Healing Together

A Guide to Supporting Sexual Abuse Survivors

Anne Miller

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780310112099
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

Sex is such an intimate topic historically wrapped in shame and when someone shares they were sexually abused, we may not know how to respond.

With recent #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, we are learning just how many men, women, boys, and girls have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted person, often family members or leaders in the church. Sexual abuse is rampant in modern society and now--sometimes many years later--sexual abuse survivors are sharing their stories.

Anne Marie Miller is a survivor of childhood clergy sexual abuse and has shared her journey toward healing with audiences all over the world. After speaking with thousands of survivors and their loved ones, she saw the need for a fundamental and practical guide for helping supporters of sexual abuse survivors understand the basics of abuse, trauma, healing, and hope. Drawing from her own experience as a survivor and evidence-based research, Anne addresses these questions and more in Healing Together:

• What is sexual abuse?
• How can I help survivors?
• Who are predators and how do they groom victims?
• How does trauma affect survivors?
• What happens when someone doesn't remember the details of their abuse?
• How does abuse wound the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of people who have been abused?
• When and how should authorities be contacted?
• How do you talk to your children about sexual abuse?
• What are the warning signs of abuse?
• Is healing possible?

Whether you are a spouse, a family member, a friend, or a church leader looking for easy-to-navigate resources to understand and support sexual abuse survivors, you'll find answers and hope in these pages.

Chapter 1
My Story of Childhood Clergy Sexual Abuse

I grew up in the church as the daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor.

My mother, my father, and my grandpa attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). My dad and grandpa were ordained pastors in small, rural Texas towns. My parents met at SWBTS as they worked toward earning their master of divinity (MDiv) degrees. My mom was salutatorian in her MDiv class of 1977 and was one of the first women to graduate with that degree. After an Easter play at Retta Baptist Church in 1984, I understood why Jesus died for me. My father baptized me when I was five years old at a small church in the Texas Panhandle.

When I was growing up, church was my second home. With all its flaws and fundamentalism, it still felt safe to me. There wasn’t anything atypical about my childhood other than the fact that we moved every couple of years to small towns all over west Texas. For a Southern Baptist pastor, this was the normal life of ministry.

When I was sixteen years old, two weeks into my junior year of high school, my family moved from west Texas to the Dallas area after my father resigned from the last church he would ever pastor. My new high school was huge, and the culture of the large city shocked me. It wasn’t easy to make friends, and there were no obvious Christian organizations on campus. One afternoon I went through the parking lot and put copies of a homemade flyer on every car as an invitation to a Bible study before school—but nobody showed up. In a last-ditch attempt to make friends, I chose to lead a See You at the Pole event at my school. Since we were new to town and my family hadn’t found a church yet, I went online to find a youth pastor who could help me gather some materials to promote the event. Maybe there was a pastor out there who knew some other kids in town who would want to come. Maybe he’d have experience at other See You at the Pole events and could give me ideas about getting people to show up.

It was 1996, and because most churches didn’t have websites yet, the only way I knew to look for someone was to use America Online’s (AOL) profile search feature. After scanning through several profiles, I found a pastor who was attending SWBTS, the same seminary my parents had attended. And he lived in Arlington, where I lived. Win-win. His name was Mark. I emailed him, told him I was a junior at a local high school, and I asked whether he could help me get some posters and flyers to advertise See You at the Pole. He emailed back and said he could help. We arranged to meet at a McDonald’s in the food court at Hypermart, a superstore close to my house.

My mom drove me, and together we met Mark. They exchanged pleasantries and connected over their shared background in ministry. After the meet and greet, she stepped away for a few moments to grab some groceries while Mark and I continued talking at McDonald’s.

There was nothing remarkable about Mark’s appearance. He wore khaki cargo shorts, a polo shirt, and a baseball hat (though I could tell he was bald underneath). I guessed he was in his midtwenties. He had kind blue eyes and a few inches on my five-feet-seven frame.

