“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
5th Step of the 12 step program.
To quote about the 5th step:
“If we have swept the search light of Step Four back and forth over our careers, and it has revealed in stark relief those experiences we’d rather not remember, if we have come to know how wrong thinking and action have hurt us and others, then the need to quit living by ourselves with those tormenting ghosts of yesterday gets more urgent than ever. We have to talk to somebody about them.” (12×12, pg.55).
This is precisely what the 5th Step of the 12 step process requires of those who genuinely desire sobriety – a candid discussion in light of a 4th step inventory. Although the word “required” repels many an alcoholics or drug addicts, Bill Wilson further warns that “without a fearless admission of our defects to another human being we could not stay sober.” (12×12, pgs. 56&57). Obviously, staying sober is a prerequisite for meaningful, fulfilling recovery.
I have served on a board for a Child Advocacy Center. I’ve been on the board of Rape Crisis Center. I’ve served as an ad litem in abuse cases. Early in my legal career I had a professional counselor who was often court appointed to cases in that area and I asked her if there was any hope of salvaging some of the offenders. Could they repent and change?
She said that long experience had taught her that only those who were fully open and who were willing to be honest about their crimes had any hope of escaping what they had done or avoiding it in the future. The rest would not change and she would see them again and again until they eventually were killed or remanded to life in prison.
The implications for situations involving sex offenders in the church are stark. Every time someone tries to “help” one of them by trying to get others to let them avoid the consequences of their actions, that person is helping the offender damn themselves.
They are not going to change, to repent, unless they face the consequences. In addition, every time they fail to change, they harm others. They harm children, little ones.
“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea. Matthew 18:6
It is popular to decry confession. To treat it as a barbarous remnant of the past. A part of history from Catholicism that is better left in the past. I’ve seen a lot of on-line discussion about how confession should not be a part of religion.
Part of confession and change is also socialization and changed environment. Confession is not enough by itself. But confession + other change is surprisingly effective.
There is actually good science on this resulting from the tracking and the efforts made to help military members who became addicted to heroin in Vietnam and who were either caught or who admitted to a problem (and who in either case were then admitted into treatment):
Those who were addicted were kept in Vietnam until they dried out. When these soldiers finally did return to their lives back in the U.S., Robins tracked them, collecting data at regular intervals. And this is where the story takes a curious turn: According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.
“I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent,” Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.
This flew in the face of everything everyone knew both about heroin and drug addiction generally. When addicts were treated in the U.S. and returned to their homes, relapse rates hovered around 90 percent. It didn’t make sense.
From: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits
It turned out that she wasn’t lying about the statistics. By following their confession (the most common way of the addiction surfacing) with changing their environment and by changing their social group, the addicted veterans were able to break their addiction 95% of the time instead of the 5-10% that others achieved. By interrupting the sequences of addiction, by disrupting or changing the environment in which the addiction occurred and then returning the veterans to a society where the addiction was not accepted and they were socialized differently, they overcame an addiction that most never overcome.
Surprisingly, similar things occur in weight loss surgery. Those who have the surgery and who change their eating patterns and regularly attend support groups keep the weight off. Those who do not generally have less than seven years from surgery to a return to their pre-surgery weight.
So, what is the lesson for dealing with sexual offenders?
- Unless they confess, fully, they do not change.
- Confession includes a full acceptance of the consequences. Shielding them from the consequences keeps them from changing. Confession also includes restitution and full acknowledgement of the harm done.
- Confession also needs to go with disrupting the environment — usually by removing all access to the victim population and removing them from the environment in which they offended. If you have a rapist and a victim in the same ward or stake, the offender should probably be moved to a different stake if you want them to really change. Telling the victim to forgive does not nothing to support the offender’s repentance in this situation.
- The offender needs an environment that does not normalize or accept offenders — combined with the offender focusing on their status being ex-offender who now avoids the situations, callings and people where they offended in the past.
- Most of the things that seem naturally part of “helping” the offender do nothing but damn them and harm their victims.
We hear stories of victims who are victimized more than once and of offenders who think they have gotten away with offending and who abuse others again, and again, and again. Over and over again the stories involve people who thought they were helping and that they were able to change people without full confession, restitution and change of environment.
The Catholic Priest problem consisted of two huge factors — but one of them was the thought that they were successfully rehabilitating the offenders when all they were doing was facilitating evil.
What do you think?
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Wheat & Tares 
What do I think? I think bishops who counsel or discipline offenders need a lot more training in order to properly counsel or administer church discipline to offenders. I think bishops need a lot more training in order to properly counsel and protect victims. I think — given that bishops never get such training and generally don’t know how to deal with offenders or victims in these circumstances — victims and parents of victims are much better off working with private therapists, social services, and law enforcement than with bishops.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying behaviorism as part of animal training. It seems to me that confession in the situations you describe above is not the primary area that allows for overcoming drugs or weight issues. Rather it’s the environment of the person. Environment creates cues within the brain that trigger behavior. So if a Vietnam Vet was an addict in Vietnam but stops using while there, when he returns to the US he had no cues or triggers at home. But a Vet who returns to the US addicted, immediately builds in cues/triggers to continue his usage as part of his non-military life and then finds it near impossible to remove those cues/triggers.
Which isn’t to say Confession isn’t involved somehow, but it is more along the lines of being willing to completely change your life so that you don’t put yourself back in the environment that cues your triggers for your ‘sin.’ And I’ll argue that willingness to change your environment precedes a willingness to confess, rather than the other way around. I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a willingness to change without being forced (the Vietnam Vet was forced if he wasn’t allowed home until he was dry) is wired into personality and perhaps related to genetics.
