ALWAYS
HOPE!
Damaged Goods
I discovered early in life that my life’s purpose is to help people. Because of my own abusive past, I specifically felt a calling to help others heal from sexual and physical abuse.
I don’t remember exactly when my own abuse started, I do remember being about three or four years old and my mother had divorced my father who stopped communicating with us and disappeared from our lives. I grew up always wondering where was he in all this that he could’ve helped me?
After divorcing my father, my mother almost immediately remarried and moved us away to a different state, and it was about age four that I remember my Pentecostal step-father began to touch me and my older sister in ways that felt “funny”. Even at such a young age, I remember the feeling of “this is wrong.” That feeling of “something is wrong” in the mind of an abused child later turns into “there is something wrong with me.” As early as seven years old, my step-father would hold a knife to my throat as he would violate me. He would take me to remote cemeteries and make me get out of the car as I would run after him begging him not to leave me. When he would finally come back to get me I was supposed to be “grateful.” So at a very young age, I learned to stuff down my tears and put on a very brave face because I was literally psychologically terrified.
My mother was abusive, physically and emotionally. Having both Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorder tendencies, she was always the queen of guilt trips and even as she would beat or berate us, she had this amazing capacity to turn it around and make it our fault, “why had we done this to her, made her get to this point of hurting us?”
By the age of nineteen, after only knowing a whole life of abuse, I was done with this world. I felt alone, unloved, and abandoned. I even felt that God had left me, that if He cared about me, why would He let all these horrific things keep happening to me? I had literally no reason to think anything would ever be different. I was the ultimate victim.
I decided I was going to kill myself.
I was walking along the side of a road in the pouring rain and a truck pulled up offering me a ride. I immediately told the driver no and began walking faster. He handed me a red umbrella and said, “God loves you.” I took the umbrella and didn’t even respond. I was crying even more, choked up with emotion, and utterly shocked. What I had needed so desperately, just some human kindness, just manifested from a complete stranger.
God sent that particular man with a red umbrella to let me know even when I felt abandoned by the world, God was there. He made that message known through a very persistent stranger through a random act of kindness. God hand delivered me- “me”, a rejected, abandoned, hopeless, broken, wounded soul- a personal message in the form of a red umbrella.
The actions of that stranger stayed with me and would cause me to do something years later that still kept his random act of kindness “ripple” in motion. I’m finally at a point where I am a happy, whole adult and can share my story of hope with others. I now carry umbrellas in my car with me to continue the ripple effect that was created so long ago and hand them out to strangers in the rain and let them know they are not forgotten. I wrote a book about my story and share my healing journey with others through the book, websites, and outreach missions for abuse victims to come together to share hope.
My abusive past may have been my beginning but it won’t be my end and what others meant for harm, God has used for good…
Excerpts from the book by Tammy M. Lang, Damaged Goods: Things You Must Know About Healing From Abuse
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