Episode Transcript
Hi, this is Rachel and recover we've got a special guest, Shelly. She's going to tell us a little bit about herself and then she's going to answer some questions to us for us on some spiritual abuse with her sexual assault.
Hi. Yes, I'm Shelly. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm really excited for this opportunity and just a bit about myself. I live in Central Florida with my high school sweetheart and our three teenagers. A brief overview of why I'm here today would be that two years ago, my pastor, who was also my boss in regularly counselled me through my daughter's severe depression. Multiple suicide attempts, and frequent hospitalizations, sexually abused me. He had been grooming me for months, probably years, and when I was at my lowest, he exploited my vulnerability through counseling. I repeatedly told him no, but after a few weeks of constant sexual harassment and his relentless pursuit, it ended in assault. It took me a couple of weeks and helped of a trauma informed friend to start to understand that I was a victim of clergy sexual abuse. I went to the police, but while the detective over my case immediately recognized the abuse of power, Florida law doesn't protect adults against psychological abuse. I disclosed everything to my church, but they immediately hired an employment lawyer and distanced themselves from me. They lied and told me the lawyer was an investigator so I would cooperate, which I did, trusting the church to do what was right. Ultimately, they used everything against me, forcing me to resign, demanding my silence, allowing rumors to be spread in their favor. They allowed my abuser to resign and they sent out an e-mail and shared at each sermon what an amazing man he is and how much good he's done for God's Kingdom. They praised him and prayed for him and sent him off with applause.
Hmm. That's heartbreaking. We're going to ask some questions. Do you feel like your childhood groomed you to be sexually assaulted as an adult?
I don't know that I would say that it groomed me to be sexually assaulted as an adult, but it definitely made me more susceptible to it. I have only come to understand this through counseling, which I started after my most recent abuse. I grew up in a home where hard things weren't talked about. When I was four or five, I told my mom about a person who repeatedly molested me. She got angry, left the room, and never spoke of it again. There were no consequences, as far as I know, for the abuser. I was never told it wasn't my fault or that it was good that I came forward. Life just continued as if I had never said anything. The silence and lack of ramifications taught me that I was not significant enough to fight for. Others could do as they wanted to me and I just had to accept it because they were more important. Later, when I was raped at 16, I didn't tell anyone because I accepted that it must be my fault. Even though I had said no, I must be to blame because it happened. So now in my 30s, when my pastor sexually abused me, it was the same thing. It must be my fault. My no, doesn't matter. I have no agency. He is more worthy than I am. It must be acceptable for him to hurt me because it means he is satisfied.
I'm. I will tell you. Since you were sexually abused or molested as a child, you are way more susceptible to being abused as an adult. Yes, I've come to that understanding and now, but that of course, it's all hindsight at this point. I didn't know that before. Well, I mean, just to statistically speaking, I think we're twice as likely to be sexually assaulted as adults and I wish more people understood that. I think there are people who understand and unfortunately a lot of them are the ones who take advantage of it.
There are definitely those who take advantage that there are also people who understand. That. It's the good guys and the bad guys, and then there's people who just. They they don't understand it, and their silence is deafening. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right.
