The Healing Path: A Faith Journey

Nearly fifteen years have passed since I flipped on the television that Friday evening in 2004 as the news commentator introduced the term grooming. I’d spent the day giving a statement to the Director of Human Resources at the seminary where I received a Master of Divinity in 1998 and was now working on a PhD. I leaned my head forward from the chair’s cushioned back as I listened carefully to the reporter describe the upcoming story about a high school gymnastics coach who was being accused of grooming his young female gymnasts in order to sexually violate them. I felt my heart accelerate as he recounted the coach’s slow but deliberate attempts at gaining each girl’s trust while choosing the most vulnerable to exploit. My head was spinning.

While my experience of violation had not been as a gymnast, I immediately recognized the pattern described in the report. Grooming. I’d never heard the term! The minute the documentary ended, I was sitting at the computer searching for more information on grooming. “…targeting an individual’s vulnerabilities, emotional needs and isolation…” I read, “…gaining a victim’s trust…filling a need.” Turning back to the search page I found the heading, “Clergy Grooming.” With my heart racing even faster I clicked on the link to find a one sheet description of clergy grooming on a website called, “The Hope of Survivors.” I printed the description.

The following day I stood facing the HR Director again. “Grooming.” I said, my voice was shaking. “Grooming—clergy grooming.” I repeated, handing her the page I’d printed. “This is what he did to me.”

First, let me say that I am not an expert in trauma, but I am an expert at having experienced what many of you are facing—the incomprehensible path toward healing after sexual, spiritual and emotional violation by a trusted individual. Even after finding The Hope of Survivors and making contact with Samantha, I vacillated between knowing that a man who represented God had violated my trust, and not believing it was true. My mind could not grasp this. Not only was my body violated but, during the process of bringing harassment charges against him, I felt my spirit had been raped—gang-raped by those behind the scenes who judged me as the cause of his actions. You know this feeling. I don’t have to tell you what it is like. You have been there and we are not alone.

My purpose here is not to elaborate further upon the grooming and abuse of power, which took place from 2001 through 2004 when I was a seminary student, because I am devoting this piece to offering hope for those of you who are currently facing the road to healing. Facing the truth about a trusted spiritual leader in whom you have placed your life is difficult and, while discovering the truth is liberating, the path to personal wholeness can be longer than we want it to be. I often struggled with why I couldn’t seem to get over the anger, the feelings of betrayal and the pain as one year turned into many—even though I was thankful to have escaped this painfully abusive and crazy-making relationship which had lost any sense of professional ethics.

And, while I have spent years reading about trauma, sexual, spiritual and emotional abuse by those in positions of power, I am not trying to provide definitive step-by-step instructions, but more a personal journey and reflection that might guide another through the difficult but transformative process of healing.

First, be accepting of your feelings of anger, sadness, betrayal and especially shame. This last one hid from me for a very long time and that’s okay. Identifying the feelings is not always easy and sometimes they remain hidden until our psyche is ready to accept them. This process may also require the help of a professional. Because the man who violated me had been a Christian therapist and seminary professor, I could not trust any therapist or pastor for many years. I also had little money but, out of desperation, I finally stepped into the front door of a women’s crisis center that charged on a sliding scale.

This was the first time I had tried to verbalize the complicated details of what took place.When I finished talking, the counselor responded with a small story. “Most women walk through my door while brushing raindrops from their shoulders telling me, ‘Whew, I got here just in time before the storm really hit!’ But, Kim,” she paused, “you came through my door having already experienced something like a Tsunami.” Then she continued, “I want to commend your strength for surviving this and not only surviving but being able to articulate what happened to you.”

Besides Samantha and The Hope of Survivors, this was my first real sense of validation that, yes, I had gone through something horrible—the word Tsunami did not feel like an exaggeration. The seminary and the church had simply dismissed me as the problem—a seductress—even labeling me as mentally ill. This counselor’s words were the beginning—but only the beginning—of internalizing that they were the ones who were wrong. I had been the victim not the problem. But truly working through the pain of having been a victim would take time. A lot more time than I wanted to allow, which brings me to a second important aspect of the journey.

