Often, I start my testimony much like many other Christians: “I was raised in a Christian home.” It is true that both my parents believed in Jesus, and I grew up going to church. However, there was much, much more going on behind the scenes.
Let me give fair warning now: there are several unpleasant themes in my testimony, including depression and suicide, physical and verbal abuse, and a brief mention of demons.
My parents divorced by the time I was two. My dad witnessed his mother shot to death when he was barely two and spent much of his childhood enduring the instability of foster care and abuse from his father. When my older brother was born, my dad began to repeat the same anger, hatred, and abuse he suffered as a child.
I’m thankful my mom was brave enough to walk away to protect us. Despite that, four years of trauma and, perhaps, a hereditary predisposition to certain struggles led my brother to become frighteningly angry as well. He took play fighting too far, struggled with his peers, and eventually developed a deep hatred toward me.
Why Do I Call it Sibling Abuse?
In addition to my desire to share what God did for me, I’m motivated to share my experience with sibling abuse because it took a long time to find someone who truly acknowledged what was happening to me. I call it sibling abuse because it terrified and isolated me. Ultimately, it led to feeling worthless and hopeless that life would ever be okay. I think the adults I spoke to simply couldn’t understand the extent of my brother’s behavior. One of my friends’ mothers told me “brothers are supposed to be mean to you.”
Brothers are supposed to be mean – but, strangely, when he demonstrated the same physical treatment to my mother it resulted in a trip to juvenile hall. That trip to juvie taught him just enough self control to hit walls instead of my mom and me. He learned to use his words and threats to inflict just as much harm.
I Lost Faith that God is Good
The police came to our house a number of times, and I think it’s a kindness from God that I don’t remember every scenario that brought them there. But, by the time I was 14 or so, I didn’t believe God had any kindness in him anymore. I didn’t stop believing in God and Jesus, but I was angry at him because I knew that other people suffered even more than I did. How could a good God allow so many people to be hurt so badly?
Growing up Fatherless
Throughout my whole life, even before my dad passed, I longed for a father figure. It’s a little embarrassing to say, but even after becoming an adult, that is a soul-deep, aching longing that I’m sure many women know. I think God intends for us to have good men in our lives to protect and love us.
I have some happy memories with my dad, but not nearly enough. Over the years, he made less of an effort to visit us. When he did, sometimes he said things that made me uncomfortable. Eventually, I became frustrated and disinterested in spending time with him. And then he passed away, just before my 15th birthday.
Losing my dad was weird. It felt like I was mourning two people: the man my dad was, and the man I needed him to be. Now there was no chance that he could step up and be the dad I needed.
God started to get my attention
Around the time shortly after my dad passed away, my mom gave me a little book titled “His Princess: Love Letters from Your King.” The letters were based on passages in the Bible which were quoted every other page. Those words sometimes comforted my aching heart. She also took me with her to a home fellowship group from time to time; they were people who welcomed me with a hug and didn’t seem to pass judgement on me like I often felt other Christians did.
Still, I wasn’t ready to trust God. I felt like my heart was a ceramic vase that had been broken into a hundred pieces and scattered in the ocean. There was no way anyone could put it back together.
God saved me from suicide
By the time I was 15 and a half, I was wading through my second serious round of depression. (The first was when I was 12). My dad’s death deeply worsened my brother’s struggles. My brother blamed me for everything – our dad’s absence, death, and his own pain. I felt that I had no space to grieve while he constantly attacked me verbally.
He came up with wildly unrealistic accusations frequently, and hurtled them at me with as much hatred as he could muster. If I cried he would mock me. He called me every name under the sun and told me I was worthless repeatedly. In his rages, he would often back me up against a wall or stand in the doorway so I could not leave.
The situation was so dark I felt there was an evil spirit in his room. I ran every time I had to pass it. At night I would lie awake wondering when he would follow through on his threats to murder me. Gradually, I lost the strength and will to live again. I began to hear demonic voices whispering my name over and over.
My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; I would hurry to find a shelter from the raging wind and tempest.”
Psalm 55:4-8
I became intrigued by self-harm, and cut myself one evening. The futility of it crushed me. I looked in the mirror and suddenly recognized a beautiful girl broken beyond repair. Cutting myself couldn’t make the slightest difference and living felt hopeless. I knew that I had run completely out of will to live. I had no fight left in me.
That night I knew that if God did not do something to help me, I would not be alive at the end of the year.
I showed my mom the cuts. She slept in my bed with me that night, wanting to somehow keep me safe. I lay awake, watching the light disappear and the leaves on the tree outside my window grow darker. Something inside me convicted me that suicide is not an option. But I was completely hopeless! And I thought:
“God, I know you’re real. I just need to know you’re there. I know you’re real, I just need to know you’re there.”
What came next all happened in an instant. I felt heaven, as though a little door had opened up and heaven was leaking through. “I LOVE YOU.” Electricity rolled from my head to my feet. The words did not wake my mother, but they filled my entire being. God’s voice touched every little part of my whole being. I simply cannot adequately describe the sensation of being immersed in God’s voice.
God is my father
God didn’t cure my depression instantly. He did, however, come through as my father, and walked with me as he gradually healed me. God swam down to the ocean floor and brought back the pieces of my shattered heart, mending them together.
Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.