What was the grooming process like? I can't say when the grooming started. Um, even still, it's for me to fully understand. The entire process is really hard, and there's a lot of things that I just have to accept that I can't understand. My pastor pursued me to take a job at the church. I wasn't looking for work, and I didn't think I was qualified for the position he wanted me to undertake, but he convinced me to try it, and he even fired a guy so that he could bring me in. I suspect the majority of the grooming occurred when he would cancel me through my daughter's depression and suicidal ideations because I was much more susceptible in my vulnerabilities there. I didn't know it was happening, but after gaining clarity, posed abuse, I can see many things, my pastor dinner said to groom me. He would say he had something to tell me and then say I couldn't tell my husband. I told my pastor that I would try, but I couldn't commit to that. But then the things he would tell me were inconsequential, so I felt like I wasn't hurting my husband by not telling him these things. After a few days, the pastor would ask me if I had told gauging my loyalty to him. Later, when he told me he was in love with me, he told me that he knew that I could keep a secret, referencing these times that he had tested me before. He knew I loved hugs, that they made me feel safe, but that I rarely initiated so he would use that one time the attacks. He asked me to come over to his house, saying his wife wasn't home. When I didn't respond after several minutes, he claimed that
the text was meant for someone else. We joked about it and I told my husband because I thought it was funny. The pastor was furious that I had told Peter, my husband. Which I couldn't make sense of at the time. If it was an accident, why was he so upset when I saw him in person the next day he actually said to me, you're in trouble. I can't believe you told on me you need to be punished, so I'm not going to hug you for a week. He also touched me often, started small by gently grabbing my arm when he talked to me, or maybe when he wanted to leave me somewhere, he put his hand on the small of my back when I walked past him. He'd rubbed my back when he'd come up behind me, and that progressed to squeezing my calves when I was working on a ladder or holding me while I cried and rubbing my back to rubbing my neck. A few times he tried to hold my hand, but I always pulled away. Hugs were a whole different part of the process. He would hug. We, or rather we would hug. When we first saw each other most days and it had always been a loose, casual, quick hug, but he started holding me longer and giving me a hard time. When I pulled away first, he was probably 6 inches taller than me, but would tell me that I needed to put my arms over his. When we hugged, I told him that made me uncomfortable, but he said he preferred it and at that point I was happy to please him, especially with something so simple just before the sexual the sexual harassment portion started when we hugged, he would put his face. Against mine, so that our cheeks made contact. When I would pull away, he would run his hands down my arms until I had backed away enough to for him to no longer be touching me. Finally, I told him I wasn't going to hug him anymore. This was after he started requesting hugs repeatedly, over and over, telling me I wasn't standing right, or that my arm seemed to be over his, or that I backed away too quickly so he would ask for another. At one point he lifted the back of my shirt to touch my lower back when he hugged me, and then he rubbed his hands up and down my sides. Later that same day, I told him that I wasn't going to hug him again and he told me that he was in love with me and after that repeatedly tried to get me to hug him again,
but I refused. When he counseled me, he would always make me cry, not from being harsh, but from crying on my herds. Then he would just come alongside me and lift me back up, pray over me, and be the hero who comforted me, a savior of sorts. He constantly complimented me, often my work, but he would also tell me what a beautiful person I was, saying that I was the most beautiful person he had ever met in the world, needed more Shelly Taylors. I always took this to mean internal beauty and never physical. I thought he was talking about my heart. He would always tell me that I was an amazing writer. He encouraged me to write to him and would go on and on about how much my words encouraged him and that God was using me when I wrote. He told me that I needed to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit and take actions to write when I was prompted. Later, he and the church used these notes against me, calling them love letters. Though there was not a single romantic word, innuendo, or sexual content in any of them whatsoever. They were purely encouragement and reminders of God's love and work, written for me and I thought to be my brother. This pastor would get angry with me if I went to my husband about something I was struggling with instead of going to him. One time he saw Facebook post where I said Peter had brought me coffee when he had heard I was having a bad day. I had pastor immediately called me and asked me why I didn't come find him to talk. Sometimes the things I struggled with weren't work related, but my pastor assured me he wanted me to. He wanted to be there for me in every area. I thought he was being sweet and really cared for me and all that I was struggling with. Later the police detective over my case would tell me that this was called alienation of affection and it's a type of isolation that predators use when a predator tries to take affection meant for a spouse all for himself. Apparently, this is a felony in many states. Of course, Florida isn't one of them.
