Ep 67: How God is in the Details and Healed Me From Sexual Trauma

If you’d like to read the content of this episode rather than listen, I’ve included the written transcript as I prepared it for recording below. However, it won’t have all of the contents of the episode as I added some details as I recorded.

This is Episode 67 of the Grace for Breakfast Podcast—the show where we talk about how to go from “never enough” to endless grace, helping you look at life through a different perspective that leads you from self-discovery to emotional growth and ultimately to self-actualization. This is so you can achieve your version of personal peace through the journey of life. Today we’re talking about evaluating the past and present through my story of healing from sexual trauma.

When I was 15, at the beginning of my junior year of high school, I was raped and beaten by a guy that I’d only talked to, and not even seriously dated for a couple of weeks. I’d quickly realized that he was abusive from his violent behavior, stealing my money, and his jealous accusations. Earlier that year, I’d come out of a very long relationship with whom I considered my first love. It was a good relationship overall but there were things we couldn’t agree on, and the fact that we were so young to be in something so serious caused it to end. Things at home were very unstable and I was very much on my own to sort things out. So that summer, the summer before my junior year of high school, I’d resorted to “do me” and “not care” anymore. It started me on a path to numbness that lasted many years, until the summer before my junior year of college. 

Just days after that incident, my mother noticed the bruising on my face she enrolled me in a new high school the following day. We never spoke of the matter again. Until just a couple of weeks ago. But let me rewind a little. About a month ago, I was at a birthday party and that guy—the one who’d assaulted me—came up in conversation. A couple of my friends were mentioning how they’ve hung out with him over the years. I felt a rush of anxiety flood me. One that I hadn’t felt in such a long time. It didn’t have anything to do with my friends. It was the fact, the possibility, that I could end up facing this guy again. It’s been 20 years since that happened. Why did I feel this way? I thought I was over it. I thought I’d done the work. I forgave him. I let go. 

That same night, my family and I were attending yet another birthday party and my mind kept going to the occurences of that horrible day when I was 15. Everything that happened. How the guy had set me up, he’d taken my shoes and coat and hidden them, his family member guarding the door, the gang threats, the rumors that had spread the next day, running out of there as fast as I could barefoot and without a coat or my phone in the bitter cold. It kept replaying in my mind. We got home and the tears fell. I talked to my husband about it. I told him the story again, one we hadn’t talked about in at least a decade. The next day was Sunday. I kept going back and forth about whether I should talk to my pastor about it or if I should do my own work on it. When I prayed, I couldn’t help but hear the Holy Spirit telling me that He had more healing for me, deeper healing, full deliverance from what had happened to me as a young girl. 

Sunday came and at the end of service I jolted myself to the pastor’s wife and told her, “We need to talk.” We set a time for the following day. Leading up to the meeting I kept debating with myself and having these moments of deep sadness and horror. Could this guy live close to me? Does he live in our hometown? Is he happily married with kids? My friend did say something about a significant other. Was it his wife? His girlfriend? Does he beat her? That was such a horrible experience for me. Is he living fine as if nothing happened after what he did to me? I had decided not to press charges. He was heavily connected with a gang and had threatened me to keep my silence.  Yet I had never seen him again. I never talked about it, processed it, or anything. I was simply dumped into a new high school and had to leave everything behind. Through that internal debate, I still wondered if I should be wasting my pastor’s time with something that happened so long ago. 

The time came for me to meet with my pastor and I shared everything with her. Every detail from beginning to end. I even shared how I’ve been able to tell this story for years now without crying or feeling any pain. I’ve done the work and I thought I was past it all. I’ve helped so many women work through issues just like this and have even been told that it was more effective than 30 years of therapy! And that’s where the confirmation came through her when she said, “It looks like God is wanting to bring this healing to completion for you and bring you to a deeper level spiritually. You allowed yourself to become unseated.” 

It was exactly what I knew but why did it hurt so bad? Wait, what? Unseated? What did that mean? I needed to know more. She then asked me if I ever grieved what I’d lost. When I thought about it, the immediate answer was no. The day after the incident I piled makeup on my face to cover the bruising, laid my hair around my cheeks, kept my head down, and went to school. I’d walked the halls while people laughed at me, murmuring a new rumor he’d immediately had his minions spread about me to ensure my silence. Only one guy who happened to know the truth about what happened the day before came to me, grabbed my shoulders, and stared sadly into my eyes but said nothing and walked away. The incident had happened on Monday, my mom saw the bruising on my face on Thursday, and on Friday, I was walking into my school, emptying my locker, and being dropped off at a new high school. NO, I didn’t grieve. I didn’t have time to grieve! My mother and I both thought therapy was a joke. I’d been put in therapy as a child because I’d been losing my hair from stress at home and the therapist had continuously fallen asleep. 

