“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Psalm 23:4
Content Warning: sexual abuse, self-harm
Last week, I focused on the innocent parts of my childhood and teenage years. I think reflecting on those times is important because, through those innocent times, we catch glimpses of how we were hardwired. For me, that included making sure others were included and an insatiable thirst for seeing God in everything.
For this installment of the series, I’m choosing to focus on the non-innocent parts of my childhood– or rather, how my innocence was taken from me. I share this part of my story not for pity, but in the hope that at least one person reading this feels less alone.
As a disclaimer, memory can be fickle. I imagine that some folks in my life may remember these events differently than I do. I’ve done my best to recall and recount them as accurately as I can.
This piece is also longer than my typical work, so I hope you’ll indulge me in this out-of-character long-form piece.
With that, let’s dive in.
My father sexually abused me on several occasions throughout my childhood. The first time I remember happened when I was around eight or nine years old (maybe even ten– it’s a bit fuzzy). The times I remember most vividly happened my last year of middle school. Those I can recount in excruciating detail.
While I was living it, I didn’t think about those incidents very often. They were confusing and uncomfortable, but my dad said he loved me. Why wouldn’t I trust him?
Near my birthday my freshman year of high school, though, I was plagued with nightmares and flashbacks of the events. I couldn’t sleep. I hardly ate. I felt this secret would eat me alive.
During small group time at my youth group that Sunday, I found myself in the unique position of being alone with my adult-volunteer small group leader. Free from the gaze of my peers, the dam burst. I told her everything. She reported the abuse to the authorities.
After the police removed my father from our home, I wish I could say things improved. My siblings didn’t understand what happened. The main idea they took away was the fact that something I’d said made dad have to leave– and made it so they couldn’t see him again until they turned eighteen. They became incredibly cold to me as a result; we fought practically daily until they turned eighteen and elected to see him often.
I know the weight of suddenly becoming a single parent of three teenagers with complex needs was incredibly challenging for my mother. There were days when she rose to the challenge admirably. Most days, though, I can’t help but feel that she, like my siblings, blamed me for the disruption to our lives.
My mother made it clear that her top priority was the well-being of my siblings, both of whom have some significant mental challenges. Worried that the state would remove us from her custody, she often said things to me like “you’d be fine in a foster home, but your siblings wouldn’t make it.”
Additionally, my mother’s attention turned to selling the house (because, unknown to us, dad had gambled away all our savings and missed several mortgage payments). She couldn’t afford to fix it up to her standards, so she had dad come to the house while we were at school to change light fixtures, paint, or whatever else she felt necessary. Often, I’d come home to find that he –my abuser– had moved things in my bedroom. I never felt safe in that house again. It was no longer home.
Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash
Reeling from the still-pervasive flashbacks, the coldness from my siblings, the often manipulative behavior of my mother, and the ever-lurking presence of my father, I didn’t have the capacity to process it all. The abuse from my dad was bad enough, but I couldn’t understand why my family refused to stand in the gap for me.
I know now, of course, that it’s basic Girardian social theory. During times of conflict, the community needs a common scapegoat to resent. Uniting against a common enemy stabilizes the community, ensuring the community system survives. In order for my family system to regain a sense of stability, the system needed someone to be a scapegoat.
For the life of me, I’ll never understand how I, not my father, became the scapegoat. No matter how much social theory, psychology, or family systems theory I use to rationalize it as an adult, it doesn’t change the fact that my teenage self was devastated.
Soon, I developed depression and anxiety on top of the PTSD that kept me up at night. The anxiety regularly led to racing thoughts of confusion, frustration, and hopelessness. The thoughts were too loud, too fast, too much; I needed them to stop.
I discovered I could silence those thoughts through self-injury– specifically, cutting my wrist. It stopped the thoughts for a moment of desperately-needed empty-mindedness, only to replace them soon after with thoughts like “what kind of monster does this to themselves?” What started as a coping mechanism quickly turned into an addiction that I wrestled with from my freshman year of high school through my junior year of college.
Most of my energy in high school was spent trying not to cut. I kept a tally on my calendar of how many days it had been since my last binge; the days I had to reset my tally to 0 were devastating. With the energy required to keep up that tally, maintain my grades, and practice clarinet, the flashbacks stopped– at least for a few years. My brain was so focused on surviving high school that it literally couldn’t spare energy for anything else.
As such, there wasn’t a drop of energy to spend on questioning my sexuality. I believe that, knowing I couldn’t handle another crisis, my brain mercifully moved my queerness to the far reaches of my back brain– until I was in a season that was safe for me to explore my queerness and embrace it. Until then, the relationships I had with guys who I mentioned last week became a source of desperately-needed comfort. Outside of recognizing that I didn’t feel a deep physical attraction to any of them, thoughts around sexual attraction just didn’t cross my mind.
Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash
College marked the beginning of intense growth for me. I started attending therapy twice a week –once for individual therapy, once for an anonymous group with other sexual assault survivors–since my undergrad offered it for free. I found friendships with people who supported me unconditionally– friends who, to this day, I consider to be the family I was meant to have.
In therapy, I also began to think about distancing myself from my biological family (even as I wrestled with evangelicalism’s message that nothing was more important than the nuclear family). I love my family deeply. Our relationship is messy and complicated– more so than it should ever have to be.
When I was in grad school, they apologized for how they’d been treating me for the previous several years. I was relieved… until I saw that they continued interacting with me as they had before. My siblings also continued interacting with our father until a few years ago –when he started treating them unkindly.
Because their unhealthy patterns continued in the years since that apology, we are currently in a season of no communication as they learn to create healthier patterns of living. I’m hopeful that, one day, we’ll be able to interact in ways that allow all of us to be treated with compassion and mutual respect.