Mark asked about me, about my school, and about the move to Dallas. I was encouraged that someone seemed to care about me and might want to be my friend. Mark helped me gather the materials I needed to promote the See You at the Pole event, and then we wandered through the store and found my mom. They talked a bit more about seminary, which professors were still there, and what classes Mark was taking. My mom found out that he served as a missionary with the same organization she had served with twenty-five years earlier, and they swapped a few more stories as our groceries traveled up a sticky black conveyer belt to the Hypermart cashier.

We paid and left.

There were no red flags flying. No warning signs that my life, my innocence, my faith, and my future would soon be bulldozed by trauma. All signs said you can trust this guy. He is in seminary—the same seminary your parents attended. And he cares about students in the area. And he’s been a missionary.

After See You at the Pole, Mark contacted me to ask how it went. As with the Bible studies I had tried to start, nobody had showed up, further cementing my sense that God didn’t care about my life. I was now a month into my new school, and I had next to no friends.

There were no warning signs that my life, my innocence, my faith, and my future would soon be bulldozed by trauma.

I told Mark about my disappointment with God. At my last school, I hadn’t been the most popular kid, but I had been involved in sports and honors society and several of the Christian clubs. As a preacher’s kid, I was expected to do everything at church, so I kept a busy schedule. Leading people and serving people fulfilled me. I felt as though I had been faithful to God—so why was he punishing me?

“Maybe I should just quit,” I complained.

“Quit what? School?” Mark replied.

“Quit faith. Quit God. None of this makes sense. If there even were a God, I’d be better off without him.”

“Don’t do that, Anne,” he said. “Can you come over? Let’s get something to eat, and we’ll talk about this.”

I told my parents I was headed out, and they gave me a time to be home, as they always did. As a sixteen-year-old in the nineties, I never thought that a quick visit with the local youth pastor was something I needed to spell out or ask special permission to do, and they trusted me. I was the quintessential good preacher’s kid.

Mark lived on the north side of Arlington, but the drive from where we lived on the south side wasn’t too bad. I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable in the rundown area of town where his apartment complex was located, but I saw him standing in the breezeway of his building, silhouetted by the hallway light. I parked my mom’s car in one of the few empty spaces. His building was in the very back of the complex, and my mom’s car faced a dilapidated wooden fence. I walked up to the breezeway where Mark was standing.

He invited me inside his apartment. The kitchen light was on, and the apartment was so small that it provided enough light for the living room and the adjacent small dining area. The TV was also on, casting a bluish tint to everything.

“I thought we could have some pizza,” he said, pulling a box from the freezer. “Do you want to go get some ice cream too?” he asked, opening and closing his refrigerator and freezer doors.

Of course I wanted ice cream. We got into his car—a nineties blue Pontiac Grand Am—and drove to a grocery store about five minutes away. Whatever flavor he chose wasn’t one I wanted, so I got chocolate, my favorite. He paid for our ice cream, and we left, driving right back to his apartment.

“Is that your car?” His car lights shone on my mom’s silver Chevy Lumina as he turned into the parking lot by his apartment.

“Nope. It’s my mom’s. I just started working after school, so I hope to buy my own car pretty soon. Riding the bus to school isn’t the greatest. I don’t know what I’d get, but I know my dream car—a turquoise Camaro—is out of the question for now.”

He parked the car next to a yellow Ford Ranger truck.

“Not that you’re asking my opinion,” he said, “but I think girls who drive yellow trucks are hot.”

“I like trucks too,” I said, unsure of how to respond.

“My couch is kind of uncomfortable,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of the couch as we walked through the door. Mark got two spoons from the kitchen and opened the ice cream. We sat on the floor, eating the ice cream, along with some pizza, with the TV on in the background. I learned a little bit about his family, where he grew up, and how he had just returned from being overseas.

He asked whether I wanted to watch a movie, and I said yes while returning the pints of ice cream to the freezer. Blankets from his couch were already on the floor, and we sat underneath them, with some movie flickering in front of us. The pizza, the ice cream, the movie, and the laughs—this felt familiar. It felt like the stuff of typical teen youth group hangouts—which I knew well as a pastor’s kid. Finally, I felt a little more at home in this new town. For the first time in weeks, I felt happy. Someone wanted to spend time with me.

