Unit 2 Lesson 5, Restoration Is Possible

I've mentioned several times that I've seen a lot of counselors. I think "early intervention" (counseling at age 12) helped to curb some damaging thought pattens. For instance, I have never blamed myself for the abuse, and that is probably the most common thought that survivors have. "I must have done something wrong/it's my fault/I deserved it/I'm bad." Perhaps getting counseling at such a young age helped to steer me away from thinking those things, and I am so grateful that that is one battle I did not have to wage within myself --- learning to accept the exact opposite of that garbage. So, while there were still a lot of awful and harmful things going on at that time (I was still being sexually abused), I was being assured by my counselor that it was not my fault (she did not know about the ongoing abuse). And I believed that.

A counselor I had in high school had a poster hanging on her wall. It said, "I am responsible for my day." At the ripe old age of 15, I was learning that it was up to me to choose whether or not I would let the garbage control my life. At that age, I was making a lot of right decisions and a few wrong decisions. But, just a couple years later, the ratio had flipped. I was making a few right decisions and a lot of wrong decisions. But, I KNEW the wrong decisions I was making. I just didn't feel like I had the power to do things differently.

I continued seeing therapists through my first couple years in college and was honest and forthcoming about what was going on in my life (and my head). I told them the truth and they always told me the truth about the mistakes I was making and the changes that should be made. I always learned the "lesson" of what they were helping me to see, but I didn't always change my behavior in response to the truth I'd just learned. Change takes time.

Then I got married --- "rescued" is what I was hoping for. And I was rescued from daily life with my family. We'd moved across the country and life was no longer abusive; but it became increasingly lonely given all my secrets and acting out. I made an absolute disaster out of my marriage - the most regretful mistakes and poor choices of my life. This man did not deserve the mess I made of his life. When I left him, I was fully aware of how I tore through his life like a tornado. When I left, nothing was as I'd found it. Just like when my abusers left my life - nothing was the same with me. I knew I needed to make major changes, as I never wanted to hurt someone else, or myself, like that ever again.

I was suddenly alert and aware as I never had been before. Shortly after my divorce, I was dating someone special and had made a commitment to myself to not lie or keep secrets from him (now my husband). I worked hard at being intentional with my words and actions. Getting my tantrums and insecurities under control was no easy task, but it was important to me. I was upfront with everything I struggled with (which I had NEVER done before). I trusted him completely.

A year and a half after marrying, we started attending church. Getting involved in different church groups changed me a great deal. Many things were really good.... However, I was still mad as all get-out at my mother and struggled in general anytime I'd think about my birth family. That's when I decided to go back to counseling. She was a Christian counselor at my church. At our first meeting, she gave me two things to do for homework. 1- Read "Dorie, The Girl Nobody Loved" by Dorie VanStone. 2- Read the story of Joseph, Genesis chapters 37-50. While reading the story of Joseph, I was to journal everything in his story that compared to mine. I journaled practically the entire story!!! And I discovered that from the very beginning of time, families have struggled, families have betrayed one another, people have had evil intentions, and those who were abused and mistreated can overcome!

Long story short... Joesph experienced massive betrayal. His brothers tried to kill him, then sold him into slavery. While Joseph was a slave, his master's wife tried to seduce him. When Joseph refused to be seduced, he was falsely accused and thrown into prison. In prison he helped others, but when they got out, they forgot about Joseph. But Joseph did an amazing thing. He kept believing in God. Eventually God delivered Joseph from prison and made him second-in-command over all of Egypt. God made Joseph forget the pain, the anger, the loneliness, and all the other distressing emotions he must have felt.

As I completed this homework, I felt relieved to know that God is familiar with families mistreating one another. You will also find a story about the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13:1-39. What we are dealing with is not new to God. He knows what we've been through, what we're feeling, and exactly what we need to heal. Joseph is the perfect example of overcoming horrible betrayal and going on to be hugely victorious. There is hope for us!

