I just couldn’t pull it together to write anything Thursday. It was one of those days. But the subject matter kept insisting to be written, even if it was a day late.
We’ll have been in our new home for a month this Sunday. Time is a funny thing. I’m almost certain it’s been twice as long and half as long as that all at the same time. I know from previous moves that the roller coaster of “Oh my gosh, this new place is so cool” and “I want to go home… where is home?” is normal, and realistically it will take about one year until we actually feel like we know the area and about two until we feel more known by people. Having family here is immensely helpful for having an “in” to meet people, but you still have to do the work of investing in relationships yourself. And, as much as it would be lovely to just have things happen, they take time, because relationships take time, energy, and investment. I’ve been making a concerted effort to say yes to as many things as I can handle, but between the kids being at home and squirrelly1 , and my introvert self doing a lot of extroverting, I’m a little out of sorts.
But this week there’s been another layer to my feeling out of sorts. Today we arrived home after VBS2 to a level of chaos which I wasn’t handling well. Then one of the kids set the fly swatter in the butter and it was everything I could do to not let a string of expletives out as I washed the thing. Surprised? Expletive slinging is not my normal mode, but when those words start running through my head after trivial infractions, it's a clue I’m living with one foot in trauma world.
My husband arrived home for lunch, assessed the situation and decided to work from home during naps and send me out on a sanity gathering mission. He’s a very wise man. I landed in a cute coffee shop on the island that just so happened to have unsweetened coconut milk — sort of the holy grail of non-dairy coffee, and a rare occasion for a latte. But what was I even there to try to do?
I’ve been known to run away from my feelings as long as possible, especially when they feel nebulous and difficult to metabolize. The problem with doing this is that it affects everyone around me. My temper is short, I retreat into screens or busy work, I want to disappear into the floor. As you can imagine this goes over like a bag of wet concrete at home. When my children sense emotional unavailability they inevitably escalate. So the only thing to do is to deal with myself, but this is more challenging than it sounds, because finding an access point to the emotions you’ve spent 15 years of your life stuffing down isn’t always easy. I catch glimmers of them when butter smeared fly swatters make me want to break glass, but it often feels sort of hopeless. Where do you put anger that rightfully belongs twenty years ago and has only accumulated extra layers as you’ve grown up?
This week, the feelings that were already bubbling at the surface were compounded by breaking news about another pastor with “moral failures” (is that what we call criminal behavior now?) It’s the same story over and over, and I’m so tired of it. These are the stories that make me despair of anyone ever holding abusers accountable.
Then I read this piece from
, and while she writes about domestic violence3, this line had me nodding my head. It applies every bit as much to sexual abuse (especially childhood sexual abuse).I honestly don’t think the average decent man has any idea just how common domestic abuse and violence really are or how difficult they are to prove in court.
Decent men don’t think like abusers, so it doesn’t occur to them how many other men do.
I am truly so glad that there are many people who cannot imagine this type of harm. That likely means they have not experienced it. But what I am so exhausted by is the assumption that because it has not personally impacted them (yet), it does not exist. What this assumption does is put the person who has suffered in a category of “other” that’s difficult to recover from. Your assumptions about what abuse is and isn’t, how it does or doesn’t happen and what recovery looks like may harm people you love more than you know.
Today, as I sat at that coffee shop and thought about how I could write myself out of this hole I’ve been in, I wondered if speaking up for myself might help. And perhaps it would help more than me — statistically speaking, there’s a quarter of you reading that share some element of this story.
So here’s an incomplete list of what I wish people knew about childhood sexual abuse:
I wish they knew that the abuse didn’t end when it was over. That it may have happened 20 years ago, but it shows up to interfere, unbidden, at the most inopportune moments.
I wish they knew it was the hardest thing I’ve ever wrangled with, that it infiltrates every aspect of my life, that nothing feels quite safe from its reach.
I wish they knew how much it’s cost to be as “healed” as I am.
I wish they knew how angry I often am, and how this anger only hurts me and the people I love because there’s no good place to put it. You can’t make people see things they don’t want to.
I wish they knew how painful it is to let anger turn to grief so I don’t become bitter and cynical.
I wish they knew the cost of what it takes for me to function well. I wish they knew that PTSD and ACE scores have a direct correlation to levels of chronic illness and that functional medicine and good counseling are expensive.
I wish they knew how guilty I feel being able to access these things, how much I think about all the people who aren’t fortunate to find good care providers, and still, how resentful I am that so much of our family’s resources have gone towards investing in something that often feels like a moving target.
I wish people understood that a “biblical counselor” is not the same thing as a trauma informed counselor trained to deal with the complex coping strategies that come from years of relational harm.
I wish people understood that trauma lives in your body and implicit memory more than in your thinking brain.
I wish people understood that sound clinical practice is profoundly biblical and it’s not going to make you lose your faith4. In fact, it might be the thing that allows you to keep it.
I wish the people who spoke out most vociferously against psychology were not also the same people who fear having the status quo disrupted by victims starting to tell the truth.
I wish people understood, that though all forms of abuse are horrible, there is a distinct evil to sexual harm perpetuated by someone who also invokes God’s name. It wreaks havoc in a way few things can, and creates an almost impossible bind where the victim is left to think God sides with their abuser5.
I wish that those who spoke the loudest about sexual sin would care more about the predators in their own midst, instead of making excuses for “moral failures” and putting predators back in leadership positions. I wish they’d talk about pornography and chastity as much as they talk about homosexuality and transgenderism.
