A Survivor Confronts Control, Racism and Abuse While Reclaiming Her Voice

***Content warning*** This episode includes discussion of child sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, coercive control, and addiction. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual abuse, you can contact Rape Crisis England & Wales (24/7) via their support page: https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-help/want-to-talk/

In this episode of Secular Sankofa, we sit down with Dionne Simpson, a Black British author, speaker, and survivor. Dionne traces a life shaped by racial isolation, church-centred control, and a pattern of strategic grooming that led to a devastating disclosure at fifteen, followed by disbelief and ostracism from both family and faith leadership.

Follow Dionne and explore her work

• Website: https://dionnesimpson.co.uk/
• Store: https://dionne-simpson-books.sumupstore.com/products
• The Sabotaged Girl: https://dionne-simpson-books.sumupstore.com/product/the-sabotaged-girl
• Spiritual Abuse Awareness Online Course: https://dionne-simpson-books.sumupstore.com/product/spiritual-abuse-awareness-online-course
• Forged By Fire (Vol. 1): Crucible of Flame: https://dionne-simpson-books.sumupstore.com/product/forged-by-fire-volume-one-crucible-of-flame
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoraMilajeAcademy
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesabotagedgirl
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dionnesimpson-author/
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dionnesimpson7
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZVCMOiE2sZLOwg2Mqkw0wQ
  
  

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Transcript

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Welcome and Intro to Dionne Simpson

Lola Tinubu 0:02

Welcome to Secular Sankofa, the Association of Black Humanity podcast, where we speak boldly, think freely, and live consciously. In this space, we'll have real conversations about race, belief, power, and liberation from a black and godless point of view. My name is Lola Tnubu. I'm your host today, and I'm joined by Audrey Simmons. We are the Association of Black Humanists.

Audrey Simmons 0:36

This week, we are delighted to be joined by Dionne Simpson. She is a Black British author, speaker, and abuse survivor. Today she will be sharing her experiences of abuse within the church context and the extreme domestic abuse that she suffered at the hands of a partner for over 18 years. I want to also say that Dionne is a practicing Christian. We here ex secular sanctuar are secular, which means that we separate religious teachings, but we're not separate from our black community. And Dionne's experiences speak to the experiences of religion and the church and being black in Britain. These stories are part of us as non-believers, and most of us have come from religious backgrounds. So I want to thank you, Dionne, for joining us today at Seculus Ancopa. And I just want to say, wow, these are big, tough subjects that we will be addressing today. But before we get into sort of the meat of it all, I just want to start at the beginning. So just tell me about you and growing up here in Britain.

Dionne SImpson 1:56

I

Dion’s Early Life in Britain & in the Church

Dionne SImpson 1:57

would say that some parts of my upbringing would be quite typical and others extremely non-typical. So I think some of the typical elements would be a black family who were the minority everywhere we were. So on the estate where we lived, it was just us. Primary school, it was just me, siblings. High school was the same. I think high school, it did eventually get another black sibling group in the school. I think there was some Chinese kids and a couple of Asian, Indian, I think, kids that went there. But when you consider that there was nearly a thousand kids in the school, and us eight. So yeah, that growing up as a minority being permanently othered, racial abuse was just so normal. Got memories of walking to school with my siblings at primary school and kids throwing stones at us and spitting in our hair and calling you all the names. See my mum chase down a few as well and give them what for, give them what for, shaking kids by the scruff of the neck in the playground. So that to me, it just felt so normal. So I don't even really feel traumatized by that, which some people may feel surprised by. It was a real place of community and belonging. I'm sure there's plenty of your community who will have had a similar experience of growing up like that. I think the things that were very uncommon would have been the some of the ways that we were raised. So my parents, my birth parents divorced when I think I was around five, so very young. My mum remarried. Both my parents are Jamaican heritage and black Jamaicans, as opposed to other kinds. My mum remarried a white guy, which is