And you mentioned in your notes that, you know, he's compared himself to David. Yeah, he also brought sexual language into a relationship. One of the last times I let him hug me, he talked about having to be careful not to grab my **** because that's what he would do with his wife. He asked me what I would do if he grabbed me and I told him that I would be angry and push him away. In the same conversation, he said something about pressing my ***** against men when I hugged them. I was visibly uncomfortable with this accusation and he added I should be able to say the word ***** in our relationship. We're both adults. This made me feel like I was being immature and uptight, I thought. Squeamishness was my fault because I grew up in a pretty conservative household where several words weren't allowed to be said at all, including breasts or any names for reproductive organs. When I asked him how I could help him not to stumble, he told me not to take my clothes off. They shocked and disturbed me and I told him that I would never do that. He said that. That was good, but continued to talk about how he didn't know what he would do if I were to do that. I assured him again that I would never do that and try to change the subject, but he repeatedly brought it back up. This was his way of not only planning thoughts in my head, but also desensitizing me to what I would have otherwise seen as a red flag. There were many other things that he did in the grooming phases, using Scripture to justify how he wasn't as bad as David. He told me that David was a murderer and still considered a man after God's own heart, and that he my pastor. What he wanted to do wasn't as bad as that, though. I constantly rejected his sexual advances and I told him I wasn't interested. He always used the verbage of we, causing me to believe that I was at fault and that this was happening because it was consensual. There were several times he told me I couldn't tell anyone what he was doing. He told me I could only go to him and that no one else could understand.
When he said that, I remember thinking, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't even understand what's happening. How could I possibly expect expect anyone else to?
Yeah. You had a really good manipulative of scriptures who manipulated them for their own glory. Yeah, anyway he was doing.
Oh, what have you done for recovery? Uh, the first thing I did was to find a competent trauma informed therapist working through childhood abuse, which I had actually told my therapist when she asked if I had had previous abuse. I was like, Oh yeah, but it's not a big deal. And she's like, well, let's talk about that. And so working through that abuse that I was never allowed to talk about, and seeing how I accepted that I wasn't enough wasn't important enough to stand up for, all led me to being abused repeatedly later. Recognizing this has helped me understand. So much about myself, which will allow me to be safer from here on out. It could be hard to find a good therapist, and it's OK to say to try several. I I went through several before you find one that you're comfortable with, but I think this is instrumental in processing the offenses done against you and the paths that have led you into these traps. I joined a support group for victims of adult clergy sexual abuse. It's called restored voices collectives. There are a group of amazing women that fully understand all the dynamics of a CSA. This has been life altering for me, I have often thought. I must be so stupid and foolish to be coerced and manipulated in this way. But in RVC I am surrounded by doctors, professors, lawyers and other extremely intelligent women and I've come to realize that a predator's choice of victim has nothing to do with the victims intelligence, but everything to do with their targets level of vulnerability during the time of pursuit. Another thing was learning about abuse and understanding trauma, responses that really helped relieve my guilt and shame that I had about how things played out. Why didn't I run? Why didn't I tell someone? Why did I let this happen? We're all intrusive thoughts. I constantly suffered. But when I learned how grooming worked and how our brains process or don't during abuse and trauma, I realized I had no control of my body's responses, and it's not fair to hold myself accountable for that. I have read dozens of books and listened to so many podcasts on the topic, and sometimes it's overwhelming and I probably pushed myself before I was really prepared mentally. But on the other side of the worst of it, I'm grateful for my perseverance. Being able to label things for what they are and getting to the point to where I could say the word abuse was difficult. But also very freeing and now I can't use any other word because there aren't any of that fully
and develop all that had happened to me. Something that I didn't initially do for myself, but more so happened to me. That helped in my recovery was discovering an attorney who is trauma informed. In a very obscure way, I was made aware of a sexual abuse attorney who happens to live down the road for me. His name is Baz Trevigen. I know you've interviewed him before. I contacted him and then my husband and I went to his office for a consultation and that was very validating and that is when we learned the term clergy sexual abuse. Knowing my rights to litigate civilly made me feel not quite so helpless with Baz, I decided to go up against the church. Taking on the powerful when I felt crushed and insignificant was extremely difficult, but it brought me so much self value and made me realize that I am worth fighting for. The church underestimated me. They wanted to break me and make me back down to limp away and no longer bleed on their carpet, but I refuse to give them any more power of me.