Confession is required in the scriptures, but is mute on the details. The major “environment” change needed is our own self view. Abusers hate their own flesh because they despise their actions and thoughts. Confession allows them to see themselves from another’s perspective and to change their own view of themselves. Little training is needed, but rather a loving listener.
I think of confession as a part of changing environment.
“The major “environment” change needed is our own self view.”
That sounds nice, but is there any research that proves this? Behaviorism and studying the importance of cues (physical environment is a HUGE cue to behavior) is not lacking in research studies. I’m not arguing that the research isn’t there, but just that I’d like to see it before taking this too seriously. Obviously, animals don’t have self views.
As I keep pondering this, I’m wondering if the disconnect is the definition of environment. I wouldn’ t include a mental/emotional change as an environmental factor. A google definition of environment is: the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates. A self-view or ‘process of change via confession’ clearly doesn’t fall into that.
The studies on Vietnam Vets seem to be studying the impact of environment. The weightloss would need more information to decide if it is bigger than environment or not.
I think confessing, if done right, can help facilitate a necessary change in environment. It takes courage and vulnerability to fully confess. It takes trust in the person to whom the confessor confesses. That trusted person then becomes a gateway to the proper resources for the addict.
I think there’s an enormous difference in confessing to the person who was harmed or involved and making things right again and confessing to a third party and walking away feeling absolved.
” A part of history from Catholicism that is better left in the past.” What does that mean? To what are you referring and what are your sources. The Sacrament or Repentance/Penance/Reconciliation is still an integral part of Catholic practice. Are you part of the anti-Catholic LDS cohort?
Alice—12 step programs assert that confession without amends is meaningless and useless.
Vajraz—I’m referrring to mostly post Mormons who assert that the LDS should drop any thought that confession serves any useful purpose.
The framing I see is not so much anti-Catholic as it is against LDS practice. Most would not really understand your question.
Sorry that wasn’t clearer.
Cody—nicely said.
Confession, for the most part, strikes me as honesty and figuring out what you need to do to heal yourself—becoming square with the truth.
Confession can be therapeutic — when the one to whom one confesses has the confessor’s best interests at heart, has some pastoral or clinical training so they know how to respond and support the confessor, and is willing to maintain confidentiality. None of those really apply to LDS bishops in any systematic way: Bishops are in the LDS hierarchy and place the interests of the Church first (although they rarely acknowledge this and may not even realize it), have little or not training and therefore sometimes afflict rather than comfort or counsel the confessor, and don’t always maintain confidentiality properly.
So I don’t quite see how one can argue that confession is beneficial or therapeutic in any more than a hit and miss way in the LDS context. It’s no different than confessing to a neighbor or a coworker, generally a dumb thing to do.
Alice is correct that unless confession is to the person offended and combined with restitution it is worthless. And the LDS church does not follow 12 steps, so the person confesses to his bishop and walks away feeling his sins are absolved. This is doing a huge disservice to both the sinner and the sinner’s victim, especially the victim. Where there is no attempt at justice for the victim, there can be no forgiveness from God because mercy cannot rob justice. We need to stop pretending that confessing to the bishop is the right place to confess, and the church needs to stop handing out “forgiveness” to those who have not completed restitution.
I once worked for a suicide prevention hot line where I was on for Wednessday evening. Every evening a guy would call me to confess he had just molested his girlfriend’s child. He babysat the child for his girlfriend to go to a weekly class. Every week, it was the same thing. There was no way to trace the call or do anything to protect this child. Now, was his confessing doing any good?
I have personal and painful experience with how the church absolves the sinner and turns its back on the injured victim. We might as well go back to Catholic indulgences where the sinner pays the church and is absolved of the sin without ever confessing to the injured party or attempting to undo the damage done by the sin. That is not the kind of forgiveness that Christ is talking about.
As far as drug addicts/alcoholics and a change in environment, that has been known for a long time. But it does not translate well to things like sexual abuse. The only change of environment that would work for most sex offenders is an isolated monastery. It is just more complicated than drug addicts in a stressful war situation, where get them home from the war and it removes the dysfunction and stress that led to addiction. With an incestuous father, he has to be removed from the dysfunctional family so that the family can heal and to prevent reoffending with a younger child. But LDS Family Services has the stated goal of keeping the family together. Once reunited, the family quickly returns to the dysfunction that led to the original abuse. Working in Utah as a counselor to adults molested as children, I had several clients whose family had been through counseling at LDS FS, where once the offender came back home, he started molesting them again, only they refused to report again and go through the terrible disruption of court, jail time, counseling, so the church always counted it as a success. Healing and protecting the victim is not the top priority of LDS FS.
Restitution has always been taught to me as part of repentance in the LDS Church. I would agree that without it everything rings hollow.
I was also taught that restitution was a necessary part of repentance. So, why do so many LDS bishops then think that confessing to them is all that is necessary and never bother to check with the battered wife, the abused child, the spouse the sinner was unfaithful to? No one ever asked me if my abusive father had really changed… Well, that isn’t true. When he wanted to be rebaptised into the church I got a letter requesting my input and I clearly said that I didn’t think he had done the one or two things I asked him to do as restitution. But the church ignored me and my mother and my sister he also abused and rebaptised him any way. They clearly did not care about the man’s victims and believed that my father’s repentance was just between him and the church. My father died in that “not really repentant” state, and, yeah, I hold the church accountable that my whole family left the church. He did not sin against the church. He sinned against his family. But his family didn’t matter in his “repentance process”. He told the church he was sorry, but somehow, I never felt that counts.
If it was just me, I would not say that the church has the whole “confession” thing screwed up. But I worked as a social worker with battered women, with adults molested as children, with rape victims and I saw over and over how the abuser was forgiven by the church without bothering with any attempt at restitution. Just because restitution is hard, doesn’t mean the sinner is not required to try.