We continued our counseling sessions, and during these sessions, the intimacy issues kept coming up. I always had an excuse, until one day Janet, my pastor’s wife told me that she really didn’t think that I was healed. I finally realized that the only true healer is Jesus Christ. I agreed with her one hundred percent, which meant we were back at ground zero. James did not like that and resented me even more, but he had to accept it. We both had to trust Jesus that he was going to heal me. I knew he would, but I knew it was a process. We all prayed for God to send someone to help me, and as He is faithful, He started the process.
One day I was at church, and a woman was there praying with me. After the service was over, she came to me and proceeded to tell me that when she prayed with me she felt so much pain in me that she wanted to vomit it up. She seemed to have the gift of feeling other people’s emotions. I was shocked at her words. I thought I had worked through all that. But I trusted that she was giving me a message from God, because I had prayed so earnestly for help. Even though she confided this to me, I didn’t do anything about it. I guess I was terrified of the emotions that might surface. But God was in control, and even though I tried to ignore this discovery, He didn’t. He sent this same friend to our house, and she proceeded to tell me again of the pain I was suffering. She explained to me that the problems in our marriage were not just because of James’ anger, but they were due to my pain also. She said there was a darkness in me so strong that even God couldn’t get through. And that the Lord really wanted to heal me, but I had to want it.
I was amazed at her words. They echoed in my ears - God wanted to heal me. I knew what that meant. It meant pain, the kind of pain that I tried to stuff back down all my life. God wanted me free from this bondage. He wanted His light to shine through me. He wanted a relationship with me. What was I to do? I got on my knees, and I said “Lord please help me, no matter what it takes, please heal me. I trust you with all my heart. Let me feel the pain for once in my life.” I prayed this prayer many times.
One day a friend called me and told me about a twelve step Christian Recovery group she went to. Because of my experience with twelve step groups, I really wasn’t ready to get into that kind of commitment. But the Lord had a different plan. He wanted me there and He was going to make sure I would be there. I decided to attend a women’s sexual abuse group. It was a very uncomfortable situation. There were only three of us there, not really enough to constitute a meeting, but not small enough for one on one conversation. It was here that I learned about a one-on-one therapy practice, and I set up an appointment. At my first appointment I told the therapist my life story as far as I could remember it. I told her that I really thought something happened before I was ten, because why would I be so afraid of intimacy after working through everything that I worked through in the last eight years on and off with secular therapists. She proceeded to say that she didn’t know if anything happened or not but if it did Jesus would heal it, because He is the great healer. I trusted this.
She also said something that was quite bazaar. She told me to go home and get in touch with the little girl inside me. I had heard that before, but what I had never heard was to do this by writing with my non-dominant hand. It has been proven that if you write with your non-dominant hand, you tap into the creative side of the brain, which is also the side that stores the memories. The way that this was discovered was during a surgical procedure on someone with epilepsy, the surgeon probed a particular part of the person’s brain, and discovered that the patient began to express memories. Apparently this became a study and hence the practice of non-dominant writing.
I previously had worked with three therapists over a period of eight years. Each had tried to get me to journal, though I never did. I guess this new way of journaling really got my curiosities up, so I decided to follow through.
My therapist also thought it would be best if I joined a group therapy session for six months in a program called Survivors of Incest. That name alone turned me off, because as far as I knew there never was any incestual abuse. But I agreed anyway. I knew I needed help, and I knew God was in control. My therapist and I would have about two more individual sessions before group was to commence, so I needed to begin my journaling. Now I wasn’t really sure about this journaling thing, but when she explained it as “You have two choices in life, recovery or sickness.” I chose recovery, and that is the journey I embarked upon.
There would be no turning back once I started, and I knew this, but as I said I trusted God and knew that my Lord would be with me every step of the way. The journey began as I began my journaling. I went home, took out paper and pen and started writing with my left hand though it seemed silly. I couldn’t understand a thing that I wrote, but I trusted that this would work, and I had tried everything else to get in touch with my memories. So I did it; I started asking this little girl that lived inside of me some questions. Now I know it sounds nuts, but we all supposedly have the children that we once were living in our subconscious.
I started asking her—my inner child or whatever you want to call her—questions about her family. How many brothers and sisters she had and about her mommy and daddy. I approached her like I didn’t know her at all. And in reality I really didn’t. So she told me she had one sister and one brother, and that they were both older than her. She described them to me and talked a lot about her brother bullying her. She also said that her sister really protected her. This was quite bazaar, having this written conversation with myself. The most interesting part was, as I was writing, I was actually remembering things very vividly. I asked her about her mommy and her daddy. She shared that her daddy had his own business, and she would go with him to people’s houses fixing their tv’s and that all these old women would give her cake and ice cream and cookies. Amazingly, I could see this in my mind. Then I asked her about her mommy. She said her mommy was a make-up lady, and she and her sister liked to play in the make-up her mommy would give her.