All of this to say... Over time you can be fully restored. With every passing day, I discover more and more good health in my life. But, there was only so much I could do without God. I had corrected a lot of my poor choices and bad behaviors before bringing God into the equation... But, the thoughts and feelings that I held deep in my heart and mind could not be fixed without His lovingkindness, compassion, forgiveness and grace.

Romans 12:2 says, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." As I ponder this verse, I feel it is telling me to not allow the world or my painful experiences in the world to determine how I live, think, act or feel. Like that poster in my therapist's office said all those years ago.... "I am responsible for my day." Will I make the choice to carry the baggage with me every where I go, or will I choose to lay the garbage down and accept a renewing of my mind?

God wants to make us new again. He wants to renew our minds and heal what our abusers have done to us. Sexual abuse is not the will of God. He is not using the sexual abuse to "teach us a lesson". His will has always been to restore to our lives that which was stolen by the abuse.

Just as the effects of abuse become evident without prior awareness of how the abuse was affecting you, God's restoration happens without your awareness of His work. One day, you are surprised by the joy of realizing that you have been changed! You are better.

My failed marriage

As I was getting a little quiet time in this morning, I felt God nudging me to share about my failed first marriage. Unfortunately, it is a good example of two things - the unimaginably high price we pay for unresolved issues (by we, I mean EVERYONE) and a failed support system.

My first marriage should have worked. He and I were both very nice people and had the same values and life goals. We got along very well. In fact, we never had an argument. We were, however, very young (I had just turned 21) and I was hurting more than I was willing to admit - more than I even realized. I'd told him about my childhood abuse when we were dating; however, I shrugged it off as much as possible and pretended to be just fine. On the occasions where I did show some emotion about it, I never told him how deeply those feelings ran.

It didn't start off this way though... Early in the relationship, he was someone I could be honest and open with. But then.. Shortly before he asked me to marry him, there was an incident at home where my mom's 4th husband had become physically and verbally abusive with me. As all this chaos was going on in the background, I called my soon-to-be-fiance. I was sobbing and my mom and her husband were yelling at me, saying awful things and calling me horrible names. He (my ex-husband) came to pick me up 30 minutes later and I never went back. He was supportive and compassionate with regard to the physical maltreatment, but it wasn't long before he was encouraging me to cut my mom some slack and allow her to have a "normal" relationship with me. (By "normal" he meant trips to the mall, dinners at their house, mother/daughter phone calls, etc.) There were so many things wrong with the way my mom treated me and allowed her husbands to treat me, that I just knew there was no way to have "normal" under the circumstances. I tried to explain that my mother's neglect and selfishness were the reasons that the sexual abuse from husband #3 and the verbal & physical abuse from #4 lasted as long as they did. But my ex-husband couldn't grasp my idea that not all moms are created equal. In my case, my mother was abusive and I deserved protection from her. He thought she deserved a relationship with me, regardless. This is when my walls started coming up and I stopped being honest with him about how much I hurt.

As we've read throughout unit 1, many times people do not know what to say or do to help people who have been sexually abused - especially when one is abused by a family member. My ex-husband was a young man who came from a wonderful family in a delightful midwestern small town. Things like this were unheard of - which means it happened in secret and no one talked about it. It was practically taboo for him to talk about sexual abuse, so it stands to reason that he would be ill prepared to help me recover from it.

When I felt like he was "on my parents' side", I felt betrayed and all alone. I completely stopped talking to him about anything I needed. We moved to the east coast a few months after we were married, and distance from home was a good thing for me. I was relieved to be far from the chaos and strained relationships; however, I'd brought all the baggage with me. Birthdays and holidays were the hardest, but I barely let on to my ex-husband that anything was wrong. He could tell that something was "off", but I think he figured time would heal it. When he didn't reach out to me, I didn't bother reaching out to him. That's when I began having difficulty with fidelity - I was looking for affirmation from other men. I needed someone to find me interesting, attractive, appealing. My ex-husband worked hard and was pursuing a career as a professional athlete, so he didn't have a lot of time for me. That hurt my feelings, driving me further away. But I didn't say much. Occasionally I would tell him that we weren't as close as I wished we were... But, by the time we were in marriage counseling, I was already pretty checked-out of the marriage and really had no intention of checking back in.

