Nicole Braddock Bromley was sexually abused by her stepfather from about age 4 until she was 14 years old.  At age 14, she told her mother, charges were filed, and her stepfather committed suicide. Nicole now is the founder of OneVOICE Enterprises and travels around the country bringing a message of healing for victims of sexual abuse.

The message of Hush resonates with me, for I too am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Like Nicole, I have experienced great healing and I have a passion to help others who have experienced this kind of trauma.

If you have experienced childhood sexual abuse, my heart goes out to you. My message to you is summarized in these five points:

1) Get Safety

If you are currently in any kind of abusive relationship, act now to get out and find a place of safety. If you need help evaluating this or developing a safety plan, one resource is the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

2) Get Support

Reach out to people in your life who are safe. Safe people respect you, listen to your perspective and affirm you. You may want to find a trained therapist who can help you process the abuse and find healing.

3) Gently Move Toward the Pain

We naturally avoid, deny or repress painful memories and painful feelings. It takes courage to move toward the pain instead. Notice what triggers you. When you get a scared, panicky feeling inside, gently ask yourself what that’s about. When I was going through this process, it helped me to picture God holding my hand and going with me toward the pain.

4) Bring it All to God

God is gentle and compassionate. He heals the broken-hearted. Psalm 62:8 says, “Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” God is the ultimate “safe person” to turn to. When we bring all our painful memories, all our intense emotions, all our confused thoughts to God, he gives comfort, grace and healing.

5) Know There Is Hope

I am a therapist because I believe that God redeems.  He brings good out of evil, strength out of weakness, hope out of despair. When I look back on my life, I see that some of the most difficult times have brought the most personal growth.

Nicole Braddock Bromley writes:

Your past can’t be erased, but it isn’t your whole story. Your pain isn’t the end of you. God can work a miracle in your life. He has something good planned for you and He can make your life the way you long for it to be.

My uncle, Christian talk radio pioneer Rich Buhler, once said to me words I will never forget. When I told him about the healing I’d experienced from the sexual abuse in my past, he said, “Isn’t it amazing how God takes that deep, dark dungeon we were afraid to enter and turns it into a beautiful museum that displays his glory?”

Yes. It is amazing.

For all of you who have experienced the pain of childhood sexual abuse, I pray that you may know that healing too.

If you have experienced abuse and would like to talk further, feel free to go here and click on the Contact Us button. We at Restore and Rebuild Ministries would be happy to hear your story and do what we can to support you.

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Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love is written by Dr. Sue Johnson. Dr. Johnson is one of the preeminent marriage therapists today, and the founder of an approach to couples therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). First published in 2008, Hold Me Tight is the first book Dr. Johnson wrote for the general public.

Couples often argue about issues such as money, sex, or relationships with in-laws, and many books focus on helping couples resolve specific struggles such as those. Other books go a step deeper and work on general conflict resolution, communication skills, or love languages.

Dr. Johnson says that to solve couple problems, we need to go even deeper than that, down to fundamental questions that rise out of universal attachment needs, questions such as: Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you try to understand me? Can I count on you to value me?

When we don’t have a sense that our spouse is there for us, we have two basic options: to push harder to try to make it happen (pursue), or to give up on getting our needs met and shut down (withdraw). This leads to negative patterns in marriages, where the more one person pursues, the more the other person withdraws, and the more that person withdraws, the more the first person pursues, until both partners feel discouraged, hurt, and even more disconnected from each other.

Dr. Johnson describes the importance of feeling connected to our spouse:

For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth. All it takes is a slight turning away of the head or a flip, careless remark. There is no closeness without this sensitivity. If our connection with our mate is safe and strong, we can deal with these moments of sensitivity. Indeed, we can use them to bring our partner even closer. But when we don’t feel safe and connected, these moments are like a spark in a tinder forest. They set fire to the whole relationship.

The seven “conversations” in Hold Me Tight are designed to help couples to identify the negative patterns in their marriage, lessen their reactivity, and build a new positive interaction cycle, where both partners feel listened to and cared about. The book includes chapters titled “Forgiving Injuries,” “Bonding through Sex and Touch,” and “Healing Traumatic Wounds.”

