Our Father is saying here that respect is not fear. Now many people will say that fear is a part of respect, but our Father says no, this is not true. Fear makes us keep our distance, it causes separation. This makes sense when the person that we are fearful of is harmful, a threat, dangerous. But our Father created us out of His love, sustains us in His love and loves us into the image of His Son that He created us to be, holding a place for us in Heaven our true home, while dwelling in the place that He made in our souls that only He can dwell in as we await the moment where we shall see Him face to face.
He calls it false respect, which is often a justified pretentious respect, justifying an aversion to having an intimate relationship with Him, which He says is an injustice to justice since He is a most tender and loving Father.
At the heart of this, often, is the inability to blame those who did harm us, those who were a threat, those who were abusive. And often it is because we hold onto this fantasy illusion which is often a delusion that we can still receive from them the good, the love, the affirmation, the intimacy which we deserved from them and did not get, receiving abuse instead which we did not deserve. But do we realize, that by holding onto this, it becomes nearly impossible to receive that which we crave, from God our Father? An authentic loving and true intimacy, for a fantasy of one? Peace love joy fulfillment, for emptiness loneliness disappointment and coping skill addictions? Does that sound like a good trade off?
So how to be free from this fear? First is to recognize that this fear is harmful and not your friend that keeps you from harm. A friend wills your good, that is charity. Fear wills to self protect, at all costs, including relationships that are good for you, willing to cut off everything and everyone that is a perceived threat to self protectiveness, and for the abused with a survival skill of self protectiveness, truth and the willing of another’s good to the point of exposing self harm, is a threat to that self protectiveness.
Once this is recognized, it should result in a desire to be free from fear. This desire is necessary as it becomes a prayer from the heart that God can respond to without overriding your free will. That is important because if you experience that your free will is transgressed you will take that as abuse and then give yourself evidence that you ought to be afraid of Him.
Ask God to help you to see clearly who is to blame for your abuse. Who did what? Who participated? Who gave access? Who ought to have protected me? ( A living person with actual responsibility and authority for me at the time of the abuse) Who knew about it and did nothing who again had responsibility and authority. Who ought to have known but was willfully ignorant? Who could have and ought to have stopped it from happening again? These are the people to blame. Blaming anyone else is misdirected and misapplied and often avoidance of facing the emotions that come with blaming a person of trust and love that was abusive. There is often a fear of creating a separation. But that was created with the abuse itself and is not rational or reasonable.
Then actually blame those responsible. Allow yourself to feel the anger which is simply the sense of justice for the injustice done as St Tomas D’ Aquino says. This can take time hours, days, months, years.
At some point you will begin to feel burdened by your anger instead of empowered. It will no longer feel helpful o correctly assign blame. You are now ready to start forgiving. Why forgive? To be like your Father in heaven who rains on the just and the unjust alike. To receive forgiveness yourself. ...as we forgive those who trespass against us... The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you. God knows that unforgiveness hurts us more than the person we hold it against. Anger is justice but unforgiveness is a willful act to attempt to punish someone. That makes us their judge, which we are not qualified to be, nor do we have the power to withhold good or punish them eternally which makes it rather unproductive and futile; a gesture which holds no weight in this life or the next. Unfruitful at best and harmful to us at worst.
He says that this wounds Him. But we misunderstand. We think that this means that we offended Him. In a sense we offend His love, because we are unjust toward Him, but again we misunderstand this. He gave Barbara Centilli an image in the Seeing with the eyes of the soul books. It is a heart with a preborn inside of it attached to the heart by an unbiblical cord. He calls it His Divine Paternal Heart. We are His children and are always in His heart, always attached, always being nourished, sustained, having new life poured into us intravenously. When we separate from Him we harm ourselves, and in harming ourselves, we hurt Him who we are connected to. If we are in His heart then to harm ourselves hurts His heart where we dwell, not by offending Him as if we were separate from Him, but the pain is felt by His heart because that is where we are and we are in pain so He feels it consequently.
When will man realize that God does not have the ego of a man, so that His ego cannot be hurt or offended? Even when He asks something from us it is always for our good, it is always primarily for us.