Healing from Sexual Abuse: My Story: Mary Demuth

Hey, Shelby Abbott here. Just want to give a heads up before you listen to this next program. Today's conversation on family life today covers some sensitive but important subjects that might not be suitable for younger ears. So please use discretion when listening to this next broadcast. All right, now let's jump into it.

All that horrible stuff happened under evergreen trees. I go outside and I sit my back against a hemlock tree and I look up and I say to the Lord, would you just be the daddy who will never leave me? I didn't come to the Lord out of a sense of my own sinfulness, of course that would come, but I just had this desperate hole of needing a dad. That began the many, many, many year journey of walking out what his healing looked like. Welcome to family life today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is family life today. So I just read somewhere that this author said, when you tell your story, it helps you heal. Do you feel like telling your abuse story helped you heal?

I read that same quote and I was resonating with that. I would have never guessed it because of my own abuse. What you want to do is hide the story, hide yourself, hide everything. And you think the last thing you ever want to do is tell your story. But there's something about telling your story that brings healing.

So where are we going today? Mary DeMuth is back with us today. Mary, I'm so glad you're back and you're brave. You're brave because you enter into areas that not all of us are willing to go into, especially when it comes to our past. You've been talking about this for a while. It's been on your heart, on your mind for healing for those that have been abused. So should we kind of go back and recall Mary's story?

I'd love to hear your story. I mean, a lot of people know you're an author. I didn't know this. I'm looking at two books in front of me. One says you wrote 16 books, the other says you wrote 40. Now it's 50. What? 50 books? Yeah, crazy. Is that right?

I'm going to bring a trophy the next time you're in here. I mean, there's 30 some books after this book. When did this come out?

Yeah, 2013. Wow. You were one busy writer. I write about three books a year. That makes sense.

Yeah. Three books a year. We write about three every 10 years. Something like that. Mary, do you know what are the statistics in terms of who has been abused, the amount, like one in what?

How many now? Yeah. I mean, it's so hard to quantify, but it's usually said about six-ish out of 10-ish for women and three-ish out of 10-ish. But the problem with that is so many people, like what you just said, they don't report. Right. And also we don't have a very robust view of the definition of sexual abuse. So the truth is, is that in healing from it, the journey is very similar for creepy uncle puts his hand on your leg versus the whole like full out problem that could happen.

Those people who've had the creepy uncle are not reporting that. And so a lot of us, many people, almost all have had some sort of sexual contact that was unwanted. With my story, I didn't know what sexual abuse was. It wasn't until I read Dan Allender's The Wounded Heart that I remember saying, that is sexual abuse.

And then that took me into a journey. But I'm thinking you're right. There are a lot of people that would have no idea that that is sexual abuse.

Right. And so that's hence the underreporting plus all the shame associated with it. But I think, too, even if you look at that in the workplace, you know, harassment, that's also a form of sexual abuse.

So I think it is rampant. And I think that's why it was so bewildering to me in the 90s, way back in the olden days of yore. When I was taught, I would go and teach on this and I would freak out all the nice coordinators in the back of the room. And they're like, you can't talk about that.

I could see their eyes get really wide. Where were you teaching? Just in Texas or no, this was in Washington State and I would teach at churches. But then afterwards, there would be this group of a line of women, 75 years old, saying I've never told a soul and weeping and just letting it out for the first time. And so I was like, I don't care if the people don't like that I talk about this. I just I felt like the Lord was calling me to be a pioneer, to go first so that other people don't feel alone because I felt so alone in my story. Me too.

Because it's not something that people, especially back in the day, were sharing openly. And so way to be a pioneer in this area. I know that when we speak at the Family Life Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaway, Ann will share her story. And there's a Sunday morning where we split up the husbands with the men. And so after that talk, we come all back together and she's done.

I can't even find her because there's a line. And I know they're lining up to talk about her sharing that part of her story. And it was back in the 90s. Yeah. When I started sharing that and people just weren't talking about it back then. And I was shocked that they would want to talk about it so openly and happy that they were willing to confess what had happened. Yeah.

