to spill out. To hold on to the lot seems impossible. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that holding the lot takes more effort than I have been prepared to make. I am thrilled about the restoration of the truth that you are a miracle-working God who powerfully intervenes in our lives. As we begin to grasp this, however, we lose our grip on the truth that you also miraculously empower us to endure intolerable conditions. Before long, we who pride ourselves on the restoration of certain aspects of truth have let other parts of your truth so completely slip from our grasp that we end up with a different mix, but with no higher portion of the full truth than previous generations. We look down on Christians who do not hold the truths we have picked up, but in reality we have just as desperate a need of the truths we have let slip as they are in need of the truths we hold. The last thing I want is to influence Christians to drop aspects of truth they have already grasped. I simply yearn for each of us to pick up still more of your truth. I wonder what astounding exploits a person could achieve if he or she could hold on to all of your truth at the one time. Oh, how I long to be such a person! I cringe to finally admit to myself that I find it tempting to reduce you to a formula. In my early teens I used to wrestle with the question as to what type of faith you wanted. Was it enough just to believe that you could do whatever I was praying for, or did I need to believe you would do it? Eventually, Mark 11:24 settled the matter for me: Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. That’s not merely believing that you have the power to do something, it’s believing you will do that specific thing. Ever since discovering this, I have seen tacking ‘if it be your will’ on to the end of my prayers as usually being a cop out. Uncertainty as to whether it is your will to grant a particular petition saps my prayer of the type of faith you tell us to have. It acknowledges your sovereignty but it excuses my unbelief. ‘If it be your will’ creates a loophole and most of faith drains through the hole. It can reduce faith to mere intellectual assent to a creed, rather than the type of faith that you commended in people you met in your earthly ministry. For the most ignoble reason I find myself wanting to build an oversimplified view of your will. If your will is complex, then for genuine, believing prayer I will have to seek your face to determine your mind on each matter. I am so uncomfortable about seeking your will that I want to avoid it whenever I possibly can. Trying to hear from you frustrates me and makes me feel alone because so often you seem silent, or I fill with doubt as to whether it is really you. I want you to be so close, and my difficulty in hearing from you seems to highlight the distance between us. So I am strongly pressured to convince myself that your Word teaches that, except for his only Son, it is never God’s will that his loved ones suffer temporary hardship or pain. Then I often could instantly assume I know what your will is on any given matter. I could convince myself that I am praying correctly, while avoiding the frustration – I could almost say trauma – of seeking your will. I desperately need a breakthrough in this area, but right now I can at least admit to myself my bias when it comes to interpreting your Word. Many Scriptures imply or specifically state that one aspect of your crucifixion is that by suffering you were providing us with an example to follow. In fact, one of these Scriptures, speaks of Christians being called to suffer (1 Peter 2:21; 1 Thessalonians 3:3; 1 Peter 4:19). 1 Peter 2:20  . . . if, when you do well, you patiently endure suffering, this is commendable with God. For to this you were called , because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example, that you should follow his steps, 1 Peter 4:1 Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind; . . . 1 Thessalonians 1:6 You became imitators of us and of the Lord ; having received the word in much affliction , with joy of the Holy Spirit, Matthew 10:38 He who doesn’t take his cross and follow after me, isn’t worthy of me. Luke 9:23 He said to all, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. Hebrews 2:10 For it became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many children to glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. John 15:20 Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his lord.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. 1 John 3:16  . . . because he laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. John 15:12-13 This is my commandment, that you love one another, even as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. Matthew 20:26-28 It shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever desires to be first among you shall be your bondservant, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Ephesians 5:2 Walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling fragrance. Philippians 2:5-9 Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus, who . . . emptied himself, taking the form of a servant . . . becoming obedient to death, yes, the death of the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name; . . . Hebrews 12:2 looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him who has endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, that you don’t grow weary, fainting in your souls. ( Emphasis mine ) When weighing up your full revelation, I am forced to conclude that you embraced suffering, not so that we could wimp out, but so that we might be inspired to likewise embrace suffering. Of course, you suffered so that we might not suffer in the next life, but with regard to our life down here, you blazed a trail for us to follow. Just as suffering preceded your exaltation, so, through your triumph, our suffering must precede our exaltation. In the words of the great sufferer, Paul, ‘we are heirs . . . of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory,’ (Romans 8:17) and, ‘We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts 14:22). This is fundamental Bible teaching that so easily slips from one’s grasp as we try to hold on to other, equally significant, Bible truths. One of my countless reasons for loving you is locked in that Romans quote: ‘share in his sufferings.’ To suffer for you would be an immense honor, but the truth is even more amazing. We do not just suffer for you, but with you. When you suffered for our sins, Father God was forced to withdraw from you, since that is sin’s most terrifying consequence. You had to bear the wrath of God so that we could enjoy the loving tenderness of God. When we suffer, however, not only do you not abandon us like you had to be abandoned, but you bind yourself to us and suffer with us. I’m even more staggered when I consider that, whereas you deserve endless bliss, any torment I could suffer would be less than the eternity in hell I deserve from the moment of my first sin, and yet you count my suffering for righteousness, not as what I deserve, but as reason for you showering me with honor. I laugh as I recall my reaction years ago to you urging us in your Word to rejoice when trials come our way. I used to think you said this merely because you want us to honor you, and because rejoicing gives us a spiritual high that helps us through our problems. How could I have so completely missed the obvious? We should rejoice when trials come, simply because trials are something to rejoice about! If there were an equally beneficial, less painful alternative, then to suffer a trial would be to suffer unnecessary hardship. That would make a trial a tragedy – something to regret, not rejoice in. You urge us to rejoice when trials come, because difficult times are the best thing that could happen to us! And I presume that in your Word you were referring primarily to persecution more severe than most of us in the modern western world have ever known. I likewise used to puzzle over why you let people struggle with besetting sin, even though you have proved over and over that you can instantly deliver anyone from the most powerful addiction, without a person even having to try. Then I discovered the startling truth that even temptation from the Evil One does us good! Taking from me all desire for sin might cause my actions to seem holy, but my heart would be as selfish as ever. I would still be doing whatever I felt like doing, as much as if I were enslaved by sin – it would simply be that I no longer felt like doing what had previously attracted me. I would know nothing about self-denial, even though this teaching was a central theme in your earthly ministry. Resisting sin’s deceitful allure builds a deeper Christlikeness within us than could ever happen if we never found sin tempting. Sin never has a positive side, of course, but fighting sin and discovering the secrets of defeating it, makes us strong, even though at the time it is most unpleasant. So hard, painful times are actually a surprise package of blessings, achieving wondrous things in our lives that nothing else could match. Thank you for making this so obvious in my life that eventually even I could see it. Only then did I re-examine the biblical context and discovered that the spiritual benefits of hard times were always the reason you gave for rejoicing in trials. James 1:2-3 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into various temptations, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Romans 5:3-5 Not only this, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope: and hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. 2 Corinthians 12:10 Therefore I take pleasure in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then am I strong. And again in your Word, you give us the most practical of reasons for leaping for joy when we suffer for our faith. You tell us that if we are persecuted, the enormity of our reward should be our reason for rejoicing. Luke 6:22-26 Blessed are you when men shall hate you, and when they shall exclude and mock you, and throw out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven, for their fathers did the same thing to the prophets. “But woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation. Woe to you, you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe, when men speak well of you, for their fathers did the same thing to the false prophets. 1 Peter 4:13 But because you are partakers of Christ’s sufferings, rejoice; that at the revelation of his glory you also may rejoice with exceeding joy. It’s like throwing a party because I’ve just been granted mining rights to the world’s richest gold deposit. Yes, for a while I’ll have to toil in a dark hole extracting the ore, but who cares? Riches are guaranteed! This reminds me of your parable of the lucky man who found buried treasure. If he could raise the cash to buy the land, the treasure would be legally his. Parting with everything he owned would normally make him as miserable as a duck forced to put its feathers up for sale, but under these circumstances he could hardly contain his excitement. The most painful part was trying to keep a straight face so as not to raise suspicion before the deal was finalized. In the age to come I’ll be barely able to restrain my joy for all eternity over any temporary earthly suffering I had previously embraced for righteousness’ sake. So I have every right to celebrate ahead of time. Miracle-working faith is wonderful, but the faith to keep enduring hardship long before I hold the reward is just as great a spiritual achievement. I crave the faith that knows that you are the Master of the happy ending; the Creative Genius whose greatest delight is to flood his loved ones with inconceivable pleasures; the infinite Lord whose stupendous rewards are surpassed only by the matchless wonder of an eternity of knowing you deeper and deeper and deeper. I bless you for every hardship you have ever allowed me to suffer. I long to thank you for my trials more than any Olympic medallist has ever thanked his coach for his rigorous training, and more than any academic achiever has thanked his teachers for challenging assignments. Your training schedules are perfect, and your goals for my life are breathtaking. Your Word reveals that in your Hall of Fame are two types of heroes: those who through faith attained miraculous deliverances from tragedy, and those who through faith endured great suffering (Hebrews 11:32-38). Millions would queue up to share your inexhaustible joys but I sense there is more to a fulfilling life than this. There seems to be what I earlier called a missing element. It seems the height of intimacy and the heart of true love to seek the privilege of sharing your sorrows. I love the way the Apostle Paul expressed this longing. Everything that had previously been precious to him, he said, he now regarded as trash, in order that he might ‘know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings . . .’ (Philippians 3:10). Sharing your joys is delightful, but what sweet fellowship there must be when you so open your heart that you let me share your pain. Feeling a touch of romance about sharing your pain is what I’d expect of some self-destructive nutcase, not me. And yet the feeling keeps sneaking up on me, and whenever it does it seems good and pure and right. Moreover, the apostles seemed to regard suffering for you as an immense honor granted only to the privileged (Acts 5:41). Immediately after being flogged we find them ‘rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace’ for you. If their attitude were mentioned only in church history books, I’d have dismissed it as the delirium of crackpots, but it’s there in your very Word. I gain the impression, in fact, that their attitude created such a cherished moment for you that, as it were, you took a snap shot and preserved it in your family album – the Bible – for all subsequent generations of your children to gaze at in reverent wonder. I’ve detected just one more element to these occasional, sacred feelings that stir me. I know how much your own suffering has warmed my heart by confirming your love for me. I find myself becoming like a passionate lover desperate for the thrill of touching your heart and proving my love for you by enduring hardship for you. Your perfections leave me like a woman so in love with her man that she cannot stop herself longing to bear his children, even though she knows childbirth is painful, and childrearing necessitates sacrifice and irksome toil. Others can have the fame, thrones and gold in heaven. How sad that there are people who know nothing greater! I care not whether your exquisite rewards be sensual delights, heavenly ecstasies or inconceivable blessings, everything is hollow, relative to the joy of touching your heart. Sacrifice is the ecstasy of giving the best to the one you love the most . Years ago I read those words somewhere, and my spirit still leaps whenever I recall them. Boundless, adoring love is the only appropriate response to the perfection of your love, and to everything about you. I don’t want to give the Evil One the slightest cause to slander you and me by accusing you of having to resort to threats or bribes to secure my devotion. Were you to continually pamper me, shielding me from the unpleasant consequences of people’s godlessness, how could either I or our enemies ever know if my love for you is genuine or whether I serve you merely out of a mercenary desire for the benefits? My love should be untainted by lesser motives because that alone is what you deserve. I long for my love for you to be as fervent and selfless as your love for me. I am called to be a witness and what more powerful witness could there be than how I handle hardship? Surely any sensible person should recoil from the thought of suffering – and I certainly do in my sober moments. These feelings are so contrary to the normal me that they must truly come from you. You know they puzzle me intellectually, but what most disturbs me about positive feelings toward suffering is that these feelings are as yet untested by the fires of severe affliction. Anyone can be brave ahead of time. Right now, what frightens me is not pain but turning into a Simon Peter and dishonoring you at the critical moment. Your ghastly experience in Gethsemane highlights love’s limits as a painkiller. If the sweet warmth of a spiritual high deserted you when you must have most longed for it, I can’t see this source of comfort remaining with me, either. But are you using the memory of those feelings as pointers to a spiritual reality that exists even when the feelings evaporate? Are you seeking to build within me an attitude to suffering that at critical times I’ll need grim willpower to cling to, but an attitude that will nonetheless help me persist during the bleakest part of the night? With these feelings coming and going, I seem like someone standing on a clouded mountaintop. Everything looks dismal. I seem lost and alone. Occasionally you allow a break in the clouds that lets me see that on every side of me I am surrounded by the comfort and security of civilization. When the clouds return, bleak aloneness seems to return. The friendly warmth of civilization seems a million miles away, but in reality it has not moved. It might be out of sight, but I’m still close to help and companionship and all that I need. I’m as safe as ever. Help me live not according to past deceptive feelings of abandonment and aloneness, nor by what I feel whenever the clouds return and the things that cheer me fade from sight. Instead, may I live according to my knowledge of what lies beyond the clouds. Intellectually, I have a slight conception of how lovable you really are, but usually this remains a cold fact, rather than something that fires my heart. Emotionally, it is as if often you were nearly a stranger. I suppose this is largely because I don’t often enough put in the effort to push through all the distractions to gaze on your beauty. The other factor is that faith, operating the opposite way to sight, mushrooms in the dark and wilts in the light. Faith is so critical to our spiritual development that you must ensure we have enough darkness to grow our faith. On the precious moments I have been talking about, it is as if the shutter on the iron case around my heart cracks open. A ray of your light hits my dark heart, allowing it to respond to you with a glimmer of the exuberant passion my emotions would always feel if they truly knew you. In your light, my heart can suddenly pierce the murk to catch a tiny glimpse of reality for itself. For that brief moment, my heart is no longer forced to blindly resort to what I tell it is real. Instead of me having to continue my usual chore of dragging my emotions up toward the level of my intellectual understanding of spiritual reality, they at last are released to frolic in the wonder of what they see, and even to outpace my mental grasp of what exists beyond the clouds. In the warm light of your love, things like pain and hardship, turn out to be very different to what I had feared. It is like flicking a light switch to discover that what I had felt certain was an intruder about to harm me, is actually a friend come to help. Suffering might be more like a surgeon than a lover, but when yielded to you, suffering ends up so beneficial that when all is revealed I’ll spend eternity thanking you for what you achieved in my life through it. One ‘thank you’ down here, however, is worth a million later, so I pray I’ll do my best to shower you with thanks before the blessings become so obvious that thanking you becomes little better than a spontaneous reaction to the uncontrollable joy you give me. I want to thank you while my thanks can still touch your heart as a demonstration of trust, rather than a mere response to the obvious. All too soon, the shutter around my heart snaps shut again. Once more I am forced to muster faith and try to coax forward the confused, frightened children that my emotions have reverted to. There is much suffering that I certainly don’t want – every trace of hardship that I could avoid if I were more devoted to you. I’d be a fool to endure any hardship when its avoidance would bring you greater honor. There is no glory in me suffering the consequences of my own sin. If, however, I were so foolish as to sin, I would prefer any suffering that results, if the experience makes me more resistant to further foolishness. I recall the psalmist praising you for his anguish. ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray,’ he sang, ‘but now I obey your word’ (Psalm 119:67). Affliction is better than going astray. Better still, of course, is to be so faithful that I have no need to be so dramatically jolted out of my complacency. Neither do I want any suffering I could have missed had I not been too lazy or doubting or confused by wrong theology to press through in believing prayer or spiritual warfare. That, too, would be foolish. I recall the webpage I wrote years ago, ‘The Role of Sickness in Your Life,’ in which I explored many surprising benefits associated with sickness. Nevertheless, despite the many good things that can result from sickness, I concluded that we should still seek you for healing. Whatever was Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh,’ it was certainly unpleasant. The apostle identified this suffering as being from Satan and yet it proved an enormous blessing by protecting him from the grave spiritual danger of pride. Like Paul, I would long to be spared such suffering, but even for the great apostle the spiritual danger was so great that there was no safe alternative. I’d prefer not to have a spiritual weakness that needs suffering to keep it in check, but avoiding spiritual hazards is far more important than avoiding temporary unpleasantness. Years of emotional pain have given me such a sensitivity to other people’s needs and has in so many ways empowered me to minister to hurting people that I’m most grateful for what I have suffered. You are such a genius at turning even my weaknesses and mistakes into something magnificent that it becomes hard to imagine a better way. Nevertheless, I’ve wondered whether I could have enjoyed these benefits with less suffering had I voluntarily done more to foster tenderness and compassion within me. Spare me needless pain, Lord, but do not spare me pain that furthers your cause. Many things I could suffer, however, are not related to my inadequacies or lack of faith. Could it be that through the occasional feelings you give, you are seeking to assure me that, when yielded to you with Christlike dedication, these forms of suffering can be beautiful – even when the pain is so intense that it obliterates every gooey feeling and every awareness of your presence? Like a little, girl-hating boy growing into a young man ready for love, may I shed my former, childish view of suffering, and like a butterfly set free from the limitations of a grub, may I soar with you to unexpected joys. Oh, how I love you! My indebtedness to you is beyond calculation. Seeing my chronic predicament, you gave your life so that I could have the heart transplant essential for my eternal survival. Now you have not only given me your heart, you have called me to the honor of following in the steps of your nail-pierced feet – calling me to plunge through all the shame and pain hurled upon you and upon me by enemies of God, and emerging to rule with you in endless majesty. Radiant King of kings, not only have you triumphantly burst through pain and death to regain your rightful throne and win new honors as well, you have returned to this grief-stricken planet. Abandoning the carefree ease that is your right, you elect to endure still more anguish – my anguish – by living in me, to bring me to glory – the endless glory of your hard-won victory. Thank you that because you have won, I’ll win. Because the God you trusted has taken your pain and shame and turned it into the power to comfort and transform lives, you’ll take anything I suffer and turn it into a blessing for others and eternal honor for myself. Truly, you are my hero. You lead me into victory. In you I am complete. The webpage preceding this one: Part 1 Related Pages If Anyone has Reason to Hate God, It’s Sue God’s execution of justice on behalf of those who have suffered Why Bad Things Keep Happening to Some People Jesus, Our Brother, Our Example Life’s Mysteries Explained Why Christ’s Suffering can Change your Life From Mystery to Ministry: The Role of Sickness in Your Life Why Would a God of Love Allow Suffering? Afraid? Help and Inspiration When Gripped by Fear Discovering God’s Love For You How Much Does God Love Me? How to Get Your Own Revelation of God’s Love

