Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome to today's episode.
You can connect to Bleeding Daylight on a range of social media platforms.
Links and other episodes are at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:31):
Please share episodes with others so that they can kick at the darkness too.
Today's guest has a difficult story to share, but she's found that sharing our stories can be the beginning of healing.
While her story is difficult, it is also full of hope and now points others towards restoration and wholeness.
(00:59):
Nancy Manassero is a survivor, advocate, and author whose story of healing from sexual abuse is both courageous and inspiring.
Unlike many survivors whose abuse occurred in childhood, Nancy's trauma came at the age of 20.
Through her journey, Nancy unpacks the insidious nature of grooming, the complexities of shame, and the transformative power of forgiveness.
(01:24):
Her book, Heart Mending, God Can Heal Your Heartbreak from Sexual Abuse, delves into the myths surrounding forgiveness and how it can lead to profound healing.
I'm so pleased that she is joining me today on Bleeding Daylight.
Nancy, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you, Rodney.
I'm glad to be here with you.
I know that your abuse happened when you were 20, but I'm wondering if you could help me understand who you were before that abuse occurred.
(01:51):
What did life look like for you in the years leading up to that time?
My childhood was lonely, I would say.
I was one of three children, but I had two brothers, so I kept to myself.
Being alone in my room was my safe place.
Our home was full of tension.
My parents did not have a happy marriage, and there was a lot of fighting and then long days of silence.
(02:20):
That's where I learned that that's how you handle stresses, by being silent.
My parents were both very heavy drinkers, probably alcoholics.
I wouldn't have said that as a child.
My father taught me at the age of 15 how to tend bar for their parties, and that kind of gives you an idea of how pervasive alcohol was in our home.
(02:42):
At the age of about 11, when I was going through puberty, is when my father started the grooming process with me.
I will just define grooming.
It's the process that an abuser uses to gain the trust of their intended victim by making them feel special, possibly giving them gifts, saying, oh, we have a little secret and you shouldn't tell anybody.
(03:12):
Another thing they do is they normalize inappropriate touch, which was a big part of what my father did with me.
Massages and just inappropriate ways of being around me and inviting me to do things with him that I refused to do, thankfully.
(03:34):
At the same time, because I was young and I didn't know any better, and back then in the 50s and 60s, that kind of stuff wasn't talked about.
To me, it was just how fathers were.
I thought he was weird.
I thought he was creepy and I tried to avoid him, but I didn't really understand that it was something I should tell anybody about.
(03:58):
I felt a sense of shame, which is so crazy, and it's really so typical of sexual abuse survivors that they do carry a lot of shame, somehow feeling like it's their fault or they deserve it, things like that.
This must have been particularly difficult in that sometimes abusers are people from outside the family, mostly known by the family, but outside the family.
(04:24):
Yet here is someone right within your family, your father, someone that you should have been able to trust, which must have absolutely shattered your whole idea of what trust could mean.
If this is what your father would do, then who can you trust?
That must have been particularly difficult for you.
(04:44):
It definitely was.
My father was very distant throughout my childhood.
He never played with me as a little kid and wasn't involved in my life.
He worked a lot, so he wasn't around a lot, and when he was around, I didn't get very much attention.
When he started to give me attention in my teen years, it was always of a sexual nature.
(05:09):
I think in some subconscious way, I was learning that that's how you get love.
That's how you get attention from a male.
That ended up leading me into a life basically of promiscuity in my high school and college years.
I felt like that was all I was good for, really, was to be sexual with a male.
(05:34):
If a young woman is being taught by her father that she is someone to be respected, someone to be cared for, someone who is special in the right way, then that's the way they'll treat themselves, and yet your father is treating you in a very different way.
You went searching for approval.
(05:55):
You went searching for love in the way that you were being taught, and yet it still came with a lot of shame, didn't it?
Yes, it did.
It definitely did.
