Season 6: Episode 16 - Carya's Story Part 6

In her final story episode, Carya reflects on what it means for God to be with her—not only through rescue, but in the long, quiet ache that follows. Through Scripture, images, and honest wrestling, she shares how comfort can coexist with agony, and how the Word that once felt distant has become both balm and challenge. Explore what healing looks like when it isn’t finished yet—when faith must hold steady between lament and hope.

• Episode 4 
• Episode 6 
• Restoring the Shattered Self and Treating Trauma and Christian Counseling  by Dr. Heather Gingrich
• Graduate Certificate in Trauma Therapy
• The Other Half of Church, Escaping Enemy Mode and The Red Dragon Cast Down  by Jim Wilder
• Self-Regulation for Daily Triggers
• Justice From the Victim’s Perspective by Judith Herman
• Honoring the Truth: A Response to the Backlash by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis
• Serving SRA Survivors: Satanic Ritual Abuse Recovery by Kay Elise Tolman
• On the Threshold of Hope by Diane Langberg

Scripture quotations are from the ESV®Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright© 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by pe

Safe To Hope is one of the resources offered through the ministry of Help[H]er, a 501C3 that provides training and resources for those ministering in one-another care, and advocacy for women in crisis in Christian organizations. Your donations make it possible for Help[H]er to serve as they navigate crises. All donations are tax-deductible.

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We value and respect conversations with all our guests. Opinions, viewpoints, and convictions may differ so we encourage our listeners to practice discernment. As well, guests do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of HelpHer. It is our hope that this podcast is a platform for hearing and learning rather than causing division or strife.

Please note, abuse situations have common patterns of behavior, responses, and environments. Any familiarity construed by the listener is of their own opinion and interpretation. Our podcast does not accuse individuals or organizations.

The podcast is for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional care, diagnosis, or treatment.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 4:13 Learning to Be Held: God’s Comfort in Real Time
• 14:10 The Scriptures That Found Me
• 37:39 When ‘Father’ Feels Unsafe: Finding Safety in God’s Other Names.
• 44:13 Peace in the Eye of the Storm
• 59:08 When Earthly Justice Falls Short
• 1:06:42 Forgiveness Defined: What It Is—and Isn’t.
• 1:14:41 Comfort Redefined: Presence, Not Prescription.
• 1:23:37 Suffering Well—Together: Learning to Live with Triggers
• 1:38:24 Invisible Limp: What Survivors Wish You Knew.
• 1:50:34 Creating Safety in the Church: What Survivors Need Leaders to Know
• 2:06:22 When Help Hurts: Words That Wound Without Meaning To
• 2:15:29 Presence over Politeness: Learning to Engage Suffering.
• 2:25:07 Doctrine Is Not Healing: When Truth Needs Love to Take Root.
• 2:33:13 The Long Work of Healing: Learning to Suffer Well.
• 2:43:36 Bearing the Weight Together: A Call to Prayer
• 2:52:20 Closing

Transcript

Chapter markers:

Learning to Be Held: God’s Comfort in Real Time

The Scriptures That Found Me

When ‘Father’ Feels Unsafe: Finding Safety in God’s Other Names

Peace in the Eye of the Storm

When Earthly Justice Falls Short

Forgiveness Defined: What It Is—and Isn’t

Comfort Redefined: Presence, Not Prescription

Suffering Well—Together: Learning to Live with Triggers

Invisible Limp: What Survivors Wish You Knew

Creating Safety in the Church: What Survivors Need Leaders to Know

When Help Hurts: Words That Wound Without Meaning To

Presence over Politeness: Learning to Engage Suffering

Doctrine Is Not Healing: When Truth Needs Love to Take Root

The Long Work of Healing: Learning to Suffer Well

Bearing the Weight Together: A Call to Prayer

Closing

Introduction and Overview

Ann Maree
Over the past five story episodes, we’ve been listening to our storyteller Carya share experiences of sexual assault, trafficking, ritualistic, satanic and cultish abuses from an early age through her adulthood. In the last story episode, episode 5, Carya shared her rescue and how her friends and their families surrounded her with care spiritually adopted her and walked alongside her as she navigated a new life. Throughout Carya’s experience, God was present. It’s kind of hard to believe, given what we’ve heard and bore witness to. So for this final story, Carya and I will be digging into that relationship, the life giving relationship with our Savior, but also some of the hurt and healing that still remains.

By way of reminder, this particular season of the Safe to Hope podcast is extremely difficult to hear. The 2025 season has been for mature audiences only, we advise listeners to apply an abundance of caution and discretion, and we warn those who might be significantly triggered. For more information about how to even process these stories, please listen to Episode 4 and the upcoming Episode 6 on the Safe to Hope podcast.

I’ve asked our storyteller to describe the details she thinks will be helpful so the audience will understand the terror she endured. While this story is hard to listen to, living it was unbelievably difficult and horrific. We bear witness as we listen. One of our goals throughout this series is to help the audience understand specifically knowing good from evil, but also to have compassion, exhibit empathy, and acquire the ability to minister to those in need, while this type of abuse is less common than others, we listen for two good reasons.

First, it is a reality that we need to be prepared to understand and respond to.

Second, even if we never encounter a similar situation to this storyteller’s experience, it teaches us, in a concentrated way, about dynamics that are at work wherever people commit harm against others.

So for today, we’re going to just have a conversation. Carya and I have been talking about some of these things all along, and even some this morning, as we’re recording, but I just want to hear now Carya’s heart, some of the things that she had to process throughout her circumstances, but also things that she might be continuing too. So I’m just going to ask questions, and we’re just going to have a conversation, and we’ll go from there.

So one of my first questions always Carya is, how did you experience God’s help or comfort, whether it was in the midst of the abuses or after or now, and what did that look like for you?

Learning to Be Held: God’s Comfort in Real Time

Carya
I think the primary way that I experienced God’s comfort and still experience his comfort, just came through learning that he’s with me and that that I can be with him too, right, right in the middle of all my pain. You know, I knew that already as a theological proposition, I could have said, “Well, God is with me. The Bible speaks to that very clearly.” But what does it actually mean for God to be with me when I’m hurting so much? And I had to learn how to actually do that, not just think about that or understand it in my head. In Jesus Is My Captain— which, you know, we aired at the beginning of the season—I talked about how for a while, what I most wanted was for God to have stopped all these things from happening to me, not just be with me in them. But I had to, I had to learn that it does make a difference for him to be with me. So even that, I mean, it’s it’s hard to know exactly, how do you learn how to do that? It was just a slow experience. I throughout my healing process, I knew that God was helping me, but it also felt like because life was still so, so hard. Like, was that proof that I was somehow doing it wrong? Like, “if God’s helping me, but I feel awful, what am I doing wrong? What’s the problem here?” And a really significant moment in sort of my healing process was one day, not long after I’d come to live with the Kuchens. I was just reading in Luke, and it took looking at the passage where Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before going to the cross. I noticed that Jesus himself was helped by God— but still didn’t feel any better. So I’d like to just read this really quickly from Luke 22. Jesus prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. And there appeared to him, an angel from heaven strengthening him, and being an agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” This is probably a really familiar passage to us, but the sequence, I was so startled to notice it for the first time that Jesus prays and asks God for help, and then an angel comes and ministers to him. And then after the angel comes and ministers to him, Jesus is in agony and sweats drops of blood because of how much agony he’s in. So the Son of God was strengthened by God, after which he was agonized and sweating drops of blood. And that just sort of blew my mind and helped me realize God, God is helping me, but that doesn’t mean that I am going to feel great all the time, that my agony is not some sort of an indication that I’m sinning or that I’m doing it wrong. So I’ve just had to come to this point of understanding that God’s presence is it’s helpful in a in a deeper way than just my circumstances immediately changing, so that’s one piece.

And then in terms of what did that actually look like for me? A lot of the ways that I received God’s help was actually kind of through pictures or visual images that he gave me, which surprises me, because I’m really a word person and not a visual person. But the way I’ve often understood God’s heart for me or been comforted by him, is when, when he shows me something, or I see an sort of a picture of something through my imagination that that he’s given. One one of those pictures was something that that occurred a bunch during my first year and a half, when I was struggling so much. I just felt like there was no solid ground anywhere. I didn’t understand what was happening to me as my world was falling apart, and I kept just kind of seeing myself, like this picture of me, like as a little infant, but God holding me in one of those infant carriers where the baby is facing outward, so the baby can’t even, like, hold on to their mother or father’s clothes. They can’t even, like, grip or lean in. They’re just held. So they are being held, but they have no part in that. They’re just there. And it just felt like that, a lot like everything is in complete chaos around me. I’m not even sure that I’m holding on to God, but he is holding on to me. And that picture was really helpful.

Another way that God has kind of used pictures to help me is that one problem that I have, that a lot of survivors have, I think, is it’s hard for me to believe that I really am actually valuable, or that the things that happened to me, mattered, and that may sound surprising, but it’s it’s just easy to feel like, well, because it’s me, it’s not that important. But often God will help me to kind of picture the things that happened to me, almost as though I’m a third person, an outside person, looking at this happening to someone else. And when I can see that, when I can see the little girl that I was, kind of from a third party’s perspective, I suddenly can see it the way that God sees it much better. So when I see that little girl being harmed, I see how vulnerable she is, and how wrong it is that she’s being hurt. And I can feel how much God loves that little girl. And then that helps me understand God’s heart for me in a way that is harder when I’m actually trying to think about it as myself.

And then one other thing I wanted to say about God’s comfort is that although a lot of things have come through pictures, there’s also been some times that I think that God has brought words to my mind that have been really, really comforting and usually in sort of surprising ways. One example is that— I talked last time about the conference that Tara and I went to together. And while we were there, one of the exercises that we were led through was a facilitator asked the room to just spend some time in prayer with the Lord, and to ask the Lord, sort of how he saw us, or what he thought about us on the day that we were born to just, you know, that he would bring something to mind, or bring a scripture passage, or, you know, bring some words or some images. And I just want to say quickly about that, that that the Bible is the only authoritative word from the Lord that we have. And so if we think that God has showed us something and it contradicts what’s in the Bible, then we know that it didn’t actually come from God. But I do think that God can bring words and pictures and ideas to our minds, and we can learn how to receive those. So while we were doing this exercise, and I was doing this praying and asking the Lord about this, just suddenly, this thought went through my mind that the Lord had on the day I was born, he had known everything that my life was going to be full of, and that he’d given me everything that I needed to actually be able to live that life. And that that’s a severe sort of mercy. You know, our human hearts would say, “Lord, I would have much rather that you say that you saw everything that was going to happen to me, and you prevented it.” But we’ve already talked about that, and it was actually a remarkable comfort just to have that sense of God actually knows and and he, he, he gave me what I would need to actually make it through that life. And I think that there’s some evidence of that now.

Ann Maree
Yeah, and I am so glad you’re spelling out what you’re saying as well, like adding to what God gave you as a an image or a vision or something, and reminding our audience, yes, this is what we believe here at helper as well, that God’s word is the authoritative standard. That’s the standard that we use to bump everything up to whether you know it’s true or a lie, and has the final word. I’ve said it before. It’s a framework for interpreting all of life, and doesn’t speak to every specific thing, but it does speak in such a way that we can, with the Holy Spirit, discern, which also the Bible tells us to do, to discern God’s will. Anyway, so I appreciate that you’re kind of spelling that out for us, but also I appreciate that you’re kind of drawing that picture for us too, because in the Scriptures, God says his name is Emmanuel. God with us, and if he’s with us, you know, does that mean we’re carrying our Bible around with us everywhere? Well, a lot of us are, because we have the Bible on our phone. But no, God is with us. And is it okay to close your eyes and just imagine him somewhere in the vicinity of your life. And I think it’s biblical, and so he is always there. And that’s just again, what you’ve said more than just a theoretical, a theological truth, for sure, but it’s also very practical.

The Scriptures That Found Me

Ann Maree
So I was going to say more, but I’m not going to, um, let me just go ahead and ask the next question that I had for you, which is, where now in God’s word, have you found his heart? But specifically for you?

Carya
Yeah, as you know, when I first started thinking about this, I threw in a whole bunch of Bible passages. One of the things that was really sweet about the time that I was struggling so much is that, on the one hand, it was really hard, but on the other hand, I did feel like the Bible just became this book that was speaking directly to me, that the Lord was was speaking to me all the time. So I have a lot of things that I could say, but I just focus on a couple of them. As I have already mentioned today. You know, there was this painful question of, Why didn’t God choose to stop these horrible things from happening to me? But then a related question is okay, maybe we can accept or maybe I can accept that he didn’t choose to stop them from happening at all. But then, why did he wait so long for the rescue to start? I was 34 when that process started. That’s a long time, and there’s a passage in Isaiah 42 that, again when I read it at some point after that rescue started, it just, it just felt like God was literally saying this to me. So I’d like to read that passage. So again, from Isaiah 42 God says to Israel, who’s been, you know, been in captivity, who needs to be rescued? He says, “for a long time, I’ve held my peace. I’ve kept still and restrained myself. Now I will cry out like a woman in labor. I will gasp and pant. I will lay waste mountains and hills and dry up all their vegetation. I will turn the rivers into islands and dry up the pools, and I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths they have not known. I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them.” So in this passage, God doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t explain why he waited, but he does say, “I’ve waited. I waited for a long time. I didn’t say anything for a long time.” But then once he does, it’s explosive. He lays waste mountains and hills. He does everything that is needed to accomplish his purposes. I just found that incredibly helpful, like, I still don’t understand why God chose to do the things that he did in the way that he did, but now, now that he’s moving, or that I can see what he’s doing, it’s going to be a major action.

Other passages that felt like they really spoke directly to me and that still feel like a balm to my spirit, are passages that acknowledge how bad things have been, or how wrong things can be, and how thoroughly God is going to change them. A really good example of this is Isaiah 35 the whole chapter. I will refrain from reading the whole chapter, although it’s worth reading the whole thing, but just a couple things that it says, talks about how the dry land or the desert will be glad that God will come with vengeance and save us, that when God is done with his redeeming work, the ransomed of the Lord, meaning the Lord’s children, will return, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. So it’s both an acknowledgement of how wrong things have been, but then how thoroughly God is going to change them, how right things will be.