Help for everyone who wants not only to be loved by God but to feel God’s love and presence The goal of my entire ministry is to help people fall more in love with God. This makes the many factors influencing feeling God’s love of vital importance to me. My extensive personal struggles with feeling God’s love have combined with years of counseling people to give me deep compassion for the many of us who find ourselves devastated by God feeling cold or distant or by us simply feeling nothing. “What is wrong with me?” we worry, when friends seem to find it so easy to feel God’s presence and/or love. Not content with mere sympathy, I have felt compelled to devote innumerable hours prayerfully seeking divine answers for all of us who are perplexed and/or distressed over being unable to feel God’s love, or his presence or favor. The following is a fascinating, easily understood exploration of the many factors influencing one’s ability to feel God. The goal is not only to reassure you but to actually help you feel God and his love, even when, as is so often the case, the hindrance is not spiritual but deeply psychological. When planning this webpage, I considered providing a list of factors impacting our ability to feel God’s love and his presence, and let readers zero in on what they see as particularly relevant to them. I quickly realized the folly of this, however. The most relevant factors are sometimes the very ones we think have no influence over us. My prayer is that the Lord will highlight to you every factor influencing you, as you prayerfully read the entire webpage. Yes, I’ve had to mention prayer twice in the one sentence. To fulfill my role I must pray, but for you to receive full help, so must you. In fact, let’s pray right now: Lord, I need you to cut through all my delusions, and open my eyes to spiritual reality. I am so keen to have a fulfilling relationship with you that I will read this entire webpage, looking to you to empower me to identify which parts are relevant to me. I want this whole matter sorted out in my life and I am determined to do whatever it takes to bring this about. Feelings Versus Reality Surprisingly many celebrities feel unattractive despite being envied for their beauty. Countless students have felt sure they have failed their exams when they actually did well. Hypochondriacs are healthy people who feel sure they are ill or even dying. A whole range of phobias cause people who are quite safe to feel frightened. In total, billions of dollars have been lost by people who felt sure their business would succeed. Feeling lucky has plunged not just gamblers, but multitudes of other people into all sorts of disasters, and feeling inadequate has kept countless others from the success they could have enjoyed. Trainee pilots have it drilled into them how critical it is to trust solely the plane’s instrumentation and completely disregard their feelings about their orientation. What magnifies the danger of drunk driving is that intoxicated drivers feel better at driving than they really are. Countless millions of people have felt perfectly safe minutes before they died. Though notoriously unreliable, and often dangerously deceptive, feelings give the powerful illusion of reality. Never is this more so than when it comes to feeling unloved. We are about to uncover numerous and distinct reasons why being loved by God and feeling loved by God, are often a world apart. The same is true of God’s presence and feeling his presence. Negative Expectations Suppose a teenage girl is convinced she is too fat for any guy to possibly like her. She has a secret crush on one young man and he actually likes her. She is so terrified of him telling her something negative about herself, however, that she keeps avoiding him. Even worse, she is so certain that she is unlovable that she keeps misinterpreting his every attempt to convey his affection. This frustratingly tragic situation is similar to what plagues the relationship many of us have with God. Rejection or apparent indifference from certain people has convinced many of us that we are unlovable. From an early age, others of us grew to expect our father to be cold and indifferent and – deep down – we think God must be the same. Some of us have actually had it drummed into us since childhood that we are evil relative to other people, or incapable of gaining the approval of anyone who matters. It is hardly surprising that most Christians who have suffered such a background, half expect God to reject them, or at least frown on them or be aloof. This mistaken expectation strongly pressures them to interpret every feeling or event, not in the light of the truth that God is incurably loving and forgiving, but according to their negative expectations about God. This can easily produce a vicious circle, with one’s mind producing feelings in line with one’s expectations. We instinctively shrink from anyone we fear is angry with us. So if we fear that God is displeased with us, we are most unlikely to receive inner confirmation of his love, simply because we are too scared or apprehensive to draw close enough to him to know his heart. Even if we know we are forgiven but suspect that God has a low opinion of us, we will similarly be reluctant to spend long enough listening to whispers to hear him tell us how he really feels about us. Moreover, we will be strongly biased to dismiss or misinterpret according to our preconceptions his every attempt to convey to us the depth of his love for us. What a bind! Let’s consider some reasons for us expecting God to think negatively about us and see how they stand in the light of biblical reality. Unforgivably Guilty? First, the bad news: the most exciting Person in the universe is terrifyingly holy. Not even the most saintly person can relate to the Holy One until his or her sins are supernaturally removed through spiritual union with Jesus, the spotlessly pure, eternal Son of God. This supernatural transformation is the most critical factor in having a thrillingly genuine encounter with the Living God. Just as instructions for using a DVD recorder are useless if you do not have a DVD recorder, so this webpage is of no use until you are genuinely reborn spiritually and understand the experience. If you have the slightest doubt as to whether you have had this experience, it is essential for you to read You Can Find Love right now . If Jesus has forgiven you, you are cleansed of all sin and have no guilt in God’s eyes. Despite this, there is a good chance that you will continue to feel guilty. This is to be expected, since, as we have already seen, there is a vast difference between reality and feelings. Most of us will benefit from reading the following, but if you are impatient and sure that guilt feelings do not secretly hinder your relationship with God, you may skip to skip to the next section . God has a supernatural enemy who is fiercely determined to minimize the impact of his greatest defeat. He attempts this by mustering all his evil cunning to afflict us with deceptive feelings of guilt and hopelessness. It is a cruel, deadly serious, supernaturally powerful attempt to fool us into rejecting the all-forgiving power of Christ’s sacrifice. In reality, it is no harder for God to accept the vilest devil worshipper or reprobate former Christian than for him to accept humanity’s most saintly person. Let me explain. A single sin – even the most minor possible offense – plunges us so far below the perfection of God that the holy Lord could draw close to us no more than a sterilized surgeon performing open heart surgery could let himself touch a sewer rat. The “tiniest” one-off sin is all it takes to keep anyone eternally cut off from the fearsomely holy God. Like trying to un-murder someone, once defiled by the slightest imperfection, there is no way any of us can scramble back to the perfection required to relate to the Holy One. Every one of us, whether goody-goody or as debased as anyone can get, is in the same impossible situation. All possibility of being able to say we have lived a perfect life is shattered at the moment of our first sin. Once contaminated by a single sin, devoting the rest of our lives to pure things could remove our contamination no more than dripping drops of pure water into a bucket of already contaminated water. The wages of one sin is death. When someone dies of a smoking-related disease, he does not spring back to life when the corpse quits cigarette smoking. Neither could quitting sin bring us back from spiritual death. So that’s it. After one sin, relating to God becomes so impossible that even a billion more murders and blasphemies could not make it any more hopeless. Defiled and unable to reach God, the whole of humanity – no exceptions – was in the clutches of the Evil One. Then God intervened by sending Jesus to swap places with us, thus making it possible for everyone – no exceptions – to be granted the righteousness of God’s holy Son and thus have full access to God. Jesus undid the devil’s evil by dying for the sins of the entire world, thus making possible the full forgiveness of every sin, no matter how gross and deliberate and repeated, or whether committed before or after becoming a Christian. Nothing could rob us of God’s yearning to pour out his love and forgiveness upon us, unless we do not want Jesus to deliver us from our sins, or we mistakenly believe that Jesus’ costly sacrifice is too inadequate to forgive the grossest of sins. Satan’s defeat means that the only place where he can hold humanity captive is in a slave camp where all the prison bars, walls and fierce-looking guards are nothing but an illusion. At any moment anyone can walk out, free. The only people staying there are those who fear freedom from sin and so choose to remain captives, or those who refuse to believe that because of Jesus’ victory, the prison’s security measures are an illusion. Powerfully intimidating, deceptive feelings of rejection by God, and feelings of guilt, hopelessness and condemnation are simply part of the Evil One’s ploy to try to fool people into acting like his slaves when, because of Jesus, every one of those who act like captives can walk free at any moment. It pains our loving Lord when we make unwise choices. Nevertheless, he honors our wishes by leaving it up to each of us whether we choose to believe in the power of the Deceiver or in the power of Jesus. In blanket statement after blanket statement, God promises over and over in his Word that he forgives whoever believes in Jesus. There are no exceptions. People who consider themselves unforgivable insult the crucified Lord, the Savior of the world, by choosing to believe in the power of their sin, rather than the power of their Forgiver. Yes, Jesus spoke of an unforgivable sin, but whatever he meant by that cannot negate the Bible’s repeated insistence that forgiveness is freely available to everyone who believes in what Jesus achieved by giving his holy life as payment for the death penalty our sins deserve. The context of Jesus’ reference to an unpardonable sin makes it clear that he was referring to rejecting God’s offer of forgiveness by choosing to believe that Jesus, God’s Savior, is of the devil, not of God. No one believing that Jesus is anti-God would look to Jesus for God’s forgiveness. So it turns out that the only sin that cannot be forgiven is one for which forgiveness through Jesus is never sought. Since Satan is powerless to stop anyone who by faith accepts God’s forgiveness through Jesus, we could expect faith in the power of Jesus’ forgiveness to be the area of greatest satanic attack. God’s spiritual foe, who the Bible calls the deceiver, is determined to flood us with exceedingly convincing feelings of guilt, hopelessness and rejection, in an attempt to get us to insult Christ by denying the unlimited forgiving power of his sacrifice. The choice is ours whether we break God’s heart and dishonor him by choosing to believe deceptive feelings, or whether we refuse that cowardly path and cling to the integrity of God’s love and promises, and to the power of Christ’s forgiveness. This area of satanic attack is so critical and affects so many Christians that I have devoted incalculable hours to writing webpage after webpage specifically for people who feel riddled with guilt or feel unforgivable. If this is an issue with you, but not an overwhelming one, you can continue with reading and visit Feeling Condemned? later. If, however, it is such a stumbling block with you that you can go no further, please read it immediately. Unworthy of God’s Love? What commonly sabotages our feelings and enjoyment of God’s love for us is being unable to think of a single reason why God would love us. We think if we, who are biased toward ourselves and presumably have above average tolerance of our own failings, find ourselves unlovable, how could anyone else truly love us – especially the God of perfection? In fact, for many of us, the notion of God loving us – as distinct from him loving someone else – seems quite impossible. We forget, however, that the Lord is very different from fickle humanity. With the God for whom nothing is impossible, no one is unlovable. I cannot figure out how my computer works, but I don’t let that stop me from enjoying it. Neither do I have to figure out why God loves me before I can enjoy his love. Nevertheless, our inability to understand God’s love can gnaw away at our belief that God genuinely loves us. So let’s look deeper into this. To intellectually know the nature of God is not enough; we must take it to heart and let the truth transform us. The God of the impossible is not only perfect in his holiness; he is perfect in love. Not only is his miracle-working power without human limits, his love is also without human limits. The Creator of not just galaxies, but sub-atomic particles, has a mind so powerful that he is intensely interested not only in constellations but in every hair on your head. So far beyond human limitations are his powers of concentration that he could not be more aware of your every thought if you were the only person in an empty universe. The Creator’s love is as unlimited and as extreme as his physical power. God is not a machine. He is not merely rational; he is passionate. To glimpse a shadow of his love, picture the world’s most selfless, devoted and proud parent of a tiny baby that can do little but cry, soil itself and wriggle. Multiply that love by infinity and you are approaching God’s love. Let’s examine parental love to see just how mysterious genuine love is. You know what it’s like when a married couple hit on the idea of starting a family. They are having breakfast together when the man suddenly exclaims, “I’m sick of gardening, looking after the car, maintaining the house, and all my other chores!” His wife looks up from her cereal. “I’ve got this cool idea,” he continues, “Let’s have children so they can do all the work.” “Brilliant!” exclaims the wife, excitedly grasping the possibilities, “I’ll teach them to do all the washing and ironing. They’ll keep our house tidy and do the cooking. We’ll have breakfast in bed every morning. They’ll answer the phone so we can have long, undisturbed sleeps.” “Yes!” chimes in her husband, “Life is too hectic. We need some children to give us some peace and quiet.” “And think of all the decisions they could make for us,” adds the wife. “I’m sick of having to choose what I watch on TV.” “Come to think of it,” says her husband, “I’ve been missing Sesame Street. And my accountant says children are a goldmine. Pouring money into kids is the best investment we could ever make. We’ll be millionaires! We’ll be retired at 35. And think of later. What are we going to lie awake at night worrying about if we don’t have teenagers? And when we’re older who else would throw us into a nursing home?” “I don’t think a woman looks truly beautiful without stretch marks,” muses the wife. “Dirty diapers and vomit, screaming kids, snotty noses, and temper tantrums are just the spark our marriage needs.” From a coldly rational perspective, having children seems almost an act of insanity, and yet billions of us yearn for it. Selfless parental love is a compelling desire placed within us by God himself – the God whose love doesn’t make worldly sense. When he loves, nothing could be further from his heart than a profit and loss analysis. Divine love – pure love, undefiled by selfishness – is based on giving, not getting. Even the most starry eyed would-be parents know ahead of time that their offspring will sometimes be naughty, self-centered and have disgusting habits. Billions of us willingly sacrifice much to have children anyway. Children inevitably embarrass and disappoint their parents but, despite having only a speck of God’s love, good parents can’t stop loving their offspring. If there are parents, powered by only inferior imitations of God’s love, who keep on loving when it does not seem profitable, how much more will the infinite love of God explode the confines of coldly rational, human thought. If passion were cold and calculating, it would make sense to consider ourselves unwanted if we can’t think of anything God could gain from loving us. Many of us choose to love adults only because of what they can do for us – kill loneliness, boost our status or egos or some such thing. We are so used to fake love that we are suspicious if ever we stumble upon the real thing. If real love were selfish, then loving not for gain, but simply for the sake of loving, would be insane. Because even humans know a little about the “insanity” of love, we have such expressions as “madly in love.” But beyond that, genuine love does not hold back until there are obvious benefits, because real love is unselfish. And God is brimming with it. God loves you because he loves you. He loves you because that’s his very nature. It’s who he is. He takes delight in you, not for what you can do for him, but for what he can do for you. His love singles you out as if there were only you and him. His love makes you special, irreplaceable, and of infinite value. The story is told of a boy who labored with his grandfather for hours and hours to design, build and paint a model sailing boat. When at last it was finished, he took his precious boat to the lake to try it out. It sailed beautifully. Suddenly a gust of wind swept the boat out of reach. It drifted further and further into the deep until the boy lost sight of it. Eventually, he trudged home, heart broken. The boy’s grandfather suggested making another boat, but the boy was inconsolable. Nothing could replace that boat. Weeks later, the boy glanced in the shop window of a second-hand dealer and saw his boat. It was weathered and beaten but it was definitely his. Excitedly, he rushed into the shop to claim his boat, only to find he was not believed. He was told the only way he could get that battered boat was to buy it. He had to find work to earn enough to buy it. When at last the transaction was completed, he hugged his beloved boat and whispered to it, “You’re mine! You’re twice mine! You’re mine because I made you and you’re mine because I bought you. And