Did I choose my abuser? If someone has told you that your soul agreed to your abuse before you were born, that question can stay with you for a long time.
It is often said kindly. A friend, a coach, a healer, sometimes someone at church, explains that before birth you lived in perfect love with God. They say you chose to come to earth to learn through pain, loss and fear, and that the person who hurt you was part of that plan.
If that left you feeling confused, ashamed or more alone, that reaction makes sense. You went looking for comfort and were handed responsibility for what someone else did to you.
‘New Thought’ and ‘New Age’ Christians say my soul chose this. Where does that come from?
The idea usually comes with the “Akashic Library”, also called the Akashic Records or the Hall of Records. It is described as a spiritual record of every thought, word and event that has ever happened. Some people say they can read your record and tell you what your soul planned before birth.
It is not ancient, and it is not in the Bible. It comes from Theosophy, an occult movement started in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky.
How the idea spread
- Helena Blavatsky took the Sanskrit word akasha (sky, space or ether) and wrote about a record of human thought held in the “astral light”.
- Alfred Percy Sinnett spread the idea of an “akashic record” in his book Esoteric Buddhism (1883).
- Rudolf Steiner broke away from Theosophy and claimed to read the records to uncover the history of Atlantis.
- Edgar Cayce, an American psychic who also taught Sunday school, claimed to read the records in trance and called them the “Book of Life”.
Cayce is the main reason Christians now hear this idea in church settings. He put Bible language on Theosophical beliefs, so it sounds familiar. Today the Akashic Records belong to the New Age movement. For many people asking “did I choose my abuser”, this is where the question was first put into their heads.
Is “your soul chose this” a Christian belief?
No. What most people are told is a mix of beliefs from different places:
- Your soul lived with God before birth. The early writer Origen taught something like this in the 3rd century. The Church rejected it and condemned it in the 6th century.
- You chose your life, including the suffering, to learn lessons. This is the modern “soul contract” teaching from New Age books.
- If you don’t learn the lesson, you come back. This is reincarnation and karma, taken from Eastern religion and reshaped by Theosophy.
- A spiritual record holds your soul’s plan. This is the Akashic Library.
It also borrows from New Thought and “Law of Attraction” teaching, which says your thoughts create your circumstances. Put together, it sounds spiritual. Tested against Scripture, it does not hold.
One life, not many
Hebrews 9:27 says “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” One life, one death, then judgement. There is no coming back to repeat a lesson.
John the Baptist was not Elijah reborn
This is the verse most often used to defend reincarnation. In Matthew 11:14, Jesus says John is the Elijah who was to come. Scripture explains what that means:
- Luke 1:17 says John would come “in the spirit and power of Elias”. He carried Elijah’s role, not his soul.
- When asked “Art thou Elias?”, John answered “I am not” (John 1:21).
- Elijah never died. He was taken up into heaven (2 Kings 2:11), so there was nothing to be reborn.
- Elijah appears as himself at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:3), after John had already been killed (Matthew 14).
Verses taken out of context
- Jeremiah 1:5 (“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee”) is about God knowing Jeremiah, not Jeremiah choosing his life.
- Ephesians 1:4 is about God’s purpose “before the foundation of the world”, not souls existing before birth.
- John 9:2–3. The disciples ask whether a man was born blind because of his own sin or his parents’. Jesus refuses to blame either of them.
Adam and Eve did not choose suffering
In Genesis 2:7, God forms Adam from the dust and breathes life into him. That is where his life begins. No waiting soul volunteered for earth.
Pain, hard labour and death came after the Fall (Genesis 3:16–19), as the result of turning away from God. Nobody signed up for them. The soul contract idea needs suffering to exist before anyone could choose it. In Scripture, suffering did not exist until that point.
The same offer the serpent made
The serpent told Eve that eating the fruit would make her “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The message was that God’s provision was not enough, and stepping outside it would make her wiser.
The soul contract idea says the same thing. Being with God was not enough. You had to leave and go through pain, loss and fear to become complete. In the Christian faith, leaving God’s presence is the problem, not the lesson. So Scripture’s answer to “did I choose my abuser” is no.