And then there are several psalms that read to me like I could have written them, if that doesn’t sound sort of arrogant to say, but they just feel like, oh my gosh, this person that’s writing the Psalm I could have lived my life, and part of that, again, is this unflinching acknowledgement of how wrong and broken things can be. But then there’s just this stubborn faith in God that really resonates. So two of my favorites are Psalm 27 and Psalm 63 and again, I’ll just read a little bit of some of those. So Psalm 27 “though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.” I mean, there are so many people that abuse me, it feels like an army encamped against me, but my heart shall not fear. And then later in the Psalm, the psalmist says, “Cast me not off. Forsake me not O God of my salvation, for my father and my mother have forsaken me.” Yeah, they did, but the Lord will take me in. That’s how it ends. So that I just love that Psalm, the hope that it ends with but the acknowledgement of what’s come before Psalm 63, I love it’s, it’s a pretty long lament. And again, you know what you’ve heard of my story, sort of picture a person with that story then saying some of these things, “save me, oh God, for the waters have come up to my neck, I sink in deep mire where there’s no foothold. I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me.” “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me.” And then there’s this note of hope. “Let not those who hope in you God be put to shame through me, let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, for it is for your sake that I have borne reproach and that dishonor has covered my face.” You know I want... I want those who know my story to honor God, you know, for that to be their reaction. So that’s, that’s a really strong one.

And then a couple others, if you don’t mind if I keep going. Is another Psalm. Psalm 30. This one expresses a hope that for long years I didn’t have, but it was so helpful to have words to sort of try to cling to that hope, even though I didn’t feel the emotion of hope. And so Psalm 30, some of what that says is, “I will extol You, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me, O Lord, my God I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. Lord, you’ve brought up my soul from Sheol. You’ve restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.” And then later in the Psalm, “You have turned for me my morning into dancing. You have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” I don’t know that my mourning has been completely turned to dancing, yet it certainly has been more than before, but I know that it will completely be that way at some point, you know, in the new heavens and the new earth, there will be no more mourning, there will be no more sackcloth, there will only be this joy and dancing and gladness. And the psalm is is helpful to me in reminding me of that and again, naming the evil that came before.

And then a last couple that I’ll say is that I talked quite a bit last time about how incapacitated I was after my rescue process began, how dysfunctional I was, how little I could do, and a lot of the time, the way that felt to me was like, if my life is this sort of messed up and falling apart, what if I’m what if I’m missing something? What if there’s something that God like, some direction that God wants me to go in, and I’m failing to go in that direction, and that’s why things are staying this hard for this long. And there was a lot about my life that looked and felt sort of like, would an outside person see these things and say, like, what are you doing? What you’re just living here on the farm doing nothing like what you’re doing this wrong. And there are some passages that really speak to how both the fact that God will lead his people and that sometimes the way that he leads them is going to look strange or surprising. So one of my favorites is in Isaiah 50. And again, I’m just going to read these two verses the Lord says, “Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his servant? Let him who walks in darkness and has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God.” So I felt like I was walking in the darkness and had no light. God says, just trust in the Lord and rely on his God. But then it goes on to say, “Behold all you who kindle a fire, who equip yourselves with burning torches walk by the light of your fire and by the torches you have kindled. This you shall have from my hand. You shall lie down in torment.” So this is Hebrew poetry. It might be a little bit hard to understand, but what this passage is saying is, if you’re walking in darkness and have no light. Trust in God. Don’t light your own light. Don’t go find a torch for yourself and solve your own problem and assume that you know how to fix this and get out of it. Sometimes God might lead you to light a light. So I’m not saying that like the point is you need to walk in darkness forever, but that that urgency to feel like I’ve got to solve this problem, there’s something wrong here, and I’ve got to figure out how to make it different, rather than just relying on the Lord. How is he leading? He’s still leading me to be here on the farm. Okay, that’s what we’re doing. You know? It’s just really, really helpful.

And then Psalm 143, another one of my absolute favorite Psalms, and that’s just because there’s these lines where the psalmist pleads with God for his leading over and over again. And to me, that’s just a reminder of like, that’s how I can live every day, like God show me. Show me what to do right now, I need to hear from you again in the morning. I need to know your steadfast love. Make me know the way I should go. Teach me to do your will. Oh, I want to do your will, God, but I can ask you to teach me how to do it. I don’t just have to figure out what your will is. So all of these have been helpful, and again, I hope this doesn’t sound like a theological treatise, because the way they’re helpful is that they just feel like, like the Lord wrote them to me, even though I know that he’s so big, he’s writing them to lots of people.

Ann Maree
Yeah, this is great. I have to, I’m taking a note down to make sure we cite your Bible version, because you’ve now used so much scripture that we’re going to have to cite it. This is great. I’ve said all along, God is the star of this story. I mean, he is the shining light of this story. And so for you to share some of the passages that he used in your in your life, in your world, in your in your harm, in your hurt, in your healing, I think those are powerful. And can I just say too... this is so helpful in that we constantly talk about using accurate language in your stories, and I want you to do that. And you and I wrestled a lot through that, through these stories, because of just the absolute rawness sometimes of the words, but they had to be said at times. But these words have to be said too, and these are, you know, God’s reframing words. He’s giving you the language. He’s giving you your voice to be able to speak these words, and then so graciously, even providing, you know, every noun, every verb, every single thing you need to express. So even going back to the way you answered the last question, and envisioning God seeing you as a little girl and giving you all you needed to live that life. You know, some of those things probably didn’t come until later and in these passages, but they’re there, right?

Carya
Oh, yeah. I mean, most of this was not stuff that I was able to think through while the abuse was so oppressive, but, but then later, yeah, it did do a lot of that reframing, yeah,

Ann Maree
Please, let’s highlight that as one is one of the most important things that we could be talking about today, is God will...he will give you your words. He will give you a language to speak, even in these even in these circumstances, you know, even in the most difficult.

Okay, but having said that, you know, we’re not painting a 70s TV show, everything wrapped up in 30 minutes, and it’s all beautiful, because I’m gonna guess it was hard to interact with God and with Scripture. So can you say anything about that?

Carya
Yes, it was. I said a few minutes ago that one of the things that was really sweet during that time that that I was struggling so much was how much Scripture spoke to me. But paradoxically, it’s also true. It was true then, and it’s still true now, that that some of the kinds of things that we as Christians tend to want to go to to either strengthen our relationship with God or help us feel encouraged things like reading Scripture or praying or trying to just spend time with the Lord, I often feel pretty awful while I’m doing that. It’s like there’s the act of trying to do those things is essentially a trigger, and it pulls up not just emotions, but even a physical reaction. And so I really love God’s Word, and I love studying it and digging into it, but I also often feel sick to my stomach while I’m doing that, and and just sort of, like, have this this internal feeling that’s like, I don’t know, just sort of this pain that permeates that. And so that is a challenge and something that’s still, I think, kind of a heartache that something that is simultaneously, excuse me, something that is life giving, is also simultaneously painful, and I wish that those could become separated.

The other kind of related thing is that I don’t know how much of this is just my personality and how much of it is a result of my abuse, but I’m not able, even when I’m just completely alone, I’m not able to really interact with God with complete abandon. Like it’s hard for me to to express truly what I’m thinking or feeling or to worship in a way that just feels like I can just think about and focus on God and sort of forget myself. I I’m very hyper vigilant whenever I’m doing anything that’s kind of consciously or explicitly related to God, and it just like it feels like I’m not free, like I’m always sort of keeping my eye out for something bad that could happen. And so, you know, that’s been a painful thing.

I think it’s also just another thing that’s maybe challenging about Scripture. I think this is it’s a good thing, but it’s a challenging thing is that there’s a lot of stories and a lot of references in Scripture to things that are somewhat like what I experienced. There’s just lots of awful stories about abuse and wrong behaviors and sorceries and things like that. And I find that really helpful, that Scripture actually is talking about this stuff clearly. And once your eyes are opened to it, it’s everywhere. But at the same time, it means that Scripture is sort of full of these little landmines for me where, you know, I’m reading about some Old Testament law, and it’s not just like a theoretical concept, like, “Don’t do like the nations did, and, you know, sacrifice their children to other gods,” like that, that’s part of my story, in a way, and then that makes that painful to read. And so I think it’s, it’s helpful, but it does make reading Scripture a challenge.

Ann Maree
Maybe, can you share some of the very practical things you know, not just, I guess, where Scripture might be hard, or relating with God would be hard, but what does that look like in your world?

Carya
Yeah, there’s a couple different things, I think I can say there. One is, I’ll start with something that’s kind of more on the encouraging end, I think. So for a long time after, after I started dealing with this stuff, kind of after my rescue started, I could not pray out loud, whether it was alone or with other people. And I don’t know that might sound weird or surprising, but there was something about the act of literally praying out loud that functioned as a huge trigger. And it wasn’t just like, “oh, it’s hard.” I mean, it would, it would send me into, sort of into a panic. I would start crying if I tried to do it, I felt super scared. And so for years and years and years, I couldn’t participate in, for example, praying for people that I cared about out loud with them. You know, my family, my adopted family, gets together every year at Christmas, and the adults have a time of praying together, and I couldn’t do it. I could be there with them, and I could, you know, mentally pray, but I couldn’t do it out loud, and that was just really painful and frustrating to feel like I can’t participate in this really kind of fundamental aspect of Christian life. But that has changed. I am now able to do that, and I don’t know why it changed, other than just over time. God helps that trigger become less of a trigger. It can still happen a little bit at times, but, you know, but that’s something that’s changed. So to me, that’s a hopeful note, that that things can continue to change.

But then there are some things that are just still really hard. I definitely struggle with my daily time with the Lord. You know, some people call it quiet time, or devotions or whatever, and it is something that I do, but just engaging in that it sort of feels like a battle, like I’m battling through how I feel inside, how my parts might be feeling, whether I’m triggered, whether I should read this passage that’s in front of me like we referred in an earlier episode to that story in Judges 19, where the concubine is gang raped and dies from it. And every time I get there, I sort of have to do this, like, internal kind of preparation, like, “Am I ready for this? Can I read this? Should I just skip it?” You know, all of that. And then what am I doing if I do read it? Like, am I actually engaging with the Lord on it? Or am I just sort of trying to survive it? So all of those things are, are definitely a challenge. And then I think probably the biggest, again, I’ll say heartache for me, is that church itself, sort of everything about church, is still pretty hard for me. It’s not hard in the way that it used to be hard. It’s not as hard. I love my church, and I love the people at my church, but it’s everything about it is triggering. I have to sit in the back still because I get all freaked out if there’s people behind me and I just end up either really, kind of raw and ragged emotionally or really shut down. And so for me, most of what happens during a worship service feels like me just going through the motions, and it essentially doesn’t feel all that meaningful. And I know that the purpose of church is not for me to have some meaningful emotional experience. It’s for me to go and worship God and be with God’s people. And so I think that there is great value and great meaning in it, but it’s painful that I don’t experience it that way, that I feel like I’m just just kind of going through the motions that I can’t really engage. I wish that my body and heart and spirit could learn what my head knows, which is that church is safe and it’s good to be here, but most of the rest of me doesn’t feel that way, and that’s painful.

Ann Maree
As you’re talking though, I have to kind of even wonder. I know there’s plenty of people in the church who could be also feeling similar things, but perhaps, put on a face, put on some nice clothing, kind of ignore that where you’re really, you’re entering into that space, you know, God’s community, genuinely, you’re walking in just as I am, right? And that you know not feeling good is not, you know, we don’t pursue ways not to feel good, especially in church. But there’s something to just that realness, and if others were that way too, there would be a sort of a comfort in itself.

When ‘Father’ Feels Unsafe: Finding Safety in God’s Other Names.

Ann Maree
Yeah, so turning a little bit like closer in on that question about your relationship with God, and you know, could be hard for some also of our audience, to hear just if they’ve had an awful relationship with their father in some way, because God refers to himself so frequently as our Father in the Scriptures. And you know, that’s the picture we have, the word picture that we have most the time. So we we’ve seen this question kind of floating around in lay counseling, biblical counseling, um atmosphere. And I just wonder if you could address this from your experience, and that being, what do you with the God as your Father concept?

Carya
Yeah, that’s a great question. For me at this point, where I am right now, is most of the time I’m okay with that again, but, but it was a bit of a journey. You know, I think definitely by God’s grace, I I entered into my, you know, my rescue process, my time where everything really fell apart. I entered into that time with pretty strong theology already, and I think that that served me well in a lot of ways. And I also have a really rational, sort of default way of thinking. I tend to separate, you know, my emotions from my rational thinking quite readily, and so I understood all along that it was true that God was father, and that the way that my father was was a perversion of what fathers are supposed to be, and that God being a father was a good thing. So like I understood that intellectually, that that was true, but just the idea of a father, I mean, in my experience, a father is a rapist, and all these other things that my father was. And so there was a period of time where it was just not helpful for me to essentially lean into that description or understanding of God. So it wasn’t that I was rejecting it, or, I don’t know, like refusing to acknowledge that that was a real aspect of understanding who God was. But I, I chose not to dwell on it. I wouldn’t address him that way very much. In my prayers, I wouldn’t think of it that way, and it just sort of felt like I needed to cut myself some slack, for maybe lack of a better way of saying it and and then it’s on a similar note, one of the one of the aspects of my abuse was that my abusers told me that Jesus would want to do the things to me that they were doing. Sometimes, when I was a littler kid, they would pretend that Jesus was actually there doing it, you know, like one of them would dress up like Jesus. Not that we know what Jesus actually looks like, but we have all these kind of cultural pictures of a guy with long hair and white robes, you know, so someone would dress like that and and then abuse me and so, especially given the fact that I have these dissociated parts, there was, sorry, these dissociated parts who have kind of these different experiences of my abuse and of these things for a very, very long time. And this was at my counselors leading I would tend to not address Jesus by name either. I would use the phrase that we use was Good Shepherd a lot and and so there were a period of years there were both Father and Jesus language was kind of rarely a part of my own lexicon. Again, not because I was rejecting those kind of theologically, but it felt like it wouldn’t be helpful to press in on them that there was sort of nothing to be gained. And then over time, as I began to really learn and my parts began to learn to trust Jesus and to understand with my whole being that my experience of a father is not the real definition of what a father is. I’ve come to a place where, where I can now use those terms and be glad to use them, but there still sometimes can be a little bit triggering, and when that happens, I still make the same choice to just kind of leave it alone for a little while and then let it come back. So I feel like this is one of those areas where it’s not helpful to say to a victim or a survivor or someone who’s struggling with that kind of stuff, like, God is a father, and he’s a good father, and this is what it means. And so you just have to, like, talk to him as father. That’s not helpful. Let them they need time. Use passages that describe what God is like, but don’t, don’t talk, don’t use the word Father, if that’s gonna just send them into a tailspin. I don’t see any reason to push on that, because God will change it over time.