Isolation And Religious Control At Home

Dionne SImpson 4:35

not an issue or a problem per se. But our lives changed drastically. And so some of the things that changed were just the levels of isolation. I was gonna call it religious doctrine, but it's not even religious doctrine. I'm gonna call it religious brainwashing, which is what it was. A complete twisting of faith and belief and practices in order to control, and it stretched to every single part of our lives. And we didn't really have friends. We discovered the other week that one of my siblings never had a birthday party. We'd seem to be poor all the time. And I know again, that's a really common thing, but it's like not having clothes and wearing other people's clothes from church. It was just it was very strange. No TV, no music, all our books were vetted. It was almost it was very it had a lot of brethren influences. So my stepfather had come from a brethren background, and so they couple these brethren practices with kind of Pentecostal beliefs and come up with something crazy. So yeah, it was a very strange, isolating, you know, they kept moving us around the country, so we couldn't maintain even the few friends we had at school. I think I had two my entire school life. But you can't maintain relationships with people, and that included extended family because we were moved around all the time, even the churches that we were part of, the moves were so frequent that we were just really disconnected, which was a real breeding ground then for abuse to go unchecked. And so I have equal combinations of good memories, being connected with family and in a safe, encouraging, welcoming space, but equal amounts of being in unwelcome spaces, experiencing racism, just being alone, othered, and being put in harm's way. So, yes, strange, complicated upbringing. Wow, that is a lot to be thinking about. So let's just unpack that a little bit. So you were talking about your mother remarrying your stepfather and this whole new dynamic of isolation that came in. Are there other aspects of it? You were talking about the church and that you're having a lot of family in that church. Is there any particular reason for that? So I honestly I have no idea how. So I think at the time I was living in Staffordshire. I don't know how the church was started or why there was so much family in it. But a lot of my dad's side of the family, my birth father, it was his family that were around. So I don't know if once my mum and birth father were married, that's where they chose to live and raise their kids because lots of family were around. I genuinely don't know, but I think the Jamaican and Caribbean roots are a large part of that. So that was the one place where the Caribbean community were together with one another, doing things in their own way with their own culture. Because I don't know of any other black churches that were around them. We had lots of Baptists and Church of England and all those other things. So that was just something that I grew up with that again seemed quite normal to me. Whether that's the case for other people, I don't know. And I think it's probably a lot different now because I I don't know, families don't necessarily tend to stay living in close quarters with each other all the time now. I think our worlds are just much bigger than they used to be. So yeah, I have no idea why or how that started. What I do know is that when my stepfather came on the scene, so he was the only white person who used to come to that church. But he also loved the attention and loved to tell people that he's part of this community now, and just yeah, I think he seemed to enjoy the limelight of it all. And I don't know if that gave him a weird taste of some sort of I don't know, power or desire for that. But I think that kind of started this progression towards so he eventually became a pastor and started his own church, and it all started there. Thank you for that. That's powerful stuff. And I just wanted to know a bit about your home life. So there was you, your siblings in this home. What was the atmosphere like? How was there was there how was there control or how was that work? Right.