All in all, it seemed like a normal childhood, but then I asked about her grandma and grandpa, and boom, there it was, she confided in me the most horrendous thing I had ever heard. When she told me that her grandma’s boyfriend hurt her, I didn’t have the vivid memory. I just wrote it like I was being told a story. And it was probably the scariest and hardest thing I had to do. Seeing that on paper blew me away. But I knew it was crucial that I accept what she was saying. I didn’t remember any of it, I didn’t feel anything personally about it, but my heart broke for this poor little girl. It’s almost like this part of her agony was completely separated from me. I was just writing a story. So I tried to comfort her, and yet at the same time, I completely disassociated myself from her and her pain. It was really weird.
Hours after I had written this traumatic, horrible experience on paper, I read it over and over. I was in shock, especially when my little girl, Rhonda, told me that this began at age three. My own little girl, Kaylie was just turning three at the time. I don’t believe it was just a coincidence that this memory came when my own daughter turned the age that all my pain began. I believe this was God’s timing. I read over this information again and again because, at the time, that’s all it was: information.
I knew it was time to take it out of the darkness —the pit of secrecy, and bring it into the light. So I told my husband the whole story, and to my amazement, he didn’t try to talk me out of the fact that it really happened. I was terrified to tell him this horror story, but the Lord gave me both courage and strength. I still didn’t have any feelings attached to it. I continued daily to journal to my inner-child, and she continued to tell me the gruesome details of these horrible times of abuse. I kept this only between James and myself. I prayed and asked God to help me to remember this, and to let me finally feel the feelings of this memory.
I’ll tell you, I’m not sure how I got through this time of recovery. I was taking care of my three kids under the age of five. I continued to live my life knowing that I was a time bomb of feelings ready to explode. I had a vision of Jesus Christ holding me in his arms and carrying me through life. And that’s exactly how I felt. I had moments where all I could do was stop and pray and cry out to Jesus to help me and give me peace. I started having flashbacks of small parts of the memory. I started seeing flashes of olive green walls, and flashes of bathrooms in my head.
I was finally beginning to put this puzzle together. One night at group, we were all to share our first childhood sexual abuse memory and who the perpetrator was. I had it all planned; I was going to share about my experience with my neighbor when I was ten. That was my plan not God’s. I started writing down details. I had already worked through this one so I knew I could share this experience and still keep my composure. But in the middle of the rehashing of this event onto paper, I felt a tug from the Holy Spirit to say something totally different than what I wrote. The Lord wanted me to share the details of what happened when I was three, not ten. So I excused myself and went into the bathroom and prayed “Lord, whatever you want me to say, let it come out of my mouth. I yield my words to your perfect words, I yield my spirit to your spirit, and I yield my will to your perfect will. Lord, help me to finally speak the truth.” And I did, when it was my turn, I proceeded to tell, in a very matter-of-fact manner, details of the horrible sexual abuse that I suffered at age three. I was humiliated, ashamed and desperately wanting to stop the words from exiting my lips. But the Lord had a different plan, and I trusted Him. I knew that if He felt it was time, then it was time indeed. I cried and shared some more, but I still didn’t experience the degree of pain that came with such violation.
The next day, James was helping someone move and, luckily, he wasn’t too far away because from the beginning of the morning, I had uncontrollable rages that could have caused me to hurt my kids. But God saw to it that this didn’t happen. I ended up putting all three kids in their rooms as a safety precaution.
During this time of recovery, I never physically disciplined my kids - I think if I would have, I would have damaged them forever. I had so much anger and rage because of what was thrust upon me as a child. So after I put the kids in their rooms, I called James and told him to come home right then. I went into my room and crawled up into a fetal position and cried uncontrollably. Then he came home and held me, and I felt like I was literally throwing up this suppressed pain of twenty-eight years. I felt like I was going to die from this emotional pain. I also simultaneously relived the entire memories of my abuse. I shook and trembled and actually convulsed with fear. I screamed a deep scream from the pit of my stomach. It sounded like a wounded wolf. I had never heard anything like it before and yet it was coming from the deepest part of me. It was the most intense, gut-wrenching howl I have ever heard. It was nothing I could even imagine coming from a human being. And yet it was coming out of me. It was suppressed pain that was stuffed under so much other pain. It was truly the beginning of my recovery process. And the Lord was with me the entire time. He never left me.
