Facing Up to Abuse

Bill Ronsheimer had been married for many years. He was a local church pastor when his wife told him that as a child she had been sexually abused many times.

Bill was committed to doing whatever he needed to do so his wife could get help. But before long he realized she wasn't the only one who needed help. There was obviously stuff in my life that needed to be dealt with and pride was among them.

So with the congregation, I shared with them and this was with the doctor's advice. It was turning out to be the turning point in our lives, the defining moment. And as much as Pamela needed help, I needed help.

The difference was she knew she needed help. I didn't realize where I was. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. We'll hear today from Bill and Pamela Ronsheimer about the very difficult, glorious, liberating journey that God took both of them on in their marriage. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I feel like we need to say to those of you who are listening that what we're going to be talking about today is going to hit home for some of you on a profound emotional level. Some of you were talking about your story today as we talk about the experience of childhood sexual abuse and how that affects your life and your marriage and all that goes on.

Some of you who are listening have never told this to anybody. You've kept this hidden and you've shared that this was your story. How old were you when you were abused? It started around three. And continued for years?

Probably until around nine or ten. Who was the first person you told? I think it was Dave when we were dating. So in growing up, you didn't tell mom, you didn't tell dad? No. Didn't tell a girlfriend?

No. I don't think I realized the shame and embarrassment and the weight of that that you carry. And I just pushed it down and when things seemed better, I thought, who wants to bring that up? And you've already shared with us that when you did tell Dave, Dave was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, well, I think I had that attitude.

Hey, just so you know, I had some sexual abuse happen when I was younger, but I feel like God has healed me and I feel good. If I remember correctly, the conversation was over in a couple minutes and I was like, okay. I had no concept of what this meant, what it would mean for our future marriage.

That came later. So part of me is like, I'm glad we're talking about this today. I'm really glad because we're going to give people hope. Well, and I would say this, if you haven't been affected by this, someone you know has been because it really does hit one of three girls and so we are all affected by this in one way or another. And Bob, we had mentioned earlier of some of the ramifications that come from that and I was very promiscuous because it was more of I want to be in control.

I don't want you to hurt me, but I will control you and hurt you. And so that's how it played out and I think that's kind of what I had shared with Dave as well. Bill and Pamela Ronsheimer are joining us again on Family Life Today. Guys, welcome back. Thank you.

Thank you. You guys have started talking to people about this and sharing with folks. You've got a ministry called Marriage Reconstruction Ministries and this is really at the heart of how you're ministering to couples in marriage. Bill, you've written a book called Help My Wife as a Survivor of Sexual Abuse.

You're an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. You were a pastor for 39 years. The two of you have been married for more than four decades and have got two adult kids and grandkids and your decision to be public about this issue really came out of having to deal with it in the context of your marriage, deal with it privately first. How many years from when you started dealing with it privately until you said we're going to open up this story to our kids and to the whole world? Pamela was the best one on that in opening up to our girls. It was when they were in junior high or earlier, earlier. When I first disclosed to Bill, we went home and that following Sunday, I did feel some sense of release from that anxiety and so I asked Bill if I could just give my testimony on that Sunday morning. Well, that's brave of you.

That's, yeah. So, I shared that something terrible had happened to me when I was 10 because, again, I didn't think of sexual abuse to be the word that I could have used. And so we shared that, so immediately I was safe to speak about it. I did tell Bill, I said, I think I need counseling.

I was trying to row a boat without a boat. And for listeners who didn't hear your whole story, you were abused by a teacher and that was during elementary school. It continued while you were in elementary school. You tried to share this with your parents and tried to share it with some friends and nobody really came around and said, this is serious. And so you began to think, well, maybe it's not that big a deal. Didn't share it with your husband until you'd been married for 10 years.

Correct. At the 10-year mark, somebody said, how can I pray for you? And you said, I was abused sexually. You were surprised that you said it because you hadn't even put words like that.

Absolutely. I'd never said it out loud before. And Bill, you were stunned because you had no knowledge that this was a part of your wife's past?

Yes, I'm not even sure I could say stunned, though, because I was ignorant. I just didn't know what that was going to mean or what it meant for her. And you went on from there thinking, well, it's out and we'll share about this without thinking, there's probably some scar tissue left on my soul, right?

I didn't know that. I just thought, I think I need some professional help. What happened at the church when you shared that, by the way, a week later, hey, let's just tell the whole church. I received many hugs. I don't think many people knew more than I did at the time of what this was going to be.

