by Rosemarie Miller

“Biblical Child Training” and the death of my brother

I am a child of the early 1970’s. I was born to parents who both tried to serve the Lord. My father, however, had grown up in a home with a very ungodly, abusive father, and only came to know God when he was well into his adulthood. Being exposed to the church’s frequent teaching on “Biblical child training” entailing corporal punishment, we children were severely abused physically in his attempts to train us. Along with that went a lot of emotional and verbal abuse. Some of my very earliest memories as a toddler involve much emotional stress and trauma due to this.

My oldest brother had major health issues that severely impacted his quality of life. Due to this, he was often unable to attend school and do things that other kids his age normally would be doing. As a result, by the time he was nearly 14 and I was six, we were very close as siblings – much closer than you would typically find with such an age difference. He was the person in my family who I felt the safest with. He was gentle, kind and caring. And even though he couldn’t stop the abuse I suffered, he would try to comfort me afterwards.

The morning he died, just a few minutes before he was found by my mother, he called my name. And generally, I was very quick to run to him to see what he needed help with because I loved him dearly and was glad to be with him. But that morning, because I was tired and hungry, having just gotten up, I stood stubbornly in the kitchen waiting for my breakfast and did not go. When, a few minutes later, there was the frantic outcry and the fruitless rush to try to revive him, I began to bitterly blame myself. It was my fault he had died, I thought, in my childish mind. If I only had gone to him, he’d still be alive. As a little child, I had no idea that my response was a common one for children, that children typically view themselves as having much more control over life’s circumstances than reality shows they do. And all the adults in my life, wrapped up in their own grief, had no idea that a lie had taken root inside of me. I watched the adults pouring out their grief, and I knew: I couldn’t tell my shameful secret to anyone.  And so I grieved – deeply – but alone with my horrible secret.

Abuse in another form

Within mere months of my brother dying, my world was rocked again when one day, out of the blue, I was sexually molested. I had no training to prepare me to know what to do. In addition to some age-appropriate sex education, my mother had always been very careful to teach me to “be modest and keep your dress down over your knees.” But she had given me no tools whatsoever to equip me to know what to do if my privacy or modesty was violated. When I said I was going to tell, I was told by my abuser, “Oh don’t you dare! You KNOW if you do, your Dad will beat you!”

Well, that was the single most effective threat that I could be given. My Dad had no issue at all about beating us with a belt, paddle, switch, or anything else on our bare skin, “till you can’t sit down comfortably for a week!” That was not an idle threat, and many times I’d be black and blue all over my backside for painful days. Terror sealed my tongue even though I desperately wanted to tell my Mom.

As the sexual abuse continued, I began to show major signs of distress, but no one in my life knew how to interpret them. Among other things, I withdrew from all physical affection. When Mom asked me why I wouldn’t let her hug me any more, I remember fumbling to know what to say, and finally telling her, “I’m too big.” That wasn’t why. It was due to the extreme conflicting emotions inside me from the abuse. But I didn’t dare tell. I didn’t want to be beaten.

I’d been a straight A student, but my grades began to plummet as the confusion and fear inside me grew. My parents, convinced I had suddenly become lazy and careless about my school work, scolded and punished me. I tried desperately to pull my grades up, but I couldn’t most of the time because there was too much going on inside for me to focus well.

During all this, as I was growing older, the shame inside me grew larger and larger. Already convinced I was a terrible person for, as I thought, having caused my brother to die, this new shame from the sexual abuse was more than I could bear. Having a tender heart and a strong desire to be obedient to God and my parents, I was crushed by the load I was being forced to carry. No one clued in to the serious crisis I was in. Even when people outside my family saw issues, they just talked to my parents about them! And since my parents wanted to raise me “right,” I was frequently criticized for concerns people pointed out, such as “not looking cheerful while sitting in church!” And depending on the complaint, more punishments would be frequently meted out to me.

Trying to cope

By the time I was ten, I was consumed with thoughts of suicide. I could not sleep much, and I would lay awake for hours, crying into my pillow. Death looked like a good option – except for two very real problems. What if I wasn’t successful? I suspected the fury poured out on me if I survived would make my life for sure not worth living. On the other hand, what if I was successful, and what IF what I’d been told about how suicide was murder and murders go to hell, was true? I was beyond sure my oldest brother was in heaven, and I didn’t want to miss seeing him again! Sometimes, I would go in the middle of the night to the bathroom and stand, crying, in front of the medicine cabinet. I knew there were enough pills in there to at least make a serious suicide attempt, but fear and uncertainty held me back. Finally, after months of this, I decided suicide was not a risk I could take. I began to try to fight my way back out of that dark hole, and by God’s mercy, I finally succeeded.

However, the fear and shame from the sexual abuse was still very much a constant in my life. No matter how I fought back against my abuser, he had the power and control to keep me in bondage. And the physical, emotional and verbal abuse at home was still ongoing. The more sermons on “child training” that came across the pulpit, the more abuse we experienced. When the preachers would get up and announce that child training was the topic, I would go sick with dread and fear. My stomach would tie up in painful knots for the rest of the service, because I knew the verbal and physical abuse was going to escalate again.