I think my father probably sensed my longing for that daddy connection that all daughters have with their dads.
(06:15):
He was able to use that to his advantage.
I just enjoyed when he would give me any attention, even if it was inappropriate touch, because I desperately wanted his attention.
That was pretty much the only way I ever got it.
That was very confusing to me, and I didn't feel that I could trust him.
(06:41):
He acted very immature around my friends, my teenage friends.
I often didn't want them to even come over because he embarrassed me so much.
He would try and be like a teenager.
I didn't learn until I was much older that he had a lot of issues of his own that never had a chance to heal.
(07:02):
This is how these things manifested themselves.
He had trauma from his life, a very dysfunctional family as a child himself.
It played out in unhealthy ways when he was a father.
He didn't know how to be a good father, unfortunately.
He never had a good role model.
There is abuse leading up to when the abuse escalated at the age of 20 because there was the inappropriate touch, which is all part of grooming to lead you to that point where it did escalate.
(07:35):
What was your feeling when it did escalate at the age of 20?
That must have been even more shocking for you.
It was an extreme upheaval of my life.
I was accepted to a university in France, which was my dream.
I was a major in French.
I wanted to spend a year living in France, going to school.
(07:59):
It was a very competitive thing with lots of oral tests and written tests.
I got accepted.
My father invited me to a French restaurant to celebrate.
This was huge.
He had never taken me anywhere, just the two of us.
I was elated.
(08:20):
I thought, finally, he wants to spend time just one-on-one with me and celebrate something because he never really wanted to celebrate anything with me before.
He has passed on, so I will never know if he had a plan for that night.
But suffice it to say that we both drank a lot of French wine.
(08:44):
My counselor believes it's possible that he drugged me because I have no recollection of what happened starting at about halfway through the meal, I guess.
I don't remember finishing the meal.
I don't remember what I had.
I don't remember leaving.
We went back to his apartment, and he raped me there at his apartment.
(09:08):
I was unconscious, but I woke up in the middle of it happening, and I was so in shock.
I could not believe he would do that.
How could a father do that to his own daughter?
It was the beginning of a downhill slide in my life that took me very far down.
(09:29):
I did not know the Lord then.
I had nowhere to turn.
I was not going to tell my mom because I loved her so much, and we were very close, and I didn't want to break her heart, which it would have done.
They were divorced at the time.
They had been divorced for a couple years.
I was so ashamed, too, because I had been drinking.
(09:52):
I thought, well, I'm already sexually active, and I was drinking, so it's my fault.
I must have brought this on myself.
I'm responsible, and if I tell anybody, they're just going to tell me it's my fault.
I can't handle somebody telling me that it was my fault, so I'll just stuff it down, pretend it didn't happen.
(10:13):
Anybody who has ever suffered any kind of deep, deep wound or trauma knows that you cannot forget.
You can try to stuff it down, but it'll pop up in some way, and it did with my alcohol abuse that started happening, drugs I was taking, just a very unhealthy lifestyle.
(10:37):
Without the Lord, you have nowhere to go but down and using all kinds of ineffective and unhealthy coping skills.
I severed my relationship with my father.
I didn't see him for a long time after that.
I don't even remember how long.
I didn't actually confront him about it for many years.
(11:00):
I finally did many years later, and at first, he denied that it even happened, and then he finally admitted it, but I never got to hear the longed-for words, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that, will you forgive me?
I never heard those words.
That is something that you were longing for.
(11:21):
You were longing to hear, I'm sorry for what I did, and yet at the same time, even though you didn't hear that, you didn't have that contrition, you were brought to a place where you had to forgive.
I suppose that's part of the myth of forgiveness is that often people think that I can't forgive someone until they express sorrow or remorse for what they've done.
(11:48):
What does forgiveness mean for you?
Forgiveness is a huge topic for me.
I absolutely love the topic of forgiveness because that's how we come to Christ, and that's how we are set free.
