Tending to the resilience of those wounded by child abuse
Teresa Hartnett has long been a crusader of kindness. One cherished ministry of hers has been tending to the healing of those wounded by child abuse. InspiredToGive.org recently talked with Teresa about her latest focus with Spirit Fire.
Spirit Fire is a Christian restorative justice initiative promoting healing and reconciliation for adults, families and faith communities wounded by child abuse. Comprised entirely of clergy-abuse survivors, Spirit Fire takes survivor resilience to a higher level of service by creating in homes, parishes and communities a legacy ministry with customized programming, tailored resources and core leadership.
Spirit Fire offers tailored services (also trains and mentors others seeking to provide these services), such as spiritual mediation, pastoral care training, parish workshops or events, peer counseling, advisory input or facilitated listening sessions, and retreats or conferences. Options for partnership and programming include a growing publishing line as well as work on-site, online and via teleconferences. Cost containment is a priority, with options for partial or wholly virtual programming.
Most topics focus on integrating the spiritual component of life with the overall recovery from abuse or trauma. Topics range from the practical to the interior self, such as: “Healing in Spirit What Psychology Cannot,” “Creating Your Patchwork of Support,” “Mastering Physical and Medical Care,” and “Ministering to Secondary Trauma.”
How does what you do contribute to a social cause?
Well, it’s now evident that our world is wounded by abuse and trauma of all kinds. My fellow survivors and I make no claim to make a big dent in that, but we do try to light others on fire to spread the healing, spirit to spirit.
We start with the focus on how survivors of abuse and trauma often remain unaware of their own strength and gifts – and how this wounded world needs them. The world needs the inspiration of our resilience. We start there.
When a survivor of child abuse walks into a room, our very presence gives hope to the people who have survived abuse but haven’t yet been affirmed in their status as a “wounded healer” (as Henri Nouwen describes survivors).
In his famous book on Christian leadership of that same name, Nouwen wrote: “Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but, ‘How can we put our woundedness into the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”
What escapes most people is that when, let’s say, child sexual abuse happens within a parish or other faith community, the wound ripples outward from the victim or victims and hurts family, extended family, school, parish and community. You can see that in the defense of cynicism that surrounds us in general.
What Spirit Fire does is walk right into that pain and grief and minister to individuals as well as to their wounded relationships. It’s why we named ourselves “Spirit Fire,” because we see ourselves as tiny sparks to sputtering embers. People who have survived abuse and trauma all have something to give. It is not about large scale when you’re healing relationships. It’s about not waiting for the leaders but starting alone, person to person, to paraphrase Mother Teresa.
What are the challenges you face in your work?
One challenge is when people think there’s a way through healing that doesn’t hurt. This is not a shortcut around the necessary process of grieving what is lost in abuse or trauma – and what will not be. No one wants to grieve – but everyone must grieve. It is what it is. We don’t sugarcoat the suffering from which we also draw strength, wisdom, beauty and hope.
Another challenge is working with the wounds unique to spiritual violence. For example, freedom and fulfillment in the spiritual life is based on surrender to God, but victims of abuse (especially abuse in a sacred setting) experienced surrender as annihilation at the hands of a counterfeit authority, even a false representation of God. A giant obstacle remains, as a survivor rightly distrusts authority and similar claims to represent or mediate with God. Even within oneself, it can be difficult to sort through the cacophony of fears and doubts and anger to find a connection to our indwelling God.
So, there’s a lot of work to do. But, actually, it’s not work as much as living. People come to live in such a way that, bit by bit, the defenses fall away in the safe and fulfilling relationship with God that is free from abusers and their enablers who offered only lies and pain. I’ve written a workbook to help walk through that, but ultimately it is a deeply personal way of living – with echoes into eternity.
How do you incorporate a spiritual practice in your service?
Gosh, my whole practice is spiritual. It’s all about integrating faith with recovery – both recovery programs and recovered lives. For example, I provide programs for therapists on integrating faith into therapy and also on how to work in parallel with a spiritual director. One challenge I lay out there is how often people with chronic mental illnesses are assumed to be unable to have flourishing interior spiritual lives.
There are a couple programs for physicians, nurses and others in how to deal with survivors of abuse and trauma; these include working with survivors of human trafficking. One big challenge with that is not just how to identify abuse but also how to engage with victims of abuse with the radical respect that can start to soak through the defenses and numb shock when one is still being abused.
