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This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

I want to talk about those people…..you know who they are…..those people who were our friends. The huggers. The people in the choir who we socialized with. The neighbors. The co-workers. spiritual supporters, family members and fellow church goers.

The people who suddenly seemed to turn against us.

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

The abuse of one person affects many people. And very often, we are left not knowing what to do or how to help those who are being abused or those in abusive situations. Sometimes when all that can be done has been done, stepping away from the situation is the best course of action is the best you can do. I’m talking about after police have been notified and the situation is not improving.

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

I once described the feeling of being betrayed by my boss the priest as if I was travelling at 90 miles per hour and hit a tree. There had been so much emotional turmoil and anxiety and confusion inside of me and once I was fired and sent home, it was a feeling that is hard to describe. Unless you have been betrayed. And we all have been betrayed at one point or another. But to be betrayed by an institution you should be able to depend upon for well being….that is a betrayal trauma.

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

Ah, the pursuit of happiness and perfection. You ever feel like you have never quite made it? Is there always something missing? Have you looked back over your life so far and you see nothing but unhappiness with a bleak future ahead? Does it feel like life is one big bowl of disappointments with a cherry on top of moments of loss and utter despair? Or do you ever look back and say….what happened to the good old days? Or do you look forward to the day when you will be able to retire or find your soul mate or win a legal battle?

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

I had a woman at a meeting last week say that she didn’t want to bore the rest of us with her story by telling it over again. Sometimes I feel that way too. Why do we need to tell our story over and over again?

This article originally appeared in The Victim's Informer (Vol. 25, No. 4). It has been copied and shared with permission from the author, Bailey Brown. See the original story on page 8.

Celebrating Mass during Christmas is something Steve Bartley is looking forward to one day in the future. He was born and raised a true Catholic and by the time he was a teenager, he realized he wanted to become a priest. However, his experience in the seminary wasn’t at all what he expected. At 71 years old, he came forward and filed police reports regarding the suffering he endured while in and out of the seminary from the ages of 14 to 25.

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

I would like to talk more about how adults should “know better” about getting sucked into being groomed and sexually harassed and abused.

We aren’t born adults any more than we start out in the middle of someone’s web of deception. We start out as children. As children, we need love, or at the very least, attention and care, in order to survive. If we don’t get that love, or if that love is linked with emotional or physical pain, that becomes our normal. We only see the world as it relates to ourselves, so the actions of others towards us begins to become how we see ourselves in our world. In other words, if our father has a really bad day at work and comes home in a foul mood, the once peaceful place where you live, and whereas a child you cannot leave….becomes a place of unrest and of fear. And as a kid, you don’t understand “bad day at work”. You just get the feeling that things are out of control. And you can’t say anything, so that feeling just gets buried inside. And you keep that feeling there and you keep it under control. Because you begin to learn that feelings can be dangerous and that the expression of feelings is very scary.

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

I was watching some more Dr. Phil this past week about something called “Catfishing”. Catfishing is when someone presents themselves as something they are not in order to scam someone. Usually, they are looking for money.

It seems impossibly absurd. How in the world could someone meet someone on-line and send them their life savings? Why would they do that? What could make them do that?

There are so many answers as to what could make a person vulnerable. Gullibility, greed, loneliness, isolation, fear, need, co-dependency, lack of confidence….these are some.v

Our GivingTuesday fundraiser, which runs through December 1, focuses on expanding our presence in the Hispanic community. The number of Hispanic survivors of sexual abuse by religious authorities has increased significantly by almost 450% in the past two years. Many of these survivors speak Spanish only, no English at all. Today, SNAP has just three Spanish-speaking SNAP Leaders: two in California, and one in Texas. To meet the need of Hispanic sexual abuse survivors, SNAP seeks to recruit in 2021 at least 30 new bilingual SNAP Leaders to facilitate support groups in Hispanic communities throughout the United States. To do so, we are launching a special project to translate into Spanish our SNAP Leader’s manual and other documents that survivor support group participants or community advocates would use. Our fundraising goal is $10,000.

This blog was written by Adults Sexually Abused by Priests (ASAP)

That’s right. That’s all I’m going to say about that. I’m trying to avoid anything political because I think it was just about to make me ill as it has been so in your face along with being kind of locked up in the house. Kind of like how those guards I read about punished prisoners by putting them in a room where they played the “Baby Shark” song over and over again for hours at a time.