Did I choose my abuser? What this teaching does to survivors
Followed through, the soul contract idea says:
- The partner who controlled you, put you down and cut you off from people was someone your soul picked.
- The parent who frightened you, used you or neglected you as a child was part of your plan.
- When a parent is pushed out of their child’s life by the other parent, and the child is slowly taught to fear or reject them, it was agreed before birth. This is known as parental alienation, and the parent is the one being alienated.
People who have lived through coercive control or narcissistic abuse are usually already carrying blame that was never theirs. They have been told they caused it, overreacted or imagined it. This teaching repeats the same message and puts God’s name on it.
It also causes practical harm:
- It can keep people in danger. “Stay until you’ve learned the lesson” sounds wise, but it keeps people with someone who is hurting them.
- It removes responsibility from the abuser. If the victim chose it, the abuser was only playing a part.
- It shuts down grief. A parent who has lost contact with their child is told it was agreed, so the loss is something to accept rather than something wrong.
- It slows rebuilding. Moving forward after abuse depends on putting responsibility where it belongs.
How this fits the Power and Control Wheel
The Power and Control Wheel, developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs in Duluth, shows the tactics abusers use to keep control. When “your soul chose this” is said to a survivor, it lines up with several spokes:
- Minimising, denying and blaming. “You chose this” denies a wrong was done and puts the blame on the person harmed.
- Emotional abuse. It loads survivors with guilt and makes them doubt their own judgement.
- Using children. When a child is turned against a loving parent, the teaching calls it the child’s soul plan. The parent who did the turning carries no responsibility. There is more on this in It’s Not Parental Alienation. It’s Domestic Abuse.
- Isolation. Survivors who reject the teaching can be told they are “resisting their lesson” and pushed to the edge of their group or church.
- Coercion and threats. Spiritual consequences, such as having to come back in another life, are used as pressure to accept the situation.
The person saying it may mean well. The effect on the survivor is the same. Being left to ask “did I choose my abuser” shows how completely the blame has been moved.
When blaming the victim becomes spiritual abuse
Spiritual abuse is using faith, Scripture or spiritual authority to control, pressure or harm someone. Christian safeguarding charity thirtyone:eight works with churches to recognise it. There is more on how it shows up in church settings in Spiritual Abuse in Church.
Telling a survivor that God allowed their abuse because their soul asked for it is spiritual abuse. It uses spiritual language to put responsibility on the person who was harmed. It can leave them believing God sides with the person who hurt them.
Scripture shows the opposite:
- Job’s friends said his suffering must be his own fault. God rebuked them for not speaking rightly about Him (Job 42:7).
- Jesus, faced with a man born blind, would not blame the man or his parents (John 9:3).
- Throughout Scripture, God defends the oppressed, the widow and the fatherless, and His anger is aimed at those who oppress them.
The Bible does not explain abuse away as a lesson. It calls it wrong.
You did not choose your abuser
Did I choose my abuser? No. The person who harmed you made their own choices, and those choices are theirs to answer for. Holding on to your faith and rejecting this teaching do not pull against each other.
How we can help
- One-to-one coaching
- Somatic trauma-informed support
- In-person support groups across the UK
- Zoom group sessions
- Trauma-informed parenting support
- Help with self-regulation and rebuilding trust in yourself
Kevin R Webb (MEd.L, BEd., BA Fd., QTS)
Somatic Trauma Informed Narcissistic Abuse Coach
If something in this has landed for you and you want to say something — even just a few words — you can email us any time at support@thepowerandcontrolwheel.co.uk. You don’t have to be ready to do anything. You don’t have to explain yourself. Just write what’s there.
References
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version: Genesis 2:7; Genesis 3:5, 16–19; 2 Kings 2:11; Job 42:7; Jeremiah 1:5; Matthew 11:14; Matthew 14; Matthew 17:3; Luke 1:17; John 1:21; John 9:2–3; Ephesians 1:4; Hebrews 9:27.
- Akashic records, Wikipedia
- Exploring the Akashic Records, Jason Colavito
- Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys, Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse (SPCK, 2019)
