Hurt people don’t have to hurt people

In junior high school, I read an article that crushed me. It said that the abused become abusers. Taking in this statement resulted in years of my being afraid of myself and what I might do to others, or what others might think I would do, because of the beatings, sexual assault, and emotional abuse that I had suffered from the time I was a toddler. This self-fear also began a cycle of lying to others, saying that I was well while actually feeling suicidal and practicing self-harm. Despite being shy, soft-spoken, and obedient, I constantly dreaded the monster that I feared lay just below the surface. 

Decades later, when I thought I was past those feelings, they came flooding back one night, triggered by hearing a radio program discussing abused children, their abusers, and cycles of abuse. But what seemed to be an enormous setback led to a transformational blessing.

Sitting open on the kitchen counter were my Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. A passage from Science and Health on the infinite distance between Spirit and matter seemed to stare up at me, demanding to be read. It said: “The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Science separates the wheat from the tares, through the realization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting the divine likeness” (p. 300).