Mark shifted under the blanket, and his shoulder grazed mine and then softly pressed against it so that our arms were touching. His hand found mine and he held it. My heart suddenly raced with fear and anxiety. Wait . . . was he interested in me? But I was a student. In high school. I froze and waited for the credits to roll.

It was late when the movie ended, and I had school the next day.

“I should probably go.” I stood up. “Do I owe you anything for the ice cream?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You can buy it next time.”

I thanked him for having me over. “I miss hanging out with my old youth pastor and his wife. This was nice.”

Mark walked me out to the breezeway, and we hugged goodbye. He stood there by his apartment door and watched me walk to my mom’s car. I turned, waved, got in, and drove home, telling myself that maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe I was anxious for no reason. Maybe he was just trying to be nice.

At this point, I did not understand the part that isolation and confusion play in sexual abuse. I had experienced an initial wave of anxiety when Mark made his first move toward me, brushing up against my shoulder and holding my hand. But I stifled the red flags going off in my head because I had an equally strong wave of feeling seen, understood, and valued. I was a vulnerable teenager who finally found a person (whom my parents and I assumed was trustworthy), and he thought I was worth being friends with. No sixteen-year-old should have to know that seeking out someone who is isolated, drawing them in, and then confusing them are common abuse strategies. That’s what was happening to me, and I was clueless.

When I got home, my mom, a primary school teacher,^* looked up from the couch where she was grading papers. “Did you have a good time?”

“I did,” I said naively. “I think I’m finally starting to make some friends.”

Mark and I continued spending time together over the next three months, mostly at his apartment. Then, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, he suddenly stopped responding to my emails and phone calls. I saw him on AOL’s Instant Messenger one evening and sent him a message asking what had happened. He said he was out of town for the holidays with family and would be back once school started up again. Sure enough, when the spring semester started back up, so did our encounters.

I suppose there are certain red flags that you see as clear as day in adulthood that you just don’t as a teen. Other than that first trip to get ice cream, there were only two times in six months that we ventured outside Mark’s apartment. Once, we went to a restaurant in downtown Fort Worth about thirty minutes away from where he lived. I got food poisoning there and will never forget the ride home. He drove my mom’s car and went the wrong way on a one-way on-ramp. I was terrified that we’d be hit before he could turn around, and the velocity of the quick U-turn he did pushed me against the passenger door so hard I was afraid I would throw up all over the place. Being sixteen, I also thought it was a hilarious adventure and remember that I couldn’t stop giggling.

The only other time we went out in public was when we visited Greenbriar Park, near the seminary in Fort Worth. Greenbriar Park is located near where my grandparents live, and every time I visited them, I would drive by the park. As I wrote this book, I found myself driving by Greenbriar Park several times a week. My grandma was diagnosed with lung cancer the summer before I started writing this book, and our family would visit her as often as we could. She passed away on May 7, 2019. Every trip we took to see her carried a shadow of my abuse, a testament to the power of trauma. (For more information on trauma, see appendix A.) Even something as sacred as my grandmother’s final months of life has threads from my past abuse woven into each visit.

As a pastor’s kid in the south, I was naive and conservative, not to mention terrified of sex. I understood sex as one of the worst “sins” (outside of murder) one could commit. My parents never talked to me about sex, and while I knew the anatomy and physiology of how it all worked from health class, that was it. Before I met Mark, I had a couple of “boyfriends,” guys I would “go out” with, but nothing was ever serious. I had held hands with boys and had even shared a few awkward kisses. A boy from my junior high Sunday school class and I were caught kissing behind the church one Sunday morning, and I thought I would die when people found out. Another time, a (different) boy who attended one of our youth evangelism events tried kissing me on an indoor roller coaster in Mr. Gatti’s, a cheap pizza arcade,^* but I thought it was gross and shoved him away. I was committed to saving sex for marriage and proudly wore my gold purity ring—that my dad had purchased from a Sears catalog—as a freshman in high school.

As Mark and I spent more time together, the sexual component of the relationship escalated significantly. Holding hands turned into kissing, kissing turned into passionate kissing, and that led to even more intimate activity, both above and below the waist. I can recall one moment with such clarity that I can tell you exactly what I was wearin...