The Shrapnel of Sexual Abuse

As a child, Pamela Ronsheimer experienced a series of traumatic events, events that scarred her soul and affected her life for years. From the time I was nine all the way through till that tenured point of our marriage, I had terrible nightmares. Nightmares where Satan would stand in front of me and say, you will never be free from me. And I knew verses, I mean, I would quote scripture in my sleep. To fight that lie.

But I did not connect it to the sexual abuse. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at FamilyLifeToday.com. The trauma of childhood sexual abuse is a big deal. It has a significant impact on someone's life. We'll hear more about that today from Bill and Pamela Ronsheimer. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. We're going to tackle a tough subject this week, and it's a subject I remember Dennis Raney would often say to me that the subject we're going to be talking about is one of the hardest stones that the devil can throw at someone. The issue of sexual abuse leaves scars in such a profound and remarkable dramatic way in a person's life that it leaves shrapnel and it leaves healing that can go on for years. You know a little about this. It's part of your story. I do. It is part of my story.

And I thought that God would heal me instantly, but it became a journey of years and years. We've got some friends who are joining us today, and this is a part of their story as well. Bill and Pamela Ronsheimer join us. Welcome to the program, guys. Thank you.

Delighted to be here. Bill and Pamela live in Minnesota. They give leadership to marriage reconstruction ministries, helping couples where sexual abuse is a part of the story and a lot more. It's not just sexual abuse, although that's been where a lot of your emphasis has been, right? Correct, yes.

Bill is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, 39 years a pastor in Wisconsin. And Pamela, your story includes a personal history of sexual abuse. You were abused when you were growing up.

Yes. First of all, let me say that when I was eight years old, I accepted Christ as my savior, and that's very important for how my story ends. I had grandparents who knew the Lord and particularly a great-grandfather who lived across the street from me when I was a four-year-old. And every day, he would come over to our yard and help with planting trees because we were building our house. And he would talk to me about Jesus all the time.

By the time I was almost eight, he was dying from cancer and had gone into a coma. Two weeks before my birthday, whatever they talked about in Children's Church that Wednesday night, on the way home, my mom asked, What all did you learn? And my response was, I found out that I've never asked Jesus into my life. And she said, Well, you can pray right now. And so I did in the back of the car. And immediately, everything changed. Really? And you were eight years old, and yet you remember this.

Absolutely. And I was so aware of my sin as an eight-year-old. I knew that I told lies to keep from getting a spanking. I knew that I was very jealous of one of my siblings.

And so with that prayer, the transformation was instantaneous. I just felt like my life had just started all over. And I was so excited to tell my great-grandpa Lynchide.

And so I told my mom, I really need to talk to great-grandpa. And so she took me after church on Sunday, the following Sunday. And we walked into the room. It was dark.

He was just quiet, sleeping. She tapped him on the arm and said, Grandpa, Pamela wants to tell you something. And so, opening my mouth, immediately there were the emotions of joy and tears. And I said, Grandpa, I asked Jesus into my heart. And He said, just as clear as could be, praise the Lord. I mean, praise the Lord, like with all awakeness, firmness. And shortly after that, He went to be in heaven.

I'm telling you, knowing that His prayers have followed me all of my life, take a story of trauma and tragedy and just completely transform everything. So, at eight, I had that great joy. A year later, my parents moved us from public school to private school. I had a little brother who had heart problems and was very ill. That just seemed to be the path God had for us. As soon as I began fourth grade as a nine-year-old, I was sexually abused by the principal of the school. He went to my church. He was really good friends with my parents. He knew how traumatized our family was. Of five kids, three of us would stay with Grandma for six weeks, then someone in the church. The other ones would go to Grandma's and then someone in the church.

So, nobody would suspect if I started behaving poorly that something other than the upset in the family was causing the problem. Was this something that He groomed you for? Yes, He did. I had a pair of shoes for school that I just thought were amazingly ugly. And so, I brought my Sunday shoes, which were very – they were from Mexico.

My grandpa had brought them for me. They were lacy, like ballerina shoes. And one of the first days of school, I was getting out of my everyday shoes and putting on my Sunday shoes.

What I didn't know, I was standing by the coat rack outside of my classroom. And all of a sudden, I heard this voice behind me go, somebody's got a secret. And like that, he had me. He knew my family.

He knew that in my family, disobedience was punished, probably with a good old spanking. And that I would be fearful that I wasn't living at home, so there was no one to tell right away. And so, within hours, it seems, from that happening, he started asking me to go to different parts of the building or outside the building where children were not allowed to be.