Daily Fear, Punishment And Spiritual Terror

Dionne SImpson 9:22

So every last little thing was controlled. So what we wore, you know, what we did. The only places we ever really went was school, home, and church. And it was like that for my entire childhood. I think we got a few more freedoms when we were kind of like as teenagers, so we could go to the church youth club and things like that. And so home was full of evening Bible studies, religious games for us to play. We did, we just we did a lot of work, and I don't think I've really recognised that till being much older. So I've got memories of me and my sister who would have been, I'm gonna say, no older than four, washing our clothes by hand in the bath. And that being quite a normal thing for us. Cleaning, cooking, looking after other siblings. I'm the eldest out of my sibling group anyway. So I think that the and I know a lot of eldest kids will have had the same thing where your childhood is frequently interrupted by being the responsible one and having to look after everybody. I think the difference in our household was it wasn't a task that was treated with respect, and there was an expectation around it, and if the rules weren't followed, there were severe punishments. So punishment was a huge thing in our house, and it would range anything from being locked in your room to having physical corporal punishment, like a rubber slipper with a leather belt, and so we'd have to pick before getting our punishments, and the punishments were over ludicrous things, so I've got so many memories of being punished and not knowing why. You'd be asked to do something, you'd go and do it, but apparently you did it wrong, so now you're getting beaten, and it's just you lived in this constant state of fear, and I think that's definitely caused quite a lot of psychological trauma. Even now, I'm creeping up to 50, and I'm still very anxious, startled easily, and just all of those kind of like PTSD symptoms where you don't really rest, you don't really relax, you're constantly waiting for the next thing for walking on eggshells. That's what they call it in domestic abuse terms, is that constant walking on eggshells. And so that was like that all the time. We were threatened with physical punishments, with divine punishments. So hell was talked about frequently. Hell, demons, evil spirits. I remember being a child looking out the window, expecting Jesus to come down and strike me with lightning and being that afraid that I'm going to hell tonight because of something that I don't really recall what I did, but I clearly did something. And so living with that level of just constant fear and panic. And whether it was real or not, sometimes we can have those feelings and emotions without anything having happened. But we had both. So we had things happening and the fear of things happening. So you did really live in that kind of fight, flight, freeze mentality all of the time. And we thought this was normal. But when we're sick, you've got everyone's breaking out the holy oil and trying to cast out demons out of you, and just it there was a lot of we couldn't have Christmas trees because evil spirits lived in Christmas trees. Halloween was nothing in Halloween scared us as much as being at home. Because we lived with evil spirits the whole entire time. So if you're not afraid of your physical earthly thing, you're afraid of God, or you're afraid of like demons, and it was just this it was chaotic and damaging. It's one of those things an abused term, abusers often like their victims to feel unstable. And so the things that bring you stability, they will remove, then bring it back, remove, but without any rhyme or reason to it. So you're constantly guessing as what do I need to do right in order to make this stop? And so my entire our entire childhood was that way. But I didn't know it was abnormal at the time, I thought it was entirely normal.

Audrey Simmons 14:00

Gosh.

Dionne SImpson 14:01

I'm sorry.

Audrey Simmons 14:03

Don't apologize. This is nothing for you to apologize for. You know what I mean? You're telling your story and telling your truth. I just want to know what happened when you were 15.