Ann Maree
And that’s helpful. Thank you for bringing up calling him Good Shepherd. He also uses multiple other terms for himself, and also draws other pictures of of himself. Even you just read in the Isaiah 42 passage, he said, “I’m like a woman in labor.” And, I mean, you know, again, there’s some language directly for you as well. He experienced what you experienced. So good. Thank you for giving us an insider perspective, if you will. And what does that look like. How does that feel?

Peace in the Eye of the Storm

Ann Maree
Kind of on that same note, how does it feel, we have used the word hard. I can’t tell you how many times in our podcast. Of course, we said it every introduction and so yes, and I think anybody listening would have said, “Oh my goodness. How hard. How hard was that?” So help us contrast that? Where or how did you find peace?

Carya
My best answer to that is that it hasn’t been in my circumstances that that for me, peace doesn’t look like, and it hasn’t usually looked like, and it still doesn’t really look like or feel like, the absence of a storm. In fact, there’s several different points in my life that I can point to where there’s this particular moment where I sensed a peace from God, just palpably, so strongly. And each one of those that I can point to was literally right smack in the middle of what felt like a pretty big storm. So it’s, I mean, maybe this is a tired analogy, but it really did feel like standing in the eye of a storm, like I’m right there and the winds are raging and there’s chaos all around me, and I’m totally overwhelmed, but somehow there’s this sense of peace. And I think that when I’ve had that, that most strong sense of peace, it’s come with just this clarity of knowing that I’m doing what God wants me to be doing, that, you know, so I think for me that what peace, where I find peace, and what it looks like is in knowing that I’m listening to him and following him, and you know, in his will. And when that’s true, that’s peace for me. And again, I’m concerned that that sounds like a really good theological answer, and I don’t mean it that way at all. I mean literally, how it felt that when I knew so an example, I’ll give a concrete example from the story that I told last time when Lynn and Joy told me that they wanted me to that well, that Lynn had bought me a plane ticket and was going to send me away from where I was still being abused in that immediate aftermath, all I could really see or latch onto was she was telling me I had to leave the only two people in the world that I trusted, and that felt awful. And so it felt like this major turmoil to me, and that’s when I started throwing snowballs and sort of being all frustrated and just literally, right then I just realized, I don’t know how I God just did this for me somehow. I just realized this is what the Lord has and that. And I just felt this incredible peace. But it didn’t feel good. It wasn’t like, “oh, okay, I’m now happy about this plan.” It just felt like, “Okay, this is right, and this is what God is doing, and therefore I can rest in it, even if it still feels like a storm, even if my emotions are still all over the place.” And I think that part of the reason that that’s what peace feels like, or looks like to me is that when I’m concerned that I’m outside of his will, it’s like if, if I’m not following him, if I’m not, you know, if I’m not where he wants me to be, then it just feels like nothing is okay, like everything is gonna fall completely apart instead of being in the eye of the storm, I’m out actually in it, being crushed by it.

I’ll give another example. And this is another one of those times where God brought words to my mind. And you know, those who maybe are a little bit uncomfortable with that idea, I would just reiterate that. You know, I don’t mean like God spoke to me and therefore I could go out and, you know, declare the word of the Lord. I just simply meant that God brought something to mind that I believe was from him, as opposed to just my own crazy mind. So when I was living with the Kuchens, I just felt like I was going crazy so much and especially, there were certain times when the kinds of things that I was dealing with were so hard and crazy and difficult and confusing that I was just convinced that like that, I was somehow like that I’d lost my mind. I was just off the ranch entirely, and there was this one particular period where that was happening, and I kept over the course of several days, maybe even a week, I just felt desperate. I felt desperately sure that I was just going in the totally wrong direction. And I kept praying and pleading with God, like, please put me on the right path and, and if I’m on the wrong path, you know, please correct me. And if you need to, you know, show up as an angel of the Lord in the path and cause the donkey that I’m sitting on to run me into the wall and crush my foot, which is what happened with Balaam and his donkey, you know, if that’s what it takes, if you have to break my leg to snap me out of whatever this wrong thing is that I’m in, do it. Please. God, do it. And so then one day, you know, all that was happening again, and I was going outside, because I was, I think, I was heading down to the barn to hit the punching bag, and I was saying that again, and just all of a sudden, these words came to my mind, and it was almost with this kind of laughing expression, like you, “you keep asking that, like you don’t think I would do that for you,” you know, like that God was sort of showing me or saying to me like “you’re acting like you don’t think that I would actually want you to be on the right path.” And it was that same thing, just the sense of of peace came over me. It didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t make me not need to go down to the barn and at the punching bag, like the storm was still there. But there was just this realization like, “oh okay, God’s still in control here. It’s gonna be okay.” Yeah, so that was a little bit longer of an answer than I thought it would be. That’s one big piece.

And then I The other big way that I find peace is just in knowing how the story ends, and knowing that God is just and and again. Maybe this is going to be the theme of this episode. I don’t mean this as a as a sort of abstract point, but as just a real sense of peace Revelation, the book of Revelation, has become my favorite book in the Bible, and the reason is not because I’m interested in all like figuring out the end times and what does this symbolism mean and all that stuff. It’s not about that at all. It’s that what Revelation describes is a world that is actually evil and fighting against him, and then it describes what he’s going to do about it. And we don’t know specifically how those things translate into you know? So what does it mean when he says that he’s going to trample out the blood from The Grapes of Wrath, and that it’s going to rise up. The blood is going to rise up as high as a horse’s bridle and be spread for 185 miles in all directions. That’s a lot of blood. Like we don’t know what that actually means, and I’m not concerned about what it actually means or literally means. But what I do know it means is that God takes evil seriously, and he is going to do something about it, and that brings me a lot of peace.

And so another quick passage that I’d like to just say is from the second to last chapter in Revelation, where it says, it talks about how God will dwell with people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall the shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And then he said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” That’s probably one of my single favorite lines, most favorite lines in all of Scripture that he is making all things new. And then he goes on to talk about his judgment. So again, that point of that that he’s not only going to make things right, but he’s going to deal with what is wrong. And then I would just like to comment on that. There’s a line from one of the Lord of the Rings books. I believe it’s in the last one The Return of the King. And this line is, I’ve heard it quoted more and more recently, and I think it’s the title of a book that someone wrote recently that’s come out. And it’s that everything sad is coming untrue. And this is something, for those of you who are Lord of the Rings nerds. It’s something that Sam says to Frodo in the last book is like, is everything sad at coming untrue? And I love Tolkien, and I love those books, and I have all respect for him, but I disagree with that way of putting it. I don’t think it’s that everything sad is going to come untrue, but that everything sad is going to come undone. So it’s not like God is going to somehow make it untrue that the things that happened to me happened, or untrue that his son had to die. I mean, Jesus is going to have scars in heaven, but the effect of all those things is going to be utterly undone, and he will make things new. And that gives me a lot of peace.

Ann Maree
Beautiful. Even though I never read the Lord of the Rings, I feel like I’m missing something.

Carya
I do highly recommend. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Yeah.

Ann Maree
Okay, maybe.

So one of the themes and you’ve brought up, maybe this is the theme of our of this episode, but I’m thinking of the theme overall, and what I heard in in your voice, if you will, when I first heard Jesus is My Captain. Is this picture that you paint of life that we tend to like to unpaint in our own little worlds of of the suffering and the hurt and the harm and the things that happen and the surprise when they do when they do happen. And you know, I think I read in the beginning and to write a couple times, and being surprised when evil happens. And you know, it’s just this, like undoing of the circumstances. And you paint, obviously, the picture of awful, evil circumstances. But what you do for us is you also then paint that. Sure of God that I think we like to also undo and unpaint. You know that, yes, he can be a peaceful God who brings us peace, but not make you feel better, and yes, he can be present with you but not change your circumstances. And so, I mean, just even thinking about that and now saying it just chokes me up, because I don’t, I don’t necessarily live that way and and so what you’re bringing to us is just so rich and I appreciate.

Carya
Can I jump in just on that point? I mean, I think, I think it’s worth inserting just to say that I don’t think it’s that God doesn’t want to change our circumstances or doesn’t care about them, but that the world is just a far more complex place. And one thing that I heard someone say at one point that I found extremely helpful, and that what you were saying just reminded me of, is that we know that joy is something that we’re supposed to somehow be able to have in all circumstances, that there’s this joy that comes from the Lord that’s not based on our circumstances. But what does joy actually look like when our circumstances are awful? And so here’s this word picture that someone else, that I heard someone else paint, which is, I think, that they were talking about one of the stories in the New Testament in the gospels, when the disciples are in the boat with Jesus and the storm comes, and it’s just so easy for us to forget what that really meant. So they were terrified, crying out to him for help. It means that they probably thought that they were going to at least shipwreck, maybe die. This is, this is a very big problem. It’s not just like, “oh, there’s lightning outside, and it’s kind of making me scared.” And so there’s but then, so they talked to Jesus. So the idea is, sort of put yourself in that picture, the storm is raging, but then you look over and there’s Jesus right there. And it doesn’t mean that the storm has stopped. I mean, later in the story, the storm does stop, but where I’m talking about before that. So Jesus is there, the storm hasn’t stopped. Everything is still just as hard. But then, like when I see him, it’s this feeling of like, “Oh, I am so glad that you’re here, so glad that you’re here, given what here is.” And I think that that is a really interesting and compelling way to think about joy, like there’s a gladness there, but it’s not a gladness of like, and “everything is okay now,” but it’s the gladness of “wow, given that this is the way it is, I wouldn’t want to be here without you Jesus.”

Ann Maree
Yeah, thank you for clarifying we don’t welcome or wish for suffering or revel in it. But yeah, I think that’s that’s a helpful picture. And I was just thinking too of when we’re recording this, and I think this week of Advent is joy. And I’m all about the Bible Project. I’ve talked to Carya about it before, and was listening to it this morning, but I won’t go into it, because I won’t do it justice. But I do highly recommend that you listen to the Bible Project on joy after now just hearing Carya. Thank you for everything that you’re doing, including clarifying that.

When Earthly Justice Falls Short

Ann Maree
But I think this is a little bit of a twist now too. I think our audience, I know some of them have been asking this, and they want to know, what justice has there been for your perpetrators, or has there been justice? And I think we’re going to, we’re going to follow that one up with the deep, heavy question about forgiveness. But just start with the first one. Has there been any justice?

Carya
Definitely, the simple answer is no, there hasn’t been. And there’s, there’s maybe a lot that could be said about that. I mean, the perpetrators that I know of, I feel very free to say they deserve to spend the rest of their lives in jail. That would be a piece of earthly justice, but I have not chosen to pursue that, and there’s there’s a bunch of reasons for that. What they fundamentally boil down to is a lot about how our legal system works and what sorts of evidence is needed to actually bring a conviction. One thing that people. May not know, and that, I think, is just a helpful point to make, is that I’m going to sound like a lawyer here, and I’m very much not a lawyer, but my understanding is that, broadly speaking, there’s two different components to the legal system. There’s criminal justice and there’s civil justice, or there’s criminal courts and civil courts. So it’s in a criminal court that you can be sentenced to jail, to serve time in prison or or more severe penalties, whereas civil courts are where you can sue people. And so the only way to have someone end up in jail is to have a criminal charge brought against them, and individual people are not able to bring criminal charges. It is the state, the government, that brings a criminal charge. Always it’s not an individual person. So I can’t go to the police and demand that they charge my father with a crime. I could go to the police and, you know, make a report, bring an accusation, and then they would conduct an investigation, and only if they feel like they have found sufficient evidence would they take it to court. So I think that’s just a helpful reality for people to realize that, like victims of any crime, it’s not actually up to the victim to determine whether or not a court, or, excuse me, a charge can be made. And I’ll leave it for others to go into more detail about that if that’s needed. But the point I’m just driving at is that the kinds of evidence that would be necessary to actually get a conviction, much less or no, sorry, the kinds of evidence that would be needed to convince a government to bring charges, much less actually get a conviction. It’s just evidence that I don’t have. I don’t have a hospital report. I didn’t ever go and get a rape kit done. So I don’t have any kind of forensic evidence. There are lots of eyewitnesses, but they’re all perpetrators. So, so there’s that part of the problem, and there’s statute of limitations related stuff. So there’s, I think, the difficulty of actually achieving earthly justice is just incredibly high. And I’ve talked to some people who are experts in this, and that was the counsel that I was given as well that not that I shouldn’t do it, but that I should know how difficult it would be to actually get anything that did feel like any kind of justice, and that not only would that be incredibly difficult, but that it would come at enormous financial but also emotional costs. So to make a long story short, I think that if I pursued earthly justice, it’s almost certain that there wouldn’t be any and that I would pay an enormous emotional and mental and financial cost for that, and basically I would be way worse off at the end of it, and have the added anguish of nobody’s actually in jail. And so that’s why I have not pursued it, at least at this point, I’m open, if I sense God leading me to something else, I would certainly want to obey.

Ann Maree
I don’t care that you sound like a lawyer. That was really helpful. You also just explained the NAPARC church, ecclesiastical court system, so very well that was, yeah, I’m sorry I’m making light of it, but I thought that was incredibly helpful.

I wanted to follow that up, and I think you did kind of answer this part of it. How do you think about that? Is there anything else you want to add?

