International Priest Helpline - Guest Article

The Impact of Intense Evil and Long Term Mistreatment Upon the Soul of Victims Perpetrators & Healers
Pt 1

By Dr F Peter Bertolero

There are Three Important Factors to Consider When Ministering to Wounds of the Soul

My good friend and nephew of the famous world evangelist, T.L. Osborn, Gary Osborn, once described in one of his articles, some of the important factors to consider in setting people free. He wrote –

Something tragic is happening in the church, and I am alarmed! Many in the Christian army are learning to be more effective than ever against the powers of darkness. We are learning to listen to the Holy Spirit, and respond to His specific directives of procedure to be followed in order to be liberated bound people from the satanic oppression of fear, insecurity, rejection, suicide, anger and bitterness. So what’s the tragedy? Simply put, we are losing people after deliverance because of a failure to understand the crises of the human soul AFTER LIBERATION.

Secular leadership understands that a soldier imprisoned as a P.O.W. must go through a period of restoration BEFORE he can enter fully into the stream of normal living. The shock of immediate transition can be crippling if not handled in wisdom. The length of time required for the transition depends upon several factors:

1. The length of imprisonment

2. The severity of punishment or torture suffered [mistreatment]

3. The individual strengths and weaknesses of the prisoner himself

The military recognizes the need for restoration, while we in the Christian army often ignore such human needs, expecting those who have been delivered from Satan’s hellish imprisonment, to instantly flow into normal church life. That is simply an unrealistic (and unscriptural) expectation.

Likewise the medical profession realizes that an individual that has undergone major surgery will not be jogging five miles the next morning! Intensive care is required first, then a period of recuperation after which the patient can gradually begin a return to normal activities.

After encouraging healers in the church to learn from the military and medical model as well, by painstakingly assigning those who have gone through major psychological and spiritual surgery appropriate tasks and responsibilities in sync with their stage of recovery, (rather than overwhelming them with unrealistic expectations), Osborn continues by writing that according to his observation –

“…most people experience a ‘high’ within the first 24 hours after an authentic deliverance experience. But quite often that initial upsurge is followed by a feeling described variously as “an empty feeling” “a sense of loss” “a lack of identity”, and a “confused state of mind”. The length and intensity of this stage seems to be almost directly proportionate with the severity of the oppression which was addressed, and the length of time which the individual was dominated by that particular stronghold. In other words, a person confronting anger which has been seething in his heart for only a few years, would likely have a much easier transition to godly behavior patterns and character traits than a person who has struggled with anger all their lives. This is easy to understand when we realize that the longer a person is bound with oppressive anger, the longer they have to build and form their whole mindset and thought patterns around the stronghold. Anger has been the driving force behind their words, criticisms, actions, and even their achievements. So when the holy Spirit removes the spirit and stronghold of anger from a person bound to it for a long time, the person will experience a sense of loss, confusion, maybe even grief. Frequently, an oppressed and bound person has actually wrapped their entire identity around their particular bondage…Frightened and confused, if left alone by those who ministered to them and set them free, they may end up returning to those old familiar patterns of bondage they were set free of simply because they do not know how to function outside of them.

What I hear Gary saying is that the higher the degree of bondage (and by bondage I mean any addictive behaviors or compulsions that seem to enslave or compel a person), the greater the level of follow up and restorative work there needs to be.

Gary Osborn was ahead of his time (this article was written in the early 80s!). Nothing I have seen or read would argue with Gary’s observations about the factors that contribute to a person’s ability to recover and go on to Christian maturity. The length of time a person has been in bondage certainly does play an important part in determining how they do with post-deliverance/inner healing recovery. The severity of the mistreatment suffered (the degree of trauma and pain experienced) is likewise important, in ascertaining the depth of woundedness and the hysteria that continues to be attached to it, and the God-given strengths and durability of the person matters, too, in determining how much of the mistreatment and pain actually reached them. Remember, when dealing with inner woundedness, what is more important than the physical pain and surface issues, is what the experience ‘meant’ or ‘means’ to the person. What did they derive from the mistreatment? What did the mistreatment say to them about themselves; God; others; the particular form of the mistreatment; good and evil; gender acceptance, etc…

There are those who have gone through unbelievably cruel and savage mistreatment from the hands of their loved ones, and at the hands of others, and who, in spite of what was done to them or how long it was done to them, were able to come out psychologically intact, albeit with some toxic residue that a few sessions with a healing team or therapist seemed to heal and reconcile. There are others who comparatively have only suffered one or two incidents of cruelty or mistreatment by loved ones or others, and who seem to have suffered irreparable damage that is beyond the reach of the most skilled and anointed healing team, and challenges even the professional therapist.

