Chapter Ten: Confrontation

Thank you to so many of you for sharing with me how my journey has affected your lives and given you hope for healing.  It took me a long time to put my life back together again after God brought the darkness into the light for healing.  But I can honestly say now that all things do work together for His good.  He takes what our enemy meant for evil and uses it for His glory!!  If this is your first time on this site please start at Chapter One and read up.

  I can remember every detail of that fateful day as I drove to the family residence and told the secret I had kept safely hidden since childhood.  It had taken me two more years after finding out about Heather to get to this place of uncovering the secret in my family.  I thought I hadn’t told to protect my Mother.   I cried and pleaded with the Lord to not make me go.  I even stopped along the way and prayed, “God, tell me again why I have to do this.  It is going to hurt her so much and I feel so responsible.”  And in a voice that even to this day seems audible the Lord in His mercy said, “My beautiful daughter, you are the victim.  You did nothing to cause this to happen to you.  You are not responsible for what shedding the light on this sin will do to anyone.  You must shed the light into all the dark areas by exposing your enemy to break the generational curse of incest.  You are doing this to protect the grandchildren you will have one day.  Your grandchildren will be safe and protected from this generational curse because you and your daughter will be walking in the light of the confrontation.”

At His voice I felt strong enough to walk in and change lives forever with what I told my mother.  She had me for lunch that day which reinforced the very thing I was fighting with all my strength, guilt.  I felt guilty that I was about to change her life forever by telling her about my dad.  I felt that it was my fault if I hurt her.   I had lived this way my entire life.  But I finally realized that I didn’t do anything to cause this.  I was the one who was violated and I needed to be responsible enough to have the courage to stop it.  I gathered my strength and just blurted out in the middle of our lunch that I had been molested by my dad.  I told her the whole story including him violating Heather as well.  It was horrible.  It was a dark time in my history.  But, I released myself from the responsibility of protecting anyone with my secret.  I was the victim.   But that is the day I became a “survivor”. 

The backlash was heart breaking for me and there was many a day when I felt I had destroyed my mother’s life by telling her about my Dad.   It broke my heart, even though I wondered how she could not know, and if she suspected, why wasn’t  I important enough to protect.  But I continued to look to the Lord to guide me.  My daughter was watching me in all this and growing in her own realization that she had a mom who genuinely loved her and was as hurt for her as she was.  By this time I had told Heather of my own victimization and explained to her that because I was a victim I had thought I was protecting her, but it wasn’t enough because the secret was still intact.   I went through years without anyone to stand with me so I knew first hand how important it was to validate the victim.  Heather would walk into healing and transparency at a much younger age than I did because she had the freedom to know it wasn’t a secret anymore and she had a mother who would deal with it alongside her.  The power of the sin was gone and God wins!

 As a result of my moving toward my own healing I founded a support group ministry called “Restoration Ministries” that reached women in our locality who were childhood victims.   This ministry was started at the time of my life after I faced my victimization and had found out about Heather.  Our family secret had been exposed by this time.  I trained facilitators to start new groups and was amazed at how many women there were out there like me.  I heard the story of their violations told over and over and watched the Holy Spirit begin His work in countless others who consented to start the journey to healing from the past and moving forward into finding God’s unique purpose for their lives.  I realized many months into this ministry, that it was satisfying to use my anger constructively towards exposing the enemy by telling my story, and by doing so I was stopping it from happening to the children of the women that came.  Hearing my story, the women realized they needed to take the steps to healing to save their children as well as themselves.  It was very sad to learn that 75% of the women we reached had children who had already been molested.  The generational pattern will continue unless we become determined to expose and stop the curse.   But there was great victory!  I watched women walk the trail of healing by becoming strong enough to face what happened to them, expose the enemy in telling the secret and begin new steps towards stopping the victimizations.  The psychologist I had worked with for a season of ministry astounded me when she said that one in every two women she counseled had been molested at some point in their childhood.  This was confirmed by witnessing the countless women coming down for ministry after I gave my testimony at various women’s meetings.  It seemed like every woman in the room stayed for hours afterwards for ministry and to tell someone,  many for the first time in their lives, that yes, they were a victim and needed healing.  The beginning of healing for me was in telling the secret.  When darkness is exposed to light it has to go.  But, unfortunately, this journey of pain and all the ramifications that went with it was just beginning to unravel in my own life.

Coming Chapter:  Life Was Changing!!