Disclosure At 15 And Community Betrayal

Audrey Simmons 14:13 Dionne SImpson 14:13

When I was 15 was the first time that I told somebody that I was being sexually abused by my stepfather. So that had been going on, I would say, since I was about 12. So a good like three years by that point. So it's a strange thing. And I tell people this, I said, he is a long game player. So it didn't just suddenly start at 12. It's like he had spent our entire childhood building up to that. So things like establishing himself as the final and only authority in the house. And as my good Christian mother was more than happy with that, because that's what we do. There were many things that he did which at the time didn't seem suspicious, but when you look back, you're like, okay. So things like he was very physically hands-on with us as children, which we were just delighted we had a dad, because our first dad had left, and then this other guy comes in all shiny and bright and wants to be stepdad to the so we were delighted, and not having any other experience really over far because our birth father left so young. The his physicality with us didn't ring any alarm bells. We had nothing to compare it with, and everybody around us seemed fine with it. There would be times when he would have overtly sexual conversations on the basis that this isn't educating you now because you need to know about these things. I remember being in the car with him and him pointing out a girl and saying, You see that mark on the back of her skirt? He said, That's semen, she's just had sex. And I just, it's cringy and horrible, but to say these were the kinds of things asking me to look at his private part, trousers on, you need to know what it looks like and what men are really after. Things constantly commenting on my body and my development as a kind of pre- as a going through pre-teen years. I think the worst thing that he did was he liked to instigate fun and happiness. And I guess that was the role he liked to play, and we the things that we would share with other people. It's such a happy, lovely household. So we used to play practical jokes on each other quite often. Which, of course, as kids we loved, you know, as we'd walking up the stairs and we'd put water on them or whatever. And his thing with me was he used to hide an alarm clock in my bedroom to go off at two, three o'clock in the morning. And he did that on and off for years. My mother would get mad because she's waking the whole house up, blah, blah, blah, and then send him in to go and find the alarm clock. That did mean that at 12, when he started waking me up in the middle of the night, I was already trained to wake up in the middle of the night. And it's stuff like that, how you understand the premeditation, the intentionality, and the insidiousness of this sort of abuse. And if I'd told someone, oh, he's been playing jokes and put an alarm clock in my room to go off in the middle of the night, nobody thinks that's suspicious. It's just, oh, it's just a cute daddy-daughter game that they play at home. So there was a lot of things like that were almost preparation. He was grooming us, I guess. I think this is the only term that you can use for that is grooming us, like constantly stepping over those boundaries in terms of talking about sex, sexuality, bodies, being very physically, physically touching your body, asking him to touch your, asking us to touch his thing has already destroyed your barriers. Boundaries have already been disintegrated till you get to that point. And I've got very clear recollections of the first time and being absolutely petrified. Got me up in the middle of the night, so I shared a room with my sister, didn't wake her up, woke me up, took me out into the hallway, and so our mum used to work away from work quite a lot, so she'd have multiple overnights, and so he was the primary caregiver, which of course gave him lots of gold stars and oh well done, father looking after the children, and all of those sorts of things. And he was just basically complaining, I'm so lonely, and like I can't really sleep, and I really need your help right now. So I just would you just I come and lay in the bed with me because you know, your mum's not here, and like I can't sleep, and it's just as a child, you'd like you know that this isn't right, but you can't really explain why, because you don't have the language, which had made sure that any kind of language around abused or that was something that wasn't in our world because he controlled all of the information that we had. And wanting to say no, and nothing coming out of your mouth, and just being uh led away, and it was traumatizing, and not even feeling that it was wrong, but not really having the reason why it's wrong, because he made it seem like such a normal thing, and that was helping, and so that went on for three years before I was like, I I this is wrong, absolutely wrong. And so I went to my mother to tell her that was a surprise of my life. I never expect the response I got was something I could never have predicted. And even now, how many years later? 30, 35 years later, I still can't believe her response. So having she I think she was cooking in the kitchen at the time and chopping and doing whatever she's doing, prepping dinner. And I said to her that I had something that I needed to tell her. And she just nodded, didn't look at me, stopped what she was doing, and I told the story of what had been happening. She didn't stop what she was doing the entire time. Once I'd finished, she just looked me dead in the eye and she says, Are you sure that's what happened? And I'm just like, Of course I'm sure. Why would I be unsure? And then she didn't say anything else to me, she just carried on cooking. And I left. So inside, I was jumping for joy, was like, thank God she's gonna throw him out and like he's gonna be out of our lives and all the rest of it. And I was like that, I had that for two days. So she never mentioned it, never brought it up again for two days. So two days later, I got called into the lounge with both of them. So it's my mum and my stepdad. They're sat next to each other. I'm sat at the other end of the lounge. That's when I knew something was wrong because the atmosphere in that room, I felt afraid. And I was just like, What's happened? I didn't know what was happening. And I got the berating of my life from my mother, who called me everything under the sun, used words I'd never heard before. So things like I remember hearing the word molested and not knowing what it was because I'd never heard of it before. And he sat next to my mother, and I just kept seeing his little side lip and a little side smile. Look at honestly, I don't really have the words because I was spinning, and now for some reason, I was in trouble. I honestly couldn't believe what was happening. After that conversation, my mother didn't speak to me for a month. We're living in the same house. I'm 15 years old. The only places we have really home, church, and school. There's nobody at school who's going to be interested in anything I have to say, because that's just not a space where I'm hurt ever. The only other place I could have got help was at our church. So we weren't at the church that we that I grew up with, my family. So we're in a predominantly white church. And by the time we get to church the following Sunday, everybody knows. Everybody knows the lies that Dionne's told. Everybody knows the wickedness and that she's been taken over by the devil, and that she's a home wrecker, and she's been trying to destroy this man of God and this woman of God. That's what I walked into on a Sunday. So now I'm getting evil looks, distancing, ostracized by a bunch of grown-ups who have believed this entire fabrication that stayed like that for 25 years. They told that story, they told that tale, and this included all of my aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and not a single person came to me and asked me what happened.

