Sympathy For The Devil

Fawn is a survival mechanism we don't talk about, but it helped me understand my abuser & make the biggest decision of my life.

I want to state that I have forgiven my abuser. I even have sympathy for him as a fellow survivor. I don’t sit around thinking about him, fearing him, or wishing him harm. In fact, I don’t think about him hardly at all. When I do, it’s because he’s been brought up by someone else. This post is about how I learned to forgive him for my own healing.

Surviving abuse is not easy. Every day feels like it might be your last and even good times are tainted by thoughts of when the violence will return. I lived on pins and needles my whole childhood. Of course, you’d never imagine this if you were looking at my life from the outside.

My abuser was a very charming man. He was also manipulative, cruel, and violent. Because he was so charismatic, he was able to inspire great sympathy and compassion from his congregation and radio listeners. Like many pastors, he was an excellent orator who wove words into compelling sermons. He also lied from the pulpit and lied often. He mostly lied about his idyllic home life with his beautiful wife and four children. I would sit next to my mother on a hard pew, listening to his bullshit tales, seething with fury. The life he described was far from what I experienced on a day-to-day basis. He was so convincing that members of his congregation would hug me and tell me what a wonderful father I had, that I was so blessed, and I should be very grateful. I wanted to tell them the truth, but I knew they wouldn’t believe me.

Outside the home, my abuser knew exactly how to play his role. Sometimes cracks appeared and he’d have to move on to a new pastoral/teaching/radio position, but he was excellent at landing on his feet.

At home, he was lazy, surly, silly, violent, and demanding. He wore many masks. Sometimes he’d be clownish and entertaining, sending my brothers into peals of laughter, but mostly he slept on the living room sofa, watched television, and disappeared out the front door to go to his “office for work” at all hours of the day and night.

Looking back, I see how much of his life was hidden from view. Not just from his congregations, employers, students, and co-workers, but from his own family.

Growing up in a dysfunctional and abusive household is harrowing. I had to adapt to survive and I used each of the survival mechanisms (fight/flight/freeze/fawn). Most often I froze. I managed to fight back a few times and only fled once, but fawn is what helped me survive the most violent time and inadvertently gave me the best understanding of my abuser.

Fawning is when a survivor attempts to befriend the abuser. It’s an attempt to evade abuse by making them happy, doing what they want, and not upsetting them. I couldn’t grasp why he hurt me so often (sometimes daily) and why I was the main focus of his violence (emotional, mental, and physical). I wanted desperately to understand why he hurt me and believed at the time if I could know him better, maybe I could find a way to appease him and the abuse would stop. Looking back, it’s probably the most dangerous thing I did in an attempt to evade his wrath.

Despite hating and fearing him (at that time), I would try to engage him in conversation about himself. He was a mystery to me, but finding out anything about him was difficult. He was a secretive man who was very, very good at keeping things hidden. Especially his sins. He had to be in the perfect mood and it was like walking on glass. Every step was dangerous.

But what I did learn about him helped me eventually forgive him. He, too, was an abused child, though he didn’t see it that way. In fact, the violence he experienced was an excuse for how he treated me. The death of his mother when he was twelve years old threw his life into chaos. When his father remarried and started a new, second family, he felt abandoned. His father went through some rough years and when he got his life together, he tried to fix the damage to his family. He loved my abuser and wanted to save him from himself. My abuser did everything his father asked of him, but not out of sincerity. Becoming a minister was something his father chose for him. He just happened to be good at it. My grandfather was very happy when my abuser married my mother because he thought she was a good Christian woman who could keep him on the straight and narrow. I often wonder how my childhood would have gone if my grandfather (who I adored) hadn’t died when I was a very little girl.

Learning all of this about my abuser did create a dangerous sympathy inside me for him. I tried for several years to fix him, often putting myself at risk. As I wrote, my abuser wore many different masks. Sometimes the “kind” mask was the most dangerous because what was seething below it was certain to erupt.

If I hadn’t spent those hours with him, trying to discover why he was hurting me, I may have never felt enough compassion or sympathy to forgive him when I later went through therapy. To this day, I do feel sympathy for him, but I also acknowledge that he chose to be the person he was and every action he took against me. He wasn’t out of control when he abused me. Those were the times when he was most in control. And he was brilliant at keeping the abuse hidden, even from my mother, for years.

Based on this knowledge, when I was twenty-two, I told him everything I needed to say and told him I would never talk to him again. I recognized that there wasn’t a way to reconciliation, only more trauma. Since he couldn’t be honest with himself about his past and his behavior, there wasn’t any chance of him being honest in his relationships.

On this Father’s Day, June 18, 2023, he’s not a part of the tapestry of my present life. He remains in the past, a trauma suffered, a lesson learned. Letting go of any hopes of him changing and reconciliation was the only way I could heal and find happiness.