Again, one way of understanding this is by Osborn’s observation that a major factor in determining the impact of what is done to us is our individual strengths and weaknesses – i.e. – the measure of the grace of God each of us has that determines our psychological durability. Also, our sin nature cannot be ruled out in the way we seem to become incapacitated by what is dealt to us by way of trouble and pain and misfortune. Jesus pointed this out when addressing the man at the pool of Bethesda, who was paralyzed for 38 years (a long time).[1] When Jesus asked him simply to “Do you want to be made well?” and the man responded by giving a litany of reasons and excuses why he wasn’t healed yet, blaming the inconsideration of others who would jump in the troubled waters before him, and those who did not offer to carry him into the water when it became troubled by the angel.[2] Later, after Jesus had healed him, he was found in the place near the temple frequented by beggars, carrying around his mat. The Jewish leaders reprimanded him for carrying his bed on the Sabbath. Sure enough, just like the prior blame-shifting behavior that was exposed by Jesus, the man quickly attempted to shift the responsibility for his actions onto “He who made me well”[3]. “After all”, he might have said, “It’s not my fault I’m healed. You need to speak to the person who healed me, because he told me to pick up my mat and walk. It’s not my fault, it’s his fault I’m doing this.” Still later, he is found again in the place in the temple where the poor were permitted to frequent, begging for food, thus reducing the amount of charitable resources needed by other’s much worse off than he… precious handouts they desperately needed to survive. Jesus’ remarks to him are astounding: “Go and sin no more lest a worse thing happen to you.[4]” To Jesus, the fact that this man was begging with cripples, the blind, and others who had debilitating illnesses, was sinful. One wonders if this kind of attitude got the man in trouble in the first place. Instead, the man went straightaway to the Jewish elders and reported to them without their solicitation that it was in fact, Jesus, who made him well, causing Jesus a lot of trouble thereafter.[5] He might as well have said, “Go get him, boys!” The rest of the story is not told as to what ultimately happened to this man, but may I suggest for the sake of conjecture, that he may very well have ended up back at the pool of Bethesda, a paralyzed, bitter blame-shifter.

Playing the Victim as a way of Justifying One’s Behavior

My point is that not all that appears to be inner wounding is in fact due to the mistreatment of others, even if it did in fact, happen. Issues and events can become magnified to those individuals who are prone toward self-pitying, blame- shifting behavior, and who lean toward “playing the victim” whenever something bad happens. I have seen such individuals take away the legitimate right of another to grieve and mourn the death of a loved one, by exhibiting so much sorrow and broken-heartedness that they gather all attention to themselves, overshadowing the needs of those around them. Everything that happens in some way affects them so that “it’s all about them” while others, who are not so prone, are left to clean up after them. They either have swallowed the bitter pill that has deceived them into thinking they are owed something because of what they suffered, or, according to their own warped way of thinking, they are exempt from behaving responsibly in spite of their grief, and as a result, have left a long wake of people hurt by their checking out of reality.

Unfortunately, the reality of life is that life often times isn’t fair, and danger and tragedy are, by their very nature unpredictable, and evil does break in to “steal, kill and destroy” (John 10:10). Still, there is much undeserved grace and mercy experienced as well. But for people who develop entitlement issues, not only do they believe they deserve better than they get (are getting; have gotten), but because they have not reconciled to their past conflicts, they are left perpetually feeling they never get their just rewards in this life. They have an insatiable hunger for justice that never can be satiated no matter how much justice they get.

John Dawson in his book, Healing America’s Wounds, eloquently wrote concerning what needs to characterize wounded healers and reconcilers such as ourselves, when he said -

“We must bring our own wounded spirit to God if we are to be used by Him as reconcilers. All of us have experienced injustice. The obvious temptation of the offended person is to give in to self-pity; a feeling stemming from a deep inner vow that says, ‘I deserve better than this.’

“But do we? It is one thing to champion the rights of others; but do we ourselves really deserve better, in an absolute moral sense? I have often wallowed in self-pity but the truth is, the last thing I need is justice.

Justice cuts two ways. What if I really got what I deserve? I’m just another depraved human being with my own history of selfish actions. The fact is, I continue to live and breathe by the mercy of God; and having received mercy, I should extend mercy to others.

When I recognize my own desperate need for mercy, the gall of bitterness is more easily removed from my own spirit. When I acknowledge how much I have been forgiven, I am suddenly more able to release forgiveness toward those who have hurt me and mine.