I highly recommend Hold Me Tight for anyone who wants to understand relationships better, and especially for couples who are willing to take the time to discuss the book together and work through the “Play and Practice” exercises included in each chapter. I am trained in EFT, and love using these principles to help couples to build strong, lasting marriages, where both partners feel like part of a securely-connected team.

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Mind you, I am not suggesting that I always apply good conflict-resolution skills.  But during these encounters I seemed to be doing it right.  My strong desire to resolve the conflict kept me persisting in the conversations.  I would think, “If I can show him that I understand him or phrase things just the right way, he’ll get it and we will resolve this issue.”  But the conversation would get worse.  Why?

In Dr. Alan Godwin’s book, How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships,he describes four essential truths:

1. Close relationships involve conflict.
2. Relationships work well only when conflict is handled well.
3. We naturally handle conflict poorly.
4. Conflict with reasonable and unreasonable people must be handled differently.

Godwin defines what bad conflict and good conflict look like with reasonable and unreasonable people.  He discusses what he calls the “reason muscles:”  humility, awareness, responsibility, empathy and reliability.  He gives practical insights on how these qualities can be developed in our lives and how they are undeveloped in the lives of unreasonable people.  He explains the damage caused by these undeveloped muscles in a relationship.

He describes the “dramas and roles” we play in dealing with unreasonable people.  As he described dramas and roles, I was amazed at how accurate his descriptions were to my situations.  I thought, Was he a fly on the wall taking notes on my experiences?

Dr. Godwin gives insights on how to assess situations and how to have good conflict.  I found his descriptions insightful, practical and realistic.  These principles have changed my approach to dealing with reasonable and unreasonable people.

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Pastors Samuel Rima and Gary McIntosh wrote their book, Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership, because they wanted to address these problems by helping pastors and other leaders to face their own issues in order to flourish in ministry.

In Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership: The Paradox of Personal Dysfunction, Rima and McIntosh clearly delineate what they call “the paradox of personal dysfunction in leadership” — the fact that:

The personal characteristics that drive individuals to succeed and lead often have a shadow side that can cripple them once they become leaders and very often causes significant failure.

They cite instances of leaders who were driven to achieve in attempts to gain parental approval, for example, but who then found that same drive became a destructive force of compulsive workaholism or perfectionism that destroyed their relationships.

In Part 2 of the book, the authors specify various forms a leader’s dark side might take:  compulsive, narcissistic, paranoid, codependent and passive-aggressive.  They describe these in laymen’s terms, rather than from a clinical perspective, but their observations are sound and applicable.  Each of these chapters ends with a short, helpful questionnaire for self-evaluation.

The authors’ recommendations for leaders found in Part 3, “Redeeming Our Dark Side,” are wise and practical.  They emphasize that is is crucial for leaders to grow in their own self-knowledge and in their understanding of their identity in Christ.

One of the helpful appendices gives an example of an annual performance evaluation of a senior pastor by a church board, a practice recommended by the authors.  They state:

Though opening oneself to formal evaluation is always a risky and frightening experience, it is well worth the risk and fear it engenders… It is always painful to acknowledge our failures and problems but it is absolutely essential if we are ever to gain control of our dark side.

Reading this book inspired personal self-reflection.  My tendencies toward codependency — the way I take care of others, my desire to keep the peace — are part of what drew me toward ministry and toward becoming a therapist.  Left unchecked, however, these tendencies damage my effectiveness.  They make it difficult for me to say no, keep me silent when I need to speak up, and hinder my effective self-care, making me vulnerable to fatigue and burnout.

It was good to be reminded that even though focusing on people-pleasing helped me to get some of my attachment needs met as a child, I can leave that behind now.  When I know who I am in Christ — that I am loved, that I am valuable — then my attachment needs are met and I can give to other people out of abundance, leading in a healthy way rather than a codependent way.

The book also increased my insight into ways that other pastors I have known have been affected by their dark sides.  The descriptions of narcissistic leaders and compulsive leaders were sadly familiar.  My heart goes out to Christian leaders who want to serve God and do not realize how much their own shadow side is negatively impacting their ministries.  May they read this book and be helped.

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