I'm so proud of standing up for myself in this way. The agency had been taken from me. But through this process and with Bob's help, I was able to reclaim it. Peter, my husband, and I have always been taught that we needed to be in the church to have a healthy relationship with God. So after we left our old church, we immediately started going to another we just didn't know any better, and it was awful. I would be so stressed on the drive to church and every single Sunday I would cry during the service. I never had anything to do with what the pastor was preaching. I was just so triggered and traumatized. I didn't know how it's to cope and I didn't know it was OK to just not show up. After a few months, the church we were visiting. Hired a new lead pastor, so I requested a meeting with him to see what his views were on trauma and abuse. I brought Peter and a long list of questions to ask him to determine if this church under his leadership would be safe. If I'm completely honest, I will say that I requested this meeting with the expectation that the Pastor would respond poorly. This is what I would use to justify never going to church again, however. The pastor completely blew me away. He admitted he wasn't trauma informed, but he talked for 10 minutes about how pastors can't have affairs and it's always abuse because of the power imbalances. He named many people that no one who hasn't, at least trying to become trauma informed, would know. I remember sitting there in disbelief as I listened to him and I prayed, God, is this what hope looks like? It's been so long since I've had any. When I felt safe enough in that meeting, I told the pastor that I was a survivor of a CSA. He listened, and he never defended the church or their actions like many others had. Then he asked if I would allow this church, which we were not members of or serving in any way, to pay for my counseling. This was completely
unexpected. My former lead pastor, the one I gave 14 years of my life to, had told me that counseling was my responsibility because I had been raped when I was 16. But here, this man I didn't know at a church I didn't serve, wanted to put their money where their mouth was, and they have now been covering my counseling costs for nine months. Our conversation didn't end with this meeting. Instead, we meet each month to continue the discussion of trauma and abuse. Many times, this pastor has taken our words and incorporated them into sermons. He has told us stories about how things on abuse said from the siege have prompted members to share their hearts with him and seek help when they finally realized God didn't want them to stay in an abusive relationship. Because he is willing to listen and accept criticism when needed, his church is safer and people are better able to be led by God's love instead of by the church's law. I don't serve or go to small groups and sometimes it's really hard. But now, when I cry during sermons, it's usually because I see hope. And I recognize that some small part of that is because this pastor is willing to sit with my husband and me and gain wisdom from our trauma. I would never recommend someone who has been spiritually abused to leave their old church and immediately attend another. It is possible to have a beautiful and healthy relationship with God without stepping foot in a church or watching sermons online. You don't need a man on stage telling you what God's word says to make you a good Christian. By the time we realized this. We didn't have. Or rather, by the time we realized we didn't have to force ourselves to go to church, we were in a place where we were seeing changes made because of our experiences. I'm grateful we are where we are, but I also think we made it a lot harder than was necessary. And I wouldn't say that the act of going to church has helped in my recovery. But meeting with the pastor each month has helped tone down my cynicism. I have been able to find hope that local churches can be a safe place, and perhaps they can fully resemble what the Church of Axes described
as. These open conversations have helped soften my skepticism of pastors. Not all pastors are in their positions because they love power and control. Meeting with my pastor as well as working with Baz, I have been able to push through my fear of men. I'm still hypervigilant when men are around, and I still tense up if someone touches me, even by accident. But I also know that I have agency now, and I can set and hold boundaries, and I don't have to apologize for it. But hands down, the biggest contribution to my recovery has come from my husband again. Not something I did for myself, but still something that has brought me to him now. He understood that I was pursued before I did, and every time I doubted myself, he reminded me of truth. There were times I just wanted to agree with the Church's implication and say it was an affair so that they would love us again. After all, an affair would be so much easier than what had actually happened. But Peter wouldn't hear of it. He wasn't willing to let me sacrifice my integrity, integrity as the church had so willingly had. He not only saved my life, but he showed me it is better to stand on truth than have the support of hundreds of people who refused to hear it.
Shelly will be back next week at Thursday at 10:00 AM. Thanks for tuning in always follows on your paper. For social media. And for podcast and if you have any questions, reach out to Rachel on recovery.com. Thank you.