Leave judgment to God; refrain from coming to conclusions about the motives behind actions. Do not impute evil intent to any action that could be interpreted two ways. Suspicion and accusation have no place in the heart of the reconciler.”[6]

The Impact of the Contagion of Evil to the Soul of both the Victim and the Healer

I have mentioned the tendency to “play the victim”, only to expose the current 40 year fad in western culture to excuse all sorts of self-centered behavior on the basis of being at one time or over a long period of time, mistreated, abused, and/or otherwise wronged by another. I want to point to a diagram that I call the cycle of recycled revenge to illustrate how atrocities have been committed in history by those who felt justified in doing so. This illustration works for anything from a single act of violence to crimes of holocaustal and genocidal proportions. Dr. Edwin Murphy, in his book THE HANDBOOK FOR SPIRITUAL WARFARE, coined a term – “sin energy”[7] to describe how transference occurs between the compulsive anger that fuels the violent acts of the perpetrator, and the frustrated anger that gnaws at the soul of the victim (should they survive), and/or the survivors of the victim (whether they do or do not survive). What Murphy posits is that the anger in the perpetrator seems to act as a contagion that infects and perverts the righteous protests of anger coming from the victim and their loved ones at the criminal mistreatment they have been subjected to. In some emotional way, such anger on the part of the victim can become the very thing that keeps them bound to the perpetrator, thus allowing the perpetrator to continue to control the future outcomes of their lives. Such is the negative power of unforgiveness, bitterness, resentment, prejudice, jealousy, hatred, and vengefulness.

At this point I’d like to refer the reader to Dr. Ed Murphy’s diagram entitled Reactionary Sin[8] to further illustrate this point. In the diagram below, Murphy illustrates this concept of sin transference. Note how he uses the term “sin energy” as a kind of “sin-print” or sin residue left on the victim(s) by the perpetrator(s).

Now what are we seeing in the diagram above? Well, to begin with, whatever forces (sin energy) were at work during the perpetrator’s (“activator”) abuse/violation of the victim, are transferred, at least in part, onto the victim like a dirty fingerprint. This “sin energy” rests on the victim and attaches to the victim’s sense of injustice or moral outrage. This compounds the victim’s sense of injustice and natural desire for justice to be served upon and restitution paid by the perpetrator. Over time, these justifiable reactions of the victim toward the perpetrator can become frustrated; especially if the perpetrator is never exposed or brought to justice or the situation otherwise rectified. This frustration can turn into bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness, hate, depressed anger, vengefulness, etc….

Such reactions to the sin/evil suffered by others (being sinned against) can become a shaping force, conforming the victim into the image of the perpetrator. This in turn can cause the victim to act out in vengeful anger, etc… toward others, who are unjustly made to reap what the original perpetrator sown. The victim unconsciously makes others the target for their vengefulness, thus inadvertently casting themselves in the role of a perpetrator/activator. And the process of transference continues as those hurt by the victim continue the cycle of revenge/unforgiveness/hatred/ etc, transferring on to others the “sin energy” they contracted from the original Activator/Perpetrator. The sewing needles illustrate how unforgiveness sews us together with the perpetrator and those we end up perpetrating against.

One can plainly see how a “soul-tie” forms between victim and perpetrator, and the tying agent that keeps them connected is unforgiveness, fueled over time by “sin energy” or the contagion of evil, or any other metaphor one wishes to ascribe to this phenomenon. Unfortunately, as time progresses, the victim will spend years of this/her life living according to someone else’s script and their purpose in life will become squandered, if not totally annihilated by the perpetual ritualistic pursuit of the perpetrator in their hearts and minds due to the tie that binds them both together. James 3:16 reveals that dysfunctional families made so due to undealt with issues and conflicts in the past, can become breading grounds for demon.

“For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there will be disorder and every other kind of evil” (L.B.).

Unless such a cycle of recycled revenge is interrupted by healing grace - “the atrocities of the past become ghosts within the memory of..,.” either the individual, tribe, or a whole nation of people, which continues to perpetuate the cry for justice/vengeance. Dawson writes

“Bitterness deepens and the victims often become tyrants, and so it multiplies.”[9]

Take for instance the atrocities that took place in Turkish Armenia, when the Ottoman Empire conducted a genocidal campaign against the Armenian Christians. In Armenian towns and villages, police led men away from their homes and families, killed execution style by firing squads, and buried in mass graves or thrown unceremoniously into the river. At the Kemakh Gorge, Kurds and soldiers from the Turkish 86th Calvary butchered more than 20,000 women and children. In Margada, 50,000 men, women and children were killed over a mere few days. The Turks would take starving, sick, and naked families, rope them together, shoot one of them in the head and then push them off a hill into the river, so that the weight of the dead body would pull the others down into the water with it drowning them all. At it’s height in 1915, one million Christian Armenians had been slaughtered.