Why Predators Hide In Religious Spaces

Lola Tinubu 23:06

This is it's just so heartbreaking. I'm sure all is feeling the same. And I come from a religious family and community like you, and I feel like I want to say I'm so sorry, and I I don't have the words to express how I feel that you had to go through that. I don't have the words, and I'm even apologetic for that. It's beyond it's beyond sad. Was there anyone at all in the church? Because we think the church should be the ultimate safe place for everyone, from cradle to grave. Was there anyone at all in the church that you could speak to? Did you find any comfort from anyone?

Audrey Simmons 24:15

It goes even deeper than you think. So the level of control and manipulation committed by my parents was beyond my capability to understand at that time. So they've built themselves, they're true narcissists. And I would go as far as saying that my stepfather is a sociopath. I don't understand how anybody with any kind of human emotion could do those things. Let's just push that aside for a second. They had worked so hard at building this external reputation, which is something very common to abusers. And outside the house, everybody loves them. They're like, not only are they committed Christians, they're leaders in the church. My stepfather is now training to be a pastor, he's starting to preach at different places. My mother's a worship leader, they're running small groups, and so they've got this whole external persona as these upstanding, righteous people. So when they say that their wayward teenage daughter has been overtaken by Satan and she's saying all these wicked things, oh my gosh, you need to pray for her because the enemy's trying to attack our family, and we've got to come against it. Nobody's questioning it. Nobody. This was only happened two weeks ago, speaking to my sister about this very same thing. And she'd been speaking to one of my one of our aunts, who's my mum's sister. And my aunt had said something to my sister, and my sister was like, hang on. So she'd said something along the lines of, oh, your sister was she was such a bad liar when she was a kid. Like, how we were, how were we meant to know she was telling the truth? Because she lied all the time. My sister was like, Hang on.

Lola Tinubu 26:16

How about school did you speak to No, absolutely not. You is it because you didn't feel because I'm thinking, is there any way, you know, anyone in authority?

Audrey Simmons 26:30

Because how could a child and this is something that I have reflected on often because the stuff that was going on, the social services should have been straight up in there. I was born in the 70s. Those things, the systems that exist now didn't exist then. And if they did exist, they didn't exist for black people the way that they are that they do now. The whole issue with Victoria Columbia, that was what that was in the 2000s.

Lola Tinubu 26:58

And it was long before then that and did you know whether any other children were you able to work friends with other children in the church to know whether something similar was going on?

Audrey Simmons 27:12

We had church, we went home, we weren't mixing with any. If we did, it was the whole family was going to somebody's house for dinner. We didn't do after school clubs, we didn't have there was no mobile phones or anything then, we didn't have a TV. I didn't even have people's phone numbers. If I wanted to ring my auntie or my grandma, that wasn't a thing we had access to. At school, honestly, if the school teachers even noticed me, all of my school reports said Dionne does well but can try but could try harder. Just the way things were there. I just wanted to get through school, non-uniformed, we hated non-uniform days. It was the 80s, where everyone's wearing like neon coloured socks and an adamant stripe and crimped hair and raw skirts. We turned up in some kind of like Amishware with long velvet skirt, with this blouse attached and the ruffles, Victorian clothes. That's what we that's what we you all. It's like we lived in some packages, and people literally wouldn't speak to us.

Lola Tinubu 28:22

That I think we need to have you back. No, I'm serious, because you have a message that needs to go out, and hopefully, people who I don't know young people who I'm sure there are still young people somewhere in churches, somewhere going to be absolutely going through. Yeah, hopefully, maybe they reach out, they reach out to you. We don't know how I don't think we I have to say, I don't think we were prepared. We had an idea of what able to video of your talk, but this is we were not prepared for this, so we need to we are asking you formally, they're going to need to have you back.

