*NOTE: This is just a heads up that you might want to put ear buds in for this episode as there are topics discussed that are sensitive, and may be triggering for young kids.
Mary DeMuth had unimaginable things happen to her as a child. The effects have been far-reaching. But God has given her the strength to boldly and candidly share her story. In doing so, she shines a light in the darkest of lives.
Show Notes:
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Transcription:
Steve Sunshine:
We live in a time of unprecedented comfort. We value safety and security, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy for us to be shaken when the straight road we’re on takes a sudden curve and seems to be pointing us in a direction we don’t want to go. Welcome to the Shaken podcast. I’m Steve Sunshine. Your confidence, your mood, your perspective, even your faith may be shaken because of something that’s happened in your life. Jesus told us we’d have trouble in this world, so we’re shaken but not surprised. He also said, “Take heart. I have overcome the world.” In this podcast, you’ll hear honest conversations with people who have or are going through life-altering hard times and have found that God was with them in the midst of it all.
Abuse is evil. It’s evidence of just how broken our world is. Abuse is devastating to the victim. Abuse of a child, even more so. Mary DeMuth experienced things as a child that most of us can’t even imagine, but she has boldly told her story, written about it in books, and she’s here to talk about it with us now. Thank you so much, Mary.
Mary DeMuth:
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me here.
Steve Sunshine:
What was it that you lived through as a child, in a nutshell?
Mary DeMuth:
Yeah, that’s a great question. A lot. I know that even as I share my story, I know there’s a lot of people out there who will be able to find some handle holds in that story. I was a child of a whoopsie, and my mom was a student of a professor who was my father. So there’s that going on as well. They did end up getting married. It did not last long for various reasons. Then there was a period of time where I have no memory of my mom, so I lived with my grandparents for a period of time, and then I went back and she married somebody else. It was during that year that a lot of the problems started, and that was my kindergarten year.
The house was really unsafe. We were in a crime-ridden neighborhood. There were drugs a lot all over the place. We were growing things in our closet, a plant that’s now legal in a lot of states, and I was even part of that sometimes. So just a really unsafe environment. Then I would go to half-day kindergarten and to a babysitter’s house. The frustrating thing about that babysitter, she hated children. So probably, if you’re going to choose a babysitter, don’t choose one of those. These neighborhood teenage boys would knock on the door and say, “Can we play?” And she would say, “Sure.” And she would shove me out of the door. That’s when the sexual abuse started for my whole kindergarten year. I remember them telling me things like, “We will kill your parents if you tell.” And then, of course, they use a bad word to describe what they were doing. So for a long time, I didn’t tell anyone, and most kids at that age won’t. It’s very common to be quiet and believe what those boys were saying.
But eventually, about three-quarters of the way through the school year, they started inviting their friends. There was something inside of me that felt like, “If I don’t get out of this, I’m going to die.” That was just, I don’t know why I was so sophisticated in my thinking as a five-year-old. So oddly, I did not tell my mom, my stepdad, or my biological father. I instinctively knew none of them were safe. So I went to the safest person I know, which was the babysitter, who hated children. She told me these very frustrating five words. She said, “I will tell your mom.” And at that time, I thought, as a five-year-old, that all adults told the truth. So the next day, when I went to the babysitters, the boys knocked on the door, and she pushed me out into the street again.
So I thought my mom knew but didn’t care. Of course, she didn’t tell my mom. That’s when I got even cleverer, and I decided no one’s going to take care of me, not my babysitter, not my parents, no one. So it’s up to me. So I learned how to pretend sleep. So I would get home from kindergarten, I would eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I would run to the back room, where her bed was, my babysitter’s bed. I would pull the covers over my head, and I would just not move for 3, 4, 5 hours. That saved me for that year. The problem being that, thankfully, we did move away from that place, but I felt like at that point I had this honing beacon for sexual predators.
