“The ax forgets; the tree remembers.” I didn’t know this old African proverb until I was much older, but it has grounded me on many occasions when I’ve been told I’m not remembering things correctly or it wasn’t that bad and I should just get over it. The abuser has the luxury of forgetting, but I still carry the ax’s scars as reminders.

Therapy has been so helpful because it has given me enough time to process and the courage to step back into these situations and say, “Okay, I don't want to be an abuser.”

I want to stop running and instead I'm going to dive back into the trauma and try to help other people. That's what I've been doing for the past year or so. I have been doing advocacy work, because the cycle stops with me.

I really believed that my relationship with God AND the relationship that my children had with God were tied up in my ability to make them love God. There was this weight, this huge fear of eternal damnation for me and for them, that was driving me to make my children sit still and listen.

There was also the weight that if my children didn’t obey me, then they would never obey God. Whatever had to be done, I had to break their spirit so that they would only have an obedient heart for God and not the world.

My ex forced me to quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom and then took away my money and my phone. Abusive churches isolate people for the same reasons that abusers isolate their victims—to make vulnerable people dependent and therefore, compliant. Don't let the church be your one and only.

My parents told us that if we told the truth, social workers would take us away and we would never see our family again and end up in homes where we weren't loved.

I’m never going to forget the first time that friend got beaten while I was playing at his house. I was about ten years old. I immediately learned that this could happen to any one of us. We would be used as an example–just like that boy was–to keep everyone else in line.

Resistance seemed futile. God was a jealous God who would break my spirit and strip me of everything in order to gain my full submission. He was a sadistic, abusive being.