Carya
Yeah, I think I’m a little bit leery of saying this, because I don’t want it to sound prescriptive, like this is how other people should think or feel. So this is only a reflection on how I think and feel. There’s a way in which the harm that I experienced and the amount of evil that my perpetrators did, it’s so high that there is no amount of earthly justice that would ever even be commensurate with that, and in a weird way that I think helps me feel a little bit less worked up about it, like, “yes, my father should spend the rest of his life in jail, at a minimum” but if he did, what is that actually going to get me? I mean, I don’t mean that it shouldn’t be done. So I’m not saying like there’s no point in earthly justice, but not sure what that would change for me, and it would just pale in comparison to what happened. And so it sort of feels like the justice, the only justice that’s really going to matter is the justiment, the, excuse me, the justice that comes at the Judgment Day. I think there’s a danger in saying that, because Christians can very easily say like, “Oh, don’t worry, God will deal with it on Judgment Day, and therefore we shouldn’t deal with it on Earth.”  And I disagree with that profoundly. I’m just reflecting on my own kind of personal how I feel about the fact that my father’s not going to spend the rest of his life in jail. And I think the way I feel about it is, “well, even if he did that, just that wouldn’t even begin to touch what he did.”

Ann Maree
Thank you for your honesty and yeah, also, it is not prescriptive. Everybody lands differently, so keep that in mind as you’re hearing.

Forgiveness Defined: What It Is—and Isn’t.

Ann Maree
We need to tackle the big question, because this is our audience. Again. We are lay counselors, pastoral leaders, biblical counselors, and the forgiveness question is, well, sometimes, and I would say oftentimes, presented not as a question, but as a command, which you know it is. And so Carya and I kind of worked through this a little before the recording today, just to see where we both stand. And I’m going to let her give a really good example of how she thinks about forgiveness and as it’s related, especially to her perpetrators.

Carya
There’s a couple of different things I’ll say. I’ll start off with this analogy that I actually heard from a recorded talk that Jim Wilder gave at some point. I can’t remember what the context was for the talk or even why I had access to it, but I’d heard this years ago, so I know that Jim Wilder was on earlier in the season, and I’ve found this to be really helpful. So he was talking about how he sometimes helps victims. Think about the whole big, complicated forgiveness question, and the analogy that he used is that, like when I when I bring my evidence, let’s say when I talk about what happened to me, that the role that that I should occupy is in a in a courtroom sort of context, the role that I should occupy is that of the witness. So I am bearing witness to what I saw and experienced. So I am saying this is what happened to me, and I’m telling that to the court, but then in an actual courtroom, the witness isn’t the one that determines what happens to the guilty party, so the witness doesn’t determine who’s guilty, nor what happens to the one who is guilty. It’s the judge who makes that determination. And so in this analogy, I’m the witness, but God is the one who’s the judge.

And so the idea is, the part that I have to play is to say to God, these are the things that happened to me. Now you God do with them what needs to be done. You figure out who’s guilty and who has to pay, and what they have to pay, and how all of that works. And I found that really helpful, because it means that I don’t have the responsibility that the judge has. We tend to want the to be the judge, or to think that we want to be the judge, but it’s actually a really difficult role, and one that only God has the knowledge and the wisdom and the goodness and the everything to do rightly and so, like I might look at my father and feel like I know what he deserves, but I don’t. Only God does. All I can really do is say to God, this is what happened. Not that God doesn’t know what happened, but my pardon it is to say to God, this is what happened. Now you take care of it. And as I said in an earlier episode, if at some point my father does actually repent and trust in Jesus, then God will have taken care of that guilt through his Son. If my dad doesn’t do that, then my dad will bear that guilt. So that’s the analogy.

And then to go maybe a slightly higher level, but with a caveat of, I’m not a lawyer, I’m also not a theologian, but the way that I think about and understand forgiveness is that forgiveness is always something that’s extended if it’s if and when it’s been asked for an accompanied by repentance, and so I don’t think that in that sort of fundamental sense, that I can forgive my father because he has not asked for that or or repented, but I can put myself in a position where I am not demanding that he pay me back for what he did. And I don’t think that that is a posture. I don’t think that what that what that means is that I’ve forgiven him. It just means that I’ve said I’m not going to sit here and demand that. I’m not saying there is no debt to be paid. I’m just saying to God the Judge, you figure this out. You figure out how to handle this debt. Who pays it, who it’s owed to, all of those things. And then I also think, so sorry, I’ll just pause there to say there’s a lot a lot, lot more that could be said about all that, but that’s kind of how I think about the issue of basic forgiveness. And I’m talking about my dad, but we could insert any of my perpetrators, but then I also would just want to say that where I land, and I think it’s utterly biblical, is that forgiveness and reconciliation aren’t the same thing. So even if one of my perpetrators did repent and ask for forgiveness, and I was able to extend that, that doesn’t mean now we have to be in relationship again. That’s a whole separate set of questions and process and all these other things. So it makes me crazy when I hear stories about victims being told, not only do you have to just immediately forgive your perpetrator, even though they haven’t actually repented or asked for it, but then you need to, like, go back and spend time with them. I mean, makes me want to tear my hair out.

Ann Maree
And given what we know about child predators, even when they do ask for forgiveness and genuinely repent, that doesn’t mean that their temptation goes away. So good points in context, in the context of your story, and I would, and I would echo everything Carya just said, because we here at Help[H]er, often get asked our position on forgiveness, because we we we work a lot, particularly with victims and survivors, and so that you just heard our position, forgiveness can’t be offered to someone who does not ask for it, and in fact, can even be dangerous to just walk up to somebody and say, I forgive. You could actually poke a bear. It’s a posture. I think that witness posture was a really helpful, again, word picture, and ultimately, that I think best vengeance is that a perpetrator would turn from his evil ways and return to the Lord. And so that is another posture we sit in, is we want to see that happen and leaving it to the Judge.

Yes, again, and then also again, the reconciliation we we agree with all those points. So very helpful for a victim of any any type of crisis or abuse to understand biblical forgiveness, or understand forgiveness biblically, I guess.

Comfort Redefined: Presence, Not Prescription.

Ann Maree
Well, we’ve spoken a lot about you, and the processing of finding peace, God giving you the language. And I think it would be easy to say that that kind of describes what Paul says, is being comforted, right? And then in the Scriptures, he also talks about taking that comfort and comforting others, which I think you’re doing broadly right now with our our audience.

But is there, I mean, does did you have anybody like just pop into your path ever that you could have given comfort to with the comfort that you’ve been given.

Carya
Yeah, the passages in 1 Corinthians, I think that you’re referring to or, or is it second? Ah, maybe a 2 Corinthians, First Chapter, 2 Corinthians, anyway, wherever it is, I love that passage. Yeah, I I’d like to think about this question from a few different angles. So there’s people who have had an experience essentially similar to mine. And you know, have I been able to comfort people in that circumstance? And the answer is essentially no or not yet. And there’s a couple of reasons for that I think are worth highlighting.

So there are people that I know from my own history who have a similar experience to mine. You know, my cousins, siblings, people in the intentional community in which I grew up. And part of the way this works is that, since I don’t know where those people are, I mean, I literally don’t know where they all are geographically, but I also don’t know where any of them are on their own process of wanting to get out or trying to get out, or not being able to do that or anything. And so if I were to try to contact them, it could be dangerous for them, because if they actually are wanting to get out and then I’m contacting them, it’s pretty likely that would be known by the perpetrators, and then those people would be further harmed. So it wouldn’t be safe for them, for me to reach out to them. It also wouldn’t be safe for me, because, as I described in my own story, there was a time when we weren’t even sure that I would like I that I not just that we weren’t sure. There was a time where parts of me would report back to my abusers things that I was doing that my abusers didn’t like and so that could be true of others. So it could be that there’s someone that I might be in contact with, and even if they are wanting to get out, if they’re still trapped, not only could it be dangerous to them, but they could put me in danger in some way. And so I have not, at this point, made any efforts to be in communication with anyone that I have, that I used to know from all of this. I what I hope is that if the Lord does start the process of breaking any of them free, that they would, that they would seek me out, and I would love to be able to help.

And then in a broader sense of other people who perhaps have had a similar experience— as I described before, this stuff is really deeply and carefully hidden, and so I don’t know that there’s someone else in my orbit that has had this experience, but it could be, and I just don’t know it, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m only, I’m really only fairly recently, at a point where I probably could offer some sort of help. So it’ll be interesting to see what God does. But so the first part of others who have had, you know, a very similar experience. I haven’t had anyone come in my path that I know of yet.

But then if I broaden this out and think about other abuse survivors, whether sexual abuse or other kinds of abuse, God has put quite a few people in my path who I’ve been able to walk alongside to one extent or another. I said last time that I taught for a while when I first moved and during my during one of the years that I taught one of my students, I learned from her parents that she had been raped several years prior, and was still very much actively dealing with a lot of the trauma of that. And I was just like, because of my own experience, I was very intuitively able to kind of know what sorts of things that we would be doing in class could be triggering for her or challenging for her to navigate. And so I was able to help her with that, give her parents heads up. So so there was that there have been some other abuse survivors that I’ve either helped to tell their own story in a way, or that I’ve, you know, just sort of walked alongside through some difficult circumstances. And I’ve been told by some that even just hearing bits of my story has been helpful to them, and that is something that not that last part about my story being helpful, but just being able to offer comfort, or to offer help to other abuse survivors, is something that I feel pretty passionate about, like I want that to be a part of what happens in my life.

And then the last angle that I would look at this question from is just, I think that probably the biggest thing that I see is that I’ve become attuned to other sufferers in a way that I wasn’t before. So whether it’s suffering from abuse or just suffering from other things in life that are really hard, I know a lot about suffering now, and God has put a lot of people in my life who are suffering. Sometimes it’s just a one off conversation, sometimes it’s a much longer thing. But I think that that attunement that I have, I just have a really high sensitivity to it, and I have very little patience for or interest in having everybody try to pretend that everything’s okay all the time. So the way that I just kind of am in the world, the way that I function or operate in my church community, the way that I engage, has been really shaped by— to use the framework that you that you used in your question— it’s been really shaped by the comfort that I have received in learning that God is with me in difficult circumstances, and learning that he does actually want us to come to him with our suffering. I think that I tend to sort of operate in a way that invites others to do that too, hopefully not in a socially awkward way. It’s not like I’m going up to people who I don’t know and saying, “Hey, you want to tell me about your suffering,” but it’s rather trying to demonstrate and and invite a realness that I think can be lacking, especially in Christian communities. So I hope that makes sense. It’s a little attenuated, but it feels to me like it’s a significant outflow of what I’ve received from the Lord.

Ann Maree
I think it answers really well. It helps us think outside the box too, for comfort. Like, yeah, I might never run into somebody who had the exact same suffering that I’ve had, but how can I use the comfort that I’ve been given in their circumstance? And I think that’s also a very stretching thing for us to do as people-helpers, that we get outside of our “Oh, you, you know, you’d give them this verse, and you tell them how this helped you,” and, you know, whatever formula you came up with, and try to apply it in different ways.

Suffering Well—Together: Learning to Live with Triggers

Carya
Yeah, if I could just say another thing, I thought I might talk about this later, but it feels like it fits right here, just that on that suffering point, I have a theory that one of the things that makes it really hard for us to help each other is that we don’t know how to suffer well, and we don’t know how to suffer with others. And I. Think that I think there’s several different things that are sort of at work in that. But I think one thing is that when we see a person who is suffering, if it’s someone especially if it’s someone that we know and love, but even if it’s not someone that we know and love, our instincts are that we want to alleviate their suffering. And I think that that’s a really good and godly thing that that is part of what God came into the world to ultimately do is to write everything that’s wrong, and that means of the alleviation of suffering. But if we think that the thing that a sufferer needs is to have their suffering stop immediately, like that’s the thing that they need. Then if we’re not able to achieve that, we don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to continue walking with them, how to continue walking alongside them. And certain kinds of suffering need to be responded to in different ways. Like, if I’ve been if I’ve received a serious wound and I’m bleeding out, I need that particular acute form of suffering to be alleviated quite quickly, so that I don’t die from blood loss. But other kinds of suffering, they’re just not going to go away quickly. And if we don’t know how to walk alongside people and be okay with the fact that, “oh, when I give them that verse then,” but then tomorrow, they’re still hurting. Well, what are they doing wrong? Or what am I doing wrong? Rather, can we live in this world where we we know that people are going to stay and suffering for a long time, and we can be with them in that? And I think that that that’s a way of and I think that’s the way Christ is with us, and therefore that’s, that’s a way to give comfort.

Ann Maree
Yeah, helpful, helpful clarification there. So you’re bringing up another point, suffering, isn’t it doesn’t have an expiration date. Well, it does. In this life, there’s not a an end date. So we’re not going to assume that you’re not suffering even today. And so I wanted to ask you, maybe to share some of the things that you do still struggle with and and help us understand even some of those things that we might not even catch. Like I want to ask you the least obvious things.

Carya
Now, there’s, a pretty long list. There’s a lot of of just really everyday stuff. Or let me back up and start this answer by saying, given how, as I’ve said before, given how incapacitated I was for so long, I sometimes look at my life now and think like “I’m all I’m all fixed up,” because in comparison, it’s so different, and that’s a wonderful thing. But then then I’ll realize how many things I still either navigate around or organize my life around because of things that I can’t handle or things that are hard, and so I just think that’s it sort of goes to the question that you’re asking, that there’s, like most days, there are things that I am managing as a result of of what I’ve suffered so on, on, really practical everyday stuff, like, I just can’t handle a whole lot of sensory stimulation, like a lot of noise, or a lot of lights or flashing things. They literally sort of flip, flip my triggers and or trigger? Yeah, not sure what the best way of saying that is, but they, they don’t, they’re not just unpleasant, but they actually put me into either a trauma response or panic or something like that. And so there’s a lot about my environment that I just kind of have to manage to avoid.