So I spent my childhood, from that point on, running away from people trying to steal from me. That’s the lion’s share of the trauma. The other part of the trauma was just all the divorces. There was another divorce, and then my biological father taking his life when I was 10 years old, and then another divorce. So it was just like a fatherless kid and all this sexual trauma and all of that. So that’s my background. That’s my story. It’s a hard one, but it is true, and I did walk through it.
Steve Sunshine:
So that’s where we start, yet tell us where redemption started to come in.
Mary DeMuth:
It started in little ways. I could clearly, now as I look back on my life, I can see where God was wooing me. Even in little things, like my favorite songs on the radio, almost always had some faith element to them. They’d be like crossover hits. It was really weird. Then I remember longing to go to church, and we went one time and it was to get baptized, and I had to go to one Sunday school class. That was the requirement in order to get baptized, weirdly. I remember asking my mom if I could please go back. There was just this hunger. She said no. So there was all of that. Just being alone, I was an only child. So just all this extended period of time alone, I would look at the stars and just wonder what it all was about.
But in my 7th and 8th grade year, I was thinking about taking my life. I was thinking about it constantly. I had a counselor in my junior high, Mr. Thompson, who just could see it. He could see that I was on the brink. I believe he was a Christ follower, and he gave me this special hall pass that got me out of class at any time, and I could just go cry in his office because my mother’s third divorce or third marriage was ending in divorce. I had attached myself to that third father because my biological father was gone, and then I was going to lose another one. I was losing my life because I just felt like nobody cared.
Steve Sunshine:
It just goes to show you that you don’t know what kind of impact you’re going to have on somebody. Even as a teacher, you don’t know. So it’s worth putting the effort forward, and boy, it’s good that God put him in your life.
Mary DeMuth:
It was a miracle, really. Yeah, I had not told anyone about the sexual abuse because, of course, I thought my mom knew. So she wasn’t safe to tell, and I didn’t tell anybody. I eventually did. After I came to Christ, I was able to share that story and start healing. But at this point, he didn’t know. So he just knew that I was this terribly broken girl. Then my ninth grade year, a friend of mine invited me to Young Life, and I remember her saying something like, “We play a lot of games, we sing songs. It’s really fun. I think you’ll really like it.” And I was like, “That’s cool.” Even though I am, at my core, an extrovert, all of this trauma had really pushed me down into the hole, so to speak.
So it was a place where I was allowed to be myself, and we’d sing the songs, the shaving cream, balloons, whatever, all these crazy things, games. Then the last 15 minutes, someone would stand up and talk about Jesus. I remember hearing His name and just saying, “This is it. This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.” And that next year. So I was very ripe for the picking. They did not pursue me, but it was just God’s timing. That whole summer, I kept remembering the story that the last person said before summer break, and it was the story of Jesus calming the sea and the disciples asking the question, “Who is this that even the wind and the seas obey him?” And that question just kept rolling around in my mind.
Then my sophomore year, I went to a weekend camp with Young Life, and I heard the whole gospel and one fell swoop, and that’s when I gave my life to the Lord, and I didn’t come as a person recognizing their sin, although, of course, that would come. It was this girl who is in desperate need of a father. So that’s why I came to the Lord. I was so desperate. From that point on, I’ve been walking with the Lord and been walking this really long journey of trauma healing.
Steve Sunshine:
Describe, after that moment, how things changed inside in terms of how you felt about yourself, about life, and anything else.
Mary DeMuth:
I think part of it was, I felt loved, not just by God but by my Young Life leaders and what would become my campaigner leaders, my small group leaders and church. I found out I had to go to church. So here’s this girl who just barely… I just eventually get my license that year so I can drive, and I’m going to church by myself. I’m also this crazy evangelist who’s trying to tell everyone that they’re going to hell unless they meet Jesus. I was very zealous, but it was the communities around me, and it was the Word of God.