It is okay, and even necessary, to need time—lots of time—to heal. Think of healing as a journey, rather than a goal. Most victims of clergy sexual violation were vulnerable from the start. For any number of personal reasons, our guard was down, right? You remember this thought, “he genuinely gets it. He really cares about me and I can trust him because he’s so godly.” While your thoughts might not have been exactly the same as mine, I’ll wager that the feeling was similar: a mixture of acceptance for who you are, a sense of being seen, understood maybe for the first time. In the hands of a professional with integrity, great healing can take place when these feelings arise and they are respected; a woman can become a stronger and healthier person. But when she has unknowingly trusted a predator, a woman becomes an easy target to be exploited, as we know from the many testimonials written to The Hope of Survivors.

This sort of exploitation tears at a woman’s very soul. I wanted to get over it. I wanted to move on with my life. Yet the first year after I faced him and the seminary with what happened, I could hardly function, much less hold a job. Violating a person’s soul is trauma. This is real. This disrupts a woman’s orientation in life. The lens with which I viewed the world, and especially God, was suddenly turned into a dizzying kaleidoscope where nothing seemed as it was before. It was like waking up in the middle of the night and realizing you’re in a strange house, trying to feel the walls for a light switch when suddenly a room is illuminated but it is a room you’ve never seen before in a place you’ve never lived prior to this moment.

I didn’t want this! I didn’t want to have to start all over with my life! I was angry; I was distraught. I didn’t have the words to express what happened and I didn’t know who was my friend or enemy. This leads me to a third facet in recovery.

It’s okay to feel angry. Anger is probably part of what got you out. Anger says, “I refuse to be the victim any longer! I refuse to let others be victimized any longer!”

Anger admits that something wrong took place and this wrong needs to be addressed. I faced the man I had trusted. I held the piece of paper on grooming that I’d printed from The Hope of Survivors’ website, staring him in the eyes. “Tell me how you’re different!” I pleaded. “Tell me how you are different than this!” I wanted him to be able to explain; I wanted desperately to believe he was somehow genuine, though all the evidence proved otherwise. I was angry. Anger empowered me to break free. Anger gave me strength to seek the truth when I wrote to the seminary saying, “Shouldn’t we, as Christians, be the first to admit that something is terribly wrong here!?”

Oh, and my anger didn’t stop there. No! I was angry with God too! And do you know what I discovered? God can handle it. Go ahead, see for yourself. Let yourself be angry because anger will guide you closer to the truth if you allow it, for anger sits precariously atop the pain desperately needing to be released. We have all seen the yellow pus needing to escape a wound before it can properly heal. I was betrayed. You were betrayed. It’s okay, and even healthy, to feel the anger and to release it in order to allow the wound to eventually begin to heal.

Feeling the anger and expressing it brings me to a fourth aspect of this healing journey. Be discerning in whom to trust your story. I learned the hard way. I was so angry and so distraught I wanted someone—anyone—to understand. But not even I understood, so how could they? Trust your story only to those who are capable of holding that trust as sacred and who truly wish to understand and support you in your journey. In the beginning, this may be a good therapist, a mentor from The Hope of Survivors, or a close friend or spouse who doesn’t fully understand yet, but is willing to grow with you.

If, like me, you get to a place where it no longer matters whether someone wants to judge because you know the story needs to be told in order to help someone else, then you may begin to make the story public—now the telling is transformed from being about releasing the pain into a tool to help others in their journey, and to prevent future victimization. Which brings me to a fifth point.