My pastor told me that I should give myself a set time to grieve so that I could officially move on. She then gave me some guidance on how to find scripture and study it based on the healing that I was needing. It was time for me to do some work. I gave myself a week to grieve. That seemed like enough, right? Whenever I felt like crying, I cried. My husband told me to come to him and talk to him as much as I needed. I spent time in introspection and I thought about what was bothering me. What was left over? Why did I feel like this? What did it mean that I allowed myself to become unseated? 

God immediately stirred my spirit telling me I was dealing with unresolved shame. There was something stuck in my subconscious mind that caused me to feel like I was still that same girl. That same girl who felt dirty and broken. I realized that there was still an imaginary tether to the 15-year-old me that God was trying to cut. 

This tether was still affecting my boldness. Back in March, I started praying for a spirit of boldness over myself and set the intention that I wanted to have an uncompromising spirit of boldness. Remember episode 50? Now, this trauma from when I was 15 was a huge boulder that God wanted to remove. And this new term about being “unseated” was one that would change my life. And yet He knew it all along. God wants to untether you from your past so that you could be tethered fully to Him. I share this story with you so that you can see how intricately God is in the details, even when horrible things happen to you out of your own rebellion. 

If you remember, when I told you the beginning of the story, I’d chosen to rebel that summer. I’d resorted to “do me.” I was operating in rebellion. No, it will never make an excuse for someone doing something so horrible to me at all. Because what that guy did was horrible. However, I’m sharing this with you because of one of the things I had to do to receive full healing for that. Because we are constantly faced with the temptation of pride. And God calls us to be humble. We’re faced with the temptation to be selfish and only love ourselves. When God calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves. God calls us to serve, help the poor and the widows. And if I chose to stay under pride, then I would be limiting myself and not opening up myself to the truth and healing that God had for me. That I’m his daughter, his baby, that I am clean, for him to remove all shame from me. This is not to be confused with self-care and what falls under that. I hope you’re hearing me here.

If you go to a doctor to get a tumor removed, you have to allow the doctor to see you naked and open up your insides. If you say, “Doctor, keep me covered and don’t look at me because I’m embarrassed and too proud for you to see what’s under my clothes.” What’s the doctor going to say? The doctor is going to be respectful of your free will—as God is—and isn’t going to do it. He also won’t be able to do it because he can’t get to where he needs to in order to remove the tumor. 

That’s the biggest tool that the enemy uses to keep you hurt. He uses pride. He uses that so that you can hold onto the shame and hurt that’s hiding inside of you. It’s disguised as pride because you can use that to stand tall and feel strong even though the pain is still buried inside of you. So you can go around living your life as if everything’s fine, but eventually, you’ll have to face something that might really break you if you haven’t allowed God to enter the deepest parts of it and fully remove the hurt. 

When you open yourself up to God and are clear about what you want, in my case it has been boldness and freedom, then God will answer. But the coolest part about it is that He was already prepared with the answer all along. Because He’s all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, and omnipotent. How can you doubt his power and holiness when he literally holds the earth and the fiery sun in His hands?

So during that week or so, I invited God into the remaining pain. I asked God for forgiveness in the areas where I felt shame. At first, my flesh, the human part of me, my soul, wrestled with my spirit about why I should ask for forgiveness if something had happened to me. And then I started to see the big picture. The picture of everything. I faced it head-on. And freedom came. And not just freedom, revelation, peace, understanding, and even new information that I didn’t expect to get that brought me to resolve.

Now the second part of it was this concept that was shared with me about the fact that I allowed myself to become “unseated.” So I texted my pastor the next day and asked her what she meant by that. This is what she explained. She said that when that happened, “I gave up my position of authority as a child of God.” You see when we have God in our lives, we are sons and daughters of the King of Kings. We can stand in authority and in boldness because of whose kid we are. We don’t have to walk in shame. We don’t have to hide. Because God’s got us. 

And there are things that will happen, perhaps people you will see from your past, or even family members you love that will try to remind you of your past. There might be people who will try to remind you or bring you back to what you did or was done to you. And those are the things that can cause you to give up your position of authority and give into self-sabotage. If you didn’t listen to episode 65 listen to it asap so that you can really start to understand how this stuff works and why I’m so passionate about mental fitness. You have the ability to get stronger in these areas and get to the point that you will not so easily allow yourself to become unseated. I know I sure won’t! 

So now I’m going to share with you what I learned from that experience by what I wrote in my journal about it. Perhaps I’ll even share the poem I ended up writing from this experience.