This love that I started having for the Bible started at that point, and so much so with the community that I was shattered at the end of my sophomore year when we had to move. I was like, I figured out this whole thing and this community, and we moved an hour away, so I had to start in a new high school as a junior, but thankfully I was able to find my tribe there, and it worked out really well. It actually was a lovely fresh start because I could reinvent myself, so to speak, and not be that shy girl anymore. I could actually be the girl I was meant to be. Not that being shy is bad. I’m not saying shy is bad, but I just don’t think that was who I was.
Steve Sunshine:
I think abusers do steal part of a person. You wouldn’t have been free to… I can see where you wouldn’t have been as free to be yourself, to be an open person, and engage with people. People had to be really scary, I would think.
Mary DeMuth:
Yeah, oddly, that’s an interesting observation, but I don’t know what happened, but when I met Christ, there was such a vacuum inside of me and a hunger for people just to notice me and love me that I thankfully began trusting and entrusting myself to those leaders, and they happen to be safe. Now, that doesn’t always happen, and there are plenty of times where I’ve entrusted myself to people that were unsafe, but in that place, God protected me.
Steve Sunshine:
Where did life take you after that?
Mary DeMuth:
So I graduated from high school, and I went to a four-year school. I am from the state of Washington, and it was just a small liberal arts school, but the Lord saw fit to send all these Christians around me. Again, it’s a really great theme, and my friends believed that God would heal me of all of this trauma, and that’s when I started talking about all of it. So they just prayed for me for four years, and I cried for four years, and God just did a lion’s share of healing during that time. So much so that when I was done with college, I was like, “Oh, good, I’m all healed, and I will never have to deal with this again.” And so even when I met my husband after college, my pre-husband, I wasn’t saying things that were untrue. I was like, “Yes, all these things happened to me, but God has healed me.” Really naive, not understanding the nature of the layers of trauma and triggering and all those things. So there was a rude awakening about seven years into our marriage of, “Okay, I still have more work to do.”
Steve Sunshine:
Yeah. How did that affect your relationship?
Mary DeMuth:
It was really hard. This is something that we don’t talk much about in the church, unfortunately. I ended up writing a book with my husband called Not Marked: Finding Hope and Healing after Sexual Abuse. He wrote the parts of what is it like to be married to someone who has this in their past. So initially, he was just mad. He was mad at what those boys did to me.
Steve Sunshine:
Yeah.
Mary DeMuth:
He was mad at how it caused me to just have a really warped view of sex, and it caused a lot of friction. Eventually, he read a book by Dan Allender called The Wounded Heart, and he came back to me and he apologized because he was blaming me for things that were almost completely out of my control.
Steve Sunshine:
Yeah.
Mary DeMuth:
He had a very shallow understanding of what trauma does to the body, what trauma does to the mind, what trauma does to everything. Also, the other thing that he did that was helpful was, he began to look at his own brokenness. So for the first part of our marriage, I was the broken one that needed to be fixing, and the comradery returned when he finally realized, “We’re all broken.” And when he wasn’t the one trying to fix the broken one, and we are two broken people trying to figure this out, it just got a lot better.
Steve Sunshine:
One of the things I know you talk about is not wanting your kids to experience anything that you experienced. The negative things that you experienced. Obviously, probably anybody, I can imagine, would say that. You drew a line in the sand. How did you follow through with that in a way that… Because I’ve talked with people who’ve had some generational things passed on that they want to change and they know they should change, and they find that it is just a tough battle.
Mary DeMuth:
It is. I just want to dignify those stories too, because they’re very real. I want to say, too, that I was fighting constantly not to fall back to the way I was raised. Really, my only method was to cry a lot and to get on my knees and ask Jesus for help because my fallback, the only thing I was modeled, was either predatory things, which I was absolutely not going to do, but the other was neglect. So there was a time where I had to… I didn’t even know what cognitive-behavioral therapy was, but I had to retrain my mind. So when my child came to me with… If they scraped their knee, I would say, “Okay, Mary, this is what a loving parent would do. They wouldn’t walk away. They wouldn’t dismiss the pain. They would go get a bandaid. They would pray with their child.” And I would just train myself how to do that with the help of the Lord.