Yeah. So give us a little bit of your story so our listeners who haven't heard you in the past know what we're talking about and then let's talk about healing. I grew up in a pretty scary home, very unprotected. And for the first couple of years of my life, I was with my grandparents, which I have a couple memories of.

And then I went back to live with my mom and a man that she met at a laundromat who became her husband. And this was the 60s. So they exchanged flowers instead of rings and all of that.

So he was this really unsafe. Wait, wait, wait. They didn't do rings at the ceremony?

No, no. This was after one divorce. So she'd already, she'd married my father. They had gotten divorced. Then I came back into the picture.

I was with the new guy and yeah, it was just, they got a toaster and exchanged flowers. So that was, I'm now five years old and I go to a lady's house after school because it was half day kindergarten in those days. And her name was Eva and I affectionately, I guess affectionately is the wrong word, but I called her Eva the chain smoking babysitter.

Really? And the one thing you need to know about her is that she hated children. So she wasn't the best babysitter. Wasn't the best? She must have been. This is the worst scenario ever. I feel like it's Matilda the movie.

It is. And so right away, these boys that were, I later find out were next door, knocked on the door of her house and they said, can Mary come out and play? So five years old, this began a year long sexual abuse. They would take me into the woods, they would take me into their home while their mom was making cookies in the other room.

It was horrendous. How old were these boys? They were in their teens, so they were probably 16 to 18 years old.

So they were bigger than me. And the babysitter didn't think this is something she knew. She knew. Even from the beginning.

I'm sure she knew. It's evil. It's evil. I mean, there's really no other word about it.

But it's weird that a 16 year old boy would want to hang out with a five year old girl. Right, but if you hate children and they would take the child off your hands during all this time, I didn't know anything. I did know what was wrong. And that was a gift that the Lord gave me at that time. I wasn't a Christian, but I knew what they were doing was wrong and that they were at fault, which is a huge gift. Most sexual abuse victims, they internalized that guilt. The guilt belongs to the perpetrator, not the victim.

But a lot of times the victims will hold that on. But they would use a bad word to describe what they were doing. They also told me that if I told my parents that they would kill them, I was terrified. First of all, I was a good little girl.

I didn't want to say that bad word. Second of all, I didn't want to be responsible for their demise. And I was a pretty sophisticated five year old. I had all these thoughts about all of this.

But finally, about three quarters of the way through the year, they started inviting others to join them. And I felt like in my mind that I was going to die. And so I decided, my mom and my stepdad and my biological father, they were so unsafe. There was drugs in the home.

It was not a good place. I decided that the safest person to tell was Eva, the chain smoking babysitter. And she said these five words to me. She said, I will tell your mom. And I believed her because all adults- Was she empathetic when you told her? No, she just told me she would tell my mom. I believed that she would. And so the next day I thought, I'm set free.

And the knock came at the door and that evil woman pushed me back out. At that point, I was like, okay, parents don't care because I thought she told them. She doesn't care, obviously.

The boys don't care. So I am going to have to protect myself. I learned how to sleep. I would come home from half day kindergarten. I would eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I would run to Eva, the chain smoking babysitter's bed.

Pull the covers over my head and pretend to sleep for the whole afternoon. And that did save me because at least I was out of her. I figured out her formula. I just need to be out of her hair.

And then we moved at the end of that year. I just have to say- I know you're already tearing up. I'm so sorry. Just imagining, first of all, your smart little girl to figure out how to get out of this. But I'm imagining this little Mary hiding in the bed with the covers over your head to protect yourself. It's the saddest thing ever. It's so sad.

I'll throw this in for a guy's perspective. Anne's husband. Do you two ever experience, when I hear that, I get angry. When I read somebody else's story, when I was reading Mary's story through the book, I was like, this is so wrong. Did you experience that part?

Or was that later or never? I was too traumatized in the time. But interestingly enough, yes, of course, very angry. But I was more angry at other people. So I was more angry at my mom for not protecting me. I was angry at my biological father, who was also a sexual predator and was grooming me to be his next victim before he took his life. But there was plenty of sexual abuse that happened from him to me. So my biological father was doing that as well. And so there was a lot of anger.