Can you imagine the justifiable rage that must have been felt by Armenians over such a heinous injustice? Yet for well past 80 years now, Armenians have cried out for the world to recognize the murderous, genocidal crimes of the Ottoman Empire, yet Turkey has never admitted it’s responsibility in the Armenian holocaust, was never called to account for what it did, and has never made restitution of the rights, property, and wealth of those from whom they forcefully and violently took it. All that is left to show for it are the remains of a million and a half skeletons, whose very existence the Turks deny.

How did the survivors of the victims of the Armenian holocaust handle such injustice? A few years ago, the news showed pictures of the corpses of Turkish men, women and children reportedly massacred by Armenians in region known as Nagorno-Karabakh in eastern Armenia, the “seed of the oppressor”, the innocent children of wicked parents, whose survivors will now feel justified in the vengeful hatred they will feel against the murderous Armenians.

In Eastern Europe, Serbs justify raping, starving and murdering whole cities of human beings, because in their own minds, they were the injured party, they were the victims. Apparently, when victims act sinfully and wickedly, and do the same things their perpetrators did, it isn’t as bad because, after all “they drew first blood”, “we are the victims here, not them” etc…

Dawson succinctly exposes the fallacy of such rationale, when he writes that claiming to be the victim, or what I called “playing the victim” –

“…is the Rolls-Royce of self-justifications, and allows the brute killer to portray himself as the one to be pitied.”[10]

The secular, pagan world’s way of dealing with victimization and the suffering of injustice and mistreatment, is justice, and if it cannot be gotten through legitimate means, illegitimate, vigilante means work just as well. And if we, as Christian healers are not careful and discerning, we, too, can easily become infected with this contagion. The hope for deep levels of healing to the wounded souls of broken hearted and heavy laden people cannot be found in justice or vengeance, no matter how justifiable and understandable, but in forgiveness and reconciliation. This naturally triggers feelings of frustration and protest because it runs counter to the way we naturally think. Walter Wink, in his book entitled ENGAGING THE POWERS, agrees with me here. He wrote –

“As long as the struggle for justice is our sole concern, ironically, we will be unable to renounce violence, because violence sometimes does prove successful in achieving short-term goals.”[11]

In Matthew 5:39a Jesus said “Do not return evil for evil” which is better rendered “Do not mirror evil.” Perhaps the reason is simply that we become what we hate. Hatred draws us toward the object we hate. Since hatred is usually a direct response to someone else’s unjust mistreatment of us, we are invariably driven to respond with the same kind of violence toward the perpetrator as was acted out toward us. In other words, we are fighting back on his terms, and without knowing it, we become like the very thing we react to.

This is an established rule of human behavior. Alcoholics have found that the harder they try to quit drinking, the harder it is to quit. Sheer force of will is usually futile in the struggle to gain sobriety. The surest path to victory over their addiction is to come to the place where they admit they are powerless over the addiction, and then turn to a “higher power” and a supportive community for help and assistance. Hating something only draws it to your self. William Blake once wrote –

“The iron hand crushed the Tyrant’s head
And became a Tyrant in his stead.”

If we are to be skilled soul physicians continuing in the footsteps of our Savior – the Great Physician, and if we are to provide healing in the deep levels of the human soul through the ministry of reconciliation, we have got to carry this strong assumption in our hearts. As Walter Wink put it –

Conquerors have all through history been conquered by those they conquer. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister…reputedly said, ‘Even if we lose we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.’[12]

Wink goes on to say

In The Devil’s Share, Denis de Rougemont articulated a penetrating warning even before the Nazis had been defeated. We Americans want to believe, he wrote, that the Nazi’s are animals of an altogether different race from our selves. We run the risk of discovering one day, that after all, they are people just like us. And it is quite true, he says; they are like us in the sense that their sin is also secretly in us.

‘This is why we say today to the worthy Democrats: “Look at the Devil who is among us! Stop believing that he can only resemble Hitler or his emulators

[Saddam Hussein; Osama Bin Ladin, etc…], for it is yourselves whom he resembles the most! It is in yourselves only that you will catch him in the act. And then only will you be in a position to unmask him in others, and to fight him successfully. For then only will you be cured of your unbelievable naivete …and be able to withstand the hypnosis.