That one seemingly bizarre thing that I just think is really interesting that sort of exemplifies this is that where I live, there train tracks, you know, at various places that you have to stop at. And I realized years ago that if I’m the first car stopped at a at a railroad crossing when a train is going by, the speed at which the cars pass, creates this visual flash, essentially, that that causes me a pretty significant problem. And so if I’m sitting there, I have to make sure that I, like, look elsewhere, either look down or look out the side of the window. Otherwise, I’m gonna, you know, like, I’m just trying to go to the grocery store, and I end up, like, triggered by this train going by, and I don’t know exactly, like, I don’t think it’s the case that trains were used in my abuse, but there’s something about that visual stimulation that mimics something that was done in some way. And so that’s just, you know, makes me feel slightly crazy, like, if there’s someone else in the car with me, like I can’t look at the train because I have a trauma response, but it’s just a really practical thing.

It’s also like, one of the things that that means or looks like for me is I don’t go to movies or to concerts or things like that. And I mean, I’ll watch movies at home, but I can’t be in a movie theater, and there’s, again, there’s a few different reasons, but the reason I’m thinking of right now is that it’s so there’s so much, like, flashing and movement and the sound is so overwhelming that I just literally can’t handle it. And that also even means, like, if I’m at a museum and there’s a film as a part of the museum, I can’t sit in there and watch the film, because it’s going to be the same sort of problem.

And then I still really struggle with having people behind me. So if I’m, you know, if I’m in a large space, I want to be seated at the back or against a wall, and this creates some just even really practical things. Like my church has an adult Sunday School hour after our church service, and that’s held in the sanctuary, and there’s usually a smaller group of people, and so they they want everyone to be pulled down to the nearest to the front. And I just can’t do that. And so it makes figuring out what to do for that Sunday school time complicated for me. And and then it’s also just true, kind of in more everyday situations, like if someone comes up behind me and I didn’t know they were there, and does something, says something to me, or touches me, it’s absolutely gonna spike me into some sort of panic. And so I just sometimes see people, you know, coming up to people behind and and either goosing them because it’s fun, or even just like, putting a hand on someone’s back to get their attention. And like,” do not do that to me” and and and it makes me really sensitive, like I tend to not do it to others, even though I don’t think that most people have that same problem, but I don’t know who does and who doesn’t. And so unless I know that you don’t have that problem, I’m not gonna, you know, touch your shoulder from behind. I verbally... I’m gonna get in your line of sight, say something to you before I put a hand on your shoulder. So that’s some, some everyday stuff.

You know, I already talked about church being hard, but other sort of Christian rituals, like funerals or weddings or communions, you know, those are, are challenging. Another big thing that I know, that you and I have talked about some is kind of liturgical season related things, or just other calendar things. So the the abusers that were in my world, they would make extra efforts to turn days that should be special or good, to turn those really even more upside down than everything else they wanted to do. So, you know, Sunday, the day of rest, the Christian Sabbath, that was usually a day that things were worse than other days of the week for me, and then other days, like my birthday or holidays, were then even more so there were some special notice was taken of them, a special ritual was conducted, or something like that. And so those days were worse, and the effect for me now is that I feel, I just feel really yucky on those days. And it’s a little bit undefined or vague, but I just, I just feel bad. So that’s part of why church is hard too. It’s not just that there’s things about it that are triggering, but also that I just don’t feel very good. Sunday afternoons is another time where that comes up a lot. I try to not do work on Sundays, but that means that I sort of don’t like... I’m trying to rest or to do something I enjoy, or to read, and I just feel sick or my heart’s racing. It doesn’t happen every single Sunday, but a lot of them, and it’s so frustrating. There was a Sunday several months ago where I spent the whole afternoon making something for someone, and it was something that I enjoy doing, and I just felt awful the whole time, and it was just this maddening thing of like I am trying to do something that feels life giving, and I feel like the life is being sucked out of me instead.

And then my birthday, just to say a little bit about that, that’s another day that is is a day that just feels really hard. It’s it’s gotten a little bit better. I, in the past have felt like I just wanted it completely ignored, like I would rather that no one even say anything to me about it or notice it. Let’s just pretend it’s not there. And in recent years, I’ve, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m, I’m definitely okay with, you know, people wishing me a happy birthday, acknowledging it. But what I think I particularly struggle with is I don’t, I don’t feel happy, I don’t feel celebratory, and I don’t want others to expect me to feel that way. So please don’t throw me a party. Definitely don’t throw me a surprise party that’ll freak me out. But just don’t, don’t expect what seems like it should be a day that’s happy to actually feel happy for me, because it’s very likely that that day was used in the opposite way. It’s also the case that two of my children were born on my birthday, that was something I was induced by my abusers so that that timing would happen. And you know that also just makes it a painful day.

And then Christmas and Easter are other days that are particularly challenging. The whole Christmas season is actually quite challenging. For me. A lot of Christmas music is triggering, excessive lights and decorations triggering not interested in parties, and that, that is, I think, the thing I’m kind of trying to hone in on here is that it feels like there’s just a lot of complexity around that so my I think I referred earlier to the fact that my adopted family gathers every year, and at one point during that, the adults have a time of prayer together. We usually do that over Christmas and that...so we do that for several days and that time of year, it’s just a really complicated one for me, because I love those people, and I like them, and I enjoy getting the ability to spend time with them and have conversations, so I look forward to that, but because it’s over Christmas, I actively feel awful the whole time, and so it’s this really weird experience where I’m sitting at tables talking to people that I enjoy talking to, and I wouldn’t want to miss that opportunity. But I also just feel really, really awful the whole time, and and then it makes it just kind of confusing to know how to even think about it. You know, everyone’s excited about Christmas. I’m not that excited about it because I’m going to feel awful the whole time, but I don’t want to be, you know, the party pooper. So, yeah, there’s that. I mean, Mother’s Day is, I don’t think I need to explain why, but that’s another day that’s hard.

Ann Maree
I wasn’t thinking of all of those key days. Yeah, and once you explain, it makes perfectly good sense why you’re feeling awful. And I can relate. I think you and I had a short conversation about that... my Easter will be forever changed and and that’s weird, because, yeah, when you walk in the door and everybody’s yelling “Merry Christmas” on Christmas, or, you know, “he has risen on” Easter, and you’re going cringe and Ow, and you want to cry. And I wish life in church was more real, as we talked about earlier, we get to that question too, if you want to answer that now, I think, yeah, this would be good timing. But thank you again. I keep thanking you for sharing those difficulties, it opens up a whole new way to think about people that we care for.

Invisible Limp: What Survivors Wish You Knew.

Ann Maree
Is there anything else that I’m not thinking of that you think would be helpful to others, for others to know about what it’s like to live through, what you endured?

Carya
There’s several things and and some of these could have maybe gone, you know, with your previous question, but they’re they feel a little bit less concrete to me. But these are sort of the things that I feel. I tend to feel like I wish that those who know me, or who interact with me knew this. And I mean, there are some who do, but it’s, it just feels like I. There are things that that feel hidden, and I wish that they were easier to see. So one is just that for me, you know, again, I’m, I’m sort of try to do this thing where I know I’m speaking only for myself, but I do think that there are going to be other people who have, who are suffering, or who have had, you know, experiences with abuse that might echo some of what I’m saying. So I’m not saying that everybody feels this way, but I don’t think that I’m the only one, either.

So one is just that for me, this stuff is literally always there, like it is. It is a part of my everyday life to deal with this, to navigate it, to feel the heaviness of it, and what it looks like that it’s there varies, and sometimes it’s only a little bit there, and sometimes it’s really, really strongly there. But I think that probably to most people, I look pretty healthy and functional and fine now, and I’m really glad for that. But in some ways that might mask or hide that I am always dealing with this. It’s always there. It’s always part of sort of what I’m managing internally. And there are some times, again, I would want to put lots of kind of caveats around this, but there are times when I’ve, I’ve sort of felt like I wish I just had an externally visible problem, you know, like that I walked with a perpetual limp, or, you know, I don’t whatever, just like something that you could just see by looking at me, “there’s something, there’s something there that she’s dealing with. She’s got something that she’s always dealing with.” And I don’t, so I don’t, I don’t mean to, to downplay any of those, those kinds of things, but I think that there’s something that feels painful or challenging about like I do have this limp that I’m always walking with. It’s just that you can’t see it, and I wish that you could.

Another thing that for me is really confusing and complicated, just to know how to do this, is that, because my past is so full of all this horrendous stuff, any conversation that talks about the past, it’s just really confusing for me to even know what to do there. Like, if you think about how many times do you have a conversation in which people are either reminiscing about the past, or do you remember when we were in high school how it was like this. Maybe we didn’t even go to the same high school, but we’re the same age, so it’s like, Oh, back in the whatever decade, you know, it was like this. Or maybe we did go to the same high school, and so we’re having specific memories, or maybe we’re just talking it’s like, oh yeah, when I was a kid, we used to do that. Or this is how this worked. Or, you know, what’s your tradition for Christmas morning? Or just any these are really, really normal kinds of conversations that we have, and whenever they come up, I always sort of feel like I don’t know what to do. Like, do I just pretend that I had a normal past in childhood and cherry pick the few, like, not weird things that I can add into a conversation? Or do I just sit there and listen and not participate? Often it’s going to do the same thing. It’s going to kind of make me feel pained or yucky. And there’s ways in which all this kind of makes me feel like it’s almost like I don’t have the past. I mean, that’s obviously not true, but I don’t have any pictures that I can share of my childhood. I don’t have anyone from before the time that Lynn put me on the plane, other than Lynn and Joy. I don’t have anyone that I’m still connected to. I don’t like. I had to cut myself off from everyone and everything, not because everyone was a perpetrator, but because the perpetrators were embedded in everything. And so, you know, even people that hadn’t done anything to me weren’t safe to be in contact with. Nothing in my childhood was normal. So I can, I can sort of pretend that it’s fine, and like, tell you some stories about soccer, but even if I’m telling you a normal story about soccer, in inside me, I know that my coach raped me, and that makes that a just a confusing thing. It might the confusion isn’t should I tell you that? Like, it’s usually pretty clear to me when I should or shouldn’t, you know, tell some of those hard stories, but just internally, how do I...how do I handle that? It’s just basically that because of the way my past is, there isn’t a topic that doesn’t have the potential to be a trigger, and so that’s confusing, and what I feel like... It’s not that I need others to manage that, or people who know to walk on eggshells around me. I really don’t want that. It’s really just part of the point that I was making earlier, of it being there all the time, that there probably isn’t a conversation that you can have with me that doesn’t intersect with my abuse past. And I don’t need you to know how it does. I don’t need us to talk about it. I don’t need you to figure out how to manage that for me, but that’s how how present it is. And I just do think that it would be good for people to know that for some survivors and sufferers, they may not have anything that’s untouched, like there might not be anything that’s not complicated, and that’s just a confusing and hard thing to learn how to deal with. So that’s something that, yeah, that I think would be good for people to know.

And I think the other that probably won’t be surprising to many, but might might be to those who just haven’t had direct experience, is that, you know, I’m still doing counseling. Counseling work is really grueling work, and so like, if you know someone who’s in counseling, especially for trauma related stuff, that is probably a really hard part of their week and life, and it’s exhausting, and it raises up new devastation. Like part of what you’re doing when you’re doing that trauma work is facing the things that you have kept all wrapped up and neatly hidden away, and so then when you start facing them, they kind of explode all over your life and make things harder. I think that I don’t know that people have said this to me, but I think that I just fear sometimes that people will hit a point, like “you’ve been working on this for a long time, like you’ve been in counseling for years. How...when are you going to get better? When are you going to, you know, not need counseling anymore,” and I don’t know. I kind of don’t think that the answer is, there’s a date. I kind of think that I probably will always... maybe I’m wrong. That would be nice, but, yeah, you got to be in it for the long haul.

Ann Maree
Yeah, and often, all I can say when I hear the ‘lasting devastation’ is I am just so sorry that this is your journey, and it makes me want to get better at being present, and there for people who have journeys like this. I was thinking as you were talking, does it help to talk future tense instead of about the past or even what topics are safe to bring up, to get to know a person like you, you know, that doesn’t want to actually dive right into that past. I kind of pride myself on being a people person who gets to know people, but now you’re you’re helping me see I may need to change up my repertoire a bit and be careful. And I think that’s the word, just being careful.

Carya
I think that’s right, and I really, really don’t want like people to feel like they have to then make the world revolve around me or my potential issues. But one thing that comes to mind when you say that is just thinking about the possibility that there may be people for whom a given thing is complicated. So I’ll give another concrete example I heard recently about like an event that someone did, and they did sort of a like an activity at the beginning. And I think that doing activities to help facilitate people getting to know each other, and engaging in conversation is really good, so I’m all in favor of those. And I wasn’t present at this, so I just heard about it later. And I want to make really clear that I think that this activity was a good one. Like this is not intended as criticism in any way.

But one of the things that was done, apparently, is that people were supposed to draw a picture of a Christmas gift, like a favorite Christmas gift that they’d received at some point. And then, you know, sort of becomes a launching point for conversation. I think that’s really a great idea. But if I had been there, that would have been one of those things that would have just been like, I don’t know what to do now, because I can’t think about Christmas gifts in any way that doesn’t feel really complicated and painful for me. So I either have to just kind of play the game and pick something and like, completely, like, disconnect myself from it, or I have to have some other way that I’m going to respond, or maybe I excuse myself, or whatever. And. And in that kind of a situation, I truly don’t mind that I just have to figure that out. But I think that you know a question to ask is like, “are there ways to to do those kinds of things that invite more than one kind of a response?” Like, rather than assuming that everyone has a positive version of whatever it is you’re going to be talking about, is there a way to open the door for something that’s not so positive, you know, like, what’s, what was the most meaningful Christmas that you ever had, or the most I don’t know, I’m thinking out loud right now. I don’t know if that’s a good question. And it’s not always the right context for it, but I think, I think that maybe part of what I would encourage people to know is that in any given context that you’re in, there may be people there who have nothing like good or happy to bring to the conversation, and so framing conversations in a way that makes space for that, or even just acknowledge that that might be true, can be really helpful.

Ann Maree
Yeah, more choices I think I’m hearing. This is pretty related to what you’ve already said, but I’m now pinpointing who we’re talking to specifically.

Creating Safety in the Church: What Survivors Need Leaders to Know

Ann Maree
What kinds of things in the church body life should church leaders know might be triggering for those with abuse backgrounds. And then alongside that, what? What should church leaders and members who are trying to help or walk alongside others, do or know.

