I grew up in a safe town where everyone knows everyone, but I grew up far from safe. From the time I was 4, I was forced to watch my biological mother destroy her body with drugs and then lie to my biological father about where she was and where her pills were. She also taught me to lie at a very young age in order to keep her secrets hidden. By 6, she had given me my first drink of alcohol and had taken me with her to sit in the backseat while she cheated on my biological father. She spent a lot of time in jail because of her reckless behavior, which meant I spent more time visiting her through a sheet of glass, than I did enjoying my childhood. My childhood was filled with sex, violence, abandonment, abuse, and trauma. I was the center of a horrible marriage and two people who had no clue what it meant to be parents.
My biological father got remarried in 2001 and we moved to Adairsville. The transition was huge. I feared rejection, I feared losing my family, and I feared having to go to a new school and being part of a family I had no clue about. The first several years were good and stable….for the most part
When I started 7th grade, I started to understand what had happened throughout my life. I was consumed with anger and rage and the abandonment from my biological mother began to sink in. My relationship with my biological father and stepmother was not good. My biological mother was still in and out of jail; making promises she knew she couldn’t keep. I was so hurt and angry; I knew I was never going to be enough for her. I began to question my existence. I tried to understand how a mother could trade her kids for a chemical high. I blamed myself at times and wondered was there ever going to be a way out of the emotions.
I had a language arts teacher that year who I gave a lot of junk to. I had a smart mouth; I popped off and enjoyed making the class laugh. These were my ways of coping with the anger. One day I went a little too far and managed to get thrown out of her class room. Deep down, I was happy because I knew this meant a one on one chat. At first I refused to open up but as the conversation progressed, I tore down a few walls. She talked to me about how the things I do when I am young, will affect me when I am older and that I needed to tell my biological mother how I felt. I walked out of that room a different person. She started a change in me that day.
During the 8th grade, I became a foster child for 2 months after accusations of verbal and emotional abuse were thrown out by my paternal grandparents against my biological father and stepmother. My biological mother was still in and out of jail so I gave her a final chance. I told her that if she went back to jail, I was done as her daughter because although I loved her very much, all the emotions I had because of her were unhealthy. At the age of 13, while most kids are enjoying sports or just being a kid, I was saying goodbye to one of the people who had given me life. With tears in my eyes, on March 2, 2006, I said my final words to my biological mother. My emotions balanced out after that and I became a semi sane teen whose relationships had improved with many people.
I have never had a great relationship with my biological father. As a child with no mother, I often sought attention from motherly figures such as teachers and my youth pastor however I was never allowed to maintain a relationship with anyone. Summer of 2009, my biological father began showing me more attention than he ever had before. It started with more hugs, more kisses, and often pulling me into his lap. Coming from a child who has rarely gotten attention from her father, I saw nothing wrong with it, but coming from a person who knew how bad the world could be, I knew something was wrong. One day my stepmother forced me to go on a trip with my biological father. Deep down I knew something was going to happen, I just prayed it wasn’t what I thought.
Always trust your hunches. They are usually based on facts filed just below the conscious level. As much as I hoped I was wrong, my biological father sexually abused me that night and took the last ounce of innocence I had left; leaving me to tell myself, I told you so. My stepmother refused to believe me when I told her because he said I was lying. She made up excuses for him time after time. I was so hurt and ashamed because the one parent who I had left; didn’t see me as anything more than a piece of tail. I eventually had to make a decision to either forgive him or move out and at 17, my choices were slim. I forgave him the best I could and I pushed the incident deep down.
Because of the childhood I had and then adding in the molestation, I didn’t think very highly of myself. I had begun dating a guy as any teen girl does and soon convinced myself he was the one. Looking back now, I realize he wasn’t the “one”, he was just a way “out”. I fell in to deep and was suddenly faced with my past rejections. All the hurt that my biological mother and father had caused me, I was trying to make him pay for it and make it up to me. Eventually, it ended and I was left once again feeling abandoned and alone. I had no idea what to do. Depression ran deep and I saw no way out.
I think that when something traumatic happens to the human brain, it sometimes goes into shock mode. This mode causes us to not really be affected by the traumatic event. For 3 years I feel as though my brain was in shock mode. One day, the fact that my own flesh and blood had sexually abused me, was just too much to bear, I just didn’t know at the time, that was the reason for my issues. The first thing I had to realize was that my issues had a cause. A person, who is violent, is that way for a reason; bad behavior is like bad fruit on a bad tree with bad roots. I spent time pretending I was ok and that what my biological father had done, did not affect me. Hurt people tend to pretend everything is ok. We hide the baggage we carry. We attempt to mask the pain with addictive behaviors (substance abuse, food disorders, emotional addiction, activity obsessions, will addictions, or sexual addictions). This behavior often carries on for generations. I made the decision that it stopped with me.