I was so confused. On one hand, it seemed our Dad loved us, and he demonstrated that by working hard to provide for us, making sure we had prompt medical attention when we were sick and so on. But the anger and the physical abuse screamed something very different over and over. And my abuser – he could be kind, fun and friendly too, but then he would molest me, threaten me, and blame me for what he was doing to me.

The first time I told

By the time I was 12, I found myself sitting in the living room of my Mennonite Bishop’s house with him and his wife, crying and haltingly trying to tell them about the emotional and physical abuse in my home. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the sexual abuse. And besides, I had just recently been relieved from that when the abuser moved out of the community. But in tears, I begged to be removed from my home and placed into a better home. I knew my Mom had tried to talk to them at various times about how bad things were in our home and I hoped that would help them take me seriously.

The Bishop listened to me for a few minutes. And then, he laughed. “Oh it’s not that bad!” he assured me, all jolliness and smiles. “And besides, you are old enough to apply the grace of God to your life! And oh, by the way? Don’t you EVER come back and talk to us ever again about anything about your home or your parents without their permission!”

I was crushed. There was no escape. I wept again bitterly into my pillow that night.

The second time I told

By the summer I was 13, I could no longer live with all the confusion and fear inside of me from the sexual abuse, and I again attempted to get help from the Bishop’s wife. The abuser was returning to the community, and so getting help was a real need! I had no good words to describe what had happened to me; my vocabulary did not include them. Also, I was full of confusion about what had happened to me, because the abuser, as abusers are very good at doing, had told me over and over again those six years in various ways that this was my fault. I knew he was the one who had started it, and he was the one who was the aggressor, so that never entirely made sense to me, but there it was.

When I managed to choke out a few sentences to explain, the Bishop’s wife immediately assumed that I was a willing party to the six years of abuse, and she began to proceed from that assumption. The preachers were called in to talk to me, and I was further traumatized at being forced to discuss my deepest, darkest secret of shame immediately after my disclosure to the Bishop’s wife with a group of men who had NO idea how to respond properly. Among other things, I was told that I had to write a letter that would be given to my abuser, apologizing for ‘my part’ in the abuse.

Telling brought me none of the expected help or relief that I had hoped for. I wasn’t given counseling, and no one reported the abuse to the legal authorities.  

Instead, I only suffered more shame, and trauma. And now I experienced my parents’ confusion and hurt as well. They had no tools to deal with this latest revelation, and the preachers provided them with none. I was blamed for the abuse: “I taught you to keep your dress down and you didn’t!” Frozen with fear and shame, I couldn’t even explain that not only had some of the sexual abuse occurred through clothing, but I didn’t know what to do when I wasn’t allowed to keep my dress down. Every time the topic was brought up to me again over the next many years, I couldn’t explain, and the pain from having it brought up again was almost unbearable. Now I really was sure I was vile and damaged goods, and again, Satan wrapped me in more pain and more lies.

By the time I was in my mid-teens, my heart was so full of pain and confusion that I could hardly cope. Consistently, I was guessed to be years older than I was because sorrow weighed me down to the point that I didn’t present as my age. I typically got along well with adults years older than I was, and that brought some stability and support into my life even though I never dared begin to tell my deepest, darkest secrets. By that point, I often had no words left to express what I was feeling inside.

Living in a church culture that taught heavily on “Purity” and emphasized a complete hands off approach to dating, with ALL physical contact to be reserved for marriage, the shame and self hatred I felt only continued to grow. I was sure I was damaged beyond repair and that no one would want to be my friend if they knew! If I had only known at the time that in the seven year time frame I attended the tiny church school, there were at least seven families with children in school with me who were sexually assaulted and abused. Sometimes, multiple children in the same family! But alas, I had no idea then that I was only one of many. (Because the typical offender has many, many victims, even one offender in a community can create much harm. I know now that there were multiple offenders in that community, and the odds are good that there are many more victims than what I am personally aware of.)

The third time I told

Finally realizing that no help was going to be given to me from my parents or the church, in my mid-teens I braved going to the Bishop’s wife once again and asking for a book to help me heal. She told me she had no knowledge of any kind of book like that. I shyly suggested that maybe one should be written. She told me in horror that nothing like that should ever be written because it “might give people ideas!” Staggered, I remember thinking to myself, “But the BIBLE is what gave my abuser the idea – because he made me read the story of Tamar being raped before he molested me for the first time!” Adding further injury to my wounds, she told me that if I was struggling as I described to her, then I was “grieving God because you aren’t accepting His forgiveness for your sins!”

Stunned, I walked away.

Broken as I was, I realized there needed to be teaching. There needed to be answers. And so the desire rose up inside of me to give answers to people who had been sexually molested. I tried to sit down and write a little booklet. But I had many questions and no answers, so I stuffed the project deep away, never dreaming that God had just planted the seeds of concern inside me that would some day bloom into a passion for ministry.