We lacked a modern representation of the Demon. We had therefore ceased to believe in him. Then we imagined that the devil was Hitler. And the Devil rubbed his hands together. (and so did Hitler).[13]

Evil in every form, from dysfunctional family issues (alcoholism to incest), to sociopathic and psychopathic behavior, to Totalitarianism and Fascism, is contagious. No one wrestles with evil without contamination and the need to recognize this and wash themselves of it. “The struggle against evil can make us evil.”[14]

We cannot empathetically listen, and thereby co-witness with those we minister to the events they remember and recall in our hearing, without receiving some degree of contamination. This contamination happens to us in two ways. We are contaminated when that which we hear moves us deeply and reenacts our own personal wounds; and we are unconsciously attracted and drawn to the very evils we most ardently denounce and seek to heal. Wink wrote –

Resistance to evil thus constellates in our own depths whatever is similar to the outer evil we oppose…Is not our very intensity against evil a dangerous sign that it fascinates us? The very sight of evil kindles evil in the soul…We are unavoidably drawn into the uncleanness of evil, whatever our conscious attitude.[15]

Understanding this from the outset will help us be more careful and discerning over our own souls, as we enter into the troubled situations from which those we pray for have emerged, damaged. We must take counter measures to insure we remain “in Christ” and operate from His vantage point and in His power. We must be wary of the enemies attempts either to debilitate us by triggering our own inner wounds by our ministering to similar to people who have come from familiar circumstances, or tempting us to secretly be fascinated and thus become inner voyeurs as we peep inside other people’s deepest darkest secrets. T.L. Osborn once remarked that if the Devil can’t stop you from going forward by sending mighty headwinds against you, he will change tactics by sending winds into your sails causing you to either be dashed upon the rocks, or proceeding to your destination more hastily than is necessary or beneficial. We must be led at whatever pace the Lord Himself has established, as we find our rest in Him. It is only then that the healing ministry can become, in itself a means of refreshing to our souls.

If I understand 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 correctly, part of the conversion and renewal of my person “in Christ” is a reorientation of how I process injustice, trauma and abuse, both when it happens to my self, personally, and when it happens to or is caused by someone else. St. Paul calls this “the ministry of reconciliation” which flows from the reconciling work of God in Christ on the cross. I tend to see things in pictures, diagrammatically. I had my son, Nicolas, illustrate the cycle of vengeance for me as I talked to one of my counseling classes for two reasons: to show the cyclical impact hatred has on successive generations, and to show where intervention can occur and the cycle broken in a person’s and family’s life. As you examine the boomerang affect of the cycle below, think about the examples I gave about the Armenians and the Jews awhile ago in this article.

Notice as we move in a clockwise direction from the top, that the cycle starts when an initial act of injustice is perpetrated upon another by an evildoer, which inaugurates a reaction of protest and anger from the victim, who claims that they have been wrongfully treated by another. This is followed by a very understandable demand for justice, which, if not satisfied according to conventional avenues, becomes a “quest for vengeance.” If the original victim who suffered the injustice, and the person who committed the injustice has died, lets say, then the personal vendetta exclusively between the victim and the perpetrator begins to expand to include the family and friends of the now inaccessible innocent and guilty party. So now the anger is transferred onto his people. When the opportune time comes, the victim seizes the moment and exacts revenge against the children of the oppressor/perpetrator, who, themselves, are innocent of any guilt and/or culpability in the matter. Thus, the children of the oppressor experiences the “justified vengeance” from the children of the “innocent” victim. If this goes on for any length of time, a kind of “toxic memory” forms in the souls of those involved in the cycle. Bitterness of soul, and prejudice against the perpetrators of injustice (who are now on both sides) so no one is capable of claiming innocence anymore, but instead, tries to give the purest history as to who it was that drew first blood. Which brings us back up to the top of the cycle, where a new blood threatens to begin again, with the perpetrator justifying his atrocities as merely getting even with the ones who had begun the whole thing, in the first place.

It would be ideal if we could prevent the initial injustice from occurring, and favorable if we could prevent the first act of revenge from being acted on. Such is not normally the case, however, with most Christian counselors and therapists, finding themselves in the midst of a cycle of bitterness, resentment and reactionary sin that has a history of drawing people into it. And it is our task as priests, pastors, lay-counselors and healers, and professional therapists, to intervene and break the cycle so that it doesn’t continue, and this requires the ministry of reconciliation.

The Cycle of Revenge is actually a tool to help others understand what is happening around the world on a national and international scale. I also had Nic make me a diagram showing this same thing on a more personal scale for a sermon I gave on Saint Patrick’s Day, as I used Patrick, Bishop of Ireland, as a model for forgiveness and reconciliation. He too was cruelly perpetrated against by Irish slavers who kidnapped him and sold him into slavery in Ireland at the age of 16. Later, after escaping and making it back to England, Patrick entered the ministry, and received a calling from God in a series of dreams to return to Ireland for the purpose of bringing the gospel of Christ to the people of the Emerald Coast. I chose to speak on the power of forgiveness in the sermon, and so Nicolas made the diagram below. Although similar to the one above, it is a more personable tool using more generic terminology to make the point. If your Irish, please do not take offense, as I am half Irish and half Sicilian.