However, they were to find out and they were going to share it with us, too. Well, and it's interesting, Bob, you said there's a lot of scar tissue. I would say it's not scar tissue yet. I would say it's more infection at that point because there's no healing that has taken place yet. Absolutely.

It's like an abscess that's under the skin that you haven't seen yet. So, Pamela realized that and I'm continuing on with my life. It's all about me still at this point. And she started asking me, you know, I need more help. I need a counselor. So, let me set some context here for those of you to whom my voice might sound young.

I'm not young, you know. I've been in ministry a long time. So, we're going back to some years where for some segments of the Christian church, counseling had a stigma to it. And so, as a pastor, to have my wife go to a counselor and somehow let that get out in the open, it was unthinkable to me at the time, given the context of things.

But I do have personal responsibility here. I was ignorant and I was arrogant. And I really did not listen to Pamela.

I did not support her at all in the help that she needed. So, eight years went by like this. Wow. Now, God has a way of bringing some things to— To the surface?

To the surface. And he did and amazingly, I ended up going into counseling after those eight years as well. So, joke's on me. When we'd been married for 18 years, I was 39 years old. And a person who had hurt me asked for forgiveness. And I was not able to give it, but that opened the door and the pain of the sexual abuse was like a tsunami. It completely knocked me flat. Immediately, I stopped eating.

I cried constantly and my behavior became extremely erratic. We would argue, I did not know that the anger towards my abuser was being aimed at Bill. And so, when I would perceive that he had done something where I didn't trust him, I just was like a lunatic. And so, where our home had been one of peace and calm, for that six weeks it became like hell on earth.

That's from my point of view. I do remember there were a couple instances, like for one, Bill brought me flowers and I took the flowers. And in my mind, the story was, if you think those flowers are going to help me, you are wrong. And I just threw them across the room. Another time, I was like too upset to be able to keep talking. So, I grabbed the keys from the—we were on the second floor of our upstairs, downstairs apartment.

And went tearing down the stairs to drive away in a rage, screaming back to Bill, you explain this to the girls, and they were in eighth and ninth grade. So, our marriage for the next, I'd say, four or five years was miserable, full of shame and chaos. I ended up, at the end of the six weeks, in a mental hospital. We found a doctor through friends that knew I was falling apart, who was a Christian, who had a lot of experience with trauma and sexual abuse. So, he admitted me.

I found that that was a very safe place to be for those four weeks. The first night that I was in the hospital on the psychiatric floor, I had begged my doctor to give me a private room and to put it far away, that little piece of me that likes aloneness, and he did it. And so, I'm at the corner of the unit, and the door is shut, and I had a conversation with God. And it went like this, loud, first of all.

I was loud. I said, God, if you are ever able to take away this pain, I will never, ever let you use me again to help another person. No, wait, wait. If you're able to take it away, I'll never let you? Never let you use me.

So, that's like, make me better, and I'll quit serving you? It wasn't that I would quit serving him. But first of all, I didn't think he could take that deep pain away.

And if he could, there was no way I was going to let him use me to help anybody else. Because? The pain was so great. And in my mind at that moment, as I was speaking out loud, because I do pray out loud, even if it's quiet and mumbling, to stay focused when I pray. That was sort of one of the effects of the abuse that I never knew, and that is that I can't, there's a lot of activity in my brain. So, if I want to pray, I have to speak.

So, I finished by saying, God, how could you love a little girl and watch that happen and not do anything? Now, all the time that I'm saying those words, I am also saying, I know you're there. I was on the third floor, and I faced Lake Michigan, and so I could see the sunrise every morning. And for those four weeks, I would get up before dawn, which is, Bill would know, I mean, like, you don't see me before 11 a.m., if I can choose.

I would get up before dawn, throw up the windows and sit on my bed and watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan thinking, if God can keep the universe running, I know He sees what's going on in our lives. And then Bill can tell, we immediately started reading Psalms together in that dark time. Before you talk about the Psalms, though, you connected this erratic behavior, six weeks of what we would look at and say, she had a nervous breakdown, right? That's what I had. You were connecting that to your abuse?

Absolutely. The idea that the pastor's wife is going to the psych ward? Well, that's where God started breaking me. There was stuff in my life that needed to be dealt with, and pride was among them. So, with the congregation, I shared with them, and this was with the doctor's advice. He didn't want everything revealed at once. He said, just let your people know that she's reached complete exhaustion physically and just needs this time for emotional rest. And that became the explanation.