I don’t care how battered you are, I’ll make you beautiful again.” That’s how God feels about you. God loves you because you are his. He loves you because he made you and because he bought you and because the All-powerful One sees the astounding person he can make you, if only you let him. With God, you are lovable. To think anything else is to insult not you, but the God of love. The One for whom nothing is impossible is so passionately in love with you that there is no length to which he will not go to pour his love on you for all eternity. God’s eternal Son went to the extreme of being tortured to death so that you could be as cherished by God as Christ himself is. I beg you not to gloss over what the Holy Son of God did for you . The great temptation is to perversely under-rate God’s personal love for you and malign the Lord of Glory by supposing Jesus died only for people in general, as if you were just one of millions, not the personal focus of the greatest expression of love in the universe. In our imagination we can cultivate twisted ideas about God’s love, but in reality, divine love cannot be diluted or depersonalized. God loves you as if you were his only child. The truth is that, with his Son’s full agreement, God traded his Son’s life for you. No matter what your analysis of your worth, no one is more important to God than you. Mysterious Depression As strange as it may seem, it is not unusual for people to be struggling for quite some time before eventually discovering that the cause is clinical depression. Depression can be a physical problem that has such a dampening effect on one’s feelings that it can be as if the intensity is toned down on almost every positive feeling; including feeling loved. The following is from a missionary who shared her heart with me. Eventually she was diagnosed and then began to learn that a common characteristic of this affliction is an inability to feel loved by God. She writes: When I was first going through serious depression, I had not the slightest idea that it was depression. I knew I was keeping a close guard on my spiritual life, but in spite of that, it truly felt like God simply was not listening or responding to me, even though I prayed and prayed. And it was that way for months. I also felt sure I was a failure in my missionary work, and that my teaching was futile. I now look back and see that the truth was very different to my feelings. People enjoyed my classes, and were eager to learn, and the papers they turned in proved they were learning. I was also sure that my co-worker – another missionary, whom I got along well with and saw constantly – was displeased with me. That frustrated me, because I didn’t know why she was displeased. It turned out that I had simply projected onto those around me, and even onto God, the negative way my depression caused me to feel about myself. I now know that one of the symptoms of depression is not being able to feel love, even by those who are close to you. In depression, most of our feelings are blunted. We feel useless, unworthy, hopeless, and that no one cares about us. Not feeling God’s love was simply a symptom of the disease. It had nothing to do with God not being there, or me being “off” spiritually. I have undergone much spiritual dryness simply because of depression. Now that my clinical depression has been diagnosed and I understand the implications, I’m no longer shaken by the spiritual symptoms. Equally Weird Anxiety Clinical depression is caused not by one’s attitude or external circumstances but by a medical disorder – an imbalance in one’s body chemistry. Clinical anxiety is similar. An iron deficiency is one of a wide range of imbalances, each of which could have anxiety as a symptom. Another example is clinical anxiety caused by an hormonal imbalance in mothers after giving birth, similar to post-natal depression. Anxiety acts like an alarm warning a person that something is seriously wrong. Just like a fire alarm, however, it is possible for a malfunction to trigger the alarm. The disturbing thing is that an alarm sounds/looks/feels exactly the same, regardless of whether it was tripped by a malfunction or a genuine source of danger. Moreover, alarms are designed to be so unpleasant that they drown out everything else and seize our attention. So clinical anxiety can mess with our feelings in bewildering ways. Anxiety causes us not just to feel ill at ease and to keep assuming we must be in some sort of danger, it usually feels identical to a guilty conscience. Since Christians are often more concerned about spiritual dangers than any other type of danger, and a guilty conscience suggests that we have done something to displease God, clinical anxiety is most upsetting because although it sets off a false alarm, it feels like the real thing –as if we must have really done something to make God angry at us – and it is so strong and incessant that it drowns out other feelings, such as feeling God’s presence, his reassurance, and so on. None of us can feel loved by someone while it feels as if that person is angry with us. So this is another example where feelings can go haywire and we must ignore our feelings (including how our conscience feels) and cling to Christ in raw faith. No matter how much biblical, counseling and divine reassurance we receive affirming that everything is spiritually okay, the guilt feelings and anxiety will continue when they are caused not by a spiritual, rational or psychological problem but by a medical disorder. Pain Avoidance Techniques So you could be unable to feel God’s love because a chemical imbalance – clinical depression – is deadening your emotions and distorting your perception of earthly and heavenly reality. There are other possibilities, however. We could be unconsciously shutting down our emotions because lurking in the shadows of our mind is a fear of getting hurt. Part of us – often subconsciously – actively resists feeling love, because to love someone is to make ourselves highly vulnerable. Loving someone gives that person the terrifying power to hurt us deeply. To really feel someone’s love requires us to open our hearts to that person. It gives a person the power to lift us to the clouds but also the power to smash our hearts like a dropped egg. Not surprisingly, the fear of getting hurt causes many of us to close off emotionally, as a form of self-protection. Tragically, the very attempt to seal off our emotions from the possibility of getting hurt, also seals off the possibility of us feeling loved. This is yet another instance when it is through giving that we receive. In theory, for us to release our white-knuckled grip on our emotions, it should be sufficient to know that God is faithful and will keep his promise never to leave or forsake us. In practice, however, fear is seldom overcome quickly. For anyone terrified of spiders, to stop fearing a huge spider will take more than just becoming intellectually convinced that it is harmless. We can expect it to take a long while for us to trust God so completely that we relax enough to be able to feel loved. So, as back to front as it seems, the first but significant step toward realizing that we are loved is to not expect to feel loved. Your emotional Fingerprint Part of the uniqueness that makes us special is that we each have a distinctive emotional reaction to identical situations. We all know that some of us are far more emotional than others. Some people seem to laugh at anything; some laugh at nothing. Some would cry if their cat sneezed. Others would not shed a tear if hit by the worst personal disaster known to humanity. The one who cries the least might have the softest heart. Lack of tears has nothing to do with how much people are hurting or how devoted they are. How emotional you are, flows from your personality and past experiences, not from how godly you are. The same is true of all feelings. To adapt what I’ve said elsewhere: Never confuse devotion with emotion. The Bible measures love, not in tingles per second, but in putting one’s life on the line (1 John 3:16-18). It’s pain endured in the valley, not gooey feelings in the afterglow of mountaintop ecstasy, that validates love. Never assume that emotional deadness – a normal phase of anyone’s spiritual life – implies spiritual deadness. We march by faith, not by warm fuzzies. Suppose someone is beaten up and sustains a spinal injury that allows him to walk but he is left with some loss of feeling in his legs. That does not make him any less lovable. Many of us have been beaten up emotionally and have been left with a loss of feeling in our emotions. That’s unfortunate, but we should not let it have any effect on our relationship with God. If a devout woman of God broke her neck and lost all physical feeling, it would be a challenge, but we would expect it not to hinder her relationship with God. Likewise, we should not allow not being able to feel emotionally hinder us spiritually. A Wrong Emphasis on Feelings It is astonishingly easy for us Christians to slip into unbiblical thinking. A quick statistical check of biblical word usage gives a crude indication of how we have strayed from the Bible’s perspective on the significance of feelings. In the New International Version of the Bible, for every variant of the word “feel” (feeling, felt, feels, etc) there are over thirteen occurrences of variants of the word “faith” or “believe.” In the King James Version, the figure balloons to thirty-seven times more references to faith/believe than to variants of “feel.” “Now faith is . . . the evidence of things not seen,” declares the Word of God (Hebrews 11:1, KJV). Most of us know the verse. The problem is that we tend to reject it and think that feelings are the evidence. The Jerusalem Bible renders the verse: “Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen.” Our temptation is to dethrone faith and try to make feelings, not faith, the guarantee or proof of spiritual reality. To do so is to stray from biblical Christianity. To cling to faith is to show oneself an authentic Christian. Expecting a Sign from God that He Loves You How do you think the Almighty would feel if you said, “God, I want you to prove to me that you’re not a liar when you declare over and over in your Word that you love me.” We’d never put it so bluntly, but regardless of whether we seek a feeling or supernatural skywriting, this is really what is going on when we seek some sort of indication beyond the Bible and Christ’s sacrifice that God loves us. Hoping for such a sign plunges us into a no-win situation. To explain, permit me to draw upon something I wrote elsewhere: I’ve suffered times when I was convinced I desperately needed personal indications of God’s presence, and I felt badly treated by God when he left me to stagger though life devoid of any tangible proof that I was important to him, even though he gave people all around me the signs I craved. Eventually I remembered Thomas, who was granted perhaps the greatest of all such experiences – the opportunity to physically handle the risen Lord. How blessed he was! And yet the astounding thing is that Jesus told Thomas that the person who is really blessed is the one who is not granted an experience like him. The best is reserved for the person compelled to hold on by faith alone (John 20:29). Finally I understood how I had forced my Lord into the position where he either had to deny me the experience I was hankering for, or deny me the greater blessing he had planned for me – the chance to gain glory by finding faith without experiencing anything dramatic and, by doing so, grow in faith, that exquisite commodity more valuable than gold. The Lord had lovingly risked my wrath so that he could give me the greater blessing. And instead of being grateful, I was annoyed at him. How often we must unknowingly put God in such a situation. Seeing only one possible solution, we demand it of God, convinced that he must either act the only way we can figure, or God cannot be loving. We force God into either denying us what is best, or acting in a manner that we have fooled ourselves into thinking he is unloving. A friend of mine confided: When I was in my early twenties I had an experience of Jesus so intense it lit me up for a few months. I wasn’t looking for it – it just happened. It was a mind-blowing experience. Temptation to lust vanished – for a guy in his early twenties that was different! I felt intense compassion for others, a total absence of fear, and joy so intense that walking down the street to get some milk was a richer experience than a recent vacation to an exotic tropical isle. Feel jealous? You mightn’t, after learning that the feelings faded – and they inevitably do, since it is vital to our spiritual development that we all learn to live by faith not feelings – and he thereafter spent decades in what he calls “real, exhausted despair at my lack of spiritual advancement;” needlessly worrying that there was something spiritually wrong. “Ever since,” he told me, “I have been lost in a dullish despair trying to recapture it [those feelings].” Thankfully, this dear man is now learning the truths in this webpage. Mysterious “Memory Loss” Slightly edited, here’s an email I received: I was just beginning to read on your website about how much God is head over heals in love with us, when the Lord said to me, “Fifty First Dates.” This is a movie of a guy that falls in love with a brain-injured girl who suffers from memory loss. Every day he tries to win her over, even though she can’t remember who he is the next day. That’s how it is with us sometimes. He is crazy in love with us. We look for spiritual highs but even if occasionally we get them, almost as soon as the high is over we assume the fading of the high means God has denied us in some way and we revert to feeling as down about our relationship with him as before the experience. Reminding me of the movie, God said, “Just because she couldn’t remember the guy the next day didn’t stop him from trying to love her and win her over. He just kept on loving her and helping her to remember who she was and who he is.” That is so much like the relationship many of us have with God. There is another side to the parable of the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45). Jesus found us, and we were so precious to him that he sold all he had, relinquishing all his kingly status and wealth, just to buy us back to the Father at the cost of his own tortured death. This blows me away! His love is so far beyond our love. No wonder we have such a hard time understanding it! Our emphasis on signs and feelings instead of faith, and us thinking divine love is like fickle human love, does indeed cause us to act as if we suffer from continual memory loss, and yet God keeps tirelessly trying to open our eyes to the magnitude and constancy of his love for us. We’re just half way through this subject. For much more about feeling God’s love and practical tips as to how to start feeling, see the next page. Continued .....

Sweet Revenge! Turning Hate into Healing The Righteous Lust for Vengeance: Satisfaction at Last! Someone has left you suffering severe emotional pain, or financial ruin, or physical disfigurement, or insomnia, or post-traumatic stress syndrome, or the loss of a loved one, or false guilt, or some other devastation. You have suffered far too much. You desperately need closure. But that cannot happen until full justice is executed on your behalf. Here’s how to see it happen. Explanation: If you have been shabbily treated, this webpage intelligently and soberly expresses the magnitude of the offense against you and your right to vengeance. Almost every human advancement starts off with a dream. So we will begin by dreaming up the ideal punishment. We will then convert our findings to practical reality. The following can be read both from the perspective of justice and also as therapy. I have written as if your offender were a male acting alone. If, as you read, you need to mentally adjust the gender or number to fit your situation, please do so. But stay focused on the text. It will initially seem that your imagination could do better, but although the first paragraphs might be mistaken for the work of a hate-crazed crackpot, the text is carefully designed to maximize your satisfaction. Take this seriously, and things more wonderful than you dare dream will happen. WARNING: Choose the Milder Version , unless you are sure you can handle graphic descriptions of violence against your offender The Dream A public lynching would be far too kind for the despicable creature who hurt you. Let’s for a moment let our minds run wild to determine exactly what punishment would be fitting. Start by dragging him before court. Let him face the music. Let his accusers point the finger. Let their hate erupt like vomit over his head. Make him sweat as they scream their chilling accusations. In fact, just for fun, make it three courts – one trial after another after another. That should raise his blood pressure. But it in no way settles the score. Hire professional thugs. With the vilest language they spit on him; demeaning their human plaything, while hammering him with their fists. Here’s an idea: have him blindfolded so that he waits in terror, never knowing when or from where the next sickening clout will come from. Blow upon blow smashes his face and body. Keep it up! Make him reel! More! More! Finally, he’s utterly broken. He’s sobbing uncontrollably, tears flooding down his bloodied face, longing for mercy. This is fun! “You’re not so tough now!” you laugh. “What’s the matter, big boy? Can’t take a little pain? Go on – grovel at my feet! Writhe like the worm you are!” You are grinning from ear to ear. But we need some instrument that inflicts more pain than fists. A whip? The thugs rip off his clothes and lash his naked back. Whack! He screams as the whip mercilessly tears through his skin. Blood spurts. Excellent! Whack! The whip cruelly digs in, ripping out more flesh. Now you’ve got him where you want him. He’s cringing in pain; a sobbing, bloodied wreck. You’re laughing hysterically. Whack! Scream. Whack! Scream. Flay his flesh! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Don’t weaken – what mercy did he have when he ruined your life? Pulverize his back! Whack! Whack! Whack! Fire up your rage. Remember the grubby way he treated you. Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! . . . Oh, no! He’s lost consciousness. Drench him with water. Shake him. Slap him around. Great! He’s conscious again! Whack! Whimper. Whack! Whimper. Whack! Whack! You’ve run out of skin on his back. Turn him over. Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! . . . Keep it up! More! More! Rats! You can’t keep him conscious any longer. You’ll have to wait a couple hours until he comes around again. That will give you more time to dream up new horrors. At last! He’s conscious again! You sneer at him in disgust. “It’s pay back time, vermin!” Jerk him to his feet. “Your day of reckoning has come!” Parade him through the busy streets, with everyone knowing he’s a condemned criminal. Incite the mobs to expel their venom on him, hissing and cursing and despising him like the nauseating slime that he is. He drops to the ground. Belt him until he staggers up again and stumbles on. A few more steps and he’s down again. Another wonderful opportunity to swat this lowlife! Finally the thugs have to drag him. What’s something new we can try? I know! Strip him naked. Shamefully naked. Fully exposed; humiliated in front of the gawking, piercing, critical eyes of crowds of laughing, jeering women and men and children. Now we need some new instrument of torture; something that will make every second sheer hell but will keep him alive minute after never-ending minute; hour after endless hour. Make the tiniest movement – every breath – a source of torment, while he remains fully exposed, with every shred of decency stripped from him, for the sneering crowds to continue to gloat. Pin him out like a captured bug on public display, with no where to hide his shame, no rock to slither under, as the world stares wide-eyed. The crowds are teasing and slandering him, yet something is still missing. I know: the sickening stench of this vermin’s offense has reached high heaven. Almighty God must be furious at what this degenerate did to you. Has injustice ever fired uncontrollable rage within you? That is but a breath relative to the terrifying tornado of divine wrath at that injustice. If a mouse is angry, you can snigger; if a grizzly bear is angry, you can fear; but if the Almighty is angry, there is no human emotion to express the chilling terror that rips through its victim. Every conceivable scale of sheer dread is exploded by this horror. Dying the most violent death a thousand times over is more preferable. The Judge of all humanity – the God who flung the flaming stars in space – storms down torrent upon torrent of his fearsome fury on this pathetic excuse for a man. In a sense, it would be exquisite to keep this torture up forever, but earth should be rid of this contemptible beast. More significant still, you need closure so that at last you can get on with life. Otherwise, like a deadly cancer, lust for revenge would eat your insides, slowly destroying you. So, finally, his body slumps in death. Now grab a long, dirty blade and have your last fling. Vent your wrath on that stinking body. Gleefully tear into the corpse, ripping it open in rage. Plunge in from below the rib cage. Burrow right through to his heart. Now mutilate that lifeless organ. Yes! There’s nothing left of this animal but meat and offal. He’s dead! Savor that word: D-E-A-D. Perfect? Sweet revenge! But wait. Although you need him dead, your ordeal has been more prolonged than his. How can this discrepancy be righted? We will soon apply our findings in a very practical way, but while we are using fantasy to establish the ideal, let’s not limit ourselves to what