And so, it started out with him wanting me to take a friend and lift our dresses or get a friend and go to the bathroom for him. And from there, it went to the unthinkable. But the saddest part for when I look at that little girl that just had joy and smile that went from one side of the world to the other, it immediately was gone.

And in its place was horror. I think the biggest thing he took away from me besides the innocence, he took away my ability to believe that I could be loved. And so, in that instant of abuse, I could not believe that God could love me. And if God didn't love me, then how could my mother and father love me? How eventually could my husband love me? How could my children, who I adored, how could they really love me? So, when someone said, in any point of life from, I would say, 9 until 18, that I did something well, that they cared about me, in the back of my mind, I thought, they must want something.

So, Satan grabbed ahold of my ability to be loved and kept it hidden for a good long time. So, that started at 9? 9. And did it continue until 18? On and off. You know, I functioned fairly well, but if you would talk to my classmates like in high school, they would probably all be able to say, something was just a little off.

We don't know what it was. I was involved in dramatics, I was involved in music, but I couldn't study. I had a lot of difficulty right away as a 9-year-old losing time and not having my work done. I had a lot of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, so I have just an extreme startle reflex.

Most often, I scare the other people more than I scare myself by that startle reflex if I don't know you're behind me or talking to me. But you had a secret and you didn't tell anyone? I did. Immediately, I told my mom the next time she was home, but she had a critically ill little baby. I was the oldest and she felt like maybe I was looking for attention. Back in the 60s, nobody even called it sexual abuse. I remember telling her that the teacher wanted me to go to the bathroom and that he was testing it, that he said he was doing that for a class and another classmate also. And so later, years later, I found out from my dad a few years ago before he passed away, she had told him that and they just thought, okay, they respected him so much. Probably believed him.

Yeah. I would tell classmates, please stay with me at recess so that he can't get me to go away. I can remember having sixth grade boys when I was nine coming for milk break, handing me a bag full of stuff that the teacher would use for the abuse, give it to me and say, you're in big trouble because the teacher's upstairs in the library waiting for you.

Where are you? I mean, he was involving other kids and they didn't even know it. This was years of ongoing abuse and people not hearing or not believing what you were telling them.

Right. When I started seventh grade, my family moved, all of us children went back to public school. And that kind of gave me some breathing room. I didn't know what an eating disorder was, but I was bulimic. And my mom would hear me throwing up after breakfast and I'd say I wanted to stay home from school and she'd say, wash your face and get to school. Wow.

So I would go. And then I got involved with Youth for Christ. I did some singing. I did a lot of singing in my church. My mom was very, very musical. Though I didn't play piano, I would hear how music should be arranged and so I'd say, okay, this is what I want you to do for our trio.

She would write it and then we would sing for Youth for Christ and she'd play for us. So, you know, just lots of things where I was finding great joy in serving the Lord. But this underneath junk, I didn't know what to do with it. So I just sort of ignored it thinking it wasn't impacting my life. When I was 18, it was the very first time I heard that the Holy Spirit is the part of the Trinity that gives us the power to live the Christian life, to have peace. You know, just to not lie.

All of the things that Christ gives us with salvation. And my smile returned. And I went to college. I did not think that the abuse had any impact in my life anymore. My smile was completely there.

I felt fully alive. You thought you'd been able to compartmentalize it. Yeah, not knowing that that's what it would be called.

Exactly. It was just, I thought, oh, that was bad. Maybe it didn't even happen as bad as I thought.

And it's done. I've talked to women who have experienced this and have heard two different reactions to their abuse over time. One has been that some women become promiscuous in an attempt to try to normalize the behavior that they experienced.

Maybe if I do this, I won't feel the pain anymore. Other women become so afraid of anything to do with sexuality. Now that follows them into marriage. And that becomes a challenge.

But any time a boy leans over to kiss them, they pull back. Was one of those two responses your response? Not at first. I did a lot of dating. I didn't want to ever be married. I had never seen a marriage that I thought would be loving enough that I'd want to be in it.

I didn't realize the impact that my abuse was having in that perception. And so I had a two-date rule. I would date a guy twice, whether I liked him or hated him or loved him. It was like I wouldn't date him again. And that protected me from falling in love until I met Bill. So how did you get to three dates, Bill? Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to remember right now, in fact.

I actually haven't thought of this. What was that third date? It must have been the winner, yeah. Truthfully, I had to just talk her into the idea of let's keep dating. Let's consider marriage. We were best friends for months and had talked endless hours before we ever actually would have been considered dating. And then by that time, he knew he loved me, and I was like, you tell me you love me, and I am so out of here. And that's what happened. Wow.

