Groomed: Overcoming the Messages That Shaped Our Past and Limit Our Future

INTRODUCTION

How Did I End Up Here?

It started with a secret.

Something happened when she was a child, right under the watchful eye of her mother. Something that she couldn’t tell anyone about.

Someone she trusted did something to her body that she couldn’t forget. It changed the way she forever saw herself.

That secret festered and stuck with her, and soon she’d collected more. If she told the truth to anyone now, she thought, she would be dismissed, judged—or worse. So she stayed quiet. She gave up her voice because there was too much she couldn’t say. A shell of protectiveness covered her once-bright personality.

Then another person came into her life and said the words she longed to hear.

I love you.

I’ll take care of you.

I see you.

That person led her into places she never thought she’d go. Convinced her to do things she never thought she’d do. Told her to sell herself because that’s all she was good for. Until, finally, she started to believe . . .

She was worthless.

She didn’t deserve to live a full life.

What had happened would define her forever.

So she stayed in the places that risked her body and tore at her soul.

The story above could describe any of the eighteen hundred young women a year who come through the doors of Selah Freedom, the organization I cofounded almost ten years ago. They are the survivors of sex trafficking, the heartbreaking $150 billion per year industry that takes children—in America, usually runaways—and coerces them into business transactions where they’re forced to have sex as often as forty times a day.

But rather than describing their lives, which are unimaginable to most of us, I’ve shared a piece of my story.

That might surprise you if you saw me in the grocery store or school carpool line. I probably look a lot like you. I’m a mom with a master’s degree, three teenagers, and no police record. I never walked the streets or took money for sex. Yet I’ve had my share of secrets, abuse, and even groomers.

No, I’m not talking about the stereotypical pimps you see on TV—the ones who wear feathered purple hats and fur coats, lingering on street corners and luring vulnerable girls into back seats and hotel rooms. My groomers were subtler, but they still manipulated my young, impressionable soul, filling my head with lies they claimed were for my own good. They taught me to do things to benefit themselves, not unlike the ways in which the stereotypical pimps we encounter at Selah Freedom groom girls (and sometimes boys) to send out to the street.

I let my groomers’ messages define me and my actions for decades. I let them lead me into compromises because I thought I didn’t deserve anything more. I settled for less. I lost my voice and my sense of self.

I let myself be controlled by the secrets and lies, and they did a number on me. It’s taken more than forty years to unravel my thoughts and actions, and still today, even in the process of writing this book, I’m uncovering new things.

And you know what else? I’m not alone. The more I talk to women across the country—from every kind of background you can imagine—the more I realize we’ve all been groomed for some kind of future. Far too often it’s a future we never would have chosen for ourselves.

But no more. For years adults in power have taken advantage of young, vulnerable women, and the world is waking up to just how much we have endured. Headlines and hashtags blast the stories of other bold women tired of hiding in the shadows. From the entertainment industry to the workplace and even the church, painful scandals have rocked the status quo.

It’s time to bring light into darkness.

This move toward honesty is not a fad, and it’s not going away. Many of you know firsthand what those women on the news are talking about. Research shows one out of three women in America was sexually abused during childhood.¹ No matter how many years it’s been, if that’s your story, those scars are probably still with you. Women who experienced sexual abuse or assault, especially those who never told anyone, are more likely to struggle with depression, eating disorders, anxiety, and shame. They’re also more likely to enter abusive adult relationships.² The voices of those early groomers are always with us.

But even if that’s not part of your story, this book is for you. Women today have been groomed for a lot more than just sex.

Have you ever wondered, How did I end up here? Do past hurts pop up regularly to squelch your happiness and limit your opportunities? Do you feel stuck in a life that looks good on the surface but leaves you unfulfilled? Or are you struggling under the weight of relationships and expectations that don’t seem to fit your deepest heart longings?

No one wants to believe they have been controlled or sold out by someone they trusted. But chances are, you were groomed to live for something other than your true self, and the more years you spend in that false place, the more uncomfortable and smothering it feels.

I’m writing this book to help you move past the place where you’re currently stuck. No one has to be defined by their past. No one has to live for their groomers. But to get there, we need to take a giant, scary step back and look at where we came from and why we believe certain things about ourselves. We need to identify the ways we have been groomed.

It won’t be easy. I’m going to ask you to uncover some of your deepest secrets, look at them honestly in the light of day, and ask questions about the motives of the people closest to you. You may shed a lot of tears as you read, and you’ll probably have some hard conversations. But in the end, if you stick with me, you’ll discover a new way of living—one that brings light into the dark corners of your life and allows you to discover a way forward in fullness and freedom.

Are you ready?

Part 1

WE’VE ALL BEEN GROOMED

Chapter 1

THE SECRETS WE KEEP

One summer evening when I was six years old, my sister, Diana, tucked me in and kissed me good night, just like she always did. Diana was nine years older than me, and she was my nurturer—the one who cuddled me, dressed me for Halloween, and played games with me. She was my hero.

Our seventeen-year-old brother was down the hall in his room, putting away his hunting rifle. Our mom grew up in a rural area where hunting was a normal part of life, and her kids all learned how to handle weapons safely, so the accident that followed should never have happened. But it did.

As Diana passed the open doorway to my brother’s room, the gun misfired. The bullet struck her temple and killed her instantly.