After this life changing, gut wrenching, exhausting experience, I began to feel something I had never felt. I felt a sort of freedom and peace that I had only heard about or read about. The pain that controlled my entire life, my every move was gone, I was freed from the bondage that Satan had me under for so many years. My whole life started to change—my thoughts, my perceptions of things and my self-esteem. I started becoming the person that God had created. My relationship with the Lord began a whole new level. I started having the peace that I never ever thought was possible. I was free, truly free. Although I didn’t know it yet, or maybe I just didn’t believe that I could really be freed from this prison I was in, but I was.
One day during a woman’s seminar, as I sat in a front row seat in a Healing of Sexual Abuse session, I heard the voice of the Lord, so clearly. He said, “Rhonda, you are free.” I’ll never forget those words. I actually yelled, “Yes!” right in the middle of this woman’s testimony. Now she probably thought I was crazy, but I knew what God told me and I believed it. He told me that I was free. Not the kind of freedom that I always searched for with drugs and alcohol or the kind that I thought I achieved every time I moved—no, this was permanent. This was total freedom from the hell that bound me all of my life. So many things started happening. I started loving myself. I started taking care of myself. I began sticking up for my self. I became a stronger person. I was no longer a doormat. I went to the opposite extreme. I also stopped the sabotage, with the Lord’s help. It was all a miracle.
I had such a peace, the peace that surpasses all understanding. And through this freedom, my relationship with Jesus grew. I continued my devotions every day. I learned God’s Word and I depended on His Word to help me through each and every day. One day I was at a ladies Bible study, and as I was listening to the speaker at the podium, the most amazing, incredible thing happened to me. As I sat there, I felt the Holy Spirit so strong— stronger than ever before. And because I was already taking notes at this Bible study, I was well prepared to write, and that is what the Lord told me to do. His spirit came upon me and all I could do was write. My lips were sealed shut, because I tried to open them and they would not move. My ears were deafened of all the noise around me, and I could only hear the Lord’s still quiet voice. He spoke to me of many things that were in my heart, and as He spoke, I wrote. He spoke to me of things I had never spoken aloud; things of my heart that only He could hear. It was the most incredible, scary thing that had ever happened to me. He told me He loved me and that I was His precious child. He called me His sweet, sweet, precious child. He filled my heart and the pages with beautiful words that only my Heavenly Father would say. He also spoke to me of my husband, telling me that He was His child and that He loved him and that He would heal him from all the hurt and pain he has been through. Well, you can imagine the shock I was in. As much as I tried to cease this writing, God would not allow me. He took over my pen, and shared with me the answers that I had been praying for—for so many years. This communication with the Lord went on the entire meeting until, in a flash, the heaviness of the spirit left me and again I was able to speak and move my lips, and I was able to hear all the noise around me. I sat there in my seat, stunned, not believing, but knowing that this really did happen to me. It was incredible.
I took this journal home and I shared it with James. I know at first he thought I was crazy, who wouldn’t? I know I did, but then as I read and began to speak to him about what God said about him, well it was incredible. All of a sudden he heard the words that the Lord loved him and that he was His child. My husband, on the inside, broke open. His prison gates were pushed wide open. He said that he completely and totally heard, through the words on the page, that God loved him. Now he had heard that many times by many different people, but this was straight from the Lord. These words were so anointed that he asked me to read them over and over again. It was a miracle in the works. But I had to also remember what God wrote about him and that he was His child and He was working a miraculous work in him. That was so hard to accept, I mean, I really wanted to fix him. After all, God was really in my life now. But that is not what God wanted. He wanted me to put him in His hands, not mine. And I tell you, from the background that I came from, I wanted so much to rescue him, fix him, and snap him out of his depression. But I really had to trust the Lord, and by the power of the Holy Spirit I did. I let him suffer so much pain. I let him try to eat it away with food and sleep it away with sleep. And all along, I could say nothing. It broke my heart to see my husband suffer so deeply. But like I said, I had too.
The only way I could do that was to stay away from him and out of his firing range, because when he was hurting, he would try so hard to make me hurt too. But one day I finally understood that I had to detach with love. Now that doesn’t mean I left him, because I was told that wasn’t an option by the people around me.