What did out of here look like? Did you stop dating? Well, I disappeared for a week.

Oh, yeah. Then I found out I was really missing his wit, his intelligence, his sparkle, how he brought such a perfect wholeness to my life by being different than I am. And I had set him up with a bunch of new freshmen coming into school. And I can remember just before school started, we were in the car in front of the college, and I said, I have second thoughts.

I don't think you should be dating all these freshmen. That was his first clue. Yeah. So you went a long time with the thought in the back of your mind, this is who I want to get to know who I want to date, who I want to be with.

Oh, exactly. I had kind of fallen into not being myself for a while, and that's a long story, had lost just the fun of life. And when Pamela came along, I knew right away, this is somebody I believe God has for marriage for me. And you knew that pretty quickly.

Yeah, we are really different in so many ways, but this is what I'm looking for. So I'll never forget, when we drive on I-94 between Milwaukee and Minneapolis, there's a spot where she first told me she loved me. And often when we, if we're on a trip and take that route. You pull over.

Hallelujah! So it was a waiting time, but I had no idea, none at all, what was behind her hesitancy regarding marrying. I mean, she had talked about the bad example she had seen, but as far as there being something that was deeper rooted, I had no idea, and I had no idea when we were first married. And I think for a lot of us guys, who would have thought sexual abuse was as prevalent as it was? I mean, if that was happening, that was happening to such a minority that, you know, we wouldn't even imagine that a girl we knew had ever experienced anything like this. The reality is, it's probably a third, you may know the statistics better than I do, but I've heard as many as a third of young women today have experienced some kind of predatory sexual abuse.

Right, and that's just the ones that are reporting. Right, so it's more common, but when you meet somebody in college, you don't think, gee, I wonder if she's been sexually abused growing up, even though that may have been a part of her past. Oh, especially in the years that we were going to college.

Right. It was, yeah, it was, not much was known back then about the prevalence of sexual abuse. Never in your mind did it ever cross your mind? Never.

No symptoms, no signal at all? I had never known anybody that was sexually abused, so I had no frame of reference regarding the whole thing. Pamela was just plain fun, you know, that's what I was looking for. I had never heard the phrase sexually abused, and so I didn't even have a vocabulary to talk about it other than if I would have described it.

Right. I honestly had no sense that any of the dysphoric feelings that I was having would be connected. We had been married ten years, and I had everything I ever dreamed for. I was thrilled with my marriage. We had two beautiful little girls.

Bill had been in ministry for ten years. And everything was going along well. Everything was normal.

And to your question – You call it normal in the book. And we should mention this. Bill, you've written a book called Help, My Wife is a Survivor of Sexual Abuse, and you say we had a normal marriage for ten years. It looked better than most of the people we were with. Yeah, I bet. But in the midst of that normalcy, prior to marriage or during ten years of marriage, did the thought ever occur to you? I should tell Bill what happened to me.

Never. And were you happy, Pamela? I was.

And that was the puzzler. I was happy, but there was this underlying anxiety that didn't have any explanation. I loved being a pastor's wife. I was so proud of Bill. I loved him. I was happy I was married. I loved my little girls.

I was involved in the community. And yet underneath, there was this kind of anxiety that would sometimes get so bad that I would think if I would not be here, everybody would be better. From the time I was nine all the way through till that ten-year point of our marriage, I had terrible nightmares. Nightmares where Satan would stand in front of me and say, you will never be free from me. And I knew verses, I mean, I would quote scripture in my sleep to fight that attack, that lie, but I did not connect it to the sexual abuse. And so when we'd been married ten years, I was really starting to feel depressed.

And Bill said if you'd stop reading all those books on how to be happy, you'd probably be happy. And I mean, he didn't know what to do with me. Did you ever tell him about the dreams?

Yes. So you knew about that? Yeah, because he had to deal with that on our honeymoon.

I mean, those buzzards came right out. So even though you had a normal marriage, you were aware there's something in my wife's soul that is restless. I'm not sure if I was that thoughtful of a guy back then, to tell you the truth, Bob.

But we can say that in retrospect, looking back on those early years, we're able to connect the dots and understand how some things that we did perceive or didn't perceive were tied to the abuse. You were thinking about other things. Yes. You were involved in ministry. Yeah.