At some point in your life, someone will hurt you (if they haven’t already). That someone will take all that you are and rip it into pieces and they won’t even watch where the pieces land. But through the breakdown, you’ll learn that you’re strong and that no matter how hard they try to destroy you; you can conquer anything. We have to embrace the conflicts God has put in our story. Often times, the scenes that we want to skip, produce the ending we all love to see. I have learned that God sometimes uses our present circumstances to not only make us more useful for later roles in his unfolding story but also because it allows us to help others. I have also learned that when another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help.
It took me several years to truly forgive my biological mother and father and I still have days where I have to reforgive them. I had to teach myself what an addict was and learn how they function. There are two sides to an addiction. The first side is pleasure involved in the relationship to the object. Most people don’t get addicted to something that will cause them pain. The other side of addiction is the use of pleasure as an escape from pain. Life in the devil’s world causes deep soul pain for all of us. This life is full of loss and the loss of important people and things cause grief in our hearts. This life is also filled with injustice and unfair treatment that causes us to feel cheated by those who hurt us. When we are hurting inside, we naturally look for ways to make the pain go away. As Children, we had very few options when we were treated unkindly. We were too young to leave and go on our own so we had to stay and find a way to cope. One way we learn to cope was to numb our hurt by repressing our feelings. Repressing emotion creates a split in the soul because it causes us to lose touch with our pain by forcing it into the back of our mind. The pain is still there, hidden but we no longer remember it and we think we have effectively dealt with it. It remains unresolved deep in our heart and can lead to depression later in life as well as other emotional issues and destructive behaviors. We have to learn to forgive as he has forgiven us. The bible says “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as Christ God forgave you” Ephesians 4:32. We have to view our abuser as ourselves and realize, they are hurt just like us. What they are doing and have done to us, was done to them. Hurting people hurt people. I recently learned that my mother was sexually abused by an uncle. She never coped. She never told. And she never healed. She masked the symptoms with a dirty bandaid and allowed a substance to ruin her life.
God says he will give us our recompense or double portion. “Instead of your shame you will receive a double portion, and instead of disgrace you will rejoice in your inheritance. And so you will inherit a double portion in your land and everlasting joy will be yours. For I the lord love justice” Isaiah 61:7-8. Recompense is a key word for anyone who has been hurt. When the Bible says that God will give us our recompense, it basically means that God himself will pay us back what is owed us. Recompense is similar to workmen’s’ compensation. If you get hurt on the job while working for God, he repays you. God will pay us back in many ways and sometimes he will give back when we least expect it. God has paid me back more than I ever could have imagined. He has given me a family in place of mine who exceed anything I had ever dreamed of having. I now have a mom, a dad, two little sisters, and many more who have helped me get to where I am today. I have been very fortunate to have so many special people shape me into who I am. And 7 years ago, I was blessed with my now, husband. He has torn down the walls and rebuilt them with windows. He is everything I ever wanted God to send me and now we have 2 beautiful sons together who God has great things in store for.
Childhood abuse is not something to take lightly. It’s not something to overlook because “it’s never happened to me”. Abused children turn into traumatized adults and then they raise traumatized kids. There are people standing around you right now that have been raped and abused and have been told to keep quiet because “this family has a reputation to uphold”. Stop letting your kids and family suffer because of what the world might think. Abuse went through so many generations in my family because of being afraid to ruin a name. Stop telling people “that’s still your family”. Toxic is toxic and no one has the right to tell someone else how to feel about something they endured.
1 in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys are victims of abuse
82% are under 18
Females ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely to be abused
90% know their abusers
30% of abusers are family members
60% are abused by people the family trust
Foster children are 10x more likely to be abused
Adolescents who were abused have a 3-5fold risk of delinquency
39% of girls 7-12 with a history of sexual abuse have academic difficulties
Female adult survivors are 3x more likely to report substance abuse
Child hood trauma often leads to many consequences even into adulthood.
Obesity
People pleasing
Teen pregnancy
PTSD
Suicide
Self esteem issues
Mistrusting of adults
Anxiety
And much more.
Be the exception. Stop the curse. Defend the voiceless.
My name is Megan Gray and I am a statistic.