seems possible. What would be perfect is if somehow he could have known since he was a little child that this horror awaited him. Let him dread it, nightmare after nightmare, day after day, year after year, all his life. Perfect! Almost. There’s just one missing element. Brutal, de-humanizing treatment is merely what this slithering snake deserves. This is in stark contrast to what he did to you. In no way did you deserve the shameful way he treated you. Wouldn’t it be exquisite revenge if he could somehow be totally innocent – as pure as the driven snow; kinder and gentler than anyone – and yet still have forced upon him all the torment we have detailed! Now that, if only it were possible, would truly be justice. The Exciting Reality This, as gruesome and distasteful as it reads, is exactly the punishment that fits the crime against you. It is no exaggeration. God himself affirms that the offense you suffered was so gross that it deserves every bit of this torture, finally ending in agonizing death. In fact, the Judge of all humanity agrees so whole-heartedly with this assessment that it is exactly the nerve-jangling torment he took upon himself to ensure the penalty for the crime against you was paid, right down to the last drop of blood. I’ve been detailing Christ’s treatment at the hands of the people he loved. It is staggering how many elements of Jesus’ ghastly ordeal fit perfectly what you have suffered. For instance, you have probably felt betrayed. Jesus was betrayed. Maybe people suspected you were being ill-treated and did nothing to intervene. It was the same with Jesus. Maybe you felt abandoned by God. So did Jesus. “You make it sound so personal,” says someone, with pain in her voice, “Surely Jesus died for everyone, not just to comfort me.” Your healing hinges on grasping this one point: Jesus agonized specifically for you. Were God like everyone else we have ever known, he would be unable to focus on you as if you and your offender were the only people in the universe. But the infinite, all-knowing Lord is altogether without such limitations. For the vaguest conception of the immensity of God’s attention and devotion to you, imagine someone who has no distractions in life. He is head-over-heels in love with you, his whole world revolving around you. His only reason for living is to make you happy. God’s uniqueness and the inconceivable intensity of his selfless devotion to you means that any analogy is riddled with holes. One of the many holes in the one just given is that it doesn’t allow for the mind-boggling vastness of the Infinite Lord’s intimate knowledge of you. He knows you not only better than anyone else does, but unfathomably deeper than you could ever know yourself. God’s attention to everything about you, right down to your every molecule, is so incomprehensibly vast that it would blow the circuits of any human brain to hold such detailed, compassionate understanding of you and of everything that touches you. You are the focus of divine love. It is not hard to recognize that with his infinite intellect and astounding supernatural abilities, God has the ability to treat us this way. Far more difficult, is believing that we are important to God. For all our lives, the treatment we have received from other people keeps telling us that we are rather insignificant and not too lovable. We keep falling for the delusion that God must be like all the puny, self-seeking people we have ever met. “No one could love me like that,” are the sad words of people whose experience has been limited to human love. For you, that limitation might soon be exploded. You could be on the edge of life’s most exciting discovery. Jesus’ actions were targeted specifically at you. From his perspective, it couldn’t have been more personal. How personal it seems to you depends on how deeply you understand Jesus’ perspective. You can forget the millions: your pain sears his heart. Christ’s yearning to see you released from distress is so overwhelming that no terror, or pain, no matter how extreme, could deflect him from his determination to restore your honor and avenge the injustice you suffered. “Not good enough!” complains someone. Jesus isn’t good enough? “Well . . . he’s too good. The person who did wrong should suffer. Jesus was innocent. He doesn’t deserve to suffer for what I suffered.” We noted that the suffering of your guilty offender does not exactly balance the books because his suffering is deserved whereas your suffering was undeserved. Nevertheless, I understand your concern. The uniqueness of both Jesus’ person and his love for you has empowered him to do something that leaves us flabbergasted. In the next few paragraphs I’d like to walk you through the perplexing issues it raises. Before doing this, however, we need to see this matter in perspective. Let us agree together that your torment has been so horrific that a whole range of seemingly impossible things would need to occur for all the wrong you have suffered to be put right. Christ’s sacrificial love for you is so staggering, and so sacred, that I can hardly bear the thought of implying it is not enough. Nevertheless, if Christ did nothing but die an agonizing death for you, then as far as being adequately compensated for what you suffered, I agree that there is a sense in which you could legitimately claim to be short-changed. To right the wrong you have suffered, the following things would have to happen: * You would need total healing of every emotional and physical hurt the offender inflicted. * More than an end to your current distress, you would have to be fully compensated for every speck of past distress and for all the years of unique pleasures you have lost. You would need to be so abundantly compensated that you have not the slightest regret that it ever happened. It is beyond the edge of human imagination to conceive of anything so wonderful that it could do this. But what if there really is a God who gives eternal life and is capable of infinitely more than we could dream? What if the Almighty cares for you so deeply that he has reserved for you rewards so astounding that they make the best things in earthly life seem pathetic? * You would need for everyone who matters to you, to fully understand how much you have suffered, and to empathize with you. * You would need your honor to be completely restored. * You would need for everyone to know that you did not in any way deserve to be treated the way you were. You, yourself, would need assurance that what you suffered was not God’s punishment, and you would need to be set free from every trace of guilt – a big issue with victims of child abuse, for example. * You would need to know you are loved so tenderly and passionately that even when you had thought you were suffering alone, that special person who cares for you so deeply was with you in spirit, moment by moment sharing your pain. * You would need to see justice fully executed on your behalf, so that no one minimizes the gravity of the offense against you and every aspect is soberly dealt with. * Your offender would have to realize how wrong he was when he hurt you. He would have to reel in remorse over what he did and he would now have to want your well-being as fervently as he had previously wanted to harm you. * You would need to know that what you suffered was not a meaningless waste, but that as evil and as senseless as it originally was, it will be supernaturally transformed into an invaluable stepping stone to fulfillment and achievement you would otherwise have not had. It would be sweet revenge indeed for the offender’s attempts to bring you down to actually lift you higher! We will examine each of these serious matters. Since we can only do this one at a time, however, it is inevitable that while I am dealing with an aspect of one matter, you will have still other needs screaming for attention. So I beg your patience. Please try to focus on the issue at hand and know that we will get to the other matters soon. Until then, let me assure you that the Almighty’s love for you is so mind-boggling that he will repeatedly do for you things that are humanly impossible. Although on earth you will take giant steps toward receiving full compensation, your time on earth is but an infinitesimal fraction of eternity; and eternity is the realm in which you will experience the ultimate compensation and restoration. For example, one feature of heaven is that we will no longer be subject to the limitations that on earth keep people from understanding your heart and what you have suffered. We should touch on one final matter to help our perspective. It is because of his astounding love that God longs to restore you. It is not as if the things you suffered were in any way God’s doing. The person hurting you was breaking God’s laws and God’s heart; defiantly doing the exact opposite of what God wanted. The divine dilemma is that you – the darling of God’s heart – have also chosen to break God’s laws, just like the rest of us. We have suffered because we live in a world in which people hurt each other as a manifestation of their rebellion against God and his ways. But we ourselves are part of that rebellion. For God to stop wrongdoing and suffering by wiping out everyone the moment they are about to rebel against him and his loving ways, he would have had to wipe out the entire human race before we were even born. To say God should tolerate some rebellion against God’s loving ways (that which you and I have committed and try our hardest to excuse), but not other rebellion, would be the height of hypocrisy. We’d love to call down fire on those who have hurt us, but we want the divine Judge to overlook the times we – by lies, cheating, stealing, or whatever – have hurt others. The Lord, no matter how much he loves us, cannot be partner to such double standards. The Holy Judge must be utterly impartial. The time is careering toward us when all evil will be annihilated. Everyone who has not allowed Christ’s holiness to enter their lives through spiritual union with him, will be destroyed. Every second the Almighty restrains his stupendous urge to destroy all evil is yet another second in which billions of the people he loves have yet another chance to come to Christ before it’s too late. So now that we have had a little overview, let’s return to the matter at hand: feeling uncomfortable with the notion of Jesus being tortured instead of the one who hurt us. It is indeed heart-wrenching to see such cruelty poured out on the kindest person earth has seen; for humanity’s most innocent to be treated like the most contemptible of criminals. And yet to lust after further vengeance is to spurn his sacrifice and pour contempt on the greatest act of love you will ever receive. Of course, Jesus deserved none of what he suffered, but for you he chose it. At any moment he could have opted out, but he endured every last dreg of the devastation and searing pain because you are so special to him. Driven by his passion for you, yearning to defend your name, he forced himself to hang on. So precious are you to him that even more unbearable than his shameful torture, was the thought of the crime against you being swept under the carpet. To him, the outrage you suffered matters enormously. If someone deeply in love with you fully understood the extent of your pain, it would break his heart. Jesus’ incomprehensible love for you means that even without his agony on the cross, he would still have reeled in emotional pain just because you hurt. Jesus’ torturous physical pain was just a logical consequence of his inner pain for you, but by physically suffering he was able to do something immensely practical both to comfort you and to restore your honor. He couldn’t stand idly by and see you suffer. Love compelled him to intervene. Where was Jesus when you were suffering injustice? He was not just weeping for you; the timeless Son of God, whom you thought was too slow in responding to your cries for help, was two thousand earth years ahead of you, having already suffered for you, so that relief would be waiting for you, the instant you realized what he had done for you. The One you thought did not care about your anguish, cared so passionately that he suffered all your pain. Why didn’t God elect to physically prevent people from breaking his laws and his heart by hurting others, yourself included? That’s a complex issue that I deal with in links at the end of this webpage. For the moment, be content to realize that if there were no downsides to merely preventing people from hurting each other, the One who suffered so much for you would have taken that easy way out. “I don’t want an innocent person suffering.” But weren’t you innocent when that brute ill-treated you? A significant feature of what you suffered is that you didn’t deserve it. So how could that offense be atoned for by merely giving someone what he deserves? When dreaming up the features of the perfect punishment, we decided that for the punishment to fit the crime it should, theoretically, be extracted from someone as innocent as you were. It makes us recoil in horror, and yet there is no other way to perfectly balance the books. Jesus’ intervention suddenly brings to reality what had previously seemed an impossible dream. In Jesus’ eyes the ghastly offense against you warranted the severest imaginable response. You suffered injustice, so to restore your honor, Christ voluntarily allowed himself to suffer the ultimate injustice. He was innocent, not just relative to the beast who hurt you, but in the absolute sense – innocent to a degree unknown in all humanity. In the dazzling light of his holy perfection, the purest, sweetest virgin is defiled. And this Innocent of innocents suffered the vilest physical and spiritual abuse for the crime against you, because you are so important to him. This is rather more than a bunch of flowers and a mumbled apology. This is the ultimate restoration of your honor. “That’s astounding. But I still want the person who hurt me to suffer.” You are right in thinking that, by itself, the torment of an innocent cannot fully ease your pain. But seeing the guilty person hurt won’t do it either. Justice is important and must be executed, but there are two other factors, one or both of which could be moving you to want revenge. The problem is that neither revenge nor justice could ever resolve these other factors. Here are the additional, barely conscious, reasons that could be goading you to want to see the offender suffer: 1. You are still hurting. Either you are still suffering physical or emotional pain, or even if you are completely restored to a normal life, it feels as if nothing could compensate for your past suffering and loss. 2. Hidden deep within you is the need to feel morally superior to your offender. A victim of child molestation, for instance, has usually been cruelly manipulated by the molester to feel responsible for the molester’s crime. Many others who have suffered are tormented by the fear that somehow their suffering was divine punishment for previous sins. People wresting with either, or both, of the above dilemmas usually discover that maintaining the rage against their offender eases their own pain and/or guilt, by shifting their focus off their own internal struggles. This psychological ploy – a mere trick of the mind – might bring temporary relief, but it will ultimately do nothing other than delay genuine healing. So although these two big needs might be subconsciously pushing you to want the offender to suffer, the satisfaction you imagine you would feel in seeing him tortured, is a mirage. It would still leave these needs unmet. “But I still think the person who did wrong should suffer, not Jesus.” Let’s explore the consequences of that logic. Certainly, one guilty person could never pay the penalty for the sins of another guilty person. Scripture reveals that death is the penalty for the slightest moral imperfection. “The wages of sin is death,” (Romans 6:23). It would be presumptuous for me, or any of my kind, to consider dying for someone else’s sins. Once I pay my own death penalty I have nothing left over for anyone else’s sin. Only a morally perfect person could suffer and die, and it not be for his own moral deficiencies. No wonder this concept is so foreign to us – we are not in the habit of meeting sinlessly perfect people who volunteer to suffer injustice! If, however, justice demanded that whoever does wrong must pay the penalty himself, it means everyone who has ever had the slightest moral imperfection – every human except Jesus – must end up in hell. It would also mean Jesus is a mistaken fool who suffered his horrific death for nothing. It would mean God is not the righteous, holy Judge; his sense of justice would be defective and we would be holier and smarter than him. Since all this is unthinkable, might I suggest that justice has been fully met? Let me explain why we desperately need the intervention of someone truly innocent – someone who is not part of the never-ending cycle of wrong-doing that plagues the entire human race. Suppose a sickening case of child abuse is discovered. The abuser – the child’s father – is thoroughly investigated by police, psychologists and the courts. It turns out that the abuser had himself been a victim of such awful child abuse from his own father that it even dwarfed the abuse he had meted out. In fact, his upbringing had left him so psychologically deranged, with such distorted views of what is normal loving behavior, that it is a marvel that he treated his child as well as he did. (Please stay with me: I know victims of crime have the right to vengeance, no matter what the claims of “experts.”) The grandfather is now dead, but the little that can be uncovered about him shows that the grandfather, too, had suffered severe child abuse. What can be done? We are rightly incensed that such a crime has been committed. If the child’s abuser doesn’t deserve the severest penalty because he was so deranged by what he himself had suffered, how else could this crime be avenged? And what about the grandfather – the abuser’s abuser – who is now dead and beyond the reach of the courts? And what if the latest victim has already mimicked the treatment dished out to him and has horribly abused his little sister? This mess describes the predicament in which all humanity finds itself. We excuse our own offenses and imagine others have done worse, but our biased tolerance of our own wrong-doing does not lower the gravity of what we have done. The magnitude of the ill-treatment might vary, but the fact clings like a noose around our necks that we have each been hurt, and in turn have hurt others. This is why we each needed the eternal Son of God to enter the human race and be willing to do the unthinkable – to have compassion on those who deserve the severest punishment and to love us so deeply as to suffer and die for every time we have been sinned against, and for every time we have sinned. What makes acceptable the extreme violation of this Innocent’s rights is that he suffered it willingly, having planned every detail to match your suffering. Driven by your need to find peace, and his longing to see justice executed on your behalf, your Savior has done everything required to release you from the never-ending, never-satisfying need to try to extort justice from the offender. Like you, Jesus suffered injustice at the hands of sinful men. The difference is that your torment was involuntary; his was voluntary. He chose that agony in order to vindicate you and avenge the crime against you. Nevertheless, there is a vital matter that can only be settled between the offender himself and his Judge. The offender will rot in hell if he dies without having faced up to his crime and admitted to himself and to Christ that what he did to you was so evil that he deserves an eternity in hell for his offense. With God, however, your rights and peace of mind are paramount. He hasn’t left things half finished, so that you are left dangling on tenterhooks worrying about the outcome. Your Avenger has seen to it that irrespective of the offender’s response, you have already been vindicated. You can rest easy: the injustice you suffered has been avenged to the last agonizing breath. Almighty God has settled the score. Moreover, you can now move on, leaving the offender’s destiny to a private matter between the offender and the God who restored your name. The offender’s fate will be determined on the basis of whether he truly has a change of heart and is filled with remorse for what he did to you. The Judge must be fair; the same rules must apply to everyone, or God himself would be corrupt. The same human sacrifice that secured forgiveness for the sins you committed, has to be the same for the sins you suffered. The very same rules that give you a chance to get to heaven – whether you repent of your wrongdoing and commit your life into Jesus’ hands – give your offender a chance. If, however, on earth the offender does not regret what he did to you and cry out to Jesus for the forgiveness he desperately needs, he will for all of eternity regret what he did to you – an indescribably terrifying prospect. Enjoying the Benefits Christ was more than just defiled, slandered, cheated, humiliated and tortured; he absorbed within his own body and spirit all the abuse and cruelty and injustice that humanity is capable of dishing out until it actually killed him. Having suffered the ultimate defeat, being well and truly dead, he burst back to life, triumphantly exploding and disintegrating every trace of shame and pain, returning to honor and sparkling purity. Christ identified with you so fully that he suffered and won in the hope that you, in turn, would identify with him. He believed in you. All that is needed to complete the miracle is for you to believe in him. Trusting him with every aspect of your life – including justice issues – will release the divine miracle whereby you and Jesus become