By the time a year had passed, we had shared everything with the congregation. But at the time she's in the hospital, I gave that limited explanation, which I'm sure raised a lot of questions in people. But for some reason, God was enabling me to be okay with that at the time, because I knew that this, well, I did not know, but it was turning out to be the turning point in our lives, the defining moment. And as much as Pamela needed help, I needed help. The difference was, she knew she needed help. I didn't realize where I was.

So, how did that journey take place? I mean, you're getting help. Yeah.

Which is typical. You know, if you've been abused and you go to a counselor, they have been trained to a good degree to know what to do with you. But there was no one for my daughters or for Bill. So, I was assigned to a different counselor in the same clinic. It bothered me a little bit. I thought, shouldn't we be going to the same counselor? Yeah.

I understand now why. I was just talking to another husband the other day whose wife is a survivor, and he said, I want to get us into marriage counseling together. I said, look, you're already in individual counseling, so is she.

Keep it that way for now. Because I know that there are things within the husband that need to be addressed, and there are certainly things in me. One of the things that occurs in the family system where abuse has occurred is that the survivor becomes labeled as the identified patient. She's the one, or if the husband's the one that's been abused, he's the one that has the problems. And the family system kind of buys into that.

But that's a fallacy. I had deep issues that needed to be dealt with, and as I sat down for counseling, eventually those things came to the forefront and were dealt with. So, we needed healing in our marriage, yes, but we were two wounded people who needed God's individual work in us first.

And then the marriage could come together again. Bill, what were your issues that needed to come up and be healed? Besides ignorance and arrogance, which you already said. Pride.

We got a whole rest over here. Pride goes pretty deep, the controlling. You know, there were temptations that I was not dealing with well. I wasn't proving myself to be trustworthy to Pamela.

There were ways in which I was drawn lustfully outside of marriage and thought life and even desiring, wishing, and all of these things that were so privately held within me. And this is so common with those of us that have been sexually abused. We're hypersensitive and aware of those little nuances. And we've had to live our entire life watching for signs of safety or threat.

And so, I would recognize the lack of safety, and when we would try to discuss it ourselves, well, that just turned into a big atomic bomb. But the counselor was able to sort that out in a much healthier way than I would have ever been able to do for Bill. How were you different at the end of four weeks in the psych ward than you had been when you went in? Well, first of all, I had been put on some medication that sort of brought the anxiety to a duller roar. My doctor was reminding me that I was going to get through it. And that was helpful.

It was. Because all I could think of, from the time I was very little, I always had this belief system, and I don't know where it came from other than abuse. If I died, nobody would cry.

Then I would cry, just silently, but I can remember the tears being warm on my cheek and my pillow being soaking wet, thinking, nobody will cry if I die. And then, as I got older, and I had shared about the abuse and the pain started to hit for real, then I wanted to die. At the end of that four weeks, I thought, the doctor said, you'll need long-term therapy. In my mind, that meant nine months, because I thought, it's a long time when you're pregnant. Nine months.

And so, that's truly what I thought. I thought, at the end of nine months, we'll be through this. Well, at the end of nine months, I was seeing my doctor maybe two or three times a week, crying for an hour and going home, screaming the whole drive home because I didn't know why. I just was, screaming because I was still hurting. So, that went on for several years. After a year's time, I felt very suicidal at the anniversary of that hospitalization. I was put back in the hospital. That happened another time, the next year.

And that also was the time of year where the abuse had happened. Pamela, can you share, what was going on in your mind? Were you reliving what had happened to you? What kind of battle were you facing? I think the biggest battle was, I was fighting for my life to stay alive to find out what God was going to do. It wasn't even that I would replay the actual abuse, as much as my nightmares were dragging me into hell, and then to wake up and have to fight Satan with my mind and scripture, I was exhausted. And I'm telling you, I just had, you know, like card after card, like what I brought today. Yeah, what were some of your scriptures that just got you through?

I would read things like this. Isaiah 46, 3. I have created you and cared for you since you were born. I will be your God through all your lifetime. Yes, even when your hair is white with age.

Now, you didn't say anything about dyeing it and bleaching it gray. I have white hair, just so you know. I made you and I will care for you. I will carry you along and be your Savior. And so, I would speak truth, and it was years of doing that. And then eventually, I would be able to say, when I would have a thought, you'd be better off dead.