I believe with all the work that I've done in my healing journey that until you can forgive that person who has deeply wounded you, you can't fully be healed.
(12:13):
You can do a lot of work of healing, you can reach a certain point in your healing journey, but forgiving is what sets us free.
When we withhold forgiveness, we are feeding our own souls with bitterness and anger, hatred, a desire for revenge.
(12:36):
You can't be unforgiving and not feel those things.
Jesus wants us to be free from those things.
It really is a myth that you can't forgive somebody unless they repent to you because, first of all, you don't even have to tell them that you've forgiven them.
(12:57):
It's something you can do in your own heart between you and the Lord, especially if they're an unsafe person.
There might be a reason that you want to tell them, I did eventually tell my father that I had forgiven him, but I had wrong motives.
My motive for telling him that was I was trying to get him to tell me he was sorry.
(13:20):
He didn't.
It was kind of like salt in the wound, and I was frustrated that I didn't get the desired result.
There are a lot of myths of forgiveness.
People think they have to reconcile.
That's a big one.
They think that forgiveness requires reconciliation, and they might use that Bible verse that we have the ministry of reconciliation.
(13:43):
That verse is talking about reconciliation between humans and God.
It's not talking about reconciliation between two humans.
Because God is a God of reconciliation, of course he would love if we can reconcile, but it's not always possible.
It was not possible to reconcile with my father.
(14:05):
I invited him to attend Christian counseling with me so that we could work through the trauma, and he refused to do that.
Some other myths of forgiveness.
One really big one is people think, I need to forgive myself.
You might think that I thought that, that I need to forgive myself because I felt so much guilt and shame.
(14:29):
I never did actually have that thought.
But the reason why I tell people, no, don't forgive yourself, because forgiving yourself is not in the Bible.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say we are to forgive ourselves.
I think what people mean when they say I need to forgive myself is they haven't completely agreed with God that he has forgiven them for something they did.
(15:02):
In my case, I did this with the help of my counselor.
I separated my sin, which was I got drunk.
I separated that from my father's sin.
Now a good father would not have done what he did to me.
A good father would have said, oh, you foolish child.
(15:24):
I'm going to take you home and make sure you get to bed safely.
Then we're going to have a chat tomorrow about this drunkenness that you're involved in and how it's going to take you down the wrong path in life.
That's what a good father would do.
My father was not behaving as a good father.
It was so important for me to separate my sin that I did need to repent for.
(15:50):
We do need to repent for drunkenness.
Drunkenness is a sin in the Bible, but it did not make it my fault.
Going back to the whole forgiving yourself idea, we need to receive God's forgiveness when we are responsible for whatever sin it is and fully agree with Him that we are forgiven.
(16:13):
If we think we need to forgive ourselves, what we're saying is God's forgiveness is not sufficient.
I still need to punish myself.
I still need to do some kind of penance for what I did wrong.
That makes Jesus' death on the cross and His total forgiveness null and void.
I want to briefly touch on something you mentioned, and that is forgiveness leading to reconciliation.
(16:40):
This does seem to be a very powerful myth that people feel, I need to forgive, and that means everything's as if it didn't happen.
Yet, that puts us back in a very dangerous position.
If there is an abuser, if there is someone who has acted against us and we say, I've forgiven them, that's one thing, that's good.
(17:02):
But then if we insist on reconciliation, oftentimes if that person is not remorseful, aren't we just putting ourselves back in a place of danger?
Absolutely.
Statistics show that most abusers and perpetrators are not safe to be around because they will not admit to you what they did and they will not apologize or ask forgiveness.
(17:26):
Therefore, they are unsafe, possibly even toxic.
You might even be putting yourself or other family members, like if you have kids.
In my case, I had little kids.
He wanted to see them and I had girls.
He had granddaughters.
He wanted to see them.
(17:46):
Oh no, that was not wise or safe for me to put them in the vicinity of him, so he never had access to them.