spiritually one. This oneness is without equal (1 Corinthians 6:16-17). The closest human parallel is a perfect marriage in which the couple are so devoted to each other that each partner’s joys and sorrows, honor and shame, assets and liabilities merge into one. If one partner is hurting, inner pain stabs the other. If one is honored, the other feels honored. If one has a pay rise, the other is enriched. If one has a speeding fine, both suffer loss. This is a vague shadow of the oneness existing between a sinner and his/her Savior, through the miracle of what Christ accomplished when he treated as his very own, every offense you have suffered and every offense you have committed. By the abuse meted out to the innocent Son of God, the Almighty Lord, the Judge of all the earth, has proclaimed that the offense against you was so grave, and your honor so precious to him, that nothing less than the horrors Jesus suffered could put it right. Now, at last, you can exult in the knowledge that the debt owed you has been paid in full. Now there can be closure. When you are one with your Savior, you can proclaim with your crucified Lord those triumphant words, “It is finished!” And as he sprang back to life, brimming with honor and glorious in his perfection, you, whose life has been on hold because of what you have suffered, can not only start living again but you can enter an entirely new level of life. Once your spiritual union with Christ takes place, heaven sees you in a totally new way. Christ’s purity, for instance, becomes your purity. What this means is so mind-blowing that it can take years for just some of the implications to sink in, but it is the most liberating experience anyone can ever have. Furthermore, Christ’s triumph over evil becomes your triumph, thereby empowering you to reign in life as victor over the offense that had threatened to crush you, just as he has been victorious over the humiliation he suffered. Like him – and because of him – you will live in eternal honor, totally freed from your past shame and pain. In the eyes of the Final Judge – in the highest court in the universe – you have been vindicated. Whether you view yourself as vindicated depends on your understanding of what Christ has done for you. And whether others regard you as being vindicated depends on their understanding. But God has set a Day when everyone will finally understand, and that Day will never end. Christ sweat blood to ensure everything needed to heal your broken life has been done. No one has ever done so much for you, nor paid such a price. A box of chocolates and a candlelit dinner are not in the same league! And yet, sadly, this greatest conceivable proof of love can still have an air of unreality about it. This, of course, is not because of any deficiency in Jesus but simply because you don’t know him intimately enough to be thoroughly convinced of his powers and of the depth of his devotion to you. Imagine a pleasant, rather attractive woman who is convinced she is fat, ugly and in every way despicable. The only time men have ever spoken of love to her has been as a con trick to try to weaken her resistance so that they can use her for their evil purposes. In all her life she has known nothing but deception, rejection and cruelty. Now the most desirable man she has ever met has started using the love word. He’s different. His love is genuine. He can fulfill her fondest dreams, but she keeps rejecting him, convinced it is just another sordid trick. What chance has she got of discovering he is genuine if she keeps pushing him away? It’s scary, but the only way the tragedy of rejected love can be averted is for her to get as close to him as she can, open up to him as much as she dares, and gradually learn to trust him. It might take her years to be convinced enough to marry him. Even then she might have only the vaguest idea of the depth of his love for her and of how stunningly beautiful she is in his eyes. She might still fear he will leave her, with everything within her screaming that she is unlovable and that at best his love for her must be shallow. The more time she spends with him, listening to him, observing him, believing him, the more it will sink in that she truly is loved, and her harsh assessment of herself will gradually be dispelled. The more she learns to trust and get closer and closer to this man, the more healing she will experience. This analogy points the way to the greatest of healings. The only way to know a fraction of the incomprehensible vastness of Christ’s personal love for you, and the enormous benefits of what he has done for you, is to get closer and closer to Jesus. You will never know, without spending time with him, sharing your heart with him and getting to know him better and better. Many of us sense that our primary need is not therapy but a life-changing relationship; not some special program but a special person. Although this is thrillingly true, we must leave fairy tales behind, and face reality. Not even the best romance humanity can offer will satisfy your need. In fact, you dare not trust a human – the best and most loving of whom is weak and fallible – until you know intimately the faithful Lord who alone gives the security you need to sustain you through the times when human relationships don’t match your dreams. Jesus is like no one else you have ever met. He is genuine and good and strong and dependable. His love is real. He is perfect. He has not merely sympathized with your pain, he has made it his own. Snuggle into him. Let his love splash over you. It will take a lifetime of intimacy to grasp the faintest hint of how precious you are to him and what he has done for you. So the sooner you start, the sooner the amazing benefits will start flowing into your life. Our need is not for a spectacular one-off miracle, nor even a spiritual revolution based on Jesus’ sacrifice (as essential as that is). Not even a once-a-week relationship with God himself will suffice. Our desperate need is for never-ending, ever-growing intimacy with our Savior. That alone will give us the security we need, building our trust in the One who reeled in agony for us. Only such intimacy will continually allow God’s life and healing to flow into our lives. As we physically need oxygen continuously, we spiritually need Jesus. Enjoying the Ultimate Revenge Many people endowed with the potential to be champions and heroes will never be acclaimed as such, simply because life never presented them with the adverse circumstances needed to showcase their abilities. For example, you cannot be a war hero if your country is at peace. For another example: what transformed Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic trek into an outstandingly heroic feat of endurance was losing much of his supplies down a crevasse. Likewise, in heaven’s eyes, the injustice you suffered is the very thing able to transform you into an eternally acclaimed hero, if you respond to the challenge with Christlike forgiveness. Though your offender never intended to give you a chance to shine forever, this is exactly what he has done. When you are yielded to Christ, your offender’s attempt to bring you down will lift you high. In his creative genius, God longs not only to eternally compensate you for everything you have suffered, he will use the injustice you suffered as your stepping stone to greatness. For all of eternity you get to enjoy the last laugh. Maximized Joy We earlier drew comfort from the realization that the infinite intellect of Almighty God gives him the unique ability to focus on everything (including our every need) simultaneously. This is one of the ways in which we are almost the exact opposite of God. When we focus on something, everything else goes out of focus. No where is this more dangerously evident than when we fixate on someone else’s sin. The result is that in our eyes – not in anyone else’s – our own sin blurs, so that we begin to lose awareness of our own shortcomings. Hypocrisy soon results, putting us in grave spiritual danger. Our personality becomes increasingly ugly and sin-stained and we don’t even realize it. People most likely to fall into this fearful trap are those who feel haunted and repulsed by their sin. They discover that focusing on someone else’s sin – usually someone who has wronged them – eases their own distress and so they almost unconsciously use this as a means of survival. The only safe solution to unpleasant feelings about ourselves, however, is to focus, not on someone’s sin, but on Christ’s sinlessness. Ideally, we should glimpse our own spiritual ugliness only long enough to be driven to Christ for his forgiveness, then we need to fix our gaze on Christ’s beauty. This two-pronged action – recognize your sin and keep your eyes on Christ – will remove guilt and transform a person like nothing else in the universe. We inevitably become increasingly like what we focus on. That’s a horrifying prospect if we keep dwelling on the sins of someone who has wronged us. Without realizing it, we will become increasingly like the person we resent. We will remain convinced this isn’t happening because our focus is the other person, not ourselves and because we will manifest our ugliness slightly differently to how the other person acted. Nevertheless, this life principle of becoming like the person we focus on becomes a glorious prospect if we keep our minds on Jesus, who is in every way desirable. We will become increasingly like the most beautiful Person in the universe. When driving a car, we will crash unless we discipline ourselves to keep looking in the direction we wish to travel, with at most only the briefest, occasional glance at anything else. Likewise, the only way to successfully steer our lives away from acting like the person who hurt us is to fix our eyes on the moral perfection and wisdom and love of Jesus. In contrast, resentment causes us to keep focusing on a person’s shameful behavior. The inevitable result of letting resentment control our minds is that our minds will churn with agitation, ugliness, hate and the other person’s low morals, until our actual behavior will begin to reflect our thought-life. In fact, have you ever considered that a desire to see someone treated as badly as he treated you, sends you crashing to the same moral depravity as him? Let resentment control your life and, instead of steering toward purity, you will fixate so much on that person’s sin that you will indeed crash into a version of the very behavior you despise. But if, instead of getting distracted, you habitually look to Jesus, your life will fill with the beauty, love, peace and freedom that characterize him. For you, the holy Son of God let himself become the devil’s plaything; physically violated, emotionally broken, spiritually raped by evil. Will you let the magnitude of his sacrifice soothe your anger and give you peace? Bitterness is like barbed wire in your insides. Will you let his love dissolve it? We have uncovered many deeply moving reasons for nestling as close as we can to Jesus and staying there. And there are a multitude of reasons we have not even touched. So why not begin right now by offering what might be the most honest prayer you have ever uttered? Try something like this: Precious Jesus, Most of this webpage seems too good to be true. To think I am the focus of such mind-boggling love and that at last there can be closure on the awful time I’ve had is almost unbelievable. I need you to open my eyes to the perfection of your justice. Explode every hindrance to my understanding of your personal love for me. Having known no-one else willing to help me, I’ve grown so used to feeling forced to fend for myself that I keep feeling the need to scheme my own revenge, even though the bitterness is eating me up and ruining my life. As my lust for revenge and issues of justice ceaselessly churn within me I am forced to admit that these matters are too big for any mortal to handle. I need supernatural help. Yes, I desperately need you. Yet I keep wanting to execute my own justice and protect my own interests because it’s so hard to trust you to do it properly. How can I trust you to take care of my needs when I doubt that my concerns are as important to you as they are to me? And how can I know the depth of your selfless love and devotion to me when I don’t let myself get close to you? You seem so unreal, so distant, and yet I guess I can’t expect anything else when, driven by my insecurities, I nervously keep you at arm’s length. What a bind! I don’t trust you enough to get close to you and I don’t get close enough to learn that I can trust you. This vicious circle feels too strong to be broken by my own efforts alone. Yes, I need your help on this one, too. I know you have already taken the initiative by relinquishing your right to justice and your ability to enforce it and voluntarily suffering the ultimate injustice for me, two thousand years ahead of me. And I greedily look to you for still more help but I now determine to cooperate with you by doing whatever I can to break this bind. I commit myself to keep pressing through my doubts and draw close to you, so that I can know you better. I believe this will not only break the negative cycle that has been crippling my life but it will commence an exciting positive one. The closer I get to you, the better I will know you. The better I know you, the more I’ll love and trust you. And the more I love and trust you, the closer I’ll want to get to you and so the better I’ll know you. May this positive cycle keep building in my life forever, giving me an ever-deepening awareness of your love and liberating me from the negative emotions that have darkened my life. Thank you that as I do all that I can do to reach out to you, you will do all that I cannot do, and meet my needs for love, peace, joy, security and so many other things beyond my grasp. I am beginning to believe that on the cross you gave yourself for me. So, as much as I can, I now return your love and give myself to you; trusting you to care for me far better than I could ever care for myself. As you identified with my suffering, I identify with you. As you rose from the dead, triumphant over the horrific abuse of your rights, I cling to you to likewise start a new life, triumphant over what I have suffered. I join myself to you so that your victories are my victories and your concerns are my concerns. As God graciously accepted your sacrifice as sufficient for my sins against God, I now accept your sacrifice as sufficient for my offender’s sins against me. As you forgave those who shamefully wronged you, I forgive those who have wronged me. I will stop trying to scheme my own revenge, so that I can demonstrate my faith that you are resolving perfectly every matter that concerns me. Whenever the old resentments come to mind I will push them away, so that I can make you my God, making you the focus of my thinking, as you deserve, and so that my heart and your heart can beat as one. Thank you that no matter what my past, you are eager to cleanse me of any and every sin that I admit to and want removed from my life. Like someone fearing a cancer diagnosis, I have tried to excuse, hide and push from my consciousness my sins. I feared the truth about myself, preferring to live in denial because I’ve suspected my sin problem is incurable or that treatment would be painful. Indeed it should be both unbearable agony and terminal but you yourself suffered that agony – all the way to death – to make the cure not only possible but swift and painless for me. In your astounding love you suffered the fate you did not deserve, to spare me the fate I deserve. The only thing that is now painful and terminal for me is if I choose to live in denial. I feared I’m not good enough to be the focus of your love and approval. I now believe that you are so good and so loving that you long to forgive me, no matter how bad I have been. You are humanity’s only soul surgeon. All you require is for me to, as it were, sign the release form, giving you permission to operate on me and remove my moral blemishes. Sin is terminal, and since you will leave any sin I refuse to admit to, I ask you to shine your spotlight in the dark corners of my life and cause me to see and face up to those things I must ask you to remove. Thank you that you have good plans for me. I trust your love and wisdom; believing that you have my best interests at heart, even more than I ever have. So I invite you to take control of my life. I rest in you.

Reclaiming the power of sexual attraction for the promotion of marital faithfulness How exciting marriage would be and how strong the glue binding each man to his wife if, twenty years after the wedding, husbands still derived as much heart-stopping pleasure from the sight of their wives as the average man gets from seeing the world’s sexiest women. Is it as unavoidable as aging that even the most devoted husband will gradually become bored with his wife’s body, relative to the thrill attractive strangers give him? This webpage will empower you to counter this tendency. It will give you practical techniques for enhancing your sexuality and harnessing the power of sexual attraction to lift your marital satisfaction to a new level. I must give three warnings, however. 1. This webpage is for men. It could harm one’s marriage if a wife reads it without her husband first reading it and deciding to try it. Until then, it would be better for wives to read How Holy Wives Express Marital Love. 2. This webpage will be of no help if a man has lost virtually all interest in sex. 3. Nor is this webpage a cure-all for those with a shaky marriage. It is primarily for every husband who wants to intensify his enjoyment of his wife, rather than suffer the dissipation of his sexual powers, which happens whenever he visually ‘admires’ strangers who think nothing of him. To see how a man can derive more pleasure from his partner, we must first understand the visual side of sex. Much of this examination will initially seem hopelessly idealistic, but bear with me: there are answers. Suppose a woman says, “My husband is only average at kissing and cuddling. There are thousands of men better at it than him, so I’ll enjoy passionately kissing any man who will let me. It’s quite okay: I’ll only go all the way with my husband.” Does that sound right to you? Or consider the woman who says, “I’ll regularly daydream about how much more exciting it would be to make love with other men, but in real life I’ll remain faithful to my husband.” This is the mentality of people who say, “It’s okay just to look.” It is saying, “There are thousands of people whose sexy bodies can thrill me just as much or more than my partner, so why limit myself? I’ll seize the visual side of sex from whoever I can steal it. I’ll only reserve the touch side of sex for my marriage.” No matter what you call it, enjoying the sexual allure of someone’s body is sexual. For a titillating moment you revel in feelings for someone that ideally should belong exclusively between a husband and wife. Each incident might last only seconds, but how many times a year do you indulge yourself in such feelings outside of marriage? The feelings might be weak but in the area of visual sexual attraction those feelings could be stronger than what you feel for your partner that day. You will find it deceptively enticing to blame the inadequacy of your partner’s body for your self-indulgence, but the deficiency is with you, not your partner. The fault lies not in your partner’s appearance, but in your lack of commitment to your marriage. You have violated the sanctity of marriage by allowing your eyes and mind to stray outside of marriage. The problem, most likely, is that years of misuse have perverted your sexuality. Instead of training and developing your sexuality, you have let it run wild until it is currently uncontrollable and an embarrassment to you and to those closest to you. If you cannot control how and where you look, you could marry the sexiest person alive and, before you know it, your eyes would stray outside marriage, for ‘just a look.’ Over the years you have let your eyes seize sexual thrills from wherever they can, until the compulsion has enslaved you. For the visual part of sex you have become so addicted to having multiple sexual partners that no matter who you chose, one person could never satisfy the lust of your eyes. In fact, not even a harem of wives could for long keep your eyes from straying to still more women. For thousands of years it has been recognized that hungrily looking at a sexually attractive person other than your spouse is marital unfaithfulness. Consider the Ten Commandments: You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife (Exodus 20:17) Then there are the powerful words of Jesus: Matthew 5: 27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ (28) But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (29) If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. .  .  .” Among the innumerable insights Jesus has given humanity is that sexually enjoying the sight of someone you are not married to, is as much a part of adultery, as hate is a part of murder. Marital faithfulness begins with making your marriage partner the exclusive focus of your visual sexual enjoyment and your daydreams. Women typically whine if their partners don’t give them adequate foreplay. What some women fail to realize is that the female equivalent is women who insist on making love in the dark, or with their bodies covered, or who don’t dress sexily for their husbands. Especially for men, visually enjoying the opposite sex is divinely designed to be a part of foreplay – part of the package intended to bind a man and woman together for life. If you think this is overstated, consider the vast numbers of men who are as enslaved as heroin addicts to visual sex outside of marriage. If admiring someone’s body is nothing but an innocent appreciation of God’s creation, why do we have more porn addicts than addicts to landscape scenes? And it would be hypocritical to point the finger at porn junkies and forget those men who can rarely resist stealing sexual pleasure from the sight of every attractive woman that saunters down the street. These powerful addictions come about because the visual side of sex is divinely intended to cause a man to be ‘addicted’ to his wife, binding a husband and wife together. To take this outside of marriage is to pervert a God-given gift. The sad consequence is the frittering away of one’s marital potential, squandering it on strangers. By focusing all the rays on one spot, a magnifying glass intensifies the heat of sunlight to astonishing levels. Astounding things can likewise happen if you use the lens of your eye to intensify your sexual powers by devoting your life to focusing your eyes on one special person. You might as well invite a seductress to live under your roof as give yourself permission to steal a look; grabbing illicit sexual thrills from whoever catches your eye. Each glimpse is a slimy leech sucking the life out of your marriage. ‘It is alright just to look,’ is as nonsensical as the anti-Christian saying, ‘Anything is acceptable as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone’ (where ‘hurt’ is crudely defined merely as obvious physical injury, excluding the eternal pain of Hell, and ‘anyone’ means anyone but the God whose heart breaks for you and his Son tortured to death on a cross for your sin). ‘It is alright just to look,’ is symptomatic of the worldly thinking that sends Christian marriages hurtling to divorce rates exceeding that of even the non-Christian marriages of past, more sexually prudent, eras. The visual part of sex usually arouses men more than women. Like men being taller than women, however, there are always exceptions to gender generalizations. Women who find themselves visually drawn to men should apply this webpage to themselves, and those who do not find themselves looking at men still need to do all they can to assist their husbands in the manner outlined below. Women should also be careful not to play the harlot by dressing in a way that sexually allures men they are not married to. (Few of us stop to consider how much normal fashion is skillfully designed to sexually tantalize men.) Nevertheless, avoiding visual sex outside of marriage merely brings us to the level of the servant in Jesus’ parable who buried his talent. He didn’t blow what was entrusted to him on an orgy of self-indulgence, and yet he was still condemned as wicked and lazy because he failed to develop it and use it positively. The focus of this webpage is therefore to give you techniques that go beyond avoiding the misuse of your God-given sexuality. The goal is to help you find more ways of enhancing your sexuality and employing the power of sexual attraction to strengthen your marriage. The world, the flesh and the devil conspire to pervert God’s gift of sexual attraction from being a blessing that builds long marriages into a curse that threatens marriages. We need to counter-attack by turning God’s gift into the power for good that it is divinely intended to be. Like material wealth, the ability to feel sexual attraction can bless or ruin its owner, depending on the degree of godly wisdom with which it is used. Just as the wise investment of money takes considerable effort and careful planning, so you cannot reach the divinely intended heights of marital longevity and fulfilment without investing considerable effort and care into how you use your God-given potential to enjoy visual sexual attraction. Without a concerted effort to direct or control it, our ability to feel sexual attraction will either dissipate or run riot, thus weakening or even endangering the marriage bond. Most of us wrongly imagine that provided we limit our physical lovemaking to marriage we can let our sexuality take care of itself. In Song of Solomon 4:16 the woman likened her sexuality to a garden. Within a few years, a garden left to take its natural course will become a source of shame to its owner. Some parts will run wild. Some will die. Weeds will flourish. For a garden to do its owner proud takes skill, planning and hard work. The more thought and effort we put into our garden, the more thrilling and satisfying the result. You cannot get a good garden in just a few weeks. Trees, for instance, take years to develop. If you have allowed the garden of your sexuality to run wild or become run down, you might initially see little reward for your effort. You will be tempted to give up in despair. If, however, you have the determination to persevere week after week, you will begin to enjoy rich rewards. Preparing for the Plunge Having almost completed an explanation of the principles involved, we are about to plunge into a description of techniques that can make your marriage more exciting and fulfilling and stronger by the positive use of the power of sexual attraction. However, we have already touched on things that seem humanly impossible. You need supernatural help. Since both sex and marriage are God’s unique invention, there is a way to soar to a realm that is otherwise unattainable. If you tap into the supernatural power of God by involving him in your sex life, you can draw upon the infinite intelligence and creativity of the Creator of sex by doing things his way. So to gain maximum benefit from the techniques, I urge you to pray something like this: Loving Lord, As I look at your magnificent creation, which you declare to be very good, I see sexual attraction built into its very fabric, with the survival of species after species depending on it. I, too, have sexuality built into my very being. I thank you for this and I believe there must be a way of using your gift that is very good. Help me find that way in all its fullness. Fill me with a determination to develop your precious gift of sexual attraction in a way that delights you, thrills my partner, and strengthens my marriage. Empower me to receive from you your very best and to give to you my best. Give me all the wisdom, revelation, and perseverance necessary to maximize the blessing you intend sexual attraction to be, and to counter every worldly influence I have been willingly or unwillingly subjected to. You know so much more than I do and because you are love personified, you want my welfare even more than I do. Your ways are perfect. More than I can trust anything or anyone, I can trust your love, wisdom, power and gentleness. So I invite you to be God of my life and of my marriage. To maximize my joy and fulfillment, I relinquish control of my life and of my marriage and I hand that control over to you. I ask that you give me deep understanding of my partner’s needs and that you give me great skill in communicating my desires to him/her. Cause me to know the joy of selfless giving. If my partner fails to grasp the significance of the issues expounded in this webpage, help me be as patient with my partner as you have been with me. Strengthen my resolve to draw from you all the gentleness, kindness and persistence I need for you to take both my marriage and my love for you to new heights. Let’s Get Practical The suggestions I am about to share are based on sound psychological principles, and the desire for them to work is, of course, based on sound spiritual principles. One problem with accepting the suggestions is that they might seem ridiculously simple. What empowers these techniques, however, is the great power and mystery of sexual attraction and what will propel them beyond your expectations is the supernatural enabling flowing from your prayers to Almighty God. Nevertheless, these suggestions might seem so peculiar to some readers that by sharing them with you I am risking ridicule and misunderstanding. No matter how I look at it, however, your marriage is worth more to me than my self-esteem or reputation. I would rather be humiliated in eyes of those who don’t understand, than keep from you something that can make a good marriage even stronger. The biblical basis for what I am about to expound is spelled out in two Scriptures: Job 31:1 I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl. Proverbs 5: 15 Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. (18)  . . . may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. (19)  . . . may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love. To a large extent, the sexual feelings aroused by a particular sight will, on any given occasion, be beyond conscious control. This is because your reaction is the product not of that instant alone but of your past exposures to similar sights and what thoughts and sensations those former sights were associated with. Over time, a person’s sexual response can be modified according to which sights are regularly associated with sexual feelings and which sights are not. A person need not necessarily experience physical stimulation for this reshaping to occur; the mere thought or anticipation of pleasure is usually enough. Suppose a woman habitually wears shorts in her husband’s presence. Because no man can maintain sexual interest throughout every waking moment, there will inevitably be times when the sight of her legs excites him no more than the wall. The wearing of shorts is not the issue –numerous other examples could have been used – the point is that every time some part of a woman’s body looks bland to her husband is another step toward to her body becoming permanently less exciting in his eyes. Without realizing it, by exposing her body on inappropriate occasions or for too long a duration, she is cheapening herself in her husband’s eyes and weakening the marriage bond. To avoid the danger of over-familiarity, it is good for a wife to cover up when her man is not in the mood for love-making. One might imagine that a man could counter this deadening of his sexual response by exercising self-control as to how often he sees his wife’s body exposed, but that presents a problem. If, for example, a man voluntarily turns his back on his wife when she is dressing, no matter how noble his motives, he is hardly sending the signal to his brain that his wife’s body is irresistible. Every time he turns away he is reaffirming to himself that the sight is quite resistible. This type of self-control is unintentionally undermining his sexual attraction to her. So it is better if the wife prevents him from seeing her by, for instance, dressing privately. Of course, a wife should not take this to the extreme of withdrawing from her man when he craves her, I am referring only to times when he is likely to have little interest in her. Let the Game Begin The ideal is for not only full nudity to be exciting to a husband, but for the sight of merely his wife’s partly exposed body to always have sexual overtones, even though the sight will not always lead to full sex. What follows is a way to achieve this. Begin by working out a detailed point system. For example, a husband might win .  .  . * one point if he sees the bare soles of his wife’s feet * two to three points, depending on how much of her thighs he sees * three points if he is aroused by daydreaming about seeing her * four points if he sees her navel * five points for deep kissing * six points if he sees down her dress The list would contain many more items, each weighted according to which parts of a woman’s body the man is particularly attracted to. Keep most of the points not for touch but for seeing various parts of the wife’s body. This is because women are unlikely to suddenly start fondling a married stranger, but women in our society are continually exposing strangers to the danger of sexual corruption by the way they flaunt their bodies. Wives need to remember that men can be as aroused by what they see as by petting. (Women wanting to increase their own visual appreciation of their husband’s bodies should work out their own point system in which they win points for seeing various parts of their husband’s body.) The husband will keep score. He wins the agreed number of points on every occasion that he experiences with his wife anything itemized on the list they have compiled. If, however, he has the misfortunate to see an attractive woman (or an image of one) exposing a part of her body mentioned in their list, he loses as many points as he would have gained had it been that part of his wife. And if he doesn’t look away from that sight immediately, he loses four times the points. If it is a sight that is rare, such as a topless woman, he loses four times the points and eight times if he doesn’t immediately look away. This applies all the time, not merely if the wife catches her man doing it. It is ultimately very much in the husband’s best interests to be ruthlessly honest with himself. Next, the husband and wife need to carefully discuss the rewards. These will be sexual treats he will win by accumulating a certain number of points. Choosing rewards that he enjoys more than his wife enjoys has the advantage of his wife not being penalized if he loses points, and since the focus is on her body, she has a fair degree of control over how many points he wins. The receiving of the reward will occur at a time mutually suitable to the couple, but the husband can never experience that treat until he has gained the required number of points. Keep the points fairly high. It might be that to receive a very special treat he has to score fifty points. For these special rewards, points can be accumulated from half the points already used to obtain smaller rewards. For instance, twenty points might win one reward, but in addition they could count as ten points toward another, bigger reward. This has the effect of adding even greater excitement to the winning of points. If you don’t like adding up, you might find placing tokens in a jar an easy way of keeping score. Of course, when away from home you’ll have to jot down lost points. The husband should try to choose rewards that are not just luxuries but things he strongly craves and would sorely miss. The rewards must be such that the very anticipation of them is exciting. This, in turn, makes it exciting for him to see things that win him points. His longing to gain points (and hence enjoy the sensual pleasure of the reward) has the effect of priming his mind and body to automatically react positively to seeing his wife’s body, and to feel negatively toward any other women’s body. Seeing, for example, his wife’s navel will gradually become more exciting to him, because it is becoming linked in his mind to anticipating an exciting sexual experience, whereas being exposed to another woman’s navel will be a disappointment and annoying to him because it will hinder him from obtaining the pleasure he craves. Over time, his wife’s body should become increasingly exciting, relative to that of other women. Increased Variety In some parts of the world, almost everyone has the same hair color and hair type, the same color eyes, the same complexion and much the same height. In contrast, immigration has created an immense variety in the western world and this has been exploded almost beyond belief by vast numbers of different hair treatments, beauty aids and clothes. A man’s eyes are constantly being caught by women who look markedly different. This swamping of the senses with such variety makes it harder than ever for a man to find just one woman the source of continual attraction year after year. A way to counter this is for a woman to occasionally use clothing, makeup, and maybe even wigs, to significantly change her appearance. I’m referring to changes that will last only for a night, done for her husband’s eyes alone. On these occasions the wife will often choose an appearance she feels uncomfortable with. After all, if she thought it enhanced her appearance, she would probably always choose that look. It is done just for fun and variety for her husband, not necessarily to make herself look more beautiful or sexier. Her husband will probably be thrilled with some looks that she thinks are hideous. Occasionally, some of her attempts might unintentionally look so awful in her husband’s eyes that it helps deepen his appreciation of her normal appearance! Even that has obvious benefits. Regardless of his reaction, the experience will affirm to the husband that if ever he wanted variety, he need not go elsewhere to find it. There is no point buying quality items for these occasions because they will only be used a few times. Try such sources as formal and costume hire, second hand clothing shops and borrowing from a friend. A Thousand Delights Husband, if your wife has only one exciting thing about her body, you are in danger of falling into boredom and being tempted to find excitement in other women. But the truth is that your wife is a woman of a thousand delights. Your challenge is to find them all. In the short biblical book of Solomon’s Song, the lover finds himself captivated by every aspect of his beloved’s body. He praises her hair, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips, teeth, mouth, tongue, voice, neck, breasts, tummy, body, figure, legs, feet, jewelry, perfume and, no doubt, he was just beginning to warm to his task. Here’s a suggestion. Get many slips of paper and on each one write the name of a part of the wife’s body – ear, shoulder, ankle, cleavage, armpit and so on – until every part of her body has been named. Put the slips in a bag. Each day, pull out a slip, read it and place it in a second bag. It might be a good idea to do this a few days ahead of time because for some parts of the body it would be appropriate for the wife to plan to dress in such a way as to accentuate that part. Suppose the first slip reads nose. For that day the couple should use their creativity to do all they can to foster in the husband a deeper enjoyment and appreciation of the wife’s nose than he has ever before felt. The husband should spend time mentally and visually admiring her nose and verbalizing to his wife how beautiful it is and explaining why he loves its appearance. He should thank God for her nose and explore and caress and kiss it. To help him receive even more pleasure from her nose, the wife could, as much as she feels comfortable, use her nose to caress various parts of her husband. The husband should do all he can to thoroughly enjoy her nose, to be thrilled about her nose and build up in his mind a deep appreciation of it. Next day, pull out another slip and the husband will have a completely different part of her body to delight in. When, after weeks, you’ve gone through all the slips, the original bag will be empty and the second bag will be filled. You could mix them up and start over again. Wrap Up Imagine a farmer who has underdeveloped land. He can clear it, irrigate it, fertilize it, plant it and harvest it to become a millionaire. Instead, he makes only a half-hearted effort to tend the land, expecting valuable plants to miraculously pop up of their own accord, and bitterly disappointed that all his land seems to produce is weeds. Instead of enjoying the riches his land has to offer, he wastes his life admiring other people’s land and wishing it were his. That fool would be you, if you don’t take your eyes off other people and pour all your effort into enjoying your partner. To steal a look is to rob yourself. Your partner’s body is the most exciting body in the world because it is the one body that you can thoroughly enjoy. You have now read about three practical ways of focusing the power of sexual attraction upon one special person, to help avoid the tragedy of a man suffering the dissipation of his sexual powers by frittering them away on strangers. The methods have been presented in order of effectiveness, with the last mentioned being the least effective. Reading about the ingredients of a cake is about as exciting as eating cardboard. It won’t thrill your taste buds, nor satisfy your hunger, nor (except to an experienced cook) will it seem to have the potential to do so. Like reading a recipe, the techniques you have just read about will seem unexciting and ineffective until you try them. Since one’s current sexual response has been shaped by experiences accumulated over one’s entire life, one cannot expect reshaping it to be achieved in a few days. Especially to the wife, the above means of achieving the goal might seem mechanical and unromantic but the goal is to make her man’s heart skip a beat whenever he sees her, and for her to be the world’s most beautiful woman in his eyes. If that is not a romantic goal, I don’t know what is. I must give a strong warning to husbands, however. We men have a frightening, self-destructive tendency to depersonalize sex. Because this webpage focuses on just a tiny aspect of sex it can seem to reinforce that dangerously wrong view. This obligates me to quote briefly from another of my webpages: For humans, sex was divinely intended to be the height of personal intimacy. If we reduce it to a mechanical act or to selfishly gorging ourselves, we degrade and dehumanize not just another person but ourselves. Treat a computer as a football and you won’t have a computer for long. You might have the pieces but it will be incapable of meeting your computing needs. A few seconds’ fun has turned you into a loser. Treat a wife as a harlot and you won’t have a wife for long, even if you keep the pieces. More Frigidity and Sexual Coldness in Normal Women How to Boost Your Wife’s Libido Putting Holy Fire In Your Marriage Stirring Up Marital Passion When Marital Relations are a Shortcut to Hell A second look at marital rights When a Wife Doesn’t Want Sex Serious help for hurting couples Being Head of Your Wife For husbands Resolving Marital Conflict How to Fall More in Love with God Contains practical suggestions for re-igniting marit al love These webpages must not be used as weapons to try to get a partner to change. Each reader must focus on applying them to his/her own life.

