Breakthrough

Clear and equipping. This book has the potential to help many churches to love God’s children through hardship and trauma. It will aid understanding of trauma and its impact on people and their loved ones.

This is not an easy read, but it’s a courageous, important read so that the church may understand both abuse and the role it can play in supporting survivors. Well written, it’s as gentle as it is hard hitting while offering hope.

This little book is a gem. It contains great wisdom, makes a lot of sense and is written by a survivor for survivors and their supporters. This is neither an academic book nor an autobiography, but a resource to make sense of the impact on us of abuse and to show us the direction of the path to recovery.

This is a profoundly positive book and shows that there is more to trauma than meets the eye. The author understands abuse at a deep level and is writing from his lived experience of surviving, recovering and thriving. I have read a lot of books in this area, but this book connects with parts that other books don’t reach!

As a psychotherapist, the author has founded a charity to help survivors and train their supporters to provide hope and help while people heal. I so wish that mental health services would take the same positive view – that with the right help most people can recover from the negative impacts of childhood abuse, even the most terrible abuse that can be imagined or experienced.

Writing as a theological tutor in an Anglican Theological College, I am delighted to see the arrival of this book with its blend of education, Christian faith, psychotherapy and honesty.

Breakthrough: The Art of Surviving is about how to survive with your faith and your inner world intact, because the author is so evidently a disciple of Christ. He notes, however, that prayer is not a shortcut to surviving abuse, but neither is psychology of the devil. He shows current insight [into Church], detailing that lots of survivors connect with Church, but many often struggle with Church. More importantly, he offers open-ended and relevant conversation about the sexual orientation of survivors of sexual abuse, including referencing his own journey.

It is way past time for the Church to engage with the depth of distress and angst surrounding the issue of abuse – abuse of children (and adults) through neglect and deliberate manipulation, and the use of children for the personal, sexual and emotional gratification of adults. Abuse is perpetrated in the Church as well as in the secular community – and we are equally culpable if we turn away because it offends our sensibilities, or challenges our abilities to cope with what we hear…

Whether or not you agree with Giles’ interpretation of these issues, he has undoubtedly earned the right to speak and to be heard. As a survivor of abuse and as a professional supporting individuals in their journeys towards healing, he offers insight, experience and skills for supporting those whom Jesus sought out – the marginalised, the shamed and the broken. I encourage you to read, to learn and to journey with him through this book, to lay aside prejudice and preconceived ideas, so that you might consider an alternative worldview, perhaps one that the Shepherd might present – that those who are lost need our understanding, our compassion, our energy, our patience and our perseverance. They are already doing the best they can – can we meet them in their pain and draw on our additional reserves to support and comfort them as they heal?

This is a much-needed commentary on these issues; there is room for more, but this is a door opened. I hope you will summon your courage and engage with this first offering.