How to Forgive Yourself After Ritual Child Abuse

Ritual child abuse often involves trying to break the child's will by forcing him to choose between two unacceptable alternatives that violate the child's moral code. For example, a ritual abuser might force a child to harm an animal or another child in order to save his own family from being murdered. After the child "chooses" to harm an animal or child, the ritual abuser tells him that he chose the behavior, causing the child to feel intense guilt and shame.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Strong desire to heal
• Patience
• Courage

1. Find a therapist with experience in counseling ritual abuse survivors. Ritual abusers often "program" their victims to self-destruct if they talk about the abuse, so you are likely to start feeling strong urges to self-injure or commit suicide as you focus on forgiving yourself for your ritual abuse history.

2. Recognize that you had no choice. Your ritual abuser set you up to believe that you had a choice, but there was never a choice. If you had not violated your moral code in obedience to your abuser's demands, even worse things would have happened. You were just a child, and you had no power.

3. Study of childhood photograph of yourself. Find a picture of yourself from the age when you were suffering from the ritual abuse. Notice your tiny hands and feet. Ask yourself if it is reasonable to expect this little child to have stopped an adult from forcing her to violate her moral code.

4. Turn your anger back onto your ritual abusers. Survivors of ritual abuse often hold themselves responsible for their abuses when it is their abusers who deserve the wrath.

5. Visualize taking your power back. See yourself as a child about to be harmed by your ritual abuser. Then, see your adult self protect your child self and attack the abuser. Allow this visualization to get as graphic as it needs to get for you to feel the release of your rage and terror.

6. View your childish actions through the eyes of compassion.

7. Let go of the bitterness. Choose to stop nursing the bitterness and self-loathing and, instead, free up that energy to heal yourself. Consciously choose to stop any negative self-talk and replace it with thoughts of things that make you happy.

Tips & Warnings

• Your therapist can provide you with additional tools to forgive yourself after ritual abuse.
• Do not try to heal from ritual abuse without entering into therapy. Urges to harm yourself or commit suicide are very common. You will need your therapist's support in order to ride out these urges without succumbing to them.

Resources

• Safe Passage to Healing