Reach out to help others. While a plethora of volunteer organizations exist, I find that often a person crosses my path that perhaps needs encouragement. We are all connected in this faith journey so that when one person is hurt, the whole of our universal being is hurt. So as we reach out to others, or are available to someone’s need, we are not only contributing to the betterment of the world, but also to our own personal well being. Finding ways to be available to others can be difficult, but is a part of what I have found to be an important aspect of the healing path.

Then, allow the pain to arouse the creativity within you. The world of language is diverse and expression moves far beyond words. I recommend writing, journaling feelings and telling your story with words, for healing takes place through the telling of our stories to trusted individuals or in our personal journals. But often words do not express the tremendous loss and grief which we have experienced in the way that artistic expression can. Many women find expression in drawing or sculpting or painting. I have found healing through dance and performance.

A year ago, I read a call for women in my area to submit their stories for a local production called, Speak. My submission was chosen and, for four nights, I acted out my story in front of an audience. While I am now telling my story so that other women can know they are not alone in theirs, I found that embodying it in this way became another unanticipated step in healing, through breaking the silence and using my experience to help others. I have also used dance as a means to heal. While you might consider joining a creative dance class, I head to the gym when there are no fitness classes being held in their multipurpose room. Donning a pair of headphones and music from Spotify, I allow myself to dance freely often combining dance with fitness exercises.

Also, learn to love yourself. A tremendous part of what we have had to face is the recognition that we believed someone cared deeply about us—remember those thoughts I mentioned earlier? “He really sees me for who I am; he loves me like God loves me.” When I am forced to see that he really saw me as an object for his own pleasure and that the people around him cared more about protecting him than caring for me, it allows an already fragile emotional state to shatter. I had to learn to love the woman that my church community considered dispensable.

Learn to love yourself again enough to take care of yourself. Numbing is easy in our society. People are numbing themselves everyday through food, shopping and drugs. I went from being a very health-conscious seminary student who ate well, exercised, did not not drink, smoke, etc., to numbing myself with running trails, sometimes for hours during the day, and binge eating and drinking at night. I was depressed, bulimic and a total mess. I planned my day on how to numb the pain until I could finally begin to face the feelings of loss and move through the difficult process of recovery. I won’t lie to you. Sometimes it felt like hell. Sometimes you will wonder, “why can’t I just get over this and move on” and you will hate yourself more than ever because you feel weak and you feel alone and you wonder if they were right about you. As I recently told another woman going through her own recovery, “sometimes it feels like a baby step forward and five giant steps backwards, but keep giving yourself credit for those baby steps and eventually those tiny steps turn into the giant steps forward that bring a new perspective on life.

During those difficult years, try not to struggle over forgiveness: Stomp on it. Crush it. Get angry at it. How in hell can you forgive this? I came out of the Evangelical Christian Church where forgiveness is heavily stressed. (Matthew 6:12, 14-15, 18:21-35…) “F*** them” I thought (I was still angry and, as one friend once said to me, “sometimes the F-bomb is the only word to express the feelings.’) Then I read over and over Jesus’ words in Luke 23:34. “Father please forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Forgiveness cannot and should not be coerced or forced. As Christians, we learn that not to forgive is to not be truly Christian and that we must forgive. But forgiveness is something that we choose and, until we are truly healing, this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do. But during those most painful years, when I read over Jesus’ words, I felt I could do what He did. In that moment upon the cross in the deepest pit of betrayal, when the world was crushing the life out of Him, He turned it all over to God—even and especially the weight of forgiveness. Jesus did not say, “I forgive you,” He said, “Father please forgive them.”

For years, I left the forgiveness to God because I was not ready to forgive this man for his abuse of power or the people who defended him. But I could say, “God, I turn this over to you, because I’m not ready to forgive.” God honors our journey. I am now in a place of having forgiven this man and the many involved, which has also released me to move forward. Yet, let me stress that to forgive someone is not to say what they did is okay. On the contrary, forgiveness recognizes the wrong committed and, while forgiving the person, does not condone the act; forgiveness does not negate accountability and forgiveness seeks to prevent future wrongs from taking place.