When I think of what the Lord has done, I can only think of how holy He is. How even in the midst of the day that [he’ll remain unnamed] sexually abused me and probably planned to kill me or do other horrible things to me, the Lord was there keeping me safe. He already had the solution in place for me. He knew what was next. When I faced the possibility of seeing him again as an adult and had to face it all again, I now know that the Lord just sought to untether me from my past. He sought to rip the cord tied to my past hurt and tether me only to Him. And that’s what He did. When He tethered me back to Him, he told me I am clean, I am whole, I am forgiven. I faced a different level of forgiveness now because there was a deep part of me that asked, “Why does it matter for me to be forgiven for me being abused and raped?” Well, a new layer came to me that needed to be addressed, which was that I had unresolved guilt and shame about the rebellion I was operating under at that time of my life and how it led to bad things happening. I’d actively made the choice and my spirit deeply wanted to be fully realigned with God. When I faced God in that way too, He released a deeper level of freedom and intimacy because He showed me that I didn’t have to live in that shame. 

Here’s the beauty that did happen from that incident and the proof that God always has a plan. Why you should always pray for your children like my mother did for me even if she was dealing with her own pain and brokenness. As soon as I went to the new school, I met my now husband. In that same high school, I became very good friends with a boy that through him, I met his sister—a key person in my testimony—and became very good friends with her. I went off to college remaining close friends with her. For my first two years of college, I was in a very abusive relationship but it was through what happened to my friend that my life completely changed. She was in a car accident that almost took her life. She arrived at the hospital flatlining and, at that moment, I told God that, if He was real, if He brought her back, I would recommit my life to Him. And He did. That same summer I left that guy, changed my number, got a restraining order, moved on campus, started going to church again, went from academic probation to straight A’s, and became a leader on campus. But it doesn’t end there. I remained friends with that girl and continued to visit her even until after I finished college. She had to learn to walk and talk again and was a different person. Her life had been changed by the accident. I remained close to her family and would spend time there a lot. And so did my husband, who happened to be very close friends with her brother. The rest, as you know, is history because I eventually started dating and am still happily married to my husband, which is another testimony of God’s healing and redemption in itself. And even more, that incident being brought up now, opened up an opportunity to have really healing conversations with my mother and brought so much healing to our relationship as mother and daughter. Please God continue to reveal more to me! I’m here for all the freedom!

So as you see, trauma causes us to remain tethered to our past. I am no longer that 15-year-old who was raped. You are no longer that child who had scary experiences or went through abuse. But trauma has a way of keeping us there or revealing itself to us and unseating us from the authority and freedom that God has for us. And I can tell you with all confidence that God wants to heal every single part of you. Some healing happens overnight and some healing has layers. It is not serving you to remain in that place of shame or guilt. You don’t deserve that and you have no reason to hide because you are no longer there. But sometimes, your subconscious mind needs help getting out of that place. That’s why this work is so important. That’s why I do the work that I do because I want to help every person I possibly can to heal from trauma and achieve the peace and inner freedom that they long for.

When you’re at that place of healing you’ll realize the incredible strength you have to be where you are now. You’ll be able to see yourself as the warrior that you are, in your wholeness, and in the beauty that you hold inside and out.

Today I want to offer you a prayer. I invite you to ask God to give you a spirit of boldness and an uncompromising spirit. Ask God to reveal the areas that you need help releasing. In the Envision Workshop, I invite you to evaluate the past year to bring attention to the places where you need to bring forgiveness and healing to. When you work with me personally, I invite you to evaluate all the way back to your childhood. When we identify those pillar moments that hurt you so bad that they shaped the way you are, we work together to uproot them once and for all so that you can untether yourself from them and tether yourself to God. We bring God into the equation so that you can get used to listening to that voice of truth, the voice of the Holy Spirit, which brings you the healing that is true to you and your experience. 

On an even deeper level, when you bring attention to the areas in which trauma creates self-sabotage as I talked about in episode 65, then you can incorporate mental fitness into the game to retrain your mind to stand in wisdom and growth. You can begin to see the gifts that came from the hurt or the setbacks. You can start to see the opportunities rather than the losses. It’s powerful work and it’s possible for anyone willing to give themself a chance. 

To sum things up, Philippians 1:6 is a scripture that I hold onto. And it says this:

“And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you, will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
– Philippians 1:6

It gives me such peace because it tells us that when new things come up, there’s no reason to beat ourselves up. This work will continue until the day we meet Jesus. That’s why this relationship is so powerful, why I personally can’t live without it and want the same for you. It’s a huge testament to God’s grace working in us so that we can be a better expression of ourselves and continue to be the light that we’re meant to be. As we work on our purpose and continue to align more with the purpose God has for us, He’ll continue to reveal more to us. That way we can be more potent for others, for our families, and in our life as a whole.

If you’ve never asked Jesus into your heart, simply repeat this, Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. Amen.

Now, the work begins but you’re not alone in doing it. Start getting in the Word and stay in a relationship with Jesus. Find yourself a community of believers and don’t isolate. Please reach out to me and I’d love to offer any resources I have for you. If you’re not on my email list, go to ivianabynum.com/start-here and we can get you started on the journey to healing. Until next time!