There can be a lot of pressure from family to reconcile.
Families don't like to have all this upheaval.
(18:07):
They want to have peace and they'll tell you, oh, just get over it.
It's in the past.
Make peace and just come to the party or come to the holiday thing.
Instead of what should be happening is that abuser who did something so horrendous and egregious to a family member is the one that should be uninvited to the family gathering and the victim is the one that should be embraced by the family and comforted and helped, but it often doesn't work that way.
(18:43):
There are all these layers and difficulties with the whole reconciliation thing.
If somebody feels like they either want to reconcile or they're being pressured to reconcile, what I would say is please don't do it without the assistance of a trauma-informed counselor because they know how to walk you through that and maybe even go with you or provide someone who can go with you who can advocate for you in case it's a sticky situation.
(19:17):
Abuse survivors often don't know how to set boundaries.
Boundaries have been stripped away from them often from early childhood, so it's very uncomfortable for them to say, well, I'm not going to come to the party if so-and-so is going to be there, or if they go, they don't know how to put their hand up when that person is approaching them to hug them hello and say, stop, no, you may not hug me.
(19:47):
They don't know how to do that.
That's another reason for needing the help of a counselor to walk through those kinds of scenarios and know how to set some boundaries for yourself so you stay safe.
Let's go back to that young woman who had been abused by her father.
As you say, it set you into a spiral.
That life really didn't go well after that.
(20:10):
What was the turning point for you?
When did you actually come to faith and start your climb out of that dangerous lifestyle?
Before I came to faith, I joined a secular therapy program that helped me a little bit.
I was really a mess when I joined them.
It was a psychotherapy type of program.
(20:33):
It wasn't a religious program at all.
They helped me set healthy goals in my life and stop abusing myself with alcohol and drugs, develop a career, lose weight and get physically fit and all those kinds of things.
That was good to a point.
(20:55):
I left that program.
After a couple more years, I met the man who would become my husband.
We've been married 41 years.
He's a gem of a man.
God sent him to me even though I didn't know God sent him to me at the time.
Neither of us were believers.
My husband, Tom, had been raised in a Catholic home.
(21:19):
My parents had taken me to church as a young child.
We didn't live in a Christian home.
We said grace before dinner and went to church every once in a while, but that was about it.
We both knew of God, but we weren't following God.
We did have a hunger though for something.
We kept saying, what is it?
(21:40):
What are we missing?
There's got to be more to life.
We both had successful careers and money and all kinds of the American dream.
We decided to go on an extended honeymoon in Europe after our wedding.
It turned out to be six months long.
During that time, we went to a place called Libri in Switzerland, which is a Christian retreat center started by Francis and Edith Schaefer.
(22:08):
Francis Schaefer was known as one of the most prominent theologians in the late 1900s.
The pastor who married us said, oh, you're going to Europe?
Can you go check out this place called Libri?
We didn't really want to because we thought, oh, it's going to be full of Jesus freaks, which I think is so funny now because I am one, but we told him we would.
(22:32):
We went.
The welcome we got there was so beautiful and so warm and so kind.
We didn't expect that.
We expected Bible thumpers who would shove religion down our throats.
Instead of staying one day, we stayed two and a half months there where we got to delve into the Bible and ask every question we could come up with.
(22:58):
Our questions were greeted with the kindest, most gracious responses.
Nobody laughed at what I consider now kind of some, I don't know, dumb or duh kind of questions.
They were just such gracious people.
We would sit around the table for two hours at a time and discuss Bible stuff.
(23:21):
We could ask any question about a cultural issue, a social issue, a relationship issue, things that we thought were contradictions in the Bible.
Suffice it to say that at the end of the two and a half months, my husband and I had both determined that the Bible was true, that there was such a thing as absolute truth, which was a new term for us.
(23:46):
We came home as Christians and we didn't know what to do then.