I'm still mad at him, just to be super honest. And then I did do a deep dive of trying to find those boys. And I threw a series of supernatural experiences that only could be the hand of God.

I located one, not the other. And he had already died. And I was so grateful because I didn't want to have to know that there was that survivor's guilt of I didn't warn other people. But there's no way I could have. I was only five. And I only knew them by their last names.

And again, through all that research, I was able to find them. But that person had died. And I think the other must have been a cousin or something.

I couldn't find that other one. Just the neglect. I mean, there's sexual abuse, but just the neglect and the abandonment that you experienced as well. It's just horrendous. I love this chain-smoking babysitter.

It sounds like a song by Alice Cooper. By the chain-smokers, right? I mean, you found out she never told your mom or did she tell her later? Yeah, keep going in your story. Yeah, so she didn't. But I lived with the belief that she had for 10 years.

Ten years. So you're wondering, why? Is my mom rescuing me? Exactly. And the other thing that happened to me, and it's why the title of the book is not marked, is that I felt like I had this come get me sign on my forehead. Like I had been marked by these predators. And so I had several different instances throughout my life where I thankfully was a runner.

And I would run away from any of those and was thankfully able to escape several different times of predatory teenage boys or men who were trying to do that again to me. And so I thought, what in the heck is wrong with me? Do I have some sort of honing beacon? But I had been so traumatized, so neglected. I had to learn later in life that I had to heal from those wounds or I would continue to be prayed on. And I realized that I had to settle that worth with the Lord.

Otherwise, I kept repeating those patterns. Even in female friendships, I would be attracted to really harsh women. And then we'd have this blow up and it would be, and I'd be like, why do I keep coming to these narcissistic folks? Well, I found out, my father's this sexual predator to the nth degree creating porn.

Like it was a very, very, very bad. My mother was a narcissistic person. I was constantly attracted to narcissistic predators because I was trying to complete a circle of a story. If I can get a narcissistic predator to love me, I can prove I'm finally lovable to my parents. But then I realized, no, I have to prove that I'm lovable to the one who created me. And when I settled that, I stopped trying to complete that story in an unhealthy way. I hope that makes sense. No, I mean, it makes sense, but I want you to explain it more. What do you mean you had to understand you're loved by your creator? Walk us through that.

Was that in high school years or was that much later? Yes, so this is the happy ending of the story. So sorry, all you people who are sad right now.

But keep walking us through that. So what happened after all that? You had several different, bring Jesus into the picture.

What happened there? Right, so we had my father die when I was 10. My mom remarried again. And so I'd had three fathers by that time. We moved several different times. And then the seventh and eighth grade year were years of suicidal ideation.

Because I would look at the ground and my feet standing on the ground and say, why am I here? Except to be neglected or abused. And during this time, my mom was never home. My stepdad was working a graveyard. And so I was an only child and I was living on a farm with seven horses and I would come home from school and I would be completely alone until like 10 o'clock at night.

And I learned how to cook, which is, I'm a good cook now, but. This is the most tragic story. It's getting better, I promise. I'm gonna be Jesus, I promise. I'm telling you though, it shows God's grace and redemption.

How he's seeing you, he's gonna call you out. Well, it's interesting also, because Mary, when you said earlier, Ann has said the exact words, what is it about me? Yeah. It's like a mark.

What made this happen? You felt the same thing. Yeah, it's a very predominant thing that people who have been abused feel.

Because it damages you in such a way that almost creates the beacon, if that makes sense. Yeah. Let me ask you, Mary, because I've recently done this. I had somebody ask me the question, picture your life growing up and the things that you went through and could you see places where God was wooing you?

He was showing you. And I went back into those days of abuse and I remember some abuse had just happened. I remember being outside and I was four or five years old and I saw a tree in the spring heavy laden with these flowers. And I can remember pulling the tree down and it was so low and these gorgeous pink, it was probably a flowering crab, pink, fragrant flowers. And I just remember smelling them and it filled my heart with this happiness. And that's what came to my mind when somebody said, do you have recollection of God wooing you?