I also highly recommend a book entitled, The Sociopath Nextdoor, by the psychologist Martha Stout. While I am not saying that every predator is a sociopath, through this book I was able to recognize that we are in continual contact with persons whose wiring is different than our own, persons who may have been born with a disconnection and inability to fully love and who live without conscience or ability to truly connect with others. This gives me compassion for them and the ability to forgive, for in Jesus’ words, “they know not what they do.” While my pain was horrific, how terrible it must be to live in a world only able to feign compassion and love.

Finally, throughout the journey in the worst of the days, try to find something for which to be thankful. Some days it may seem almost impossible but there is something about having gratitude for the smallest of things that snowballs into greater thankfulness. When we open our hearts in thanksgiving, we open our hearts to possibility. And when we open our hearts to possibility, we open our lives to the infinite power of healing.

I remember being so financially poor during the recession of 2010 because, though I held two seminary degrees qualifying me to be the pastor in any United Methodist or other denominational church, I could not tolerate being in a church or reading the Bible because of what happened to me during my seminary experience. So I was working as a cashier in a big box retail store making less than $9 per hour. It was the only job I could find and I was buying groceries on credit because my pay could barely cover the rent. One morning I opened the blinds to the window of my basement studio, whose singular view was the tires of the cars parked on the black asphalt parking lot, only to see that my car had been stolen. With no alternative, I began walking the hour-long trek to the job that I resented.

Then someone told me about a bike trail that wound along the river on my route to work. During that walk, I would cry and get angry with God that I was in this position, and then I would listen to the water trickle over the rocks, or watch a small bird dance upon a limb. In winter, snowflakes shimmered like tiny diamonds and, in the spring, I witnessed green buds and small flowers burst forth from the cold earth. Little by little, I was thankful for my walk. I was thankful for each day that I saw some small sign of new birth, somehow knowing this was capable of happening in me. I even became thankful that my car had been stolen, or I might never have discovered this beautiful path to work, which became my prayer path, my contemplative path and a huge part of the healing path in my faith journey.

Gradually I was realizing that the dizzying kaleidoscope’s view was coming into focus again—but in a new way. I began to recognize that I was slowly seeing the world in a new light; seeing God in a very different and more loving way; seeing God as so much bigger than my Christian faith could express! The kaleidoscope of colors had completely transformed my understanding and experience of God and the world in a beautiful and bigger way. This feeling came to full fruition one day when I was scrolling through the pages of the seminary’s website, where the abuse took place. I saw the faces of professors who had once been my classmates but, instead of feeling anger or jealousy that they had been taken seriously as students, while I had been exploited as a woman, I recognized that I was actually thankful that my lens of God was much bigger than this institution offered and that, were I on that faculty, I would be required to adhere to certain doctrinal beliefs that, because of my experience, I now understand as limiting God and who we are able to become through our faith journeys.

In a brief moment, I was aware of how thankful I am to have walked this horrible path toward healing. As I write this, I can say that what happened to me was undoubtedly wrong and what has happened to you is equally as wrong and I would never ask anyone to face what we have been forced to face. But what I am also saying is that God is not black and white—God is in the wrong experiences and God is in the right but, most of all, God is with us in the horrible journey, accepting our anger, holding us in our pain when we least recognize this, and drawing us into the bigger mind of Christ that God intended for us to experience from the beginning.

Author: Kim Erickson

If you are a survivor of clergy sexual abuse, we would love to hear your story and possibly make it available on this web site for others to read and renew their hope. You can use a pseudonym if you choose and rest assured that all personal information will be kept private and strictly confidential. Please contact us.

Please note We do not necessarily agree with or endorse all the information contained in the survivor’s stories. We do, however, feel they have some valuable information that could be useful to you in your recovery. It helps to know you’re not alone, that others have shared your pain and have healed, by the grace of God, in their own time and way.