God in his sovereignty planted us in an apartment next door to a Calvary Chapel pastor, and they became good friends and took us to their church.
It went from there.
We started following the Lord and learning what it meant to do marriage as Christians and how to raise children as Christians.
(24:15):
It wasn't actually until several years later that I discovered that my sexual abuse and my relationship with Christ had a connection, that Jesus wanted to heal me.
It had never crossed my mind before, but there was a support group offered at my church for sexual abuse survivors, and God gave me a little nudge.
(24:41):
He said, it's time.
It's time to go there.
Like I say in my book, see that valley of the shadow of death?
It's a shadow, it's not death, and I will walk down there with you.
I will be with you and we'll get through this together.
I like to say that in a way, I viewed it as pushing back the darkness in my life then, and that's how I view my ministry now and how I view what my book is like now, pushing back the darkness.
(25:13):
It ties in with what you say about your ministry too, Rodney.
I'm interested where things went with your father, because you say you did have contact with him after that.
Not that he was ever prepared to really say he was sorry, and at first didn't even want to admit that the abuse happened.
But where did that relationship with your father lead eventually?
(25:36):
My father lived to his mid-80s, so he passed away in 2015.
So during all those years, it was over three decades, we were pretty much out of touch with each other, because I had tried the reconciliation route and that didn't go anywhere.
And I saw him at several family funerals, and he was always drunk and very confrontational and offensive, both to me and my husband.
(26:09):
And we deemed him unsafe to be around or to have around our children.
So we cut off our relationship with him.
When he was in his 80s, he developed dementia.
And one day I sensed the Lord, not audibly talking to me, but you know how you get that inner sense from the Holy Spirit saying, you need to go see your father.
(26:35):
And I thought, what?
Why me?
Why do I need to go see my father?
I have no relationship with him.
I refused.
I said no to the Lord.
Well, you know, God always wins in those situations.
He keeps nudging until we surrender or walk the other way in total rebellion.
(26:59):
But I finally surrendered to the Lord and I said, okay, I don't know what this is for, but I will go.
So my husband and I drove two hours to where he was in this residential facility.
When I walked into the room, he said, who are you?
And I said, I'm your daughter, Nancy.
And he said, oh, I have a daughter.
(27:21):
Now this did not shock me because my brother had told me years before that my father had erased me from his mind.
And he told people I have two sons.
He didn't even mention that he had a daughter.
So I saw that as his coping mechanism to deal with his own shame and guilt is just try to erase me.
(27:44):
So it didn't shatter me.
Also, God had done an amazing work of healing in my life at that point.
I felt a lot of sorrow for him and pity.
And I just said, yes, you do have a daughter.
I'm your daughter.
We just started talking with him and I kept praying, Lord, why am I here?
(28:06):
Why am I here?
I sensed the Lord saying, tell him about me.
God was not foreign to my father.
He had gone to church and he had sung in the choir and he knew the hymns and all that kind of stuff.
But I just started talking to him about Jesus.
And I said, Dad, you can be forgiven for every horrible thing you've ever done in your life.
(28:32):
Maybe I should have used the actual words for sexually abusing me, but I didn't.
And my father clutched his chest and said, oh, really?
Oh, yes.
I would love that.
I don't know for a fact because my husband and I then prayed with him.
(28:54):
We took his hands and my husband led him through a prayer of repentance and receiving Christ as Savior.
I don't know if it was real.
He had dementia, but I do believe that the Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of penetrating through dementia or mental illness or any other kind of limitation that we humans would put on somebody.
(29:20):
And of course, I want to believe that he was saved at that moment because as a Christ follower, I don't wish anybody to go to hell.
There was a time when I wanted him to go to hell.
I even prayed that he would go to hell.
But that was part of my healing is to have the heart of Christ for sinners.
(29:41):
I had been praying for his salvation.
My husband and I got in the car and said, whoa, what just happened?