Frigidity and Sexual Coldness in Normal Women: The Shocking Secret How to Boost Your Wife’s Libido Writes a woman about this webpage: “How did you get into our home and find all this out? It is as if you have lived here and worked out the details of our marriage relationship.” To her husband’s bewilderment, the more a man tries to entice his wife to be better in bed, the colder she is likely to get. With his own needs screaming within him, a man can be expected to start emphasizing sex, and yet this usually sets off alarm bells within a woman. Despite her husband’s best intentions, she could soon end up feeling devastated, imagining he married her simply because he wanted a legal prostitute! Men typically dismiss such wifely outbursts as complete nonsense. The sad reality, however, is that the best of us are in danger of lapsing into shallow sex, dragging our wives down with us. Even more disturbing is that we men seldom sense when we are on this decline. Women, on the other hand, tend to be acutely perceptive of what we are really doing to them. The popularity of porn proves this male tragedy. As unbelievable as it sounds, men are capable of so demeaning themselves as to have sexual interaction with ink on paper or electrons in a computer! As if this were not shocking enough, they can engage in this depravity and barely be aware that they are degrading and depersonalizing what was meant to be the pinnacle of interpersonal relations. If so many men can fall into having a sexual experience with a piece of paper, each of us live a knife edge away from sometimes treating our wives as no more than a lump of flesh and not even realize how much we have debased both ourselves and the most precious person in our lives. The shocking truth is that the most common reason for female frigidity is that their men are not the great lovers they imagine themselves to be. As an egg cannot burst into life unless it is kept warm, and plants can flower only under the right conditions, so a normal woman can reach the pinnacle of sexual passion and abandonment only if she feels loved, valued, secure, relaxed and physically refreshed. When, instead of doing more to foster these feelings, a man tries to overcome his wife’s sexual inhibitions by focusing on the physical, she slips from feeling secure and relaxed to feeling pressured to perform. She slumps from feeling valued as a person to feeling reduced to a toy. Under the devastation of this emotionally crippling insult, her sexual passion dries up. Her sex drive will most likely vanish for as many weeks or years as she continues to feel that this is how her husband sees her. On the other hand, if it gradually sinks into the core of her being that she is loved, honored and cherished by her husband, her yearning to sexually thrill him will skyrocket. Your wife’s passion is the culmination of all the feelings you have generated within her, not just in the last ten minutes, but every time you have been in her presence in the last days and weeks and even months. If a woman is cold in bed, it is usually because the way she is treated outside of bed has left her cold. In making a woman feel loved, a hug not intended to lead to anything, is worth twenty passionate kisses when is sex on the agenda. When a husband does little to make his wife feel valued except when he wants his sexual needs met, acting like the world’s greatest romantic for what to him are the few critical moments, will not prevent him from being a miserable failure as a lover. Rightly or wrongly, she will feel not loved, but the victim of a cold-hearted con artist who is unconcerned about her and wants only to manipulate her for his selfish gratification. A woman’s hearing fails if the only time she hears, ‘I love you,’ is during foreplay. To her, the words end up sounding remarkably like, ‘I love conning you into serving my needs.’ And, ‘You’re beautiful,’ begins to sound like, ‘Just forget about your feelings – I have. All I care about is using your body as something to masturbate inside of.’ It’s too late to suddenly transmute into the perfect lover when you want sex. If how you treat your wife then is inconsistent with how you treat her the rest of the time, your attempts to arouse her will affirm not your lovemaking skills but your hypocrisy. The show you put on might be so convincing that you fool yourself into thinking you are loving her, but she will see right through it and feel not loved, but violated. Hypocrites arouse in their victims neither love nor lust but pure disgust. Under those circumstances your failure to sexually arouse her would prove not her frigidity but her intelligence. A particularly important time for a man to show love is the few minutes immediately after he has been sexually satisfied. At this, the very time when most men feel like sleeping, a hormone is usually released within a woman that heightens her alertness and longing for romance. This makes it a critical time for bonding. A man does not deliberately create his wife’s coldness. He simply becomes preoccupied with other things and so his wife’s feelings fade from his consciousness. Unfortunately, this preoccupation means his wife has slipped in his priorities. No matter how much we kid ourselves, our priorities are a most revealing measure of the genuineness of our love. Animals seek to satisfy their sexual needs. Humans make love. Lovemaking is a sham if it is only seen when a man wants his animal needs met. Since women are made to be sexually drawn to men, not animals, women can be expected to be turned on by the qualities that set us apart from animals. In addition to love and selflessness, speech is one of the major characteristics separating us from animals. The less you really speak with her, and the more you merely grunt at her, the less you are acting like a human being, and so the less appealing you can expect to be in the eyes of a normal woman. Conversely, the more deeply you communicate with her, drinking in her words and baring your heart to her, sharing your joys, your dreams and your failures, the more sexually responsive you can expect her to be. The way we treat others bounces back at us, profoundly affecting us. We couldn’t murder someone without it turning us into murderers. We can’t steal from anyone without it making us thieves. And we can’t degrade our wives, as if they had no feelings or preferences, without ourselves being degraded. For humans, sex is divinely designed to be the height of personal interaction. If we reduce it to a mechanical act or to selfishly gorging ourselves, we end up debasing and dehumanizing ourselves as well as our wives. So you have much to be grateful for if your wife acts as an alarm alerting you to times when you are on the slippery slide to degradation. Technique It is generally realized that for good sex most women need genital caressing during foreplay. A common complaint women have about this is that their partners keep pressing too hard. This mistake, however, is merely a symptom of the real problem. At the heart of such matters is that the wife has not taught her husband how to please her. In most cases this can be traced to what is commonly called the male ego – the tendency for a weak man to crumple, pathetically thinking himself a failure, if forced to admit to himself that he knows less about his wife’s sexual feelings than she does. Let’s face facts. Every woman is unique. No one can become a good lover merely by reading books or from former partners. The only way anyone can learn how to sexually thrill a specific woman is by responding to guidance she gives. Many couples tragically miss out because the woman is too timid to provide the feedback necessary for good sex. Usually it’s because the husband has given the impression that he is that weak sort of male who can never learn from the only person who truly knows how to thrill his wife – the woman herself. If you cannot learn from your wife, you might pass as an animal, but as a husband you are a failure. What ignites a woman sexually varies enormously, not just from woman to woman, but from day to day. For example, studies have shown that, especially for a woman not on the pill, male body odors that disgust her most of the time arouse her at a certain point in her menstrual cycle. Likewise, what visually appeals to her sexually varies according to the time of month. You can only get to know your wife’s sexuality the same way you get to know her personality – from her, not from books or videos or guesswork. Getting inside her body without getting inside her mind will end up a hollow experience for both of you. Let’s Get Practical Treat a computer as a football and you won’t have a computer for long. You might keep the pieces but it will be incapable of meeting your computing needs. A few seconds’ fun would turn you into a loser. Treat a wife like an inflatable doll and you won’t have a wife for long, even if you still have the pieces. Many of the most significant things in kindling a woman’s sexual feelings are quite different to what makes a man feel like sex. The average man can see the link between maintaining a car and that car’s performance, but he seldom sees the link between maintaining his wife’s awareness of his love and his wife’s sexual performance. Here are pointers as to how to help a woman know she is loved. From this will flow astounding benefits, including bringing her to the peak of her sexuality. Praise her. Regularly find things you like about her physical appearance, her character and her abilities, and verbalize your admiration. Appreciate all that she does for you and freely express your gratitude. Be loyal to her. Don’t say negative things about her behind her back. Defend her if anyone speaks negatively about her. Don’t undermine her authority in front of the children. If you use humor that puts her down, be extremely careful. She might, laugh but at times your words could be damaging her. Try to wean yourself off such humor. Seek to discover her inner feelings. Keep pushing yourself to new levels of tenderness and sensitivity to her needs. This is a huge challenge for most men. We live in a world that is so twisted that many of us end up imagining that the way to be esteemed as a man is to be morally bankrupt in such basic virtues as kindness and gentleness, known to Christians as the fruit of the Spirit. To imagine that to be male is to be morally deficient is a gross insult to masculinity. Aim to go beyond the standard set by your own father, gallantly breaking into new realms of tenderness and exalting your wife. Recognize and make allowances for times when she is tired or upset or not her usual self. Respect her opinions. You might not always agree with her, but try to. Thoughtfully consider her views. Never rubbish them. Consult your wife before making decisions. Share your plans and dreams with her. Be open and honest with her about every aspect of your life. Realize that for your wife to be the full woman you need her to be, she needs close women friends. Don’t feel threatened by this. It is part of what makes her a woman. You married her because she is a woman, not a man, so let her be the full woman she is. Regularly ask her such things as: * What can I do to make you feel more loved? * What can I do to boost your confidence and help you feel good about yourself? * What can we do to make sex more exciting and fulfilling for you? Perhaps you are scared to ask such questions for fear she will say something like, “Help more around the house.” Be brave! If this really is high on her priorities for feeling loved, then it is important. More is at stake than a bit of housework. It touches her emotional well-being and your entire marriage. Only she knows the critical elements in making her feel loved. If you are the leader in your home then your role is to lead your wife to heights she would never otherwise attain. To achieve this you must exalt her, doing everything you can to help her reach her full potential. If, however, you are not a leader but an oppressor, don’t bother calling yourself a husband. Christian Perspective Any man not doing what he can to make his wife feel loved and secure and honored is not just a failure, he is doing the devil’s work. I say that very deliberately. By his actions, or lack of them, such a man is in league with the Tempter, inciting his wife to go to someone who will honor her the way she deserves. If she yields to that temptation, she will be accountable before God for her sin. Regardless of her response, however, God holds her husband responsible for the temptation even existing. This is a grave responsibility. ‘Temptations must come,’ said Jesus, ‘but woe to him who causes them. It would be better for him for a millstone to be placed around his neck and he be tossed into the sea’ (Luke 17:1-2, paraphrase). Such a man might consider himself the model of faithfulness but in reality he has not only betrayed his wife, and his marriage vows, he is a disgrace to the name of Christ. You, however, were born to be a lover, and born again to receive divine empowering to soar way beyond what you could otherwise attain. Rise to your high calling and you will find fulfillment beyond your fondest dreams. Not Always the Husband’s Fault A man e-mailed me, guessing that despite my first name being Grantley, I must be a woman because of the emphasis in this webpage. “I have seldom read such a lopsided piece of writing,” he complained. “You completely ignore the fact that there are many physiological, and psychological reasons for frigidity that have nothing whatsoever to do with the relationship of the couple.” He has a very valid point, even if he reacted without reading my many other pages that cover factors he blasts me for omitting in this webpage. And perhaps I should have insulted your intelligence by suggesting that neither you nor your wife had thought of a medical checkup. Nevertheless, the first thing a husband must do is examine himself before assuming the problem is his wife’s. As Jesus wisely pointed out, we must first remove the beam from our own eye before trying to help anyone else. This is something we typically find hard to do. If following the above suggestions proves to be less than the full answer, here is a sample of some other pages that might help: Serious Help for Hurting Couples How Holy Wives Express Marital Love Smashing Inhibitions Marital Secrets Smashing Inhibitions

Predators Hunt the Wounded An abuse survivor e-mailed me saying how she seemed to attract men who want to exploit her. On the other hand, good people seemed to run from her. Tragically, this is the common experience of abuse survivors, whether they be men or women. I had often puzzled as to why this is. The woman sent me a couple of photos of herself and suddenly I understood. No, she was not dressed to seduce. The reply I sent her was a little gentler than the following, but here is the essence of what I said: Your photos, though nice, give the impression that you are sad, shy, lacking in confidence and aching for love. An evil man might look at those photos and think to himself, “I bet her self-esteem is so low that she thinks no decent guy would want her. Her need for love and for a boost in self-esteem seem so great that if I let her think that I could meet these needs, she would be so scared of losing me that she would give me anything I want, no matter how perverted. If I initially treat her tenderly and kindly and flatter her, I’ll have a good chance of turning her into little more than my slave. Then I could treat her however I wish.” If, on the other hand, a man saw you as happy, confident and relatively content, he’d assume you are quite choosy as to who you relate to and how far you would go. He’d assume you have none of the desperation that pressures some women to compromise their morals to get the love they crave. Anyone with evil intentions would be likely to back off and look for someone who seems more vulnerable. Not only could this be a factor in men with evil intent being attracted to you, it could cause good men (or good women with a lesbian weakness) to feel tempted to try to get their way with you. Because they are honorable, they are likely to run from you, fearing that if they stayed close to you they might yield to that temptation. Regardless of how resistant to sexual pressure they really are, people with low self-esteem and who crave love give the impression that they are vulnerable to exploitation and/or seduction. Upon finding such a person, immoral people feel emboldened to test their suspicion that they have found someone they could seduce. People lacking in self-esteem are likely to mistakenly believe that sex – not their personality – is their only way of winning the love they desperately need. They fall for the horrible lie that their only chance of receiving even an illusion of the love they crave is to yield to sexual advances. This makes them highly vulnerable. So intense is the pressure, that they need far superior self-control than what other people need in order to remain sexually pure. Moreover, abuse survivors are strongly tempted to accept the lie that because they have been mistreated before, they have little purity left to protect. As if these strong pressures were not enough, abuse survivors find resisting an evil man much harder than other people find it because they have suffered the past horror of having done everything possible to resist and yet still being overpowered. Having suffered situations in which resistance was impossible causes them to lose hope that they could ever successfully prevent anyone from exploiting them. They become convinced that any attempt to resist would be a futile waste of effort. Sexual predators know this, so they are on the look out for abuse survivors. A tragically large number of abuse survivors have mistakenly thought that perhaps they have low morals or are evil or that God is against them, since that they seem to attract sexual predators. This is most certainly not so. The thought is so obviously incorrect that, theoretically, there should be no need to deny it. Sadly, it needs to be spelled out because sexual offenders are skilled at cruelly manipulating tender consciences, causing their victims to have a mistaken view of themselves. The truth is that abuse survivors tend to attract repeat offenses simply because they are hurting, and sexual predators, like beasts of prey, think the wounded might be an easier target. If sexual predators imagine they have a chance with you, it means nothing. Simply by refusing their advances, you can prove them wrong. A woman responded to this webpage with the following e-mail: I see myself in that article. I see myself as nice, shy, and looking for love, and have recently started a relationship with a man that has given me attention, and constant compliments. The relationship turned sexual and I almost feel that he can have me do anything, even things I would normally say no to. How can I stop this bad relationship and boost my self-esteem? I have tried to end it before and have not had the strength to, and did not want to live without the warmth and “love” he has give to me. With great concern, I immediately replied: This is serious. Saying no and afterward giving in is exactly the sort of behavior that can turn a man into a sexual predator. You are training him not to take, “No!” to be no, but to mean, “Try harder and I’ll say yes.” I fear for you. It is vital that you muster the willpower to completely cut off all contact with this man. If that involves changing phone number, email address, etc., then do it. Have not a thing to do with him. It is just too dangerous. Moreover, if you were to marry him you would be condemning both him and yourself to continuous torment because you have not yet healed from your past sexual abuse. This is too serious to wait until you grow in self-esteem. With regard to that matter, however, see How to Change Your Self-Image With regard to mustering will-power, please read the below Death Blow to Addiction. Death Blow to Addiction You have probably heard of the Greek myth of the Sirens, whose beautiful singing would lure sailors to shipwreck on the rocky coast. Wanting to enjoy the exquisite music without losing his ship and his life, Odysseus, (or Ulysses) blocked the sailors’ ears so they could not hear the enticing sounds and had himself tied to a mast so no matter how crazed he became he could not change the ship's course. This ancient legend demonstrates the longing of sinful humanity since time immemorial to steal the pleasures of sin without reaping the devastating consequences. Being a myth, Odysseus escaped unharmed. In real life, he’d have kept coming back for more of the captivating music until something went horribly wrong. In reality, we always pay. It’s not if but when. What you sow, you’ll reap, promises Scripture. Sin’s pleasure is the bait in Satan’s trap. If we agree with the Deceiver that the bait is desirable, he has almost won. Before long we’ll find ourselves circling the bait, savoring the sight and the aroma and wondering if we could gently lick it without setting off the trap. We’ll get away with this for a while and we’ll be more and more enticed by the bait until one day we go just that tiny bit further and suddenly the trap snaps around our neck. If we love the bait, fearing the trap won’t protect us for long. We must see the bait and the trap – the pleasure and the horrific consequences of sin – as one unit, not as two elements that we can separate. We must view the pleasure with as much disgust as we view the evil consequences. Train yourself never to think of the pleasure without immediately focusing on the ugly, evil trap that is an inseparable part of the pleasure. For instance, whenever an image associated with your past addiction comes to mind, superimpose over the ‘bait’ an image of a giant fishhook poised to rip into your mouth and turn you into a writhing, captive fool. Then on top of both images see Christ on the cross, bloodied and agonizing because of that sin. Then see hell's maggots and flames. The aim is to turn the thought of sin into something distasteful – to see through the illusion to the real horror of the sin. After pondering the matter carefully, make up your mind that for the entire remainder of your life you don’t want the tiniest speck of sin’s tainted pleasure. Then, when you are certain, tell God this is what you really want. A friend of mine shares this testimony: Even after I met the Lord in 1976, I continued to struggle with an addiction. I tried deliverance from evil spirits, inner healing, renunciation, self control, and anything else I could think of, but for 22 years I keeping struggling and losing. Because I continued to repent, ask forgiveness, and try everything I could think of to be set free, our Father in heaven continued to forgive, despite what I deserved. I had been claiming the crucifying power of the death of Jesus, and the renewing power of the resurrection of Jesus – and I highly recommend this – but still there seemed a missing element. I asked Jesus to show me the key. What follows is the key that set me free, but in the final analysis, the key is to ask Jesus for the keys. The Lord told me that it was because I didn’t hate my sin. ‘You don’t like it,’ he said, ‘but you don’t hate it.’ So I asked him to give me his hatred for my sin. The next time I fell, the words, ‘I hate this!’ just burst from my lips in a combination of sorrow, anger and hatred. Then the impression came that I needed to renounce the pleasures of sin. Wanting Scripture for that thought, I searched my computer Bible. This is what I found: Hebrew 11:24 By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; (25) choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin; (26) considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward. [Through faith in God’s eternal reward Moses turned his back on ease and worldly honor, choosing to embrace hardship for the rest of his earthly life rather than ‘enjoy’ things that grieved God.] 2 Corinthians 4:1 Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we received mercy, we do not lose heart, (2) but we have renounced the things hidden because of shame . . . So I said, ‘Lord, please show me how to apply these verses to my life.’ He gave me the understanding that the pleasures of sin are the worms on the hook that the devil uses to lure us back into sin and captivity. By renouncing those pleasures, the hook is laid bare, and there is no incentive to bite that bare hook of temptation. ‘To renounce is to relinquish something formally and usually as a matter of principle,’ says the American Heritage Dictionary. As a lawyer I know that if a person renounces an inheritance he is saying, ‘I don’t want this inheritance that is left to me. I hereby relinquish my right to it. Leave it to whomever it goes to as if I were dead.’ Once a person signs his name to this decision there is no turning back. He will suffer that loss for the rest of his life. So to renounce the pleasures of sin I would be saying, ‘I don’t want the pleasures of sin in my life any more. Consider me dead to those pleasures, and let them go to someone who wants that inheritance.’ So I decided to make a solemn commitment to go through life without the slightest whiff of the pleasures that until then had meant so much to me. I make a formal declaration to my Lord, saying, ‘Lord Jesus, I renounce the pleasures of sin. I ask you to remove them completely from my life so that I will no longer do or think those things that grieve you.’ And you know what happened? He did! I was freed from the compulsions that earlier ensnared me. That was seven years ago and I have not fallen back even once. I am not free to flaunt my freedom, but I am free to choose to please God in every decision. He showed me that in my every decision I make, either the Father will look down and say with approval, ‘That’s My boy!’ or the devil will mock God and say, ‘Is that your boy?’ I never again want God to be mocked because of me! Not only did this renunciation of sin’s pleasures free me from my addiction, it also transformed other parts of my life which I thought were under control. And it enabled me to move on from constantly battling the same temptation to battling the Lord’s enemies. Once we are free from the pleasures of sin (which last only until condemnation comes), we will be free to enjoy the pleasures which are at the right hand of God (which last forever)! What a deal! Knowing why the wrong sort of people might try to exploit you can be a relief. There is nothing wrong with you, other than the simple fact that you are hurting. I am sure what you really want to know, however, is how to prevent this attention. It’s easy to say that self-esteem, confidence and feeling loved is the answer, but the difficulty is knowing how to grow in these things. The pages listed in How Much Does God Love Me? Your Personal Revelation of God’s Love will greatly help, but for them to be effective you will need to prayerfully read them over and over again, letting the truth sink deep into your heart.   More: Why Bad Things Keep Happening To Some People There’s Hope! A Sane Guide to Finding Hope When There is No Hope Vital Help For Both Genders The above is just part of a series of free webpages devoted to the full recovery of survivors of all forms of sexual interference. It is essential that you read Comfort, Understanding and Healing for Abuse Survivors for an overview and links to the other critically important pages.