Audrey Simmons 29:16

But nobody can really prepare for this. I just like to say that there's no way to prepare for this.

Lola Tinubu 29:22

I have one question for you before you go. We are going to have you back. I have one question and I will hand back to Audrey. And I apologize. I have to go there. You are a believer, we are non-believers, and this is one of the reasons that some of us thought, where is God in all of this? Who are the people of God that are doing this to children? Because I have to say to you, there is a link between sexual abuse and religious community. We've got it in the Catholic Church, we have it in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, we have it in Baptist, we have it in all the churches. What is the link between what is it about religion and sexual abuse? And how are we going to deconstruct this? This is too big.

Audrey Simmons 30:18

Yeah, so I have thoughts on that certainly, because it's something that I have pondered long and hard on and read and researched. And my conclusion is that religion allows predators to hide in plain sight. This whole giving, forgiving, nurturing, loving, you can come as you are, approach to all people allows all people to get into spaces, get into positions to gain authority that they should not have. It's almost like religious people have forgotten or choose to ignore the fact that wickedness exists. We just imagine that all of our churches, all of our mosques, all of our gudwaras are all full of people of light and joy and wonderment and peace. And so the very notion that somebody could be part of that community and not be that way, that's not true. That can't possibly be true. And so it allows predators and wicked people to fly under the radar. And even when they get caught out for the odd thing, so quick to forgive that it must just be a fluke, it's just a one-off, yes, they had an affair, he's a man, he's got me, and we make excuses. And that is that's a challenge that I still have for speaking to leaders from different religious backgrounds, and particularly because a lot of those leaders are still male, and it affects the impact of sexual abuse affects them the least. Because let's be honest, predators aren't here, they're not out there trying to uh abuse other leaders, they're trying to abuse the weakest, the least, the quietest, the obscure. And of course, so it doesn't impact them. So they think, oh, it's not a problem. No one said nothing to me. Why would they go and talk to you about it? So that is a major issue in terms of dealing with it. I'm trying, sister, in my small, limited way.

Leaving, Long-Term Harm And Healing

Lola Tinubu 32:36

I'm always asking this question that if religion is not religion, if it's, for example, an organization non-religious, would they would they allow them to exist?

Dionne SImpson 32:52

Is an excellent question. Or it could be that you're just you're estranged from your family. I was estranged from my family for the longest time. Got picked up by a 30-something-year-old man who started feeding me heroin because I was vulnerable. And then we all have times in our life and circumstances in our life that make us more vulnerable. And when we're that vulnerable, the places we go to are our religious groups, our faith groups, our religious institutions where the predators are waiting. And it's a real struggle to help. And I'm gonna say leaders, and I know people are gonna get annoyed with me. They're the ones with the power, they're the ones with the author authority, they're the ones who make the decisions. There's loads of people like me who see what's happening, but we've got no power to make any of those changes. And so we're constantly pushing, you know, boulders uphill, and the people at the top of the hill are like that. Oh, there's no problem. And we're like, no, there's a big giant boulder of problem, but you can't see me, you can't see past the problem to see me, let alone come down from your high top and actually help. So I don't have the answers. All I know is that I won't stop.