Notice that once an offense has been received, the offended carries a strong feeling of being “owed” something from the offender. Over time, feelings of anger, resentment, and bitterness (perhaps even hatred) merge with and keep the memory of the offense alive and burning, which we often allude to in the US as “Chewing the cud” making reference to the way a cow perpetually chews it’s food. Perhaps you know this already. Cows are famous for pulling up all sorts of stuff when grazing: weeds, twigs, trash, etc…Cows have two stomachs for this very reason. In the first stomach everything goes, as the cow swallows everything without discrimination. But because some of the stuff is not fit to be digested, the beast will continually burp up clumps of predigested or undigested material, and attempt to chew it up a bit more, breaking it down enough for it to pass on to the second stomach and on through the digestion system.

Many people “chew the cud” of past, unforgiven offenses, which in turn take hold of their life and frustrate the maturational process and thwart their “moving on” in life, older and wiser. Instead, they live in the past, as they ritualistically assassinate again and again those who hurt them. Alas. What is needed is forgiveness, and a breaking of the patterns of behavior that have long since formed syndromes and disorders that cause people to live in a recycled version of the past offense continually. Once again, the ministry of reconciliation is the answer and the solution.

The ministry of reconciliation requires of those of us who minister unto others, the boldness to come alongside of the victim/perpetrator, and together with them, go to the cross of Christ to recognize the injustice and despicable abuse of the Savior, in order for payment to be made for the sins of the world. It wasn’t fair for Jesus to suffer as he did. He did it out of mercy and sacrificial love, grace and mercy, all of which, by their very nature, are unmerited and undeserved. What we all deserved was condemnation and eternal death. That would have been fair and just. God was not obligated to forgive us, or come up with a remedy for our sins. We were by nature hostile toward Him, and at enmity toward Him. Yet the Scripture tells us that God demonstrated His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:8). Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:32 that we are to forgive “as God, for Christ’s sake, forgave us our sins.” Just as God mercifully intervened, and provided a way out of the cycle of animosity and alienation between Himself and us, forgiving us, justifying us, and adopting us into His family, so we are called upon to do the same as agents of change, as well as in our personal and family lives.

The work of reconciliation has been completed when the victim/perpetrator (sinned against, or has been sinned against) has agreed to come out of denial, stop all blameshifting and self-justifying behavior, acknowledged their own guilt, sin, and culpability for what has transpired in their life (only the stuff they are responsible for), and have agreed to forgive those things others are responsible for doing against them; have connected with their own sense of personal loss and regrets, and worked through grief and sorrow issues, anger and rage issues, and finally, come out on the other side of the process, actually being grateful to God for the good that came about as a result of the evil that transpired. Only then, has the work of reconciliation been fully worked through and completed. At this point the wound and deep heart brokenness and personal rage has been healed, and the path toward Christ-likeness, personal holiness and wholeness, and re-entry and empowerment be engaged in once more. The person that goes through such a process (and many, like myself, go through it often) finds that they are better and stronger and have more depth than they ever would have been if nothing bad ever happened to them. Hence, the last stage of reconciliation being acceptance and gratefulness.

It is only after we can draw close enough to God’s love and forgiveness in light of the gravity and seriousness of our own sinfulness and propensity to commit evil deeds, can we find the proper motivation for ending the cycle of revenge. It is only when we come to understand that there has been no sin committed by a human being against another human being, that we, in similar circumstances of nurture and nature, could not do, that we can finally empathize with those who have done them. This does not mean we do not condemn the actions, nor punish the evil doer, but only that we do not do such things from the standpoint of moral superiority. It is by grace that we are saved and brought into right relationship to God through Christ. Not by our own righteousness, and thus, we are robbed of the right to boast in ourselves (Ephesians 2:8-9). But if we have failed to both be “new creations in Christ” (reconciled to God, ourselves and others) we cannot be agents of reconciliation, and in fact, become victims to not only the evil perpetrated against us by others, but also by the evil we are selves do. Let me conclude this article by giving some extreme examples of how the evil doer is impacted by his own evil behavior.

The Impact of Evil on the Soul of the Evil Doer

Evil has a way of emotionally and spiritually damaging the perpetrator of it even more so than those he/she have perpetrated against. Imagine the father in an incestuous relationship. Here is a man who has done the unthinkable to his own daughter, and in so doing, “…has seared his own conscience for a furtive moment of gratification.”[16] His daughter is in no way responsible for her father’s evil actions, yet she is given a deep and terrible wound to her soul and spirit. I cannot help but be moved deeply with both sorrow and anger just thinking about such a thing. I feel deep pain for the girl, even when speaking of such a thing hypothetically, and will often times catch myself sighing prayerfully “God Forbid that such a thing would happen.” It is not hard – it requires little effort of most decent people to react to such a thing with deep compassion toward the daughter and deep anger toward the father or other similar perpetrator. However, it is not natural at all to even allow ourselves to ponder, if just for a moment, the damage such a depraved man does against his own soul.

