Unashamed
Content Warning: Abuse
As a young girl, I was sexually abused for many years. When I was twelve, I was removed from my home and placed in a Christian group home for troubled kids. It would take years for me to realize that the abuse I’d endured before that transition was not the worst hurt I would know.
The adults within the group home ministry dressed us in the shame they deemed appropriate based on our backgrounds, genders, behaviors, and obedience. My guardians vacillated between shaming me for “lying” about the abuse they had decided did not happen, and shaming me for having been in that position of abuse to begin with. Either way, I was deemed dirty, ruined, garbage. As time passed, I began to open my palm and take the random shames they’d serve. These were adults after all—wasn’t I supposed to trust them?
Whenever my period came like a wave, inconsistent and intensely painful, these same adults decided I was lying. I was fine. As my gushing flow would ruin furniture, car seats, and the thread-worn thrifted clothes they gave me, I was shamed for this too, adding to the list:
Shamed for loving my birth mom because she was a sinful woman . . .
Shamed for my family not wanting me . . .
Shamed for being in a group home, and being a bad kid . . .
Shamed for being a girl . . .
Shamed for liking a boy, for having hurt feelings, for having a lazy eye . . .
Shamed for . . .
Everything.
I could try to love Jesus enough, and to the best of my very broken ability, I believe I did. I could please the people around me, nurture and take care of my friends, and bear the burdens of others so that I was shown some semblance of love. This worked for a time until I would do something deemed inappropriate, and the fall shrouded in their disappointment would nearly destroy me.
Every breath, every step—heavy.
As an adult, I struggled through miscarriages, infertility, and loss. I adopted those same shaming patterns for myself. Of course I did—isn’t that exactly what I’d been taught to do?
Shame for my inability to have a baby . . .
Shame for messing up the only reason I’d been created in the first place . . .
Shame for not being able to be the woman in the bedroom that my husband deserved because I had mental and emotional trauma from years of sexual abuse that became blanketed by years of quilted, heavy shame . . .
Shame for the lack of education the group home had given me, making further education an impossibility . . .
Shame for working the jobs I did, shame for not making more money . . .
Impossibly heavy had become my baseline.
Having been told that therapists were evil, I sought counsel in the church, which led to less understanding and more stuffing my trauma inside and locking it tight with shame.
Shame.
When infidelity ruined my marriage, I was offered a front-row seat to the ways in which shame sometimes arrives cloaked in pity. Even so, when we are broken enough, we can squint our eyes just so and pretend that pity is empathy, feeling comforted even if it’s only for a moment.
I learned to hide everything that made me me—well, the things I could anyway. The childlessness, weight gain, and the lazy eye were always there, but anything else that did not conform to what I was told was righteous I buried deep down inside. Only so much could fit, and eventually every ugly, shameful, and truly unlovable thing about me came spewing out.
My mess covered the feet of my church friends, leadership, family, and innocent bystanders. I became the example of what a true woman of God was not—simply could not be. Messy women weren’t seen as favorable, and my unearthed trauma led to a disaster zone. Unresolved childhood abuse issues, infertility, grief—complete brokenness at nearly every turn . . . As if my life hadn’t lost enough over the years, I sat broken and alone. It became easier for the majority of Christians in my life to turn and walk away rather than acknowledge my imperfections—no longer fitting into their perceptions or able to serve the church body in the way they’d believed I should.
It took the isolation to see how I’d been failed by both the family I’d been born into and the group-home family I’d been placed with. In time, through healing, I was able to see how the church had failed me too. Again and again, in the “name of God” people had only seen what made me not enough in their eyes. In the unraveling of a lifetime of shame I was able to take notice of my worth.
And in that raw, unearthed honesty, I finally learned to see and fall in love with me.
Mae Wagner is an author, podcaster, women’s trauma mentor, and community builder. A gypsy soul, Mae currently lives on the coast of Lake Erie with her husband and their menagerie of pets. You can find Mae’s blog and links to published works at www.rainydayinmay.com.