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Rosstrum Publishing

Rosstrum Publishing is a division of The Border Company, LLC
 

8 Strawberry Bank Rd.

Suite 20

Nashua, New Hampshire

   
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Watching Oprah – October 1998

 That day was a huge step of courage and freedom for me. After our son’s wedding I was finally able to relax. Everyone except my parents had left our home. Dad was in a different room while my mother and I watched television. The Oprah Winfrey Show was on. I don’t remember exactly what the program was about that day, except I do remember that part of it was about confronting your past. I admired the courage and boldness it must have taken on the part of those who were speaking. My mother and I were agreeing with Oprah and her guests about the importance of coming clean from whatever harm had been done to you.

     I remember thinking to myself, I wish I could do that! How I wish I could openly tell my mother about being molested by an older family member. But the secret of that hideous humiliation had been locked inside me by tremendous shame. Years of doubts and fear had bound me for decades! 

    How come I don’t have that kind of courage? What is it going to take for me to tell? Questions I had asked myself over and over again.

 Keeping the Secret

     My mother was now in her early 80s, and I was an adult, thirty-three years into my marriage. Just that summer, I had mustered all the courage I had and finally told both of my parents about the youth pastor who had sexually touched me when I was eleven and twelve at a church youth camp all those years ago. 

     But, this deeper secret plaguing me was too close to home because it involved a family member. The secret had been buried for a long time, but it was now creeping to the surface. What energy it took to keep it under wraps! Would my mother believe me anyway if I told her? Besides, I was living with the fear my father had impressed on me when I told him about the family member just three years earlier. He had said, “Don’t tell!” Funny, that’s exactly what that relative told me after he molested me so many times. It felt as if I were being victimized all over again by my own father. He went on to say, “You can’t tell her; it might kill her!” 

     “Daddy,” I said at the time, “I know without a doubt that she was also a victim!” Two of my relatives had already told me they had also been victims of this same person. I knew from what I had read that child molesters don’t stop at one victim. They usually hurt many in their family.

     The sad part was that this dirty little secret lying just beneath the surface was killing me!

 

Suppressed Anger Surfaces

    An abuse victim suffers in silence. By remaining silent, and with the fear of anyone discovering my “secret,” the effects of the abuse on my adult life were sometimes far more devastating than the actual abuse! I had been trying for years to get free from my addiction to a life of denial!

     When The Oprah Winfrey Show/i> was over, I turned off the TV and my mother went upstairs. Soon my father came into the family room and began to chide me about my ministry to those “crushed in spirit”—the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, ex-cons—those people the world sees as throwaways. I think he was concerned I might be putting myself in jeopardy and it was his way of saying he cared about my well-being.

     God had just begun to give me His heart for those who were in that kind of darkness. My husband and I had gone into a minimum-security prison and a crack house to minister. We had started to mentor those steeped in their addictive lifestyles. For the very first time in my life I was beginning not only to feel tremendously deep empathy for all of God’s children He created, I was also able to bring the wounded to the Great Physician who is able to meet all of our needs and free us. Isn’t that what the Bible teaches? And isn’t that what I had heard my dad preach from the pulpit for years?

     Seven years before this incident, I attended a ten-session course for abuse survivors that had been helpful as far as information, but it didn’t really get to the issues I needed to address in my life. When the topic of anger came up in one of those classes, I couldn’t identify. I didn’t see myself as an angry person. But what I failed to see was that unless anger—whether it shows outwardly or is deeply suppressed—is dealt with, it has the ability to destroy you! When it is released, it doesn’t mean that those horrific memories are forgotten; it means that you are released from the hate that has settled inside your soul.

     Suddenly, on that day, in that room with my father, all of the suppressed venom, like poison from a viper, came out with an overflow of tears and sobs that I didn’t even realize were coming from me. I had never acted this way and was so afraid my mother would hear me. I heard myself say, “Daddy, you don’t understand! The pain the people I work with are in, is the same as my pain; they aren’t any different than me! Why can’t I tell my mother? This relative is dead. I did nothing wrong to deserve my being so dead inside my soul!”

 Pandora’s Box Is Opened

      By now I was weeping as my mother came back down-stairs, thinking my father and I were arguing. I heard my father say, “Maybe you should tell her now.” Words I never thought I would hear. They would free my spirit forever.

    I immediately ran to the basement where my husband was working. I grabbed his arm and told him, “Pandora’s box has been opened! You’d better come upstairs, because I’m about to tell mother the dark, dirty secret of my past.”

 The Sins of the Fathers

 “He does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

Exodus 34:7

     I sat weeping, grieving deeply for the loss of my childhood innocence. I also realized the importance of what was about to happen in relation to the healing of my family. I took my husband’s hands as well as those of my father and mother. They were intently looking at me, wondering what I was about to reveal to them. I started by telling my mother that I was a victim of abuse, not only by a youth pastor, but also by someone very close to her who was a family member. Before she could respond, I went on to tell her I believed that she, too, had been a victim of this same person.

 

  
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