But as Christian ministers, go there we must, for many of us have been called upon by our Lord to, in fact, minister the love of Jesus to such men and women. But let me regress for a moment. Think of the damage done by the incestuous father to his own soul. Dawson portrays him for us,

His intellect has been employed in justifying his dark fantasies, but once acted on, he finds himself rejected and accused by his own conscience. In this way, the oppressor becomes even more damaged than the oppressed. This is the phenomenon we call guilt.

Guilt is really the ultimate wound of rejection. It is a harsh thing to be rejected by your mother or your spouse, but it is a more terrible thing to be rejected by yourself. To be condemned by your own conscience and intellect is to be tormented by an unquenchable flame. “Can a man take fire into his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27).

Every time this man sees his little girl he is reminded of his actions. She makes him feel bad, leading to an alienation that only deepens with time.

It is often the case that perpetrators have oftentimes been abused themselves, many times in the same way as their own abuse of others. Because there is so much shame, guilt, fear and confusion, that they may have protected themselves from the memory of what they have done by shutting out the information from their conscious minds. Thus they may be aware or only partially aware of their acting out behavior, depending on the extent of their denial, repression of the memory of what they have done, or dissociation.

It is not very likely that perpetrators will ever open themselves to the healing grace of Jesus unless moved to do so out of their desperate sense of need combined with hope that there is help for them and that they can truly be changed and set free. Without the grace of God and the advocacy of the Holy Spirit, they are unlikely to ever come to acknowledge and confess their wicked behavior (less than % 20 ever admit what they did). The most common responses from perpetrators when confronted with what they have done is to deny the abuse ever took place, or justify their behavior and blame and attack the victim/survivor.

Doubling

Doubling is a term that describes the division of the human personality into two functioning wholes, each of which acts as an entire self. Doubling is a milder version of MPD/DID, which permits an otherwise well-integrated person with a conscience to engage in heinous criminal activity.[17] Doubling permits a person to commit wicked and cruel, even sadistic acts without violating his or her conscience.

Herein lies the basis for such concepts as Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as the whole lore behind werewolfism, technically called lycanthropy. Doublers have been called Hybrids of human and beast, combinations of the image of God and a perversion of that image by Ted Peters.[18] Peters asks a series of questions after discussing the “healing-killing paradox” engaged in by medical doctors involved in Hitler’s concentration camps. These doctors engaged in some of histories cruelest experiments and tortures, and yet were capable of being loving family members, responsible and moral citizens, appreciative of culture, pillars of their society. Peters then asks –

What does this mean? Are we all potential wolves in shepherds clothing? Is there lurking just below the surface of our civilized values and habits some sort of primitive beast just waiting for the license to emerge? Is that what ideologies as Nazism do- provide the license?[19]

Cruelty without Conscience: The Loss of Personhood

The term psychopathic killer evokes imagery of insane and remorseless, sometimes ingenious stalkers who hunt human prey and kill them for pleasure or out of sheer boredom. It is not accurate to say that such people do not know the difference between right and wrong, or good and evil, for they do. But what they lack is any internal inclination or motivation to apply it. In fact, the knowledge of right and wrong is what helps them be such expert liars, and to engage in blame shifting and self-justification in order to appeal to what they know to be the conscience in others. They are not blind or self-deceived, per se, nor is there any need for doubling. They simply have no internal need to do good, feel righteous, or conform to any moral standard. Any overt show of self-justification, loyalty, remorse, even insanity, are all for show before those who they well understand, need to believe the good in someone. But for them, there is no strong conviction toward good or evil. They are cruel for cruelty’s sake, as an end in itself, without any internal controls over their impulses. While committing their cruel and torturous crimes, it is doubtful a blood pressure cuff or electroencephalogram would detect anything but a slight blip in their blood pressure.

Sadism

Sadism takes the lack of an internal conscience one step further, and identifies a blatant philosophy of cruelty. As soon as the Enlightenment period was well underway, and the Western conscience found itself suddenly liberated from primitive loyalties to Biblical Christianity with it’s attendant moral restraints, people began to respond more freely to the call of the wild- that innate natural urge to return to the way of the wolf.