I wish that the burden of proof was not always on the person with the fragmented memories to prove that they have a coherent enough story to be believed.
I wish people actually read the research and grasped that 1 in 5 men, and 1 in 4 women is a lot of people and they almost definitely know someone who’s suffered from childhood sexual abuse.
I wish people knew that those most likely to abuse are not strangers in parking lots, but adults who have gained the trust of parents through careful grooming.
I wish people knew that pretending these things don’t happen is the best way to let them keep happening.
I wish people who care about other people’s stories would make an effort to educate themselves, so that they’re prepared to ask good questions and listen well.
I wish every pastor, priest, and lay leader would read Dan Allender’s book, Healing the Wounded Heart, and give it time to digest before they opened their mouth to deliver a platitude that makes them feel better but heaps shame on the recipient of their “help”.
I wish I didn’t have to wish for any of these things.
I wish this was not my story, but because it is, I’m determined that it will not have the final say.
And my wish for you, if it’s your story too, is that you would find all the hope, healing, fortitude, and grace that you deserve as a beloved child of God.
Further reading and resources:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
When the Body says No, by Gabor Mate
Healing the Wounded Heart by Dan Allender
This series on spiritual abuse (which often does entail sexual abuse) from The Allender Center
This series from Adam Young about engaging people’s stories well.
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Eating (or at least cooking): This blueberry crisp, this berry crisp, this corn salsa, and so many blueberries I might actually get sick of them. We came home from a berry picking venture with 6 1/2 gallon buckets of fresh blueberries! Incredible. “Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk”
Thinking: I keep hitting these blocks with unpacking where I need to find another storage piece, or figure out where item x is going to go because item y is contingent on it having a home. It’s like a giant puzzle. And then there’s the random piles of clothes — too small, too big, maternity, regular. I want to stick everyone in a jumpsuit for the summer or let them run naked or something. I don’t think either of those are options so I’ll have to just figure it out. My goal for the weekend is to figure out bathroom storage so we can stop retrieving towels out of the Rubbermaid bin on the floor (it does make a good seat for toddler bathtime) and remove at least a few piles of stuff from around the house.
Loving: It’s so good to see the kids get to run around and be on bikes and scooters all day long, or building forts. Yes, we’ve instituted a mandatory “do not leave the house without bug spray, hat, shoes” policy (this one is working pretty well), and yes, this new level of activity requires nightly showers and baths. But it’s so much of why we took the plunge to come out here and it makes my heart happy.
I have been trying to get out for a 20 min walk in the evenings or when it’s cooler and I’m always so much happier when I come back. We’ve got blackberry bushes along the driveway and I’m taking notes of all the new birds. Usually it’s just me and the dog, and he can go off leash. I hate walking dogs with a leash, but love walking them without (I always take one with me just in case). There’s just something about a happy dog sniffing to his heart’s content that’s just as it should be and I’m always surprised by how much good a little outside time does, and grateful for the space to enjoy it. I’ve even stolen the kids’ scooter a few times because I secretly I am still nine years old at heart. I broke my wrist on one as a kid, but they’re just so much fun.
Because 1)moving 2) constantly on the go playing with cousins 3) I don’t even know why they can’t stop touching each other but if one more person whines about a LEGO I’m hiding them under my bed permanently and they’re going to play with pine cones all summer instead but will probably still yell about how their brother stole theirs and now it doesn’t have the right cape or helmet that they wove out of grass and need me to fix with a stapler.
Which yes, I re-learned that I had signed up for a whopping 14 hours before it began…
Specifically the ways in which statistics don’t tell an accurate story of how pervasive this is, and how calls for no-fault divorce to be taken away are not the answer. Again, I’m not advocating for divorce by ANY means. But as
put it so well in a comment, “A marriage where one spouse abuses the other is not mutually self giving. It is a hostage situation, enforced under duress. That is not a marriage. No one in their right mind would advocate for a hostage to stay in a hostage situation on vague principles. The default human response is rescue.”I really enjoyed listening to this podcast with Dr. Alison Cook about Internal Family Systems —but she brings up this point about how in any other medical specialty, we don’t tend to screen our oncologist, dentist, etc… for whether they’re a Christian, but instead look for whether they’re competent. I do think that having a Christian counselor is something I’d definitely encourage, but having one with relevant training and expertise is a non negotiable. I thought the suggestion (from two christian counselors) to focus on credentials first was interesting.
This is absolutely untrue. God hates abuse. But perpetrators of abuse are skilled in knowing how to wield religious language that creates layer upon layer of shame for their victims and makes the prospect of owning up to what happened to them unbearable. Add in a little dash of purity culture and you’ve got a really nasty concoction.
I know the rage you describe and the way it seeps through the cracks of our mothering. I’m still learning to be gentle with myself when it does, to take a breath and then go deeper into the broken places. The work is worth it, for ourselves, our kids, and our communities. Thank you for reminding me of that. ❤️
Thanks for sharing yourself. I’m so sorry you had to go through this . Thankful it hasn’t turned you bitter, but I know how hard that road is… I pray you continue to have every grace you need on the journey.
I’m a licensed counselor, love Jesus, want people to experience the sound clinical practice you talk of… if we’re not trained to be trauma informed, among other things, it is so difficult to walk with people. I hope you know you’re seen and loved! When my son had heart surgery this past year, I wanted with everything in me to know he loved Jesus, too, but we also had to go with the most trained and competent person. Couldn’t hand my baby off to anyone else. Same thing goes with our “hearts,” right? I’m glad you give yourself good counseling. We all need it (me included) in the challenges and heart breaks of life.