One of my primary focuses is on programs for ministers and religious groups on how to offer pastoral care in parallel with (not in lieu of) therapy for survivors, family members or whole families or parishes. This is particularly challenging because, whether you’re talking about the Catholic Church or some other Christian congregation rocked by an abuser, people often lose faith in the whole institution. This is in addition to the entirely reasonable loss of faith in God which survivors experience either from time to time – or for a whole lifetime. How does a church, while wounded itself, speak to these human and reasonable responses?
But we talk about integrating the spiritual or faith element in all areas. One colleague works with legal professionals. Another focuses solely on pediatricians. Yet another is entirely devoted to rolling out child safety programs in all settings where kids and teens spend their time. For all of us, our motivation and our message is Spirit-driven.
Also, I would have to say that my role, essentially as a mediator in one way or another, is spiritual. As a survivor of devastating spiritual violence, I am committed to impose similar violence on no person. This plays out when my Christ-centered program serves non-Christian people or groups. Or when this program, born as it is of the suffering and resilience of Catholic clergy-abuse survivors, serves non-Catholic Christians. I work a lot with fellow Christians in other denominations. This spiritual non-violence, I guess you might call it, takes the psychology of mediation to a profound, personal level.
How does your spiritual practice help you?
A friend who left a lucrative career to become a minister in hospice laughs to see my path into this ministry, saying that I’m in “God’s tractor beam.” It has been like that. When I am working in Spirit Fire, the depth of joy and peace is sublime – like nothing else I have ever known. Despite the darkness that victims experience, that we all experience, my confidence in victory in the Light of God grows each day.
This reflects my personal healing in a way I’d never have imagined. Only our Creator could imagine such an amazing outcome. My healing started as a very young adult. It was a tough therapeutic process that required me to find, recover and remake my abandoned child self who had destroyed by abuse when I was a kid and a teen. My service, now, oddly, to my joy, is to turn around and surrender that self here, serving others in Spirit Fire. The first loss was a theft and involuntary, the second is a free gift and is voluntary.
Now, at this point in the walk along the arc of personal recovery, I have to say it’s all been quite astounding, and, yeah, really helped me in ways I’d never dream.
How does it benefit those you are wanting to help?
Spirit Fire aims at the full web of harm and hurt following abuse, but focuses on each individual. Survivors often report therapy that had slowed down or stalled being sparked to new leaps, and whole new depths of comfort with the God of their understanding. Members of both original and primary families report finding permission to admit their own vicarious suffering and affirmation in finding ways to tend their own wounds as well as of loved ones. Priests, religious and other ministers report finding a new language to use to build bridges with survivors, family members and entire parishes or other faith communities. Leaders accept the challenge to move outside a response informed by PR or legal practices and lean on the wisdom and resilience of survivors to find a reconciling path forward after crisis. It’s great, actually, and I can assure you that’s not by our power at Spirit Fire but by our serving God and bringing God’s Spirit into places that are very wounded.
One observation I’ll share, is how a lot of this work taps into people’s creativity. The ideas Spirit Fire adds to the mix of shock and recovery following abuse captures their imaginations. It’s not that surprising. It’s the divine leading us toward our fullest and healed self through creativity, including into a new and active confidence about cultivating a flourishing life in unique ways. Who’s surprised, right? This is after all our Creator, the most creative of all forces in the cosmos. When we take even the smallest, bravest and maybe really difficult step to grow, our Creator is right there, ready to bring the tiniest and most timid effort to life. It’s an astounding process, really. As people are creatively inspired by our Creator a lot of wonderful graces and gifts are showered into a previously bleak situation. A momentum builds in one life and in many lives.
Can you share a particular story when you saw the effect of your spiritual practice on a specific situation?
I remember speaking at a tiny little church in the far, far outback of Virginia. There was only myself, the priest leading the prayer service, and the social worker who arranged the service. Otherwise, the church was – or seemed – empty. As I offered the sermon, in the far back of the shadowy church, behind the old columns in the back, I spied a woman, more of a shadow form, swaying and crying as she stood there. So, I kept talking. Then the priest, who is a dear friend who really understands survivors, picked up the prayer with a focus on her. She fled before the service was over. You’d think that service was a failure if you’re judging by the metrics of today – but this is how Spirit Fire ministry works.
The next day, the woman reached out. Over time, she and I became profound friends (in the way survivors can offer each other friendships no one else can). We walked together through a lot of her recovery, so I was able to watch her whole family heal, and her life evolve into a wellness that integrates faith and therapy and physical self-care. She has, herself, since become a mentor and friend to new survivors who are coming forward – and has become a leader in the survivor community where she lives. There’s no telling what this one amazing woman will achieve, alone, person to person, the rest of her life.
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To learn more about Spirit Fire visit https://spiritfirelive.wordpress.com/ or their ezine, The Healing Voices.