As I look back on this failed relationship, I have many regrets. He is truly a very nice guy and I believe he was willing to listen, if only I would have talked. I believe he would have been open to understanding where I was coming from, if only I'd have had the courage to be vulnerable with him. I know now that he was just inexperienced, not insensitive.

When I say I have regrets, I absolutely do not mean that I regret where I am today. I DO NOT. But, I regret how I acted in the first marriage, how I hurt my ex-husband and our families and friends; how I dragged that baggage with me and let it consume my life for so many years. I deeply regret how I hurt others, all because I was wounded and was choosing not to deal with it.

One Man's Story

This is an amazing testimony from Dave Cox.

NOTE - When I posted this yesterday, I had a million thoughts running through my mind, but didn't know exactly what to say. I still don't know what to say, but I feel I should clarify one thing - Dave did not ask me to post this. Dave Cox was my church's pastor. Many friends from church may be checking this out just to see Dave, and I want to encourage you to do just that. He talks about you, and it meant something to me to hear it. I received this video via email from a friend. I have not talked to Dave in almost two years, so the video appearing here is not self-serving on Dave's part. The abuse in his childhood is no excuse for the poor decisions he made - and he's careful to point that out. But there is no denying that the abuse left a gaping hole in his life that he tried filling with various things over a period of many years. The results were devastating to thousands of people, many of whom are still dealing with it today. I see a lot of my own life in Dave's story and think many other survivors will too. Again, Dave made the poor decisions, but the initial void was caused by one person's sin of child sexual abuse... and that sin reached into the lives of many in our community.

Part 1:
http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=e52ed0b7cbe2e4a426fe

Part 2:
http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=7bb616c404f121a083ac

There are several LifeLines (support groups) at our church for hurting people.

Victory Over Sexual Abuse (women only) will begin meeting next Thursday, Jan. 22 in Overland Park, KS and Lenexa, KS.

Victory Over Sexual Sin (addiction to pornography, etc. - women only) begins tonight in Lenexa, KS.

One-on-one counseling is also available!

Email victoryoversexualabuse@live.com for information about any of these ministries.

My story

For the first 27 years of my life, I rarely felt like I “belonged” anywhere or to anyone. My mother and birth father were married for about a year and a half and split up when I was about six months old. I didn’t see or hear from him again until I was 26 and that reunion only lasted one weekend.

My mother met her third husband shortly after leaving my birth father. Almost immediately, Mom decided that we should live with this new boyfriend. They eventually married and had another child. This man adopted me when I was eight years old and started sexually abusing me around that same time. The abuse lasted for a short time before I told my mother. She confronted him and the abuse stopped for a while, but eventually restarted. They stayed together for another three years – divorcing at the end of my 6^th grade year.

During those three years that they remained married, I hated myself. I felt like I was weird, like I had to keep big secrets from all my friends and like I was trash. There were times I even felt like a prostitute – and I was too young to even know what that meant. I wanted more than anything to be changed into a boy. I ran around with all the neighbor boys and started causing trouble in school. I didn’t want anything to do with femininity – I hated when Mom would make me curl my hair or wear a dress. I don’t remember ever having a doll or a Barbie.

When their divorce was final, Mom and I celebrated together. I thought she believed me and was finally putting my needs first. I thought she would protect me. However, when I was in my mid-20’s (years after their divorce), my mom confessed to having never believed me. She thought I was crazy, a trouble-maker, a girl trying to seduce her step father. When I asked her why she divorced him then, she said that she felt she had to before I ruined the entire family.

In the years following the divorce, my mom and my abuser continued to date. My mother insisted that I go with my sister on all visitations with him. She told me that it was to protect my sister, sending me the message that I was the sacrificial lamb. My abuse continued until I was 15 ½ years old. At that time, I was the one who had to stand up to him myself – confronting him one night when he came to me – and refusing to go on anymore overnights. I didn’t bother telling my mother that he was abusing me again, as I knew she would not protect me and she would likely even accuse me of seducing him again. Eventually she did find out, but it wasn’t because I’d asked for her help.