In undergrad, I also began to question what I believed about a lot of things, including LGBTQ+ people. I shared more about this in my Damascus Road reflection, but suffice it to say, I was beginning to wonder if God actually made –and blessed– gay people after all.
Photo by ennif pendahl on Unsplash
In evangelical spaces, people rank testimonies based on how much trauma is in the story. The more traumatic the story, the “better” the testimony. While hearing the testimony of someone getting that job they’d prayed for was nice, nothing compared to the cinematic quality of someone coming out of drug addiction, leaving a gang, or withstanding abuse. Surviving sexual abuse, overcoming self-harm, and working to forgive my dad– according to evangelicals, my story had all the pieces of a testimonial masterpiece.
This ideology is incredibly harmful. It suggests that we need to have experienced trauma in order to have a testimony powerful enough to “win” souls for Christ, a mindset which glorifies suffering. Perhaps this mindset is part of where evangelicals get their victim complex because –trust me– you don’t want these experiences (let alone want to want them) just to have a “better” story to tell.
Besides, who among us has not joyfully teared up when a friend told us they are having a kid? Felt our hearts come alive when a child told us something they learned today? Thanked God for a much-needed career transition? All testimonies are worth telling because they remind us that there is still good in this broken world.
As a young evangelical college student, though, I fell right in line with the evangelical ideology about testimonies. I felt obligated to share about the abuse because it was a “good” testimony. And share I did– well before I was ready to. I shared it at churches. I shared it when mentoring youth groups. I shared it in a campus devotional book that was given to every incoming freshman. I shared it when meeting new friends (because I believed that “real” friends don’t keep secrets like that). I shared, shared, shared.
Part of me was relieved. My mother had made it clear to me in high school that I wasn’t allowed to talk about what was happening at home with anyone outside the family and punished me when I did (even now, I feel a spike in my anxiety at the thought of my mother learning that I’m “airing the family’s dirty laundry” online). I was now exposing the truth and that would set me free… right?
Another part of me, though, wondered if I should be giving strangers access to this part of my story– a part I was still trying to process.
To be clear, I think it’s important to hear stories of abuse so that people know they’re not alone. Talking about abuse breaks the stigma around talking about abuse, which is why I’m sharing it here. That said, there’s a way to do it that’s considerate of other people’s triggers. At that point in my life, I was a walking psychology example of oversharing (or, as the kids call it these days, “trauma dumping”).
Fast forward a few years to grad school. I moved to Atlanta for school– away from my family. After my first year of pastoral care classes, I wasn’t oversharing my deepest traumas left and right. I was enjoying my classes. I had a part-time job I found incredibly fulfilling, a job where many of my colleagues were openly queer. As such, my brain finally felt I was safe enough to bring my queerness to the fore-front of my mind, which I’ll discuss more next week. As I began reflecting on the experiences I mentioned in last week’s piece, so much of my childhood began to make sense. By affirming my queerness, God handed me a puzzle piece to myself I didn’t know was missing.
As I felt more comfortable accepting my queerness, though, I felt that I couldn’t be as open about my status as a sexual abuse survivor without compromising my witness as a queer Christian.
A common belief in the dangerous, widely-discredited practice of conversion therapy is that people aren’t born gay, but may “struggle” with same-sex attraction because of some kind of conflict from their childhood. This conflict could be feeling distant from their opposite-sex parent or more traumatic like sexual abuse– like I’d endured at the hands of my father. As a result, I’ve had people suggest to me that I’m not actually gay, but my dad’s abuse made me afraid of men.
But they don’t take the time to learn about all of the queer people who haven’t experienced that kind of abuse. They don’t take the time to consider that if more than half of the women in the US have experienced sexual assault (as a recent study from the CDC indicates), then, according to their logic, a huge percentage women in the US would be lesbians or bisexual. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 7.6% of US adults identify as LGBTQ+. Their theory simply doesn’t line up with the facts. But these folks don’t care about facts.
They do with data what they do with scripture: cherry-pick only the parts that confirm their biases and ignore the parts that challenge their beliefs.
Nowadays when I process through these experiences with my therapist, she often asks, “how did you make it out of there? How did you keep your faith? How did you end up NOT being an asshole?” I get it. Hearing a story like that, you expect to read about seasons of risky sexual encounters, drug abuse, suicide attempts. You probably expect the person to be hard, to interact with the world with coldness– and rightfully so. The fact that my story lacks those parts is, well, pretty damn queer.
As cliché as it sounds, God’s the reason I survived those dark days of high school. To keep from cutting, I’d pray through scripture. To keep from dwelling on my family’s treatment of me, I’d write in my prayer journal while listening to my favorite Christian rock band. To stop feeling so helpless, I asked God for strength to help my friends. Those friends also became the hands and feet of Christ to me, from getting me a secret emergency cell phone to writing messages on my arms in marker– covering my scars with love.
Some days were too heavy for those things to keep me from hurting myself, but most days it got me through. I’m not saying they got me through easily, but they got me through well enough to make it one more day.
Queer people know what it means to tap into something bigger than ourselves when we face adversity. We also know that, as paradoxical as it sounds, the thing bigger than ourselves is simultaneously within us– at our very core. When we tap into that reservoir within us, we discover the resiliency needed to survive.
It’s the resiliency Moses found when leading the Hebrew people through the desert, Deborah found when no men stepped up to lead the army, Ruth and Naomi found after their husbands died, David found when fleeing through the wilderness, and Jesus found when he prayed in the garden before his arrest.
What some call resiliency, we might call queer faith. And I’m thankful that my faith was queer enough to help me survive.
Next week, I’ll explore how I found peace in entering my first queer romantic relationship– with the dear friend who is now my wife of nearly seven years. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Thank you for entering into this space with me. I hope you feel a little less alone.