Healing Principles Exemplified in the Life of David In a previous webpage I described ways of speeding healing from sexual fears. Although the principles are currently used by therapists they can actually be found in the Bible. This continues a web series that begins at When a Woman Doesn’t Want Sex Young David was out minding Dad’s sheep when he spied a lion ready to pounce on a lamb. David loved that lamb but this was a terrifying situation. If he let the lion have its way, he would lose a sheep, but David would be safe. If he tried to rescue the lamb, however, the lion would want to turn on David and tear him apart. No doubt, David quickly prayed for the lion to go away. Almighty God did nothing. Heart pounding, David refused to be intimidated by this ferocious beast. He faced that terrifying creature and slew it. Later, David spied a bear. Bears were even more feared than lions because they are stronger and more erratic. David prayed. Again God did nothing. Instead of retreating, David, inspired by his former experience, again refused to give into his fears and suffer loss. Why had God not intervened? Why did he leave it to David to face that fearsome beast? Later, Goliath was making a mockery of God and of all the people of God. All Israel was praying that Goliath would go away. God did nothing. Israel’s entire army were willing to surrender to their fears and let Goliath intimidate them. But suddenly David discovered why God had allowed that lion and bear in his life. Inspired by his previous efforts, he faced that giant and delivered Israel. Not even that was the end. David continued to find himself in frightening situations where it would have been so easy to act like Israel’s army hiding in holes hoping for a miracle. Each time, Almighty God could have slain the enemy, but instead he waited for David to do it. Why? Because each time that David refused to surrender to his fears, he become stronger. The Lord had exciting plans for David. He wanted David to progress from rescuing a lamb, to rescuing the entire nation, to ruling that nation. It took many hard, seemingly endless years, and many apparent setbacks, but every distressing, fearful experience was preparing him for greater and greater exploits for God. David ended up not just ruling God’s people, but blessing every subsequent generation of God’s people through his psalms. His songs touch us because they tell of his fears and his depression and agonizing questions that speak powerfully to us in our own trials, and he inspires us because he faced those emotions and overcame. Likewise, God could instantly deliver you of things that threaten to rob your marriage of its unique joys. But you are destined to bring glory to Almighty God. As the wife continues to seek to reclaim the treasure of marital relations, she will not only gradually receive that prize, but the inner strength that these victories give her will take her to greater and greater things. And, like David, her victories will empower her to minister to hurting people. Likewise, as the husband refuses to be dominated by his flesh as it screams out for things that his wife cannot currently give him, and as his spirit cries out to God for more of the fruit of God’s Spirit in his life, he can rise to spiritual greatness. Like David, they can move from spiritual insignificance to being giant-killers, and to being people who bring comfort and deliverance to countless people. In achieving your goal of you and your partner thoroughly enjoying each other sexually, I have emphasized taking lots of small steps and avoiding large, scary ones. At first glance, David’s progression from shepherd boy to king seems to involve just a few, large, scary steps. In reality, David’s progression fits the pattern we have established, although the steps were scarier than I advise because some things are meant to be scarier than making love. Too much fear is always counterproductive, but in dangerous situations, a little fear is helpful. It puts the body on red alert, releasing chemicals and physiological changes that raise the body and mind to peak performance when you need to fight for your life. Making love, is divinely intended to be the exact opposite of fear. If the purpose of marital relations were character development, then forcing yourself to endure fear or unpleasantness would be a display of love, self-control and courage that you could regard as a victory. But character development is not the divine purpose of marital relations. Your long term goal should be sex that fits the divine pattern. By that critical measure enduring unpleasantness in marital relations is not an achievement but a setback because it further entrenches into your natural reactions feelings that sadden God. Alternatively, whenever you limit yourself to only what you find pleasurable, it is a victory because you are moving further along the path of delighting the Giver by gaining maximum enjoyment of his gift to you. Marital lovemaking is meant to be blissfully reassuring and soothing; making one feel wonderfully secure. In fact, Scripture refers to the act of intercourse as the giving or receiving of comfort (Genesis 24:67, and especially 2 Samuel 12:24). Fear should be avoided to help you grow into the habit of enjoying marital relations as the source of reassurance and emotional warmth that God intended it to be. But this must be coupled with a desire to be released from every fear and to keep progressing in your ability to enjoy every aspect of marital relations. So in your relentless pursuit of God’s best, be inspired by David. David’s advance started with target practice. Over and over and over he used his sling, limiting himself just to a target. Somewhere in this process he would have started imagining his target was an animal. He would eventually have progressed to trying to hit game. Like his early attempts at hitting a target, he would have missed more often than he hit, but he refused to give in to discouragement. He kept trying and trying and trying. He knew that as he grew older his father would want him to protect the sheep from wild animals. So somewhere in his development of his use of the sling, the boy would have started imagining his prey was a lion or bear. The very thought must have been frightening but he kept gaining confidence in his skill with the sling and kept visualizing killing a wild animal until the thought seemed increasingly normal to him and he came to believe it was within his capability. Slings were not just for hunting game or killing dangerous animals, however. They were weapons of war, and Israel had enemies that men were expect to fight to the death. So David would have begun visualizing killing an enemy soldier with his sling. And like a typical boy, he would have progressed to imagining he was defeating a mighty warrior, maybe even a giant. Using similar steps, David progressed with his harp playing until he could confidently play before an audience. Eventually he found himself playing before the scariest audience – the royal court and the king himself. Slowly he began to feel more at ease in the King’s court. He felt very uncomfortable with royalty but gradually his friendship with the King’s son grew. Slowly he progressed to speaking to the King’s daughter. Saul offered him the chance to join the royal family through marriage. That was too scary for David and he refused. But it had sown a thought within him. Slowly he began to imagine himself becoming the King’s son-in-law. Gradually he become so comfortable with the idea that, after considerable coaxing, he married the King’s daughter. Samuel had already anointed David as the future king, so, as scary as it was, David would have begun thinking of himself as one day ruling all of Israel. He slowly grew in leadership skills. First with a handful of society’s rejects, then the number gradually grew to about six hundred (1 Samuel 23:16). Finally he became king, but only over two tribes. Later he progressed to being king over all of Israel. Gradually, still other countries became subject to him. Despite wanting to keep this brief, I have detailed many of David’s steps to what would once have been terrifyingly impossible because I want you assured that rarely does God drop anyone in at the deep end. He takes us one tiny challenge at a time. So we have every right to expect that God would not usually take an abuse survivor from terror to full marital relations in one giant step. Modern researchers might be discovering that – surprise, surprise – the method outlined in Scripture works, but the fact is that it is God’s way, not some modern invention. The Lord is lord. He can, if he chooses, break his normal way of doing things. He has every right to command a woman terrified of sex to plunge immediately into full marital relations, and he has all the power to make it miraculously successful. This is no more likely however, than the instantaneous healing of a broken leg. A wife should deliberately engage in an aspect of lovemaking that currently upsets her, in the same way that she would run a marathon on a newly-broken leg – only after being absolutely certain that God is asking it of her. Maximum sexual enjoyment will most likely be attained by receiving exquisite pleasure from things you currently find unpleasant but, the normal way to arrive at this is by steps so tiny that no step is fearful or unpleasant. Related Pages When Marital Relations are a Short-Cut to Hell Comfort, Understanding and Healing for Abuse Survivors Ensuring You are Truly Head of Your Wife These webpages must not be used as weapons to try to get a partner to change. Each reader must focus on applying them to his/her own life.

The following is based on an e-mail exchange with a Christian husband who has not had marital relations for years. Many helpful angles are examined. We have been married over 46 years. Congratulations! To remain in marriage for so long in our decadent society is an achievement worthy of honor. We had a good relationship in the first years, almost as you express in your webpage. About 15 years ago things changed. I lost a job and at the same time she was going through “the change.” I tried to get her to talk about it and was told it was her problem and she would handle it. My response was, “No, it is not just your problem. And no, you are not handling it.” She told me we were through with sex, it is for younger people. Research shows that it’s older men who tend to give up sex. Women usually keep going and going. I’m wondering whether due to vaginal dryness, or whatever, she found intercourse painful. I suspect there is a large medical component associated with her losing interest. I cannot believe she is happy with this situation. I’m sure she would love a return to the old days, but has given up hope of an improvement. I have not gone to other women or the bottle as most. Excellent. Have you, however, been able to maintain your love and tenderness and patience and understanding? We have had much communication troubles that only got worse. I wonder if your wife feels some resentment coming from you. I wonder if she feels unloved and not understood. I suspect she feels bad about herself – feels a failure, unattractive, etc. I think she needs to be romanced and have her self esteem built up. I have a number of webpages that could help her, such as To God, You Are Special. I was able to finally get her into counseling and to enrichment seminar. I asked her for a commitment, only to find out she thought that just going was all that it took. That must have been heartbreaking for you. At least she went, however. I haven’t accused her of defrauding me, but there is no doubt in my mind that this is a sin that must be dealt with. As you know, Jesus emphasized that we must focus on our own shortcomings rather than those of other people. I want to thank you for the excellent webpages about marriage. You have a gift for communicating that is outstanding. I like the way you use the Scripture and will give this to others that I know are hurting. Thank you. I would hate for my webpages to be used as weapons to try to bludgeon a partner to change. My longing is for each reader to apply it to his/her own life, and not point the finger. Please don’t beat your dear wife with Scriptures. Giving way to a holier-than-thou attitude would greatly worsen the situation. Your wife is hurting and needs your love and support. I have an internet friend who has suffered enormously due to her husband’s mid-life crisis. Things are very much improving now but she had a tough battle for many years. She has formed a little group of Christian women who are similarly suffering from their husband’s mid-life crisis. I wondered if she has any suggestions for when the roles are reversed. After removing anything to identify you, I forwarded your e-mail to her. Her response is brilliant: A couple I am close to have a similar problem to your friend. They sleep in separate bedrooms now and their marriage is pretty much a housemate relationship. They have little in common and it seems very sad. She still loves him. I’m not sure about him. I think he’s been hurt so much that he’d not even be interested if she changed now. He’s accepted things the way they are. From my experience, what more than anything else makes a woman love a man and want him physically is for him to talk to her – to give her his undivided attention and make her know that he is interested in what she has to say. I don’t mean just chatting, although that’s important. He needs to take her out for dinner and look into her eyes at the table and make interesting conversation – not about the kids or the bills, but as if he were with someone he enjoyed being with and was very interested in her opinions. He needs to hang on every word. That will make her feel loved. Also, he needs to go very slow. Just because they have a wonderful conversation one night does not mean that she will respond. He’s got to change his ways and that takes time. She will not believe he has done it overnight. Women don’t like to be rushed in any way. He needs to make her feel like he has all the time in the world for her. Another most valuable thing is simply cuddling, holding hands, and making her feel special by holding open doors, complimenting her, and so on. Honoring her in front of others does wonders for a woman. Additional Thought: Especially regarding what is done in public, be sensitive to any shyness your wife may have. What for one woman could make her feel special – such as sending flowers to her workplace – could for another be painfully embarrassing. – Grantley Of course he needs to pray that God to give him green and red lights. If he really gets into the word of God, I believe that it will affect his thinking, and as he continues to pray, those signals will automatically come. God will tell him when to push, when to wait, when to hesitate. He will learn to recognize what God is telling him to do regarding his wife. I suspect far too few men and women pray about their sex life. The above are the kinds of things that would draw me. That’s all I can say. She must be valued. And if she feels like the only value she has is physical, then that is the last thing she will want. If he’s been nagging her about it, or making her feel guilty, he needs to stop and not bring it up till he gains her trust again. I’d advise him to do all he can with no thoughts of initiating sex. Wait for her to bring it up. She needs love, not sex, right now. Additional Thought: Pay much attention to your wife’s feelings. For instance, it’s not nearly enough that she be treasured by you, she needs to feel treasured. Often it is what to a husband seems inconsequential things that convey this feeling to her. To give another example: it’s not enough that you would never hit her, she must feel safe. Even a slight display of anger on your part might make her feel frightened. It’s not sufficient for you to know your anger would never get out of hand, she must feel certain. This might mean that for her to feel really secure, you must control your emotions far more than what to you seems necessary. Always consider not just reality as you know it but how it feels to your wife. I recall hearing of research that concluded that the single greatest determiner of when a woman whether experience orgasm is the degree of security she feels in a relationship. Your wife needs to feel secure in your love. She needs to feel she is not being compared with other woman and that your love for her is forever. In order to flourish she needs the security of unconditional love. – Grantley Please thank your friend for me. She is a very sharp lady. My wife had her uterus removed and I know she has had trouble with the change. I have been as loving and understanding as I know how. She just will not discuss things with me. I have read many books and articles dealing with our problems in an attempt to get a better understanding. She just cuts me off . I commend you for all you have done. Many a husband would not have used his initiative like that. Through your research you most likely understand the medical side better than I do. Have you thought of alerting your wife’s doctor to her behavior? That way when she next has a medical appointment the doctor might have some suggestions for change of medication or whatever. I’m no expert with medical ethics, so I leave it to you to sort out the merit of this suggestion. Given your wisdom, I think you are sure to have tried a version of the following but maybe it’s worth one more shot. Perhaps your wife has some deep hurt or resentment toward you that you are not aware of. As is the case with virtually every husband sometimes, it’s possible that she mentioned the matter years ago but you did not realize how big an issue it is with her. If there is something that to her mind has not yet been resolved, she has no doubt wrongly given up all hope of you ever changing and so she will see little point in bringing it up. It could therefore take a truckload of humility, gentleness and patience on your part to entice her to re-open the matter. Just to double check whether there is such an issue, maybe you could try saying to your wife something like the following. (I’ve worded it assuming you’re an excellent husband, but like the rest of humanity, not perfect.) I wish I’d been a better husband to you. You deserve the best husband in the world. I’m deeply sorry for the times I’m know I’ve disappointed you. [You could add some examples here if you wish.] I’m even more concerned, however, about the times I have let you down and that even now I’m too insensitive to realize how much it’s hurt you. I’d like to apologize, do what I can to make amends and try to learn from what you share so that I don’t repeat my mistakes. Would you mind reminding me of all the times I have hurt you? It would be very hard on any husband if a wife were to go full throttle listing all of his mistakes. Nevertheless, it could be that if she got started and found you weren’t fighting back she might eventually get to the real sticking point, if there is one. Through my suffering I have come closer to God and am in a position to help others that are hurting. The suffering has a purpose, that is to prepare us for the ministry of help for others. That’s beautiful! A treasured member of my prayer team has chosen to forego marital relations because of his wife’s long-standing medical condition. He, too, reports immense spiritual blessings stemming from his voluntary sacrifice. You are right: suffering has immense value. Of course, God did not cause your wife to act this way, but once we are in a trial, our Lord doesn’t waste our tears. On the contrary, he sends special blessings. When looking for counselors I always seek out people who have known great pain or hardship. They are the ones who know how to minister God’s comfort. I would like you to receive prayer support. I have established a large prayer team, scattered all over the globe. They would count it a privilege to uphold you in prayer. I urge you to read If only he knew by Gary Smalley, published by R.M. Marketing, 1979. It explains in detail how to revive a woman’s interest in sex. May the Lord bless you and your ministry. It sure has blessed me. Thanks for letting the Lord use you in a mighty way. Thank you for your kind encouragement. For our wonderful Lord to use me is an undeserved privilege. For important further information, see How to Boost Your Wife’s Libido and links at the end of that page How to Fall More in Love with God Contains helpful practical suggestions for re-igniting marital love. Your wife might find the first part of the following webpage helpful. Be very cautious and wise, however about how you introduce it to her: How holy wives express marital love: Smashing inhibitions and misconceptions For inspiration, see How Carol Saved her Doomed Marriage