Psalm 68:5 ESV
One day I sat on the floor while my brother stood over me shouting. God became a shield to me. I could almost see the words hitting an invisible wall and dropping to the floor. I didn’t have to fight back anymore. God protected me supernaturally.
How Christian camp helped me learn to surrender to God’s will
Throughout the instability of my home life, there was one thing that remained constant: my mother, an adventurer at heart, took me to family camp at a Christian summer camp every year of my life from the time I was a baby. I learned more about God in that one week at camp than I did during the rest of the year. Located in the most beautiful corner of the entire United States, this camp was a thin space between earth and heaven. Each year I counted down the days until we would go to camp.
When I was 17 I attended a youth leadership camp there. It was led by a middle school teacher, the camp director’s kid, and a young woman from India whose testimony of God’s healing from abuse encouraged me. The training curriculum was all about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and what it costs.
I felt resistant to the level of surrender and submission to God that discipleship calls for. Aware of this, I asked God to help me surrender my desires to him. I had an idea of how I wanted my life to go. Could I let go of my own desires and trust God to lead my life? With his help I chose to surrender.
God answered my prayers after 10 years
As I got closer to turning 18 my brother’s constant shouting and breaking things began to wear me down again. Eventually, I talked to the youth pastor about what was going on in my home. He seemed shocked and told me that it was abuse. He wanted to find me someplace else to live. I honestly had never considered moving out. It took me the entire summer to decide what to do.
God’s quiet voice came to me as a I sat in the camp chapel and anxiously weighed leaving my family home:
“Do not be afraid. Do I not have a plan for you?”
Yes.. After praying for 10 years that God would rescue me from the situation in my family, God provided a safe place for me to live. The first three days there were so strange as it sank in that I could truly be at peace.
God healed my scars from verbal abuse
Let’s fast forward a couple years; I finished my associates degree at community college, worked as a camp counselor for a summer, and attended a year of Bible school in Cannon Beach. During that time I joyfully watched as God acted as protector, provider, and healer. I found closure with my father’s death and fully embraced the joy of having God as my father.
The first summer I worked at camp, a girl prayed for me and said she saw a vision. In it, I was a white room. There were red balloons everywhere, representing lies I believed. Some of them were popped, and someone was sweeping up the pieces. She said that God is popping the lies that I believe about myself in this season of my life.
That is exactly what God was doing. After years of being crushed under my brother’s words, I finally began to believe that I was not fat, ugly, worthless, or a slut. Looking back at the difficulties I’d been through, I saw the pieces of a beautiful story coming together, and God is the author.
Why am I depressed. I thought God healed me?
Fast forward – I was 19 years old in Bible School, and I thought I had life figured out. God had rescued and healed me from my traumatic adolescence. He brought me to a beautiful place to settle into his presence and learn about him. Somehow a little trickle of sorrow began to cut through my heart like little streams of water in the sand on the beach.
It followed me to my next summer as a camp counselor. My stream of sorrow quickly turned into body gripping, crippling numbness. I began to binge eat.
There I was, nestled in the very mountains that taught me about God’s grandeur my whole life. Every day the constellations and the glowing winter snow reminded me of my great father who rescued me. And yet, I became more and more empty. I thought I was depressed and guilty of gluttony. Two months of shoveling snow and hauling firewood to ten cabins didn’t budge my emotional state one bit.
I felt deeply ashamed of myself. I thought Christians aren’t supposed to be depressed. God rescued me, so why was I replaying my traumatic experiences in my mind and having nightmares? Because of my own experiences with depression, I felt that happiness is a choice. Why couldn’t I choose to trust God and be okay?
The following summer I worked at another camp and then moved to a new college to study Outdoor Leadership. When I worked up the courage to go to the student wellness center, I quickly learned that I was wrong in thinking that God wanted me to go to this college for a degree. He wanted me to go to this college to get help.
Every day I binged food and the internet. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t be still, I couldn’t even make friends. My struggles made me feel so ashamed I did not want to be seen.
The counselor I worked with there was incredible. A former missionary, she intimately knew God and the Bible. She taught me that sometimes there are layers to healing. After 6 months of difficult emotional work where I literally had to learn to identify what I was feeling, I was finally done with the bingeing & I could actually sleep at night.
God’s Triumph: I am not a statistic
I recently learned that the brief, powerful depressive moments I’ve had since moving back from college can be attributed to post traumatic stress (not the disorder, though). At first, the reality of that felt heavy. But I went back to my therapist and asked if the crippling numbness, binge eating, and anxiety I had in college was PTSD. Yes, and God already brought me through the worst of it. Thanks to God.
Right now I live in what used to be my grandma’s little house. It’s also where I spent the first two years of my life. There are crayon scribbles on the underside of the kitchen counter. I live in the same house where my dad threatened to kill me and my brother and my mother.
Every day I see the house next door, where my family lived when we moved back and I was ten years old. I can almost see younger me in there, trying to withstand my brother’s hatred. It is such a stark contrast to the gentle words and hugs my husband gives me every day.
One word comes to my mind now, over and over: Triumph.
God is so, so good.
To close…
If you have read this far, thank you so much for letting me share how God miraculously moved in my life and what a good Father he has been to me. I hope you were encouraged. Sign up for my email list so we can stay connected. You’ll get to read more about faith, God’s word, and living intentionally.
For more information about abuse, follow these links to some solid resources on sibling abuse, and emotional and verbal abuse. Here’s one more from Focus on the Family.
Love always,
Sanna