Carya
I’ve got a couple different thoughts here. I think anyone who has experienced abuse, certainly in a church like that there’s been spiritual abuse, or church based abuse, or anyone who’s experienced abuse sort of from any kind of authoritarian system, means that anything that’s related to church leadership is just really fertile ground for triggers. So like in my own experience at the churches that I attended members meetings, even though I wasn’t being abused in a members meeting, they were places where I was seeing the leaders who did abuse me manipulate the church in various ways. So members meetings feel really complicated. And so then it means that when I’m in a members meeting now— and just as an aside, I’d love, I’d like to say that I love the way my church does members meetings. There’s some really cool things about the way we do that— even so whenever I’m in a members meeting, it’s like my antenna are up for, for ways that things could be being manipulated. And it’s, it’s not a conscious thing. It’s not that, I think that there’s manipulation happening, but that’s what I’ve learned from my past experience. And so a members media can feel like an unsafe place for a victim and just communication from leadership, I think that that a more victim-centric, or trauma-informed, or just caring and shepherding, way for leaders to handle the way they interact with the flock is to go the extra mile to demonstrate that they are not being manipulative, that they are not wolves in sheep’s clothing.

And so one example of this would be, you know, every church polity has its own way of organizing itself, and there might be policies that prevent this. But like as it just as a really concrete example, I think that it’s a good idea for whenever there’s a vote and there’s ballots that are being counted, that someone that it’s not only the elders that are counting the ballots, because, like that just looks and feels like it’s a way to prop up a bad leadership system.

So, you know, there’s an example, another concrete example that, again, I’ll, I’ll base on my my own church experience, is that the church that I go to now where where I feel pretty safe for the most part, and trust the leaders very much so, and trust others there. We recently underwent a pastoral search because we needed to bring in a new pastor. And it’s kind of a long story, but the short version of it is that once we were at the point of actually like we’d identified the candidate, we were bringing him in to do his sort of candidate weekend, and then we were going to be voting on him. So it was ahead of that, that process, and I was just a royal mess. I was feeling really bent out of shape for in a lot of different ways. And then I finally realized, I think, the night before the vote that what I felt or what I believed, not with my mind, but with my heart, that what many of my parts believed was that, well, this is going to be a little bit blunt, but that what was going to happen was that we were going to bring in this new pastor who I didn’t know, and this man would have sexual rights to me, and I didn’t have anything I could do about that. Now, as soon as I articulated that to myself, as soon as I realized that that’s what I was feeling, I knew that that wasn’t true, and so I was able to, you know, speak the truth to myself, but I still think that’s really telling and, important to understand that, like what I’ve learned that my church is that my pastors are safe, but I haven’t learned that pastors are safe, you know, sort of writ large, and it doesn’t mean that I consciously or actively think that all pastors are rapists, but I sure know that they can be, and it means that leadership stuff is really challenging like so I want to assume that pastors are truly godly men, but I’m going to feel uncomfortable around a pastor until I’ve actually learned that that pastor is different from what I grew up with. I’m talking about myself, but I think that’s true just across the board, that victims are going to victims who have been harmed by leaders are going to struggle with leaders, and that struggle isn’t going to end just with one new experience. It’s going to take lots of repetition. So I think just related to that kind of flowing out from it is one of the biggest things that I would like people in churches to know, whether they’re pastors or leaders or just anyone in church is that you shouldn’t expect others to know that you’re safe.

Just because you know that you’re safe, you might know perfectly well that your intention in picking up a child is totally good and wonderful and loving and all the things, or that your intention in, you know, running a meeting a certain way, or having a certain conversation with someone that you are genuinely safe. I don’t just mean you think you’re safe, you’re genuinely safe, but just because you know that, it doesn’t mean the other person does, and they’re not going to learn it just by you telling them. And so people need to be given time and space and patience and and I would like to see church leaders not take things personally. There’s one of the former pastors at my church. I started meeting with him to do pastoral counseling, and I was never comfortable doing it in person. And it wasn’t because I thought that he was actually going to do anything to me, but I just couldn’t sit in a room with an actual pastor and talk about anything about my past, and so we did it over Zoom, and he never took that personally like that. I was saying, “I think you’re unsafe.” He just got it. I needed that kind of space. I think that’s the way it needs to be.

Ann Maree
I want to go back a minute, though, and see if you can elaborate a little bit more on like kids you or a child. Obviously, we’ve heard that in your story, when a lot of the abuse was happening, as well as later in your life, but tell me more about that, that safety as an adult in those interactions with children, even in like, just church,

Carya
Yeah, this is something that, I mean, I’m much more aware of it now as an adult than I was as a kid, but I think especially in church contexts, I kind of mentioned this a minute ago. You know, adults often are eager to interact with kids in ways that are that are sort of physical. Like to to wrestle with them, or to pick them up and give them a hug, or even just to maybe pat them on the head as you walk by, or something like that. And I think there’s something that’s really good about that, that kind of physical interaction, I think that kids need that. But at the same time, I think it can be really easy, especially in Christian spaces, for adults, to just assume that it’s okay for them to do that with a kid, whether or not the kid actually feels comfortable with it. It and to I think it’s really, really, really important for us collectively to recognize that kids need to have, you know, it’s kind of a buzzword, but they need to have the agency to determine for themselves whether or not it’s okay or whether or not they’re comfortable with someone engaging with them physically. And I think what I mentioned a few minutes ago is you may know you’re safe, but that doesn’t mean that the other person does. So with a kid you know, you might see a kid and want to go pick them up, or something like that, a kid that you kind of know but maybe don’t know super well, just because you know that your intentions are good, the kid doesn’t necessarily know that. And if they are growing up in an environment where kind of all adults around them have the right to physically interact with them, and they don’t have the right to make any choices around that, then that’s going to make them really vulnerable if and when there are people in their lives who don’t have good intentions and who want to do something to them physically, if what they’ve learned, essentially is any adult in this church can touch me whenever they want, and all that touch has been safe, but the kid hasn’t learned that they get to decide then they’re going to be vulnerable later.

And the I’m going to give kind of a concrete example. This isn’t actually in a church setting, but when I was living with the Kuchens, early on in my time with them, one of their grandsons, a toddler, at that point, came down to spend some time with them. So he was there staying with them. I was there. He’d never met me before, and, you know, didn’t really know who I was. And there was this one day that we couldn’t find him. We nobody knew where he was. And so, of course, we were all sort of panicking, and we all dispersed around the farm to try to find him, and I was the one who found him. I found him. He he walked into the garage and the door had blown shut behind him, so he was stuck in the garage, and he was crying and crying and crying, and everything in me wanted to comfort him, to, like, reach down and pick him up and give him a hug and tell him it was okay. But I just in that moment, I had this sense of he doesn’t really know me. I mean, he’s been around me for a couple of days, but he doesn’t really know me. He doesn’t understand who I am. He hasn’t learned that I’m a safe person in his life. I know that my intentions are good, but he doesn’t, and so rather than, you know, swooping in to take care of him, I instead, just squatted down and said, “Would you like a hug?” And in this case, his answer was a very clear yes. He was like, “Yes, please.” But what if he hadn’t? What if he’d shaken his head? Then he needs to have the right to say, “No, I don’t want a hug.” And so that that’s just an example. I think we need to to not just assume that kids want us to hug them, to high five them, to touch them. Let let them decide

Ann Maree
That is just great information to never would have thought of it honestly until having this relationship with you and dignifying all human beings at every age to be able to make their own decisions. And what a great lesson that is for protecting themselves in the future. That yeah, really helpful.

Carya
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. And you know that it spills over into sort of parenting advice, but you know, should you make your kids give Grandma a hug goodbye, give aunt so and so a hug goodbye, if they don’t want to. That’s a really complicated issue, and I don’t want to just kind of, you know, speak definitively, but my my instinct, is to say it’s kind of the same thing, like they they need to learn that they actually have autonomy over their own bodies. And if they’re not comfortable with the hug or the kiss, what are other options for ways they can say goodbye or say hello? Yeah.

Ann Maree
And given the statistics that we’ve learned, even in this series, I’ve most a lot of abuse is happening with people they know. So good points. Yeah, yeah. Anything else that would be helpful for the church to hear from your perspective?

Carya
So yes, there was one other thought that I had on this larger question about, what does the church need to know, and that’s that if we want people to feel safe in our churches, and what I mean by that is is safe talking about their real lives, showing up as who they really are, then we need churches to have people in them that model weakness and vulnerability. So if we want, if we want our church members to be able to be vulnerable or to show up with their weakness, there need to be other people who are modeling that for them. And I think that this is one of the main reasons why I’ve been willing to share my own story, you know, here on this podcast, but even in my own church, in the little ways that I’ve done that, it’s to try to make space for others. It’s like if I want others, let me say this a different way, if, when I’m at church and I ask someone, “how are you doing?” And what I hope from them is an answer that’s deeper than “Oh, I’m fine,” then probably the way to get there is for me to model that too, for me to be the one that’s willing to answer the question of, “how are you doing?” with something a little deeper. And then if I do that, it demonstrates to others that maybe it’s okay for them to do that too. And I think that that’s, I think it goes without saying, that that would be healthy for churches, if it if we were, if churches were places where people gave more honest answers, then, “oh, everything’s fine.” Then rather than waiting for the people who aren’t fine to do it first, we need other people to model it for them and to demonstrate that. And that invites that.

Ann Maree
Agree. I think too. I always think of the term that I learned back in the early Church Growth Movement days, speed of the team is the speed of the leader, and so yeah, as leaders are creating a space that they are vulnerable. And I don’t mean that in a kumbaya type way. It’s just so helpful to have somebody set that pace. So another reason, I appreciate so much that you’re helping us with this podcast. You are. You’re demonstrating the type of vulnerability that perpetuates being able to bear witness with one another.

When Help Hurts: Words That Wound Without Meaning To

Ann Maree
So on that note, though, just being in a one-another atmosphere in our churches, in our Christian organizations, there’s so many things that we can say to one another that can be hurtful, and we don’t always know it going, you know, similarly to what we do interactions in our interactions with children. You know, the words too can be harmful unknowingly. What kinds of things have been said to you that the church might want to recognize could potentially be harmful for people telling your your type of story.

Carya
I think most of what I’ve heard that has felt harmful, has has been said, not only unknowingly or not only like I think most of it’s been well meant, but I think it’s it’s also just people aren’t even really thinking about it like they’re they’re Not realizing what they’re doing. And I think a lot of it just kind of boils down to different ways of essentially trying to minimize the past or the pain that someone has experienced. And that can be done in a lot of ways. You know, there’s, there are a lot of Scripture passages that I think can be misused like, “well, we’re only supposed to think about what is true and beautiful. We’re supposed to forget what’s past and press on to what is ahead.” There’s another passage that talks about how it’s shameful even to speak of what they do in the dark. And to some extent, it’s that I’ve heard people say these things and like, directly to me, but often it’s just sort of more. You hear it in the air like, I think that what’s been harmful is less what people have said directly to me, like, “Hey, you should forget what is past and press on to what is ahead.” But it’s more this kind of generic, you know. “Oh, but isn’t it better to to not dwell on those things” or, or just this notion that, that we’re supposed to not think about or talk about things that are evil, um, instead, we’re supposed to only think about, again, what’s true and beautiful and lovely. And if, if, what that means if, if the instruction to think about what’s true and beautiful means like that I shouldn’t think about what happened to me, ever, then that just creates a lot of confusion and complexity, because those wounds aren’t going to heal, and I don’t think that that’s what those passages mean. So I think that some of those things just kind of get, get stated, like in the life of the church.

And related to that. I I can’t remember perfectly well, but I think that I kind of said something similar to this in the conversation that you and I had with Julia Fillnow towards the beginning of the season. But I think that probably the other biggest thing that has felt harmful or painful is when it’s kind of similar, but it’s when people just want to so quickly move from the pain or from the hard thing towards towards the good. So it’s it’s the the eagerness to point to Christ. And I always feel like I’m a heretic when I say that, like because we do need to be pointed to Christ, but I think that that’s often done in a way that’s like, “oh, but those bad things don’t matter. Because look, look at what Christ has done,” or “he’s saved you,” or “he’s he’s so good, it doesn’t matter that the bad things happened.” And part of why that feels harmful is that it doesn’t just hurt in the moment, but then in the past it has, and it sometimes still can just put me into a real tailspin, like then for days or weeks, I’m kind of stuck in this cycle where I’m like, I must I must be just doing this all wrong. I must be displeasing God, the fact that these things still hurt, rather than it being evidence that there’s a wound, it must be evidence of sin in me, or a failure to believe him properly, or a failure to trust him. And so when I when I hear individual people or just church cultures talking in that way, it rather than helping me to actually lean into Christ, what it does is is make me assume that, like everything about my pain is actually my fault, as though, if you get if someone cuts off your arm and then two days later, the stump is still really painful. It’s like, “Well, you shouldn’t be hurting anymore because your arm was cut off two days ago.” That doesn’t make any sense.

Ann Maree
Yeah. I mean, that’s just a real, necessary correction for us to hear. First of all, yes, please. And I’m probably the worst, because I’ve been told this since I was a child. Think before you speak, even if the words that come to your mind immediately are Scripture, think about the impact when those words leave your mouth and fall on a person. But yeah, I mean the correction here what we do then, if we don’t do that, if we don’t think first and be careful with what we say, we cause you to have morbid introspection. We cause you to take your eyes off Christ and put them back on you for a performance versus putting them on Christ or his performed already work. And it’s not to say that we don’t talk about that. I mean, for goodness sake, this podcast, in our tagline, says that we are “looking for God’s redemptive thread throughout our circumstances.” And I’m not going to apologize for that, because that’s what Scripture is doing. You know it is, it is our, it is our responsibility as believers to put our eyes on Jesus. But now, even just having said that, when I say that, how I say that to who I say that to, all make so much difference, and I pray that you just received it well.