Your girls would be better. I would be able to say out loud, that is a lie. God has made me, I am His, it is a lie. And I pretty much do that every morning before I get into my day. I don't memorize the things that I speak because I don't want them to ever be just done by rote.

I actually just sit with my cards and read them. I want you to help me as a husband, because like you, I would think nine months should fix this. And so, for you to say years and years and you have to go back a couple of times to the hospital, as you're telling the story, I'm not thinking, boy, there's something really wrong with Pamela. I'm thinking, there's something really wrong with me in thinking this should be over in a few months. Oh, can I answer that?

Yeah. It wasn't until the 1970s that clinical psychologists were beginning to recognize the long-term effects of sexual abuse. And then in the 90s, they began to recognize that as they were hearing the stories of war veterans coming back from war, and the stories of sexual abuse survivors, that the long-term effects they were hearing were very similar. But there's an extra complexity thrown in for survivors of sexual abuse, and it's called complex trauma. For a war veteran, you expect the enemy to be shooting at you. You don't want it, but you expect it. For a survivor, it's the person who's supposed to be their caregiver, not an enemy, that is the one who is abusing them. And it becomes a very complex situation. Here's my answer to your question. We would never say to a war veteran, why can't you just get over it? It would be unthinkable to us. And we need to take on that same attitude for survivors, whether they be male or female, survivors of sexual abuse. If anybody wants to get over it, they do.

But it is a process that for some reason God has chosen to use to work some deeper good into our lives. I'm thinking there may be as many women who are interested in reading your book as there are husbands. You wrote this for Husbands' Health. My wife is a survivor of sexual abuse. I'm guessing a lot of wives are going to say, I want to see what you're telling the husbands in this book. That book addresses 10 questions husbands have that out of my research I began hearing these questions over and over again. I had every single one of those 10. Wow. And Pamela would be quick to say, you know what, those are my questions too. Yeah.

Yeah. What's a normal marriage? When do I get my wife back? Should I stay or should I go? Why doesn't God heal my wife?

When will this be over? Why can't she just get over it? Those are the questions you're addressing in the book, and I'd encourage any husband whose wife experienced sexual abuse. And again, the statistics that we've seen are one in three wives has experienced some kind of direct sexual abuse as a child. Get a copy of this book. Read through it yourself. Read through it with your wife.

Enter into what has to have been a significant trauma for her and be the husband God has called you to be here. The book we're talking about is called Help! My Wife is a Survivor of Sexual Abuse by Bill Ronsheimer. You can go to our website FamilyLifeToday.com to get your copy or call to order. 1-800-FL-TODAY is our number. Again, the title of the book is Help!

My Wife is a Survivor of Sexual Abuse by Bill Ronsheimer. Order online at FamilyLifeToday.com or call to order 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. You know, as we have had this conversation today about how important it is for us to invite others in to the challenges we're facing, to have a safe community of people who can support us as we go through difficult times, as we process what's going on in our lives, I was thinking about many of you as listeners who have gotten in touch with us and asked us to pray for you, and we do that regularly. I got an email from a listener recently who said, Pray for my marriage, for my children, our finances, for my physical and mental health. Somebody else said pray for my anxiety during this difficult season. Somebody else said pray for the restoration of my marriage and my family. Somebody else said we're trying to have children.

The doctors say we can't, we're trusting God and seeking His direction. So many burdens that people are experiencing and so many of us need a community we can connect with. And to the extent we can be a part of that community with you, we want to do that. Family Life Today exists to help effectively develop godly marriages and families. And we do that by providing you programs like Family Life Today.

We do that through the resources we develop, our website, our events. But we also do that by connecting with you as listeners. So as you have prayer requests, we're here for you and want to pray for you. And we want to say a special word of thanks today to those of you who support the work of Family Life Today on an ongoing basis, our legacy partners who every month help us cover the cost of producing and syndicating this radio program and doing all that we're doing here at Family Life Today. We are grateful for you. If you're a longtime listener, you've never made a donation, or if you'd like to become a monthly legacy partner, join the team that makes Family Life Today possible for so many people every day.

You can do that online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY and just say I'd like to be a legacy partner, part of the Family Life Team. We look forward to hearing from you. Tomorrow we want to talk about the hope and the healing that is available for people who have been down this dark road, who've experienced this kind of evil. Bill and Pamela Ronsheimer will be back with us again tomorrow. Hope you can be back as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.