By the grace and mercy of God – and that is the only way I can explain it – my heart, though very damaged, always still knew that I desperately needed God. Even though He’d been given the “credit” for the physical abuse (“We have to do this because God says to!”) and my abuser had involved the Bible AND God in the sexual abuse by insisting at times that I had to pray with him and ask God to forgive me for “my part” in the abuse, I somehow still had glimmers of knowing that God loved me, and that I loved Him. Even though the church had let me down again and again, I still was drawn to God and the love I felt from Him. Even though I was often confused and insecure in my relationship with God, I still longed for His love,  and on some level, believed in it.

Trauma

On the Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire, I score solidly at a 5 (indicating severe trauma). And that is without even a category to score spiritual abuse! According to the ACE rubric, my life so easily could be different than what it is today. But when I was 19, in what I can only describe as a miracle, given how abused and damaged I was, and how at risk I was to make unwise life choices, my life began to change for the better.

My now-husband and I started dating. And in spite of much fear and struggle, I pushed onward with our relationship, begging God over and over not to allow us to marry if He didn’t know it was a good thing for us. When we married, the day I walked out of the church with my husband began a very new life for me. I had married a godly man who has loved me passionately from the bottom of his heart. I had married a man who had no idea what he had signed up for when he promised to love me for better or for worse, but who has lived out that promise. And it’s not been easy for him to walk that journey with me, but he has for over 27 years.

As recently as the summer of 2017, I was sitting on the edge of our bed one morning, putting on my shoes, and he walked up to me, still finishing dressing himself, and leaned down to kiss me while buckling his belt. Even though my husband has never once threatened to hurt me, or lifted a hand against me, I froze. I went cold with horror and sick with fright for a few seconds. His hands on the belt buckle, him leaning over me…it combined to trigger a sudden panic as I flashed back to my childhood. This is the reality that we live with – that even though God has done tremendous healing in my life, we never know when something from my past will strike and will need to be worked through.

Gifts

As a young mother, I desperately wanted to be a good mommy and protect my kids with all my heart, but I knew I was lacking the knowledge to parent my children like I wanted to. I again mustered up enough courage to try one more time to reach out for help. That time, I found good help, thank God. My counselor began the mammoth job of trying to help me unravel the years of lies, abuse, confusion and pain. It was yucky and hard. For the first few months, I wondered what I had done because it seemed like it would have been better off not to even start, the process hurt so much!

I spent a year in counseling and it was the best gift I ever gave myself. My counselor helped me separate truth from lies, helped me learn how to identify my tangled emotions so I could give words to them, and gave me tools I could use to process life correctly and continue to heal. No longer was I completely controlled by shame and fear. He worked with me to help me understand the spiritual abuse that had been piled on top of the other abuse. My relationship with God began to change for the better, and I began to feel like I was growing in many other areas of my life.

Eventually, God led me into ministry to fight the scourge of child abuse. The seeds He had planted in my heart so long ago began to bear fruit that I could see, and I began to see that even though so much wrong had been done against me, God was expertly taking the broken pieces of my heart and life and bringing some order and restoration to them. Even though I’m very thankful for that, it doesn’t mean I’m fully healed, or that the various types of abuse I suffered do not still impact me. They do, and I believe that they likely always will until I am fully healed and restored in heaven. This is one reason I will always fight so hard against child abuse!

My life today

Before I close, I want to make clear: My parents would not have wanted me to spend six years of my life being repeatedly sexually molested and, in fact, have grieved over it. They had no idea that the unstable, abusive environment in our home left me very vulnerable to becoming a sexual abuse victim. My father had no idea that his brutal beatings laid the groundwork for my molester to terrorize and control me. In the last few years, he has allowed God to do an amazing work in his heart, has apologized to me, and we now have a relationship that is far better than anything I had as a child. It is not perfect. Years of abuse cannot be undone overnight, but it fills my heart with joy when he talks to me and I hear clear love in his tone, and gentle words come out of his mouth. My mom has admitted she was naive, and she tries to be supportive of what I am called to do. That means a lot to  me.

Today, I have a relationship with God that means the world to me. I have an incredibly awesome husband who supports me in my calling to ministry, loving wonderful children, and good friends who I can be honest with, who speak truth into my life. I have joy and peace in my heart, and so many other blessings!

These are not things I take for granted, because I’m aware my life could so easily have been different. The older I get, the more I realize that while God truly grieved over the abuse and pain I suffered as a child, He was able to look at it and say, “In spite of everything Satan is throwing at this kid, I am going to help her, bring healing, and set her free! I will use her brokenness to show my power to heal. I will redeem her and what should have completely ruined her will become a strength in her life.” THAT is my God. And I praise Him for that. Because only He could have brought me from my childhood to where I am now. Only He could have rescued me out of the pain and confusion of my childhood and set my feet on a solid path.