Healing Child Abuse with A Course in Miracles Teachings
Question:
Dear David,
I was abused as a child and have difficulty with issues of trust, integrity, respect, and holding my own power. Can you help please?
David Hoffmeister:
Beloved of God,
Thanks for writing and sharing what is on your mind. Opening to Integrity and Self-honesty is the willingness to feel the Love within and let it shine without limits of any kind. The ego wants to discourage you from looking within, for beneath the seeming blackness of false belief is the bright Light of Truth and unconditional Love through which the ego is undone. Abuse is the false belief that something can happen to one apart from one’s asking. The Holy Spirit unveils the insane wish for conflict and separation and reveals its nothingness in God’s Light. People-pleasing is an ego mechanism which looks for love and recognition and respect from others instead of within. It is a way of distracting away from looking within and uncovering/releasing the darkness that is believed to be real.
In sleep, it seems that people and circumstances determine one’s state of mind. Yet people and circumstances only reflect what the mind believes and but seem to act out and represent the unreal thoughts that the mind thinks it thinks. The willingness to see that one has been mistaken about the mind and the false self and the false world is the first step toward healing. It is helpful to acknowledge that there has been a fear of healing and a fear of loss, yet underneath these fears is the fear of Love. The ego fears Love, and it is only the identification with the ego that generates the false emotion of fear. Self-honesty sees the reality of Love and the unreality of fear. If God is with OneSelf, who or what could be “against” anything? Love has no opposite and therefore Love never “opposes.” “Let all things be exactly as they are” is a reference to the eternal Spirit that God creates as One.
Remember that your mind has the power to choose its state of emotion. You can control the direction of your thinking, and the Holy Spirit teaches us to think with God instead of trying to think apart from God. As you learn of the Holy Spirit, you open to the experience that there literally is nothing “outside” Spirit. “The truth is within” is a way of saying that the truth is Spirit and nothing at all is “outside” Spirit. We are the meaning of life as Spirit, and the world of images (persons, places, things, etc.) have no meaning. Spirit is forever, and images are temporary thoughts which vanish as they are brought to Light.
The “effort” of Awakening is in watching your mind and harboring no thoughts of the ego. The “patience” is having faith to continue with the practice until no scrap of fear remains in awareness. We are joined in the Purpose of forgiveness of illusion, for no illusion can stand in the Light of Truth. Time cannot obscure eternity and illusions cannot veil the Truth. God is inevitable, and so is the Self God created One forever. There is nothing else to dwell upon. In this experience is all resistance dissolved, and only Love remains.
I love you forever and ever,
David