Carya
So, yeah, completely. And, I mean, I think that’s right. I hope this is why I always hesitate to say that thing like, “oh, it’s, it’s harmful if you talk about Jesus too soon,” that sounds terrible. And that’s, in some ways, that’s not what I mean, but it’s, it’s that, what is it you’re actually trying to do when you talk about Jesus? I mean, let’s, let’s talk about Jesus, and let’s talk about the way that God responds to the psalmists, and what the psalms are like there. I mean, there’s so many psalms that are psalms of lament, and we in the white western church don’t do lament well, we don’t know how to. It makes us uncomfortable, and it sort of feels to me like we’re essentially willing to say, like, “Okay, God, I’m really hurting, but now that I’ve said that, I’m going to immediately move to all the things that are good, or all the reasons I shouldn’t be hurting,” or something. And I just think that ratio is a problem. So the psalms of lament, the Psalmist spend a lot of time in lament, and in all but one of those psalms, they do then also praise God. So I’m not saying, let’s not talk about Jesus. I’m not saying, let’s not go there and lean into that. And I hope that I’ve done that a lot. But when then “let’s talk about Jesus” isn’t a is sort of like a weight of it’s it’s being done to short circuit the lament part, I think that’s a huge problem that we need to learn ourselves how to and be willing to sit with others in “Yes, This really hurts, and it’s not the way it’s supposed to be,” and Jesus is right here with us, saying, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.” That’s how I want you to point me to Jesus. Jesus is here with you, lamenting, and then there’s this hope of what’s to come. But it’s not because Jesus is here with you, therefore you shouldn’t lament,

Ann Maree
Yeah, and Jesus is here with us. And it is, it is finished, meaning you don’t have to pick up the slack of all the ways in which you’re responding. Isn’t, quote, unquote, God glorifying. He even did that for us, right?

Presence over Politeness: Learning to Engage Suffering.

Ann Maree
So how, how would you want? I think this might be a little repetitive, but I think you have some you’ll have some good things to say. But how would you want people who, now or already did know your story, to interact with you like me. How do you want me to interact with you? And then, just by implication, how might other— because you know we’re not just saying that, you know you set the standard for how all people should be dealt with— but how should other suffer. How might they want to be sufferers, be interacted with?

Carya
So yeah, thank you for that question. I do. It definitely kind of flows directly from some of what I was just saying. But I there’s some further points there, I think, in addition to to the church, and again, I want to say the the white American church, or the white western church. I mean, anytime we’re talking about the church, it’s like, there’s we’re painting in really broad brushstrokes. But as a whole, I think the African American church is much more comfortable with and does a much better job with lament. And that’s not my tradition. And so when I say the church isn’t good at this, I’m, you know, I’m speaking about my experience, which is in the the white American church. So we’re not, we’re not great at lament. But I think part of why we’re not great at lament is that we’re also not great at just handling or responding to other people’s pain, it makes us uncomfortable. And one of the things that that looks like, but then is a response to your question, is when we hear or see that other people are in pain, we don’t know what to say or what to do with it. And so what I experience from others who know anything at all about my story, whether it’s just the merest, you know, two sentence version or more, is that very often there’s a fear they it seems like they are afraid that they’ll cause more pain if they interact with my story in any way, and I don’t know if that’s an assumption that like that, what they think is that I’ve got all this pain, and therefore the last thing I want to do is to talk more about my pain. So maybe they’re trying to protect me. Maybe they think it’s the kind thing to do, like, oh, let’s not talk about that. Like you don’t need to be dragged through that mud again. Or maybe it’s just that they are afraid that they’re gonna say the wrong thing, that whatever comes to their mind, they might feel like it’s inadequate and and so I think that one thing that I want from people that maybe is not what they would expect. Is I actually want them to engage me about those things. Like, if you know anything about my story, I don’t want you to pretend that you don’t know it, or that it’s not there and like, rather than it being the case that I don’t like I don’t ever want to talk about it. Yeah, sometimes, or even a lot of the time, I want to talk about other things, and I need friends to laugh with and have fun with, and, you know, do other things with. But if those friends don’t ever sort of you notice or take account of those other things in my story, then that that’s actually not likely to reduce my pain, but increase it, because it makes me feel less seen, you know. So if a person thinks that they’re gonna sort of help me or protect me by pretending that the bad stuff isn’t there. What that does is make me feel like I’m already kind of bearing this load by myself, and now I just have to bear it even more by myself, because I can’t share it. I want. I want to be able to share it. And so one of the things that I feel like I want from people, and I want to reiterate what you just said a minute ago about I can’t want to be careful to not claim that I’m speaking for everyone. So this is an answer that’s very particular to me, but I know I said this earlier, but I I do think it’s not only me, so I don’t think that I’m the only weird person like this, I think this is more broad that that one of the from people is questions. So I think that, I think that we are afraid of asking each other questions, because we think that questions will be taken as intrusive, that questions will be like, if you ask me a question, that I will feel like you’re intruding on me, and because you are a kind person, you don’t want to do that. But the way I receive questions is that that’s actually an indication that you’re willing to walk with me. You’re willing to help me bear my burden. It also tells me, if you ask me a question, it tells me that I’m not too much for you. So this is something that victims and survivors feel, I think, a lot, which is that they’re too much. Their story is too messy, their mess is too toxic, like all they do is show up in other people’s lives and cause problems. And so there’s this constant feeling of like, I think I’m going to be too much for you, and so I’m trying to kind of guard against that. And if I tell you a little bit about my story and you don’t ask me any questions, then that kind of confirms for me, like, “Yep, I’m too much, and I need to not talk about this anymore.” Whereas if you ask some sort of follow up question, like, “gosh, what was the hardest thing about that?” Or, like, “how does that still show up in your life today,” there are questions that are intrusive, like, if you ask me a question, like to describe the details of the abuse, yeah, I don’t want you to ask me that question, and that is intrusive and not helpful. But if you’re asking like, how something affected me, or what I’m struggling with, or, you know, just sort of like, how is this, it is completely a part of my life. And if you’re asking me questions to help me, excuse me to help you understand how it’s a part of my life that actually feels really good. And I think, I think that that is hard for people. We just default to like, “oh, we shouldn’t ask people questions about that.”

And I think this is true for all kinds of suffering. Like, if you know, I’m thinking about the person in church who’s got the cancer diagnosis, and it’s maybe they’ve been in treatment for a while, and we ask them how they’re doing, and they give sort of whatever answer. But then maybe we we just sort of allow it to move on, rather than saying, like, like, “how is your heart really doing with this right now?” Or the couple in church who you know is struggling with infertility and wants to have kids, and they haven’t maybe talked about it in a while, but are we willing to just go up to them, if we have a relationship with them, and and just say, “hey, just wondering how you guys are doing in that” not meaning, “Hey, how’s the attempt to get pregnant going? You know, tell me about your treatments,” but just like, “how are you doing in that?” I’ve had some of those conversations with people. I’ve asked those questions, and the response that I always get is like, “Wow, thank you for asking me, thank you for asking me.” And I’m just sort of trying to reflect the same thing, like, that’s the way I feel. And I think a lot of these kinds of stories we’re hesitant to do it, but there’s some that were maybe a little bit more comfortable. Like, if I know that your father died six months ago, maybe I’m at least a little willing to ask you how that’s going, although even there, I don’t think we’re great at that, but know that I’m in counseling for all my stuff. Like, I would welcome a question that’s like, “Hey, how’s your counseling going? How are you doing?” So, please ask me questions and and a really good question to ask. First might be, how do you feel about questions? You know, can I ask you a question? Yeah, like, are questions welcome, or do they or do you actually just not feel ready for those?

Ann Maree
Yeah, good point. Um, all right, so I think in every episode, we started out with our introduction disclaimers, trigger warnings, etc, but what we did want to do clearly each time was describe why, why this story? Why this story on this podcast? Why do this? And I think we had very compelling answers, not just in that introduction, but throughout the whole story season. We have good reasons for bringing this into the light, bringing your experience into the light. So let’s like, do this like 30,000 flyover thing again, and close that loop.

Doctrine Is Not Healing: When Truth Needs Love to Take Root.

Ann Maree
So, the question I want to ask then is, what do you want the takeaway to be? What do you want people to walk away and think about after they’ve heard all of this?

Carya
This is kind of a dangerous question, because I could talk for a really long time about this, and I’m already talking for a long time, so I will try to keep this fairly succinct, but I do have several points. I think one of the biggest things that I want people to take away from my story, from all of this, is that while good doctrine and sound theology are absolutely crucial and essential. They are not sufficient for healing, for healthy body life, for healthy walking with God. And part of what brings me to say that is several different things. One is my own church history and tradition was a very, sort of doctrinally centric church really focused on believing the right things. And I’m still in a church like that. So I’m in a different denomination than I used to be, but church that’s still very much that way. And then I’m also really, really wired that way, like I’m I’m a very kind of rational thinker. I I love, I love good doctrine. I think it’s really important. But a lot of what I’ve learned from my own experience and that I therefore now see as a weakness in large swaths of American Christianity, Western Christianity, really is that merely believing the correct truth is all you need for life and godliness and all the things you know. And I think scripturally, I think that actually we can make the point doctrinally that that is not true and and a lot of my own journey was the experience of learning how to bring what I believed into a place where I was living out of that. So I’ve already said on this episode that I’m not a lawyer and that I’m not a theologian, and this is kind of in the same light, I’m not I don’t know if this is that I’m not a theologian or I’m not a an act, you know, an academic biblical scholar, but we talk a lot about Orthodoxy like we in the traditions that I’m a part of orthodoxy. It’s the idea of right belief. And there’s another word that I really like, which is orthopraxy, and that is right practice. And I think that we, we tend to divorce those often. And if you look at 1 Corinthians 13, it’s the famous love chapter. You know, “if I have all these things but I don’t have love, then I’m just, you know, a sounding Gong.” I think that that. I think you could essentially rephrase that by saying, if we have good doctrine but we don’t have good practice, then it’s, it’s pretty useless. It’s false teaching. We need far more than good doctrine from our leaders. We absolutely need good doctrine, but we don’t only need that, so we need that from our leaders, but then also the wounded need more than good doctrine for healing. You know, in the in that tradition that I’m kind of a part of, I think it’s easy to feel or to believe that just once you know the truth, then you’re good. And I don’t think that that’s exactly incorrect, but I think it’s it’s kind of constrained, because the word know means so many different kinds of knowing. Knowing is not just something that we do with our intellect. We know. Know with our hearts, we know with our bodies, even we know with our souls and our spirits, as well as with our minds. And so I needed a lot more than propositional truth to help me heal. So that’s that’s a huge takeaway. I want people to know that that’s not sufficient to just have good doctrine. Sorry, go ahead.

Ann Maree
No, I was interrupting you. I just want to you said something that, you know somebody might go, “Huh, you know what?” But just out of Scripture to illustrate what you’re talking about, King Solomon was what he was, the wisest person in the world, right? But that didn’t stop him from falling into sin.

Carya
Significant sin. 300 wives, 700 concubines. They worshiped other gods. They pulled him into false worship. I mean, yeah, it wasn’t just like, “Oops, I made a little mistake. “

Ann Maree
Yeah, “oh, didn’t know that.” But also David King, David, relationally, man after God’s own heart, again, didn’t mean that He was sinless and grievous sins. So, yeah, I just wanted to point out when Carya says biblically, we can say this. I want to point out where, so go ahead. I’m sorry.

Carya
Yeah, that’s good. And that’s, I think that’s part of of the 1 Corinthians 13 piece as well, like that that’s, maybe, you know, Paul says in there, “if I prophesy, but don’t have love, it’s, it’s useless. It’s just a sounding Gong.” And I think the implication there is that the prophecy is true, like if I’m speaking true words, if I’m speaking the truth, but I don’t have love. It’s pretty useless. So, yeah, that’s one big takeaway. Good doctrine, sound theology, is so important. And I love them both, but alone, they are not enough.

Another big thing that I just want people to take away, and I we’ve said it every episode, so I apologize for the repetition, but that there is more evil and deeper evil in the world than we want to know or admit. And some of it is deliberate. So there’s just lots of evil in the world, but there’s also lots of evil that where the people who are doing it are like, they know it’s evil. They’re doing it on purpose, and we don’t want to admit that either. And so I I just want people who hear my story to have their eyes opened to that reality that essentially, things are much worse than you thought, but God is much greater than you realize. The victory that he accomplished through the death and resurrection and ascension of his son are so enormous and so beautiful and and stunning. And so when I say things are much worse than you thought, it’s not to be depressed or, I don’t know, like fatalistic or something, but rather to say, “let’s look at this world rightly. Let’s see how much there is wrong and how good God is, and what he has done and is still doing, and wants to use us to continue to do, to partner with him in the renewal of all things” and then you know, related to that. Because, sorry, did you want to jump in?

Ann Maree
I did. I mean, I wrote this in a substack about this series. This has been one of the most impactful thing, not that there wasn’t many others about the season, to me as just how bright the light is, because we’ve heard this darkness. Wonderful. Beautiful light, and you brought that out so beautifully. So, yeah, just wanted to highlight that.

The Long Work of Healing: Learning to Suffer Well.

Carya
Well, good. That’s encouraging to me. And so then just another big takeaway, that’s, I think the previous point is a practical one. But then I think that to kind of bring it down to a more local level, because there’s more evil in the world than we realize. What that means is that the church, your church, is full of desperately hurting people. And I don’t mean that your church is full of people just like me. I mean that there are, there is so much evil in the world, so much harm as a result of sin, that your church is full of desperately hurting people for all sorts of reasons, and they think they’re the only ones. They think that no one is hurting in the same way that they are, or that no one can quite understand, or that they have to pretend that they have it all together. Yeah. And if those people who are hurting think that if it was really known how much they’re hurting and what the problems are, they would they think that if that was known, that they would not be loved, that they could not be loved. And I mean, I don’t have any kind of statistics to throw out there, but my guess is that if you’re in a Sunday school classroom with 20 other people, it’s at least half of them that have that feeling somewhere in them that for whatever reason, this thing, “if you knew this thing about me that is so wrong or that hurts so much, I would be rejected.” And I want people to know that, and to be able to be in relationship with others in a way that holds that tenderly and can make space for those people to be known. I just want us to know that, like we say, the church is supposed to be a hospital for the wounded, like, really, for real. It’s full of really, really wounded people.

