Philippine E-Journals

Kiss of Heaven: Recovering from the Trauma of Child Sexual Abuse among Evangelical Christians

Florence T. Ladion

Discipline: Psychology

 

Abstract:

The study investigated the trauma of Child Sexual Abuse (eSA) on nine evangelical Christian survivors. Etched against the backdrop of Browne and Finkelhor's ( 1986) Four Traumagenic Effects of betrayal, powerlessness, traumatic sexualization, and stigmatization, the dynamics of eSA were empirically chronicled via the multiple case study design. Using Zinnbauer and Pargament's (1998) model, the research assessed how a Christian eSA survivor's specific experience of Spiritual Religious Conversion has propelled her to a lifetime trajectory of di scovering, conserving. and rediscovering significance in her abuse in light of the sacred. In studying the Christian CSA survivor's continuing recovery process (Anthony, 1993). some parallelisms between the standard practice of psychotherapy and recovery in the Christian sense were drawn.