And interestingly, my father was diagnosed with cancer within a few weeks.
He died a couple of months later.
So his time was really short.
One time I calculated it.
(30:02):
I think it was something like in the last one half percent of his life, he received Christ as Savior.
I hope he's there.
We mentioned before your book, which is Heart Mending, God Can Heal Your Heartbreak from Sexual Abuse.
And that's obviously a great resource for someone who's going through trauma from abuse that they've suffered.
(30:25):
But you also minister in other ways to those who have been through that journey.
Tell me about the work that you are doing at the moment.
I mentor young women, or not just young women, anybody who is a sexual abuse survivor who wants to be mentored in their healing journey.
(30:47):
I come alongside them one-on-one or I've taught classes at my church.
I want people to know that there's hope.
I want them to feel safe.
I want to be a listening ear to them and pray with them.
I'm not a counselor, but God has taught me a lot.
(31:08):
I believe that I have a lot to share with people about the healing process.
So I go looking for sexual abuse survivors.
And I will say they're hard to find because they're hiding.
They're carrying a lot of shame.
Many of them have not told their story.
And that is the first step, is telling your story.
(31:31):
So I try to provide opportunities for people to tell their story.
I also do online mentoring anonymously through a Christian organization where I'm a volunteer, and I interact with people who post their stories of trauma.
They post their stories anonymously, and I respond anonymously.
(31:55):
I'm just so thankful that these are people who are reaching out, at least in some way.
It's a cry for help.
They're asking for advice and someone help me.
I want to kill myself or my life is a mess.
I'm a disaster.
I'm afraid to leave my home.
They say all these things.
So I try to respond with as much hope and encouragement and specific tips I can give them if they're telling me something specific.
(32:24):
So these are all ways that God has me just continuing in this ministry.
It seems there's at least three ways that people are kept quiet once they've suffered abuse.
You mentioned that some abusers will say, this is our little secret.
We keep it between ourselves.
And even once they're no longer in the orbit of that person, they still feel they need to keep that secret.
(32:48):
There's the protection of others.
As you mentioned, you didn't tell your mother because you wanted to protect her.
But there's also the shame that you've mentioned, the shame that says it must be partly my fault, even though we know that's absolutely not the truth.
We know that whatever we've done, we're not inviting that kind of abuse.
(33:10):
And yet the shame still lingers.
What would you say to someone who's listening right now, who whether it's that we must keep a secret, whether it's trying to protect family members or just that shame that they're feeling that is keeping them quiet?
What would you say to them right now?
I would say that first of all, you absolutely must embrace the truth that it is not your fault.
(33:39):
Shame is something common to every human.
Every human carries shame for various things.
But Jesus died for our shame.
He took that and he wants you to be free from shame.
You cannot heal until you slay your shame.
(34:01):
I call it slay because it really is a battle.
It's a spiritual battle.
We have to take up our sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and literally cut and slay something that is a lie.
The enemy gets his hooks in us in the event of the trauma and begins to tell us lies and we take them on.
(34:29):
We take them into our hearts and souls and minds.
We find our identity in a lot of these lies.
They're all soaking in shame.
The best way to release your shame, or I should say the starting point, is to tell your story.
You don't want to tell your story in an unsafe place or to an unsafe person because you could end up with even more trauma if you tell the wrong person or you're in an unsafe setting when you tell your story.
(35:00):
But the unburdening of shame is so glorious.
You won't believe how great it feels to tell your story and be unburdened from the shame and have someone who is safe, who understands, who loves you, put their arm around you and say, it's okay.
(35:20):
It wasn't your fault and I'm going to help you walk through this.
Nancy, I'm going to put links to your book and to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net because I'm sure that there will be people that will want to contact you, who will want to be in touch with you and hear more of your story so that they can unfold their own story of healing.
(35:44):
But I just want to say thank you so much for your time on Bleeding Daylight today.
Well, thank you, Rodney.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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