The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was a common criminal who spent most of his life in prison for debauchery and petty crime. While in prison he wrote extensively, espousing his relativistic and atheistic philosophy, denying any existence of right and wrong. There was no point for human beings to seek to be dignified and so boiled the whole of our existence down to the pursuit of personal pleasure. Since success and wealth and good fortune happened to the wicked just as often as to the just, he saw no good reason to live morally. In fact, he saw more reason to live wickedly. If torturing someone gives you personal pleasure, this should be pursued with no pangs of conscience.

In his writings he taught that sexual pleasure is more intense than most, and so should be pursued without restraint. But under certain circumstances, crime could be an even more thrilling experience than sexual pleasure. Thus if they were somehow combined, than both excitement and pleasure would be combined in one experience, producing more intense pleasure than could be experienced with only one. Sex crimes were thus the result of de Sade’s philosophy.

The greatest delight for de Sade in particular, came from performing acts of criminal sexual cruelty on children, especially if the acts included degrading and humiliating the child. The most pleasurable act for him to imagine involved the humiliation of a child, physical torture, and sexual abuse culminating in murder. The evil of de Sade can be seen in the fact that no regard or attention is given toward the suffering of others, or the choice of others. The feelings of others, whether of pleasure or of pain is of no consideration whatsoever. Only the pursuit of one’s own personal and particular brand of pleasure, no matter how wicked, cruel, or sadistic, mattered.

All these sinful patterns of thinking and behaving have one thing in common: there was a failure on the part of the victim/perpetrators (all perpetrators were at one time victimized) to be reconciled to their life. As a result they were unable to be truly thankful or grateful people. They all felt they were owed something, and when they were not given these things through conventional avenues, decided to become takers, and in the process, some became rapists, murderers and finally, quite inane in their socio-pathology. A heavy price to pay, indeed, for nurturing unforgiveness, wouldn’t you think?

In the US there has been a prolonged period of time, perhaps generations long, where a truncated and anemic gospel has been preached to the masses resulting in half-hearted conversions, and sub-Christian, Christian culture. As a result, many come to Christ with out true, saving faith, the kind that transforms and supernaturally empowers. This is readily seen in the lives of many of those who answer the call to full time ministry, in that a good number do not survive the temptations and trials that come their way with a vengeance because of whose they are and who they serve. There is an awful price to pay when one is set apart unto the priesthood of Christ. And everyone who endeavors to be true to that calling from God, will pay it. Things like betrayal, rejection, gossip, low pay, loneliness, sexual temptation, deprivation, long hours, personal neglect, etc…virtually leap upon those who would serve Christ by serving others. To survive such an onslaught, one must have a healthy, accurate orthodox Christian faith, and a vital, disciplined relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ through the enablement of the Holy Spirit. The mysteries and doctrines of the Scripture must be more than just memorized and disseminated religiously. They must be life giving, and bursting with awe-inspiring truth that edifies and empowers.

Christ must be our all in all, and we must be cautious to not entertain feelings of entitlement, and being “owed” something. We must confess quickly when we find ourselves becoming embittered, and break the cycle of unforgiveness before it ever gets the chance to start. We must learn to not only forgive, but be reconciled to the fact that offenses will come, hardships will need to be endured, and life, in general, will be unpleasant – a trial to go through and learn from. Nurturing a sense of humor combined with a good balance of optimism when it comes to God (God will work things out for the good every time) and a pessimism when it comes to man (mankind will blow it every-time) will go a long ways toward kindling light-heartedness and sober judgment. But one must deal forthrightly with injuries and offenses sustained in life, and make sure one is not like the proverbial hamster on the wheel, merely running round in circles, while going nowhere. The key is forgiveness, and reconciliation. I encourage you to step into the former, and continue on until the latter becomes a reality. The Lord bless you and keep you.

If you would like to contact Dr. Bertolero, you may email him at peterbertolero@earthlink.net or visit his website at www.fcgcchurch.com. His insights are filed under “archives.” Browse till your hearts content

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[1] John 5:1-16
[2] Verse 7
[3] Verse 11
[4] Verse 14
[5] Verses 15-16
[6] Dawson, John. Healing America’s Wounds. Regal Books, USA. 1977. pp. 270-271
[7] Murphy, Ed. The Handbook for Spiritual Warfare. Thomas nelson Publishers. 1992. p. 172
[8] The Handbook on Spiritual Warfare
[9] Ibid, p. 56
[10] Ibid, p. 57
[11] Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers. Augsburg Press. 1992. p. 215
[12] Ibid, p. 199
[13] Ibid, p. 199
[14] Ibid, p. 206
[15] Ibid, 206
[16] Dawson, Healing America’s Wounds. P. 54
[17] Peters, Ted. Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society. WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY., GRAND
APIDS, MICHIGAN. 1994. p. 205
[18] Ibid, p. 204
[19] Ibid, p. 206

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