Closing Reflections And Resources

Dionne SImpson 34:52

Dionne, we we we haven't got the time. This is a whole day thing. This is something that we need to take time to unpack. But I do want to end on something a bit more, you know, something because you're here today. So I just want to say, firstly, how did you escape physically? And how did you escape mentally? So escaping physically was difficult. So after that whole incident when I was 15, and I realized I wasn't going to get any help, I left home at 15. So I was I wasn't living by myself. I like I say, I got picked up by some adults and taken advantage of. However, that didn't deter me. I continued to do school, I did my GCSEs, I went to college and did my A levels, and I spent probably three, three and a half years away from my entire family. So me keeping myself safe meant that the only people that I really knew and who knew me, I had nothing to do with, which included my siblings. I wasn't allowed to have contact with them, they weren't allowed contact with me. And I ended up not going back home, but having to reconnect with my family to do that. I had to apologize for what I'd done to my stepfather and my parents. I had to do the same at church, and that by taking by lying to everybody, I was then able to re-establish connections with my siblings. But that also meant my stepfather continued to have access to me. So that access continued till I was nearly 30. Because that was the price to stay connected to my siblings. I tried several, so I'd been I'd got married in my early 20s, hoping that would create enough of a barrier. I ended up going from the frying pan into the fire with that one and met a man just as wicked. So it's so being able to escape physically took decades of my life to actually do that, over a decade. In terms of mentally and emotionally escaping, again, I didn't for the longest time. I'm I'm a recovered drug addict, so I was addicted to all the hard stuffs for a long time, trying to cope with everything that I had gone through, and still being labelled as the problem. Oh, we'd expect that from her, wouldn't we? She's been troubled since she was 50. And so that has just carried with you. Irony of ironies, after that happening at 15 with home and church and all the rest of it, I was just like, y'all can't all burn in hell. Right as it would be is a normal response. However, I had to separate people from what I believed, and it was really hard because all the things that my parents had instilled in me, all of their religious and faith beliefs that instilled in me as a child, as twisted and messed up as a lot of them were, didn't leave. Like I still felt like I needed that in my life, and because everything else was such destruction and mayhem and trauma, I felt like my faith was the only thing, only stable thing that I had. And I wasn't wrong. Whether we believe in whatever kind of God or no God or people ascribe it to your own will, your own self, I clung on to that and I don't know how I've gotten through and I'm the person that I am now because I've seen people go through less and not make it. I've seen people go through less and not make it. So I, for me, it gives me the healing journey has is has been lifelong. And I say that having had I have sleep disorders that have meant that I've had to give up a career. I work mostly from home. I've had so many health problems in and out of hospital, surgery, medication, PTSD. I've done all the therapies you can think of, even electric shock therapy. I've had everything that I can do to get well, I have done. There are still signs, as I mentioned to you earlier, I have a I'm not a nervous person. I do hold a level of stress and anxiety. So I'm I'm still. Startled so easily by something and nothing. I can't have people standing too close to me in cues because I just I and now I'm yelling at people in cues like you need to get away from Th there are signs that there are just signs. I still don't sleep properly. I have narcolepsy, which is a neurological disorder that means my brain can't regulate when I'm awake and when I'm asleep. We know the root cause of that, and I can't fix what happened, but I'm really pleased that I feel like the bulk of my healing journey, not that it's over, but that it's worked. I've had to work so hard trying to do therapy while being a mum, while being at university, while doing the breadwinner, while running a hat. It's a lot. It's absolutely a lot. And I think there's some things that might never get fixed, but I'm well enough to live a really good life. I've got good relationships with my family now. I've got a lovely community around me. So I'm just I'm really pleased that I've been able to get this far and able to communicate the things that I've been through and how I managed to survive.

Audrey Simmons 41:17

Wow. I started this show with wow and ending this show with wow. This story is so vitally important for the black community, for those who are in churches or in other institutions. And these institutions, as you say, are run by people who have reputations to uphold and egos to nurture. And the idea that because you are a person of God, that you are beyond reproach is a notion that we need to dispel. Dionne, I want to thank you. Thank you for your bravery. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for speaking up and speaking out. It's been truly an amazing session. And so this brings us to the end of the show. But as Lola says, this isn't the end of your story. This isn't the end of Dionne being a part of Secular Sankofa. Thank you again to our guest Dionne. Thank you to Lola for being a part of this today. And I want to thank the listeners for taking part and being a part of this story too. This is Secular Sankofa. We are signing off with our usual affirmation. Please stay tuned, and we will have all of Dionne's socials in our comments. So do follow Dionne and her story and thank you once again.

Humanise Live 42:41

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