As a child, I wasn't aware of everything going on around me, but I don't believe the authorities were notified of the abuse until I was 15 ½. It is unclear to me who required (or why) that I see a counselor and participate in group therapy when I was just 12. A state social worker would pick me up from school once a week, during class, and take me to the county mental health office. In front of the class, my teacher frequently commented on my having to leave early. I said I had doctor’s appointments and hoped they all just thought I had cancer or something. The car had a state license plate on it, making me feel like I was riding around in a car with a huge neon sign on it that advertised my damaged state. The girls in my group all lived in foster care. My mother would tell me that if I told them about her dating my abuser that they would take me away too. The unknown could be far worse than the known, so I didn’t share the depths of abuse and neglect going on in my homelife..

Another problem I had at the time was that we had moved. We left our modest house in a nice neighborhood and moved into a low-income town home in a far less desirable part of town. The kids in the new neighborhood hated me on sight… I was very quiet and shy and rather bookish, so they made fun of me, called me names and chased me home from school threatening to beat me up. Those kids made it painfully clear that I did not belong there! I transferred schools the following year. Changing schools meant no longer running home from the school bullies, but now I was in classrooms with kids I believed had families that loved them and weren’t poor. I was very quiet in class, always certain that if I opened my mouth I’d say something stupid. I had very few friends. I constantly feared that if people knew the truth about me, knew about the abuse, where I lived, or how I lived, that they wouldn’t like me. Now, some of this is normal teenage angst, but I’m certain that the abuse played a substantial role in my non-existent self-esteem.

Most of the happy childhood memories I have involve church. My parents attendance was very sporadic. Most of the time I rode to church with my friend's family. Her mother took me to church, Vacation Bible School and even arranged for me to go to church camp every summer. At church camp, when I was nine years old, I accepted Christ (but really had no idea what that meant). After my family moved, she wasn’t able to give me a ride anymore. I cannot remember a single Bible lesson I was taught over those ten years, but I remember that church was the one place I felt loved and cared for. It was the only place I laughed with abandon, acted like a kid and felt like I belonged. That ended when I was 15 years old.

My life was pretty much in a downward spiral after that… I started running with a partying crowd and dated a boy for a couple of years who’d cheated on me, was incredibly disrespectful and even beat me once. I stayed because he said he loved me. He showed me more affection and concern than my parents, so I felt like I’d found a place where I belonged. During our three-year on-again-off-again relationship, I was constantly talking to him about marriage. He wasn’t interested.

After that relationship ended, I bounced around from one short-term relationship to the next. I felt the only way I could interest a guy was to flirt a lot and morph into whatever he wanted in a girl. I also turned to drinking a lot. I have never been addicted to alcohol, but I have never once had a drink without the intention of getting drunk. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, and being drunk either made me feel like I was someone else or took me to a place where I no longer cared about who I was.

Barely 21, I married a guy that I’d been introduced to by a friend. He had big professional aspirations, I had emotional needs and secrets that I couldn't begin to verbalize. I was needy for security, physical touch, quality time and verbal affirmation. I was so unfulfilled and hurting... I flirted non-stop with any man who seemed to notice. I did not want to flirt with other men, but I didn’t feel whole without the attention. And the attention still left me empty, but it was a momentary high that I enjoyed. Eventually we saw a marriage counselor. One day the counselor referred to me as an “abandoner” (having such a deep tendency to reject before being rejected). I strongly disagreed, and never went back – I abandoned counseling because I didn’t care much for the truth. We’d tried a lot of superficial things to make the marriage work. We spent a lot of money, built a house, took elaborate vacations, bought designer everything, had brand new cars and joined a country club. After six years, I quietly left him. I’d abandoned my old life and began a new one back home.