As you’ve read, we had already had some very horrible times in our marriage, but the worst was yet to come, at least for him. Since God had freed me from my pain, I became a new creature, the old had gone and the new had come. Although I looked the same on the outside, I was not nearly the same on the inside. I learned, from my therapist wonderful tools of communication and acceptance of other’s feelings. I also learned to give the feelings back to them and not accept them as my own. Our marriage got a lot worse. This new me went from a lamb to a lion and I did not take any disrespect from him. He got in my face, and I got right back in his. When he would get in my face and yell at me, well in the past, I would cowardly take it and fear that he was going to hit me, but not anymore. It was like World War III at our house. I used to take it all from everyone, and now I wasn’t about to take even a smidgen of a comment or put down or ridicule. It was a really freeing feeling at first to stick up for my rights and who I was, but then it became a war zone.
Back into therapy we went, to learn how to communicate. We really worked hard at this communication thing, but one real essential ingredient was still missing from our relationship. I bet you can guess what that was, yes, you guessed it, intimacy - pure uninhibited sexual intimacy. I was still so terrified of sex even though I worked through all those issues, every single abuse that has been written in this book was dealt with, but there was still fear. I didn’t understand it. Why was I still so afraid? We prayed and prayed and prayed. I even wrote to a well known ministry that was having a prayer vigil, of my issue and asked for prayer. My church was also having a prayer vigil, so I fasted sweets for forty days, well actually thirty-five days, because I started late or should I say, obeyed late. Anyway I, elusively, shared my prayer with the group. I didn’t tell them what it was, but I told them that there was a bondage that I was still under, and I needed to be freed from my past. So even though they didn’t have details, God did. He knew how much I wanted intimacy, but yet the fear held me back.
Shortly after the vigil, I was at home one Saturday, and as I usually prayed and asked God if there was any more pain that I needed to work through. He was always faithful in revealing the truth to me. Well, I felt led to do it again. Now I thought for sure there couldn’t be any more. I thought I had worked through every single solitaire issue from birth to current age, (thirty-two at the time). I prayed this prayer and asked God to reveal more truth if I had missed something. He did, and within the hour, memories poured out. I will not go into the details, for I don’t believe the Lord wants me to reveal this, but I will say that it was overwhelming. It was so painful and so scary, and I was very young.
As I poured out these tears and screamed and yelled and punched pillows, I thought it was all out. Not so, because the next morning I got up and got ready for church like any other Sunday. I felt fine, no depression, no anger, just normal. Then it happened again. James, the kids and myself were driving to church, which was all of five minutes away, and I started crying. I said to God, “Why now? I don’t want to go to church crying.” As I said this to God out loud, James heard me and said, “This is the time you need to be in church.” So I agreed to go, and luckily, the crying stopped, and I pulled myself back together and walked calmly into church, thinking and praying, “Please don’t let me fall apart; Lord, it’s okay at home, but I don’t want all these people to see me loose it like this.” I didn’t want them to see the real pain I was in. It was okay to show the surface stuff, even the self-esteem issues, but not this. How would they accept me if I was a bundle of pain? Well, you know God and His infinite wisdom. That’s exactly what I did, I fell apart as soon as worship started and the tears poured out like a never-ending faucet. I continued, or should I say, that God continued to cleanse me the entire service. I couldn’t stop crying; I tried, but I had no control over this. The Lord knew it was time for people to see my pain, and, boy, did they ever. Through this most humbling time, I knew that it was time for people to see the real me, instead of just a well-dressed mask of me.
Even under the kind of pain that I was experiencing, I could hear the Lord’s still soft voice speaking to me. And right in the middle of my tears, the Lord had me go up to the front of the church and pray for my pastor’s wife, Janet. It was powerfully commanded to me; all I could do was obey. So I went up front and prayed for her. She was not feeling well; she was in pain (physical pain). I had no clue why she was up there, but it was not very often that I had ever seen her up there, and never had I seen her there for herself. I put aside my pain, or agony I should say, and I reached out to someone else. Not for my own needs, but the needs of another suffering Christian. And that’s what it’s all about. No matter what we’re going through, whether it is physical, emotional or even financial, when the Lord says go and pray for someone else, we need to obey; and I did. I don’t even know what I prayed that day, because as far as I thought, I was useless spiritually. But that was so far from the truth. Actually my heart-felt prayers were heard, because a few days later, Janet was rushed to the hospital with abdominal pain. She had an ovarian cyst that burst. Miraculously, it did not go into her blood stream. God protected her, and maybe He may have had me pray for that particular reason. I guess I’ll really never know until I ask Him face to face, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I obeyed. And through my obedience, the Lord blessed me, because after all these years under the bondage of the enemy, regarding intimacy, I was totally, completely, miraculously and permanently healed. The blood of Jesus Christ washed all the pain of my past away, and all the inhibitions of intimacy were free. The fears were gone forever. Truly the prison gates of my past were broken.