Of saying like, I see you. Have you ever thought through that? Yes, definitely. And for me, a lot of that abuse happened at the root of an evergreen tree. I think in some ways the Lord has created the human body in such a way that protects us. And so I did disassociate and fly up to the top of those trees. And that disassociation was a gift. But I also like little things like all the music I was attracted to as a child and then as a young adult, they all had Christian themes to them.

Really? When I was like in sixth grade, my grandmother who never went to church said, you need to get baptized. So they like took me to this church and the requirement was that you had to go to one Sunday school class.

So I go to one Sunday school class, we make Jericho out of these cardboard bricks and kick them over in the name of Jesus. And I just was like, I wanna go back. And my mom said, no, you're not going back. But I got sprinkled then and I heard from my uncle, he said, well, now aren't you happy you're not going to hell? And I thought, yeah, that's a good thing. I'm happy I'm not.

But I thought that's the most magical water. But this is where I'm at at like seventh and eighth grade to get back to the story, suicidal ideation, writing suicide poetry. And here's where I wanted to say to those of you who are in children's lives, there was a counselor, Mr. Thompson, who saw where I was. And I believe he was a Christ follower. And he allowed me just to come into his office at any moment. I was this little girl who was this total straight A student, but I would cry in the middle of class because at this point, my mom's third marriage was breaking up. And that man I had kind of attached myself to. And so he was going to be leaving and I was gonna lose everything. And so he was there for me that year.

And so I see the hand of God in that. And then the next year, my ninth grade year, a friend of mine invited me to Young Life. And she said, it's really fun, there's cute guys there. And I was like, okay, cool. And, but after all the fun and the shaving cream and singing songs, someone would stand up and they would talk about Jesus. And every time I heard the name of Jesus, my heart would just pound out of my chest. And so that whole year I would hear about Jesus. And then my sophomore year, I went to a weekend retreat where they gave the whole gospel. And what is so poignant about what scholars call inclusio is when you have something that starts here and here, you also see it, you see it in the Genesis narrative and you also see it in the book of Ruth or Chiasm.

You start at the same place where you finish. So all that horrible stuff happened under evergreen trees. I go outside and it is dark and I sit my back against a hemlock tree in the Seattle area. And I look up and I say to the Lord, would you just be the daddy who will never leave me? And so I didn't come to the Lord out of a sense of my own sinfulness that of course that would come.

But I just had this desperate hole of needing a dad. And I like to tell audiences and then I was completely healed and everything was fine. But that began the many, many, many year journey of walking out what does healing look like? And some of that, which is a subject of this book is how can marriage be a place of healing for a sexual abuse victim and how we, my husband wrote in this book as well. So how we together kind of worked through this very traumatic issue. Can you give us a taste, let's start walking into that and we'll continue it in tomorrow. But give us a taste of what that started like, how that healing journey started with your husband. Or even before your husband.

Yeah, so I'll back up slightly. So I just cried a lot because I just love Jesus and people loved me like these young life leaders would love me and so that was just very powerful. But when I got to college, I found a group of friends that actually believe that God healed people and they just prayed for me for four years and I wept.

And so when I finished college, I was like, oh good, I'm done with that. And so when I got married, we had the conversation. I didn't withhold it from him, but I had told him, but you know, that's in the past and God's healed me of that. This was our conversation. I'm good now because I know Jesus.

I'm fine, Jesus healed me. I did a lot of pressing down of that story and when all these triggers and things would come up, I would have these frustrating evangelical voices in my head that said, you have to be all sexy for your husband. And I was like paralyzed by it and then constantly felt guilty that I wasn't fulfilling my duties.

And that will, I mean, I think when we talk tomorrow, I'll tell why I wrote this book, which goes back to that story. But it was excruciating. Like I cannot tell you how excruciating it was for me to talk about sex with my husband. It felt like I wanted to barf. Like it was just so hard because I could not see it as beautiful. I could not see it.