Ann Maree
I think. I think what gets us tripped up is knowing that Satan and his work is limited in this world. Um, and it gives us a false sense of peace and safety. Right. And what you’re saying is so true. Maybe because I’m in an industry, if you will, that works with hurting people. But it just I don’t know many people who aren’t suffering with something. It it’s a fallen world. You know, the fall is crushing us. But also, even though Satan’s limited, this is his heyday. This is his last hurrah. Yeah, yeah.

Carya
You’re reminding me of a of a picture that has come to my mind. Uh, in the, in the past, just about that idea that that Satan is limited. I’m kind of going on a tangent here, but, uh, so Satan, the idea that Satan is limited. And yet, in my own experience, it kind of felt like he got to more or less have his way. And so it’s just something I wrestled with. And in the course of that, I started to have this picture of Satan is on a leash. I don’t know if that terminology is used in the Bible, but I’ve heard it elsewhere. This concept, like Satan is kind of running rampant, but he’s on a leash. There’s there’s boundaries beyond which he can’t go. And the picture that emerged for me is like, he may be on a leash, but the the length of the leash is like the whole world, like there’s there’s no where he can’t go. And I do think it’s— I thinking out loud very much here— but I just, I think that it’s kind of that point that ultimately Satan is bound and he will he will be finally completely defanged. You know, he’ll he’ll be thrown into the lake of fire. He won’t be able to do anything anymore. But Revelation talks about that. He came down to earth in great wrath. And. And then it says, “woe to you, O earth and the people that dwell within it, because Satan has come down in great wrath.” So he’s on a leash, but that leash has a lot of length to it, and he can do a lot. And the point there is not be scared, be freaked out because God is has the victory. So ultimately in Christ, Satan is defeated, but in the meantime he can wreak and is wreaking a lot of havoc.

Ann Maree
Yeah. Thank you for developing that doctrine a little further. Yeah, yeah. Anything else, uh, you want to say about lasting memories from from the story?

Carya
Yeah. There’s two other things that I. Then I’m thinking about and, um, again, like I said, I could sort of talk about this forever, but just two other points that I really want to make is another thing that I want people to really take away from my story is that the healing process takes can take a really long time. And again, I’m not only talking about people just like me, but people dealing with all different kinds of suffering. Like they’re they’re not just going to get better immediately. And in some cases, it could be something that requires active time on their schedule, like maybe they’ve got a weekly counseling session, or maybe they need, you know, some other sort of thing for years and years. And that doesn’t mean that they’re not doing it right. That doesn’t mean that the church is not surrounding them well. But I think that that long, long road is one, that it’s a hard road to walk. And part of what makes it hard to walk is the sense that those who are walking it can get from others. It’s like, why are you still on this road? Why aren’t you? Why aren’t you done yet? Um. And so I just want people to take away like this. This can be a years long, maybe even a lifelong work. And that’s not an indication of a problem. It’s an indication of a wound that is being slowly healed. But it’s not an indication of a problem.

Ann Maree

And may I add to that, coming from my profession, that it is also not an indication that we are trying to make money off of people who are suffering. Yeah, the therapist doesn’t necessarily engage in these long roads for the money.

Carya
Yeah, most had not even heard of that or thought of that.

Ann Maree
But most of us are in this because we love people. We just love people. And it hurts us even to have to watch how hard this is for you and how long it’s going to take. Um, we are not heartless money mongers. Now, that’s not to say there might be some, but on the whole, most people don’t go into this profession for the for the money.

Carya
Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think probably the last thing that I’ll say here in terms of what do I really want people to take away. And it really it’s kind of a theme with everything else I’ve been saying, but it’s just about suffering that I think that every single person who follows Christ is called to suffer. That if we haven’t yet, we will. And the thing that I want people who are who are walking alongside others, people who are hearing this, just think about the question of the reality is that people will suffer, that they are suffering. And yes, there’s a need to alleviate suffering, but there’s also a need to help people to suffer well. And that that’s a phrase that I find really meaningful, like how am I going to suffer? Well, the question is not am I going to suffer? The answer is yes, but am I going to suffer well? And what does it look like for me to do that? What does it look like for me to help others do that, to walk alongside them in a way that helps them to suffer well? So are we willing? Are we prepared to help other sufferers in that way to to walk alongside them in that way? Are we willing to suffer ourselves? Are we willing to, um, you know, to take up that invitation from Christ? I’m always really, really struck by the verse in Philippians. I think it’s in chapter three. I didn’t look it up, but it says “that it has been granted to you to suffer. “something that’s granted to you as a gift or a privilege. It’s it’s not, you know, it’s been permitted to you. It’s been allocated to you. It’s been granted. This is a privilege. Boy, is that not a comfortable thought and a and a thought that, like, makes natural sense to us. Um, but I think it’s something that we need to think about a lot more.

Ann Maree
Yeah. And coupling it with the verse that says we join together with Christ in his sufferings. You know, what were those sufferings? A lot of similarities to some of the things that you suffered as well. Yeah. Not an easy truth. Like you said earlier, I think in this podcast or a different one, um, a tender mercy.

Carya
Severe mercy.

Ann Maree
That’s right. I was thinking, wait, you know, and there’s a book by that title also. Mercy. Yes. Oh, okay. Thanks. No, really.

Carya
And on that cheerful note.

Ann Maree
On that note. Yeah. No, honestly, I really do appreciate all the words of wisdom you’ve given us. Um, it’s at this point, and I’m not going to cry because I know you and I will have a relationship for a long time, but it’s at this point that I get really tripped up on my own emotions because it’s so bittersweet to end.

Bearing the Weight Together: A Call to Prayer

Ann Maree
Um, but like myself, I think our audience would also want to know... they want to...they want to take you with in their hearts. At least I know a lot of them have reached out to me for that purpose, to to know how to do that. How how can they be? How can we all be praying for you? What are some of your greatest needs that we can ourselves take to the Lord on your behalf? What can we do? Just let us know. What can we do?

Carya
Thank you for asking. Um, I’ll just say first that. Yeah, I, I’ve come to really value this friendship that’s developed over the course of this. And I’m very glad that this is not the last conversation that we’re going to be having. Um, but yeah, in terms of, of how to be praying for me, I really do appreciate that. And I feel like almost all my answers are like, well, “I could say so many things”,

But the three things that come kind of most readily to mind for me about this are one just to continue to pray for healing. Um, I. It’s been good and sort of fun for me in some ways over the course of doing this podcast, to reflect back again on how far God has brought me and how much healing has occurred, um, you know, the fact that I’m even doing this at all like that would have been completely incomprehensible not that long ago. So there’s a ton of healing that has happened, but there’s also a lot that that yet needs to happen. There’s all sorts of places in me that are all tangled up and, you know, full of pretty raw pain still and things that are just undealt with and unsolved. Uh, and so just prayers for healing. I’m still in, in that work. You know, I am I am one of those people who’s still in the counseling and has been for years. And, um, and, you know, early on in my counseling, part of the goal was like, am I ever going to just sort of become more functional again? And that has happened in spades. Uh, so I have a lot of, of optimism and hope for what God is doing, but there’s there’s just a lot of work still to do.

I think another one that, again, I think I mentioned this earlier in the season, but one of the biggest things that I’m still struggling with and I start to feel my emotions come a little bit, is I haven’t really grieved my own experience very well yet. I’ve I’ve done some of that. Um, but I feel like I, I always end up kind of cutting it off when it starts to come that there’s just a lot of a lot of pain, a lot of loss, you know, a lot of things that I have lost that at the times that I lost them, I just didn’t even really have the bandwidth to feel anything. You know, it was just kind of like, okay, well, there goes that too. Um, and I don’t think that we’re meant to feel or do everything all at once. So I don’t necessarily think of that as a problem like that. I didn’t grieve those things at the time, but I do think that if I don’t ever that that that will, you know that that will kind of short circuit the healing. So in some ways this is just an extrapolation of the healing point. But just I don’t I haven’t grieved well, I don’t know how to do it well. And and then I feel the, the need to have there be other witnesses in that grief. And I don’t know how to do that at all. I think that’s the part that I kind of said earlier in the season, um, you know, what is what does it look like to to let others be a part of my grief in any way? So there’s that.

And then something that I think it’s been kind of more top of mind in recent months for me, maybe even last year or so. Is I feel I struggle often with feeling really alone in all of this and, uh, That I, I, I struggle even to admit that or to admit that out loud, because God has brought community around me. And I’ve talked about Lynn. She’s been a friend that’s walked with me for a long time and really well. Uh, I’m in a church now that I have good community there. I have this friendship with you now. Like, there’s there are people that God has brought into my life. But I feel I feel like I’m carrying the weight of all this mostly alone most of the time. And it’s heavy. And, um, I feel I feel like I’m walking a pretty lonely road, that it’s very challenging to, uh, to have other people walk with me for more than just a few steps at a time along that road. And so most of the time I’m, I’m just walking it by myself and. You know, at least in the last year or so, that’s something that I’ve been feeling it right now. You know, I just feel a lot of kind of rawness around that and wanting to not feel so alone. And I don’t know what that requires. Like, what is the I don’t know the answer to that. What is the answer to that prayer? I don’t have to know. God knows. Um, you know, some of the answers that he is with me. But he also said it’s not good for us to be alone. And I don’t really want to end this podcast with me crying. That’s kind of happening right now. But yeah, I just I would I would really appreciate prayers for that. Like to not feel so alone.

Ann Maree
Yeah. And we’re putting that out there into a virtual space where you’re not but you’re not going to know either those people.

Carya
Right?

Ann Maree
Um, you know that you you know us and that we’re right there. We are, even from a distance, carrying you and in particular for that. And please, to our audience, I think I’ve heard this a few times in conversations maybe not recorded with Carya. Um, and each time the weight just burdens me more. So please put that at the top of your list as you pray. Uh, just. Yeah. In very, very. Scary, high suffering times. I try to think about encouraging, um, not encouraging, suggesting that the person that I’m hearing, um, I guess it’s praying for them to literally feel the breath of the Lord on their cheek. Um, and if that’s in in human format, great. But in whatever ways, that’s what I ask for the Lord to do, is to provide that actual warmth of feeling, um, physically speaking. Um, wow. Okay. Well, I have thanked you and thanked you and thanked you, and then I thank you again. Um. And it feels like such a small word, but, you know, maybe, maybe someday I’ll be able to articulate better just the multiple ways in which you have blessed and blessed our socks off. Um, educated us. You’ve cared for us. I mean, even one of our listeners brought that up that they could tell how you were caring for me and the audience.

Carya
Wow.

Closing

Ann Maree
Um. And you’ve done all this? I mean, those are just, like, two things. But you’ve done this as a significant sufferer. Um, I hope that somebody else will find that hope in hearing today.

Carya
You too.

Ann Maree
Um, yeah. Thank you, my friend.

Carya
Thank you. This has been, uh, not an easy experience, but a really good one. And a lot of that has been because of you, so. Thank you.

Ann Maree
I want to thank our audience, for sticking with us, right alongside, both myself and Carya, and the expert contributors. it’s it’s been powerful for Carya, to know that you’re listening to her and for her to know that you’re also out there bearing witness. And so it was very important that, it doesn’t always seem as though listening to a story is, helpful or healing, or even powerful, but I’m sure I can speak for Carya and say that it has been. so. Thank you. Thank you to the audience. and also just recognizing for all of you, this was not easy. It wasn’t easy for me. It wasn’t easy for Carya, as you heard. and that that story still, in many ways, her story sticks in my throat. And I’ve heard that from other people as well. It sticks in their throat still.

but we heard from others that this was meaningful, that she’s not alone. We’ve heard from people with similar stories, but also just hearing from other people who have had, like we talked about so many times, a different, maybe abuse in their world, in their lives, in their experience that, even Carya’s experience could speak to. And we thank you as well.

And we heard from the naysayers, and to be honest, we had to dig in and do some more learning. more than we anticipated headed into the season and into the season, and we had to, research and, grow in our understanding, not just in the dynamics of, all of the abuses that we discussed this year, but in how to care for somebody who’s both in it or out of it. And so we appreciate I know this this sounds even more weird, but we appreciate the naysayers that we heard from as well.

I think Carya’s, um, what she did for us this year. I think for all of us, both the Staff here at HelpHer. But the audience as well, is she gave us access to something— an education in suffering. And in that we can find ways that we can care for others in our lives that are in crisis. I think another thing the audience could be doing going forward is a kind of a way to be thankful to Carya, for what she’s done, is to in express in your a thank you kind a thanks in your own world of what we call our our values that HelpHer and that is to engage women in your life with empathy and with curiosity, and then listen deeply to them, learn wisely from them, and respond humbly to them.

In two weeks, we are going to have one more episode. A bonus episode that Dan Allender had requested he could have a conversation with Carya. I want to just reiterate, that this is a conversation. It is not in counseling, her counseling career. It’s just having them having a discussion about several key things, but, I’m not gonna give it away. I’ll just listen in.

After that episode, we’ll take a break during December and most of January. The next Safe to Hope podcast will air sometime in the end of January. And what that’ll be is, Lord willing, it’ll be our HelpHer staff doing an introduction to the 2026 topic, which, um, dum de dum dum dum. Get a drum roll here. That topic—it’s not light either, but, it will be about spiritual abuse. We’re going to host six different storytellers, and that will include myself as I tell a portion of my own story of spiritual abuse in the church context.

We will continue to have six expert contributors chime in on the storyteller’s story and speak to us and our audience about how to care for somebody in their situation well, and we have had some of the most interesting and, well, wise, experts on our show. We are so very thankful for. we will be asking many of them to come back again. We have also noticed and we noticed it this season with our episode with Lynn, the the friend, Carya’s friend who helped rescue her. And what we noticed was just this real depth of wisdom and faithfulness, and guidance, that somebody who isn’t necessarily in the writing books or on the speaking circuit, but just faithfully serving in their own local context, they too have so much to offer us. So we’re going to dig a little deeper into these disciplines and find some of these people who, like I said, are just faithfully serving the Lord. So we do have a couple of commitments already from some authors on the subject of spiritual abuse, and we’ll be working toward, for the rest of this year to get more contributors that we will continue to call experts. But like I said, these will be your fellow church members, perhaps, and, people who we have grown to love and trust for their wisdom.