Too much so, right. And I was a controlling husband during these years, things were going the way I wanted them to go, so we're fine. And I was the perfect match. My perception of my parents' marriage was different than my siblings, but my perception was that my mom was the boss and that I felt bad for my dad. And so in my mind, I thought, okay, I will never be bossy to my husband. Well, that's just the perfect storm, because I didn't tell him how I really felt about anything. You became the good, submissive wife. And even though I have a really strong sense of who I am and I am a good thinker, I just sort of shrunk that, made it small on purpose, because I wanted him to be the one that shined. And that felt good to him, that felt good to you? Until it didn't. When we'd been married 10 years and I was hitting that point of feeling depressed, I told Bill we were going to a pastor's wife's retreat, and I said, if we don't get help at this, I don't know what will happen.

And so after a prayer meeting— Now, hang on. It's been normal and everybody's fine, and it was this kind of like, where did that come from, when she says, if we don't get help, I don't know what's going to happen? Did you know what help about was?

No. And you didn't either, Pamela. I didn't either. I did not know it was about the abuse. I thought, I need help to not be so anxious.

And what about physical intimacy? Were there any clues there? No, no, there weren't. But then at that point, after a prayer meeting, a man came up to us and said, someone we didn't know, said, looked at Bill, and he said, God has just told me that I should pray with you.

Is there something I can pray for you? And Bill was quiet, and I looked up at him, and these words came out of my mouth, and I was as shocked as the world. I was sexually abused when I was 10, and I'm going, holy cow, where did that come from? You did not pre-think I'm going to say this.

Had no clue. God just brought it out of my mouth. Bill, what were you thinking? Well, I'll tell you who I was. It's easier to tell you that than to remember what I was thinking at the time. I didn't know what to think. I was totally ignorant as to the ramifications of being sexually abused. So she said it, and I thought, that must be a problem.

Wow. And the other problem was I was arrogant. As a controlling husband, I wanted it my way, and it was all pride.

So ignorance and arrogance, you combine that together. I totally lacked empathy of what it was to be in Pamela's shoes, which is something that I'll want to talk about later and what empathy means in a marriage, especially in a marriage where there's been abuse. You've laid a foundation for us here, and there's obviously a lot we want to dive into and dig into. I'm just wondering how many women are listening who have never told, maybe never understood for themselves, that what they experienced was a bigger deal than they've even thought it was. Or how many men who are listening who maybe their wives said, you know, I experienced sexual abuse, and like Bill, they were like, oh, huh. That was me. When Ann shared it with you? Oh, yeah. I had shared it with Dave before we were married, but like— I was like Bill. I was like, oh, yeah.

Yeah, data point. That was years ago, and it doesn't sound like a bigger deal. And I didn't think it was a big deal either, because it was—I had suppressed it, I thought I had dealt with it, I felt happy. And so it wasn't until we were in seminary where we were taking classes on how to counsel people, and we started getting into our own past that it came up. And for me, it wasn't until we were talking—this was years ago with Dr. Dan Allender, who wrote the book The Wounded Heart about sexual abuse, and I started to realize the level of trauma and damage and injury that happens when somebody experiences sexual abuse. You've done us a great service by opening up your story to us, and Bill, you, in coaching husbands, to understand this is huge, and we need empathy and we need understanding.

And if we're going to apply 1 Peter 3 to live with our wives in an understanding way, we need to understand this better. Your book is a great tool for husbands whose wives have experienced sexual abuse. We've got copies of the book Help! My Wife is a Survivor of Sexual Abuse, Answers to Your Most Important Questions by Bill Ronsheimer. Go to our website, familylifetoday.com, to order your copy, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com, the number to call to get a copy of the book Help!

My Wife is a Survivor of Sexual Abuse. The number is 1-800-FL-TODAY, 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. I know the subject we've talked about today has hit uncomfortably close to home for some of you who have been listening. At Family Life, one of our goals is to have honest conversations about the real issues that we face in our marriage and in our family relationships. Family Life is here to provide practical, biblical help and hope for the issues all of us face as we navigate life in a broken, fallen world. And for those of you who have benefited from our conversation today, the people you have to thank for that are your fellow listeners, those who contribute so that Family Life today can continue to be heard on this station and on various platforms all around the world. Your fellow listeners are the ones who have made today's program possible and who enable us to reach more people more often as we seek to effectively develop godly marriages and families. If you're a longtime listener, we'd love to invite you to join the team that makes Family Life Today possible for your fellow listeners. You can donate today online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call to make a donation, 1-800-FL-TODAY. And on behalf of those who will benefit in the future from the donation you make today, thank you for being part of the Family Life Today team. Now tomorrow, we're going to find out more about the process that Bill and Pamela Ronsheimer went through that led to healing and liberation in their marriage, and ultimately, how the two of them decided to share with the church what was going on in their marriage. We'll talk about that tomorrow.

Hope you can be with us for that. 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.