We had gone to a family life marriage com. I could not see it as like the gift God gives spouses. I could only see it as trauma. And so for me to bring it up, then it felt like I was really broken, really damaged. And he had to suffer the consequences. Talk about being mad.

He was mad at those boys too, because they stole something from me that caused me to really not engage in the act of marriage. And I just did what I did naturally. I flew up into the tree limbs and I watched everything happen, but I couldn't put my body there because I was still too traumatized. And I was so little trauma informed that I didn't know what was going on with me.

And we weren't talking about that at that time in the 90s, but I just didn't know. And so I was just constantly feeling defeated. Like I was failing my husband, but I also was completely like shaky and freaked out and like trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps.

And now I wish I could go back and see what the Lord was seeing there. And I know he just wanted to hold me through all of that, but I was just broken. What would you do different knowing what you know now and thinking, I'm thinking of a listener who's saying I'm going through that right now. I haven't really dealt with it.

I'm feeling those same things. I just disassociate when it comes to any kind of physical intimacy. What would you say to her? First, an untold story never heals. So she needs or he needs to pour out that story and sometimes people cannot do it verbally. So write it down and slide it across to a safe person.

That person needs to be safe, but find a safe person and let them read it first if you can't say it out loud, but get it out first. But then the second is trauma informed counseling and especially someone who deals in sexual abuse. And even if you could go further sexual abuse and then who's a marriage expert because it's just such a complicated thing.

It is the best gift that you'll give that part of your marriage for sure. But we were poor. I mean, I wanted counseling. And counseling wasn't a thing back then. No, but I actually wanted it, but we just did not. I was a stay-at-home mom.

We had no money. And the first time I was able to finally get counseling was when my husband was in seminary and they said that wives could go to counseling for the people training to be counselors for free. And so I was like, finally. So I began that journey then. So you were really not talking to anybody except your husband for a while.

Correct, yeah. A couple of friends knew as well. But again, they didn't necessarily have my, I had a pretty traumatic story. So they didn't know how to counsel me. He didn't have that story. He didn't know how to counsel me. And then you're dealing with the hurt and pain that he was experienced, which I just couldn't carry because I was carrying so much on my own.

And so, yeah, the transition began to happen later. We kind of muddled our way through, and we'll talk about that on the next episode. I think that's too why your book is so powerful to have your husband's voice in it as well, just to say this is what it was like and this is what you can do. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to David Ann Wilson with Mary DeMuth on Family Life Today.

You know, this topic is always so complex and can be difficult to even approach. And I'm so glad Mary was with us today to be honest about sexual abuse and its effect in our lives. I personally am a sexual abuse survivor, and hearing her talk about it is something that will no doubt be part of the healing process, not only for me, but for you too, if this is your story. And Mary has written a book called Not Marked, Finding Hope and Healing After Sexual Abuse. So not only is this her story, but it offers some added perspective from Mary's husband, Patrick, to support any spouses who want to foster healing and strengthen their relationship with their spouse if they've gone through something traumatic like this. So you can get your copy of Mary's book, Not Marked, right now by going online to familylifetoday.com and to request your copy there. Or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329.

Again, the number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. So this topic is obviously difficult, and it's a part of families everywhere. And that's one of the reasons why we at Family Life are so passionate about helping to reach marriages and families. It hits you right at home, and we want to be part of the solution in your lives. And one of the ways that we're able to do that is we have partners who come alongside us, give monthly, and help support the ministry of Family Life. So if you want to be a part of the solution and join us in this ministry, we'd love it if you become a monthly partner.

And the cool thing is, all this month, in the month of May, every donation that you give will be matched dollar for dollar up to $550,000. So you can learn a little bit more about the details by going online to familylifetoday.com and clicking on the donate now button at the top of the page. Or again, you can give us a call at the number 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now tomorrow, Mary DeMuth is back with the Wilsons to talk about how past trauma impacts your marriage. And she's going to talk about discovering healing and gaining some insights from abused survivors. That's coming up tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.