Around this same time, I received an email from a guy that I went to high school with. We met for dinner one night and married just ten months later. From the very beginning, I was honest with him about where I’d been in my life and what I needed. He was up for the challenge – and boy was it a challenge in the first couple of years! While I was functioning well compared to my parents, I was still quite wounded and frequently acted on it. Marrying into a “family” was very hard for me. I was suspicious and jealous of my mother-in-law and sister-in-law. I analyzed their every move and had come to the conclusion that they were needy and relied on my husband in an unhealthy way. I developed an ugly attitude towards them and found myself on a website “venting” my frustrations about them. My postings were eventually discovered, and they were wounded in a way that I can never take back. With all my heart, I wish I hadn’t done the things that I did.

I am sharing this with you because I want you to know not only the way people have sinned against me, but also the ways I have hurt others as a result of my unbearable pain, hopelessness and unhealthy defense mechanisms. There are so many things I regret having done – so many people in the wake of my despair.

A year and a half into our marriage, my husband and I were expecting our first child. We both felt the need to raise our kids in church, but for very different reasons. He wanted to raise our kids in a Christian home; whereas, I simply wanted our kids to experience the little bit of childhood happiness I’d had.

Eight months pregnant, we found a church we both loved. And, of course, the church was in the middle of a “love your family” kind of series! After two sermons, I emailed the pastor a brief summary of my relationship with my parents, ending with the question “how am I supposed to honor my mother and father when they’ve never done anything honorable?” This was pretty much the reason I’d avoided church for the last 10 years or so… The pastor responded with some sermon notes that changed my life! What stood out to me the most was a bullet that said, “forgiveness does not require reconciliation”. To which I said, “Okay, I can live with that!” What I needed at that time was to be able to forgive my mother while also keeping my distance. She is still the same person she’s always been, so for me to buy into the whole forgiveness idea, it had to be okay to not spend any time with her.

That was 5 ½ years ago and I have learned and grown a great deal. Attending church regularly, being involved in ministry, reading the Bible, and spending time talking through life with godly people has completely changed my husband and me and our marriage. We have learned so much about God, his sovereignty, his strength, his holiness, his provision, his forgiveness, his love and his faithfulness. But even with all of that growth and transformation, I knew I was still missing something. I had to deal with my childhood before I’d have the peace I so desperately wanted. I’d finally admitted to myself that I’d completely lived up to the pastor’s comment about not reconciling with my mother, but I hadn’t gotten far with the forgiveness bit. So, I did something I swore I’d never do… I let my mother send me back into therapy! I’d forgiven my step-father years earlier (I haven’t spoken to him since I was 15 ½, so being out of sight helped), but just couldn’t get there with my mom. She is my mother – the person who was supposed to protect me and choose me over all others! Instead, she chose him, and she chose herself and her needs. She did not protect me, and that hurt more than anything physical my abuser could have done. I needed a counselor to help walk me through this forgiveness bit! At our first meeting, my counselor gave me the book “Dorie, The Girl Nobody Loved”. I was immediately drawn to it simply because of its title – boy could I relate! Dorie had a much tougher upbringing than any I could imagine and she was able to forgive. She allowed God’s love to transform her life. He grew her into a remarkable woman, so I began praying that God would do that kind of work in my life.

For the first couple of years, I had to be very intentional with my prayer time, Bible reading and overall attitude towards my mother. Many prayers started with, “There is nothing in me that wants to pray for her, but you love her and I need to forgive her. Help me to do that…”. In time, I was filled with the grace and mercy needed for me to forgive my mom. The peace and comfort I’ve found in God is quite overwhelming – truly a feeling that is only made possible by Him.

And as I look back over my life, I can clearly see God’s hand in it. It wasn’t luck that planted my childhood friend and her mom in my life. That was God’s doing. That woman, along with many others at that church, loved me and invested in me. And as I was about to become a mother, it was their love that I remembered and wanted to replicate for my children. While I truly believed for many years that I was all alone and utterly unloved, God was loving me and just waiting for me to love Him back.