I slept through the chaos that happened next—the sirens, the paramedics, the pools of blood, the cries of my family members. Looking back, it’s clear that my ability to black out during traumatic situations started early.

I went to sleep with a beloved sister. When I woke up, she had disappeared. But the real tragedy for me was that no one in my house ever talked about Diana again—at least not to me. In grief, everyone went dark.

My parents sheltered me from the aftermath of the accident. I stayed with relatives for two weeks while the house was scrubbed and my sister was buried. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. I know that it was all done to protect me, but the result was that I never had the chance to say goodbye.

Years later a family friend told me about Diana’s funeral. Close to a thousand people filled the church until it was standing room only. I think about that day often and wish I could have seen such an outpouring. It would have matched what I was feeling. Instead, I was alone. Nothing in my external world acknowledged the level of my internal grief, and I was left with so many questions. I sometimes felt as if I had imagined having a sister. As if she had been a dream.

A few weeks after Diana’s death, I went with my family to a cousin’s wedding. There was an empty space in the line of bridesmaids where Diana was supposed to stand, but still no one mentioned her.

After the ceremony a family member found me crying in a corner. What’s wrong? she asked.

I miss Diana, I whimpered. My stiff, ruffled dress crumpled around me. My loss in that moment was achingly physical. I longed for my sister. I wanted to talk about her, to cry to someone, to grieve.

Instead of opening her arms to me, my relative said, You’re not even old enough to remember her. Then she walked away.

The message was clear: My grief was not welcome in my family. I would have to hold this deep ache inside.

It was my first secret.

What was your first secret? You know, that thing in your past, probably in your childhood, that forever altered the way you understood everything?

Before your first secret, you thought the world was safe and your place in it was assured. But secrets shift that perception. They make things seem out of balance. When people you thought you could trust reveal themselves as flawed, your future becomes a little less hopeful.

The memory of your first secret probably still stings, even after all these years. It’s not pleasant to talk about. Perhaps someone warned you never to talk about it. Yet it’s never far away. It reaches into your life even now. It comes to your mind when you’re alone, without distractions.

More than forty years after Diana died, I still think about my sister every day.

Who do you think about?

Our painful secrets are as diverse as we are, and so are the results. They emerge from moments of trauma, whether those come from accidents, negligence, or the intentional actions of others. For me, grief was my first secret. For others, it was a feeling of being unloved or unwanted. I know women who hold secrets about the first time they lied to cover for a loved one’s issues or the first time someone shamed them for being different from everyone else.

For the survivors who come to Selah Freedom, their secrets were almost always what drove them from their homes. Running away was preferable to being crushed by the weight of their unspoken burdens.

I’ve never met a person—man or woman, wealthy or scraping by, married or single, in a faith community or not—who hasn’t covered over some kind of wound.

And yet we all assume that since everyone around us seems fine, we’re alone in our pain.

I’m here to say that, no, we’re not alone.

Things went downhill fast for my family after Diana died. My brother enlisted in the military and left home as soon as he turned eighteen. I understand now why he did it, but at the time it seemed like he, too, disappeared from my young life. Then my father’s job transferred him from Chicago to California, and my parents explained that he would move alone at first to settle in. I was too young to understand what the trauma of losing a child had done to their already rocky marriage. Within a few months my noisy, active household of five shrunk to just my mom and me, living alone with our secrets.

My mother has always been stoic, quiet, and task oriented; I take after my father’s emotional, confrontational, relational nature. I remember those years with her as being very quiet, my mother and I each going about our own lives. I longed for the chaos and action that had once filled my home. I ached for Diana and her emotional covering and caretaking.

It’s no surprise, then, that my favorite childhood memories happened in the summers, when we would visit my mother’s family in Arkansas. My aunts and uncles lived on farms in the country, in places so rural that some didn’t even have running water. It was a paradise for a city kid like me. I had lots of cousins to play with and could ride horses and name baby animals.

The summer I turned twelve, though, another dark cloud entered my life—and it happened in the one place where I still felt like a safe, protected child.

Everyone was getting ready for church on a Sunday morning, and I was fixing my hair in the bathroom. One of the adults who was often around—not an immediate family member, but a family friend—came into the room and stood behind me, staring at me in the mirror.

You’ve really grown up this year, he told me. You’re so pretty now. Then he reached around me and put his hands on my breasts.

I froze. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. My only thought was, This can’t be happening.

And then he was gone, walking out of the bathroom as casually as he’d walked in.

The moment felt unreal. This was someone I’d known my entire life, someone I trusted. He wouldn’t do something like that! I finished getting ready and tried to push away the memory, ignoring the new sensations of shame I felt in my body.

When the family split up into different cars to head to church, the man arranged for me to ride with him. I didn’t argue; who would believe me if I revealed what he’d done? I watched with detached terror as he slid his hand under my long, conservative skirt. I can still see the look he gave me, not one of lust but of pure power.

When we got to church, that same man pulled out a guitar and headed inside to the front, a smile on his face. He was on the worship team.

While my molester sang about Jesus, I went to the bathroom and cried. All I felt was confusion. What had happened seemed like something from a soap opera, not my normal Christian family life. It was too big, too damaging for me to take in.

By the time I went back to the service, I knew that I could never tell anyone what had happened. Another secret.

When the music ended and we all sat down in the pews, one of my uncles put his arm around me, probably