Then the other thing that really helped me was, I needed it modeled. I read all the books, and those were very great tutorials for me, all these parenting books. But I realized I learned better by watching. So I watched people a lot like a creeper, but I also had this mom that was maybe 15 years older than me, and I asked if she would help me. So we would take walks together, and I would just ask her all these questions about parenthood.
Steve Sunshine:
It’s interesting. That’s another example of God putting the right person for you and your path at the right time. That’s pretty cool. So what do you say to someone who has had a rough childhood and doesn’t want to pass that on, going through that battle? Obviously, I know prayer is a big part of it. What would you say if they came up to you and said, “How can I make sure this doesn’t happen to my kids?”
Mary DeMuth:
The first thing I would do is commend them for telling their story, because I often tell audiences, an untold story never heals. So they’re doing the first best part by talking about that story and letting it out because if it stays inside, it festers, and the enemy just has this heyday with your brain because of it. Then I would say, “Yes.” Of course, prayer, community, and authenticity, but if there was a lot of trauma, I would highly recommend therapy, traumatic… Someone who is trauma-informed to walk you through just things that maybe bewilder you. You might be asking yourself, “Why do I keep going back to that? Why do I have this addiction? Why do I hear my parents’ words coming out of my mouth when I absolutely don’t want to?” There’s these things that happen that you have to work through in a trauma-informed way.
Steve Sunshine:
Talk a little bit about where you saw God through all of this.
Mary DeMuth:
Yeah, so you mentioned my book Thin Places, which is a memoir that I wrote. The metaphor there is the Celtic term thin places, and that’s a physical place on earth that the Celts believe, like, at this rock, the veil between heaven and earth is thin, so you can see over to the other side and experience God’s presence. It’s almost like getting really close to the Holy of Holies. So I use the metaphor as places, that God came near these thin places. What I learned as I recounted my story was that God came near in the most broken places. We usually don’t talk about our growth in Christ of like, “Oh, 2023 was the best year ever, and I grew so much.” It’s usually like, “Oh, that was a really hard year, but the Lord was faithful.” And we do live on this sin-scarred world, and so there are going to be hard years, but the beauty of the Lord is that He before us a banquet in the presence of our enemies. He provides a feast in the midst of the pain.
Steve Sunshine:
As you were healing through all of this, and I’m not suggesting that’s not still going on, how did you draw comfort from God and really experience His presence?
Mary DeMuth:
There were times I was definitely really mad at the Lord. Why did this happen to me? And especially when I became a parent, because I would have these children obviously, and I would look at them and think, “If I knew that my child was being abused, I would move mountains to save them and help them.” So I just couldn’t understand how a loving parent would allow something like that to happen. If I’m a loving parent and I’m 1 million times less holy than God, 1 billion, trillion, what gives? And so I did share those things with the Lord, which actually caused me to have that intimacy with Him because I realized His shoulders were big enough to take my verbal assault. Then there’s all those lament psalms where the psalmist or David is like, “Why, why, why? How long, how long? Why do the evil keep winning?” And I haven’t resolved that question 100% completely.
I do know that it involves the fact that the Lord gives us all free will, and so my abusers had free will, just like I have free will. So I understand that, and there’s still a little tension there, but it’s better every day, and there’ll be one day when all those tears and those questions will be wiped away. I say that to say that it’s okay to feel like your journey is taking a long time. There were many years in the middle of this that I was like, “Lord, how long is this going to be an issue for me? I want to be done with it.” Only to have another layer exposed. There was so much complex trauma in my past. You’ve heard just a surface level of the story. It just takes a long time. I want to dignify the listener out there who’s like, “It’s taking too long.” And I’m like, “Yes, I get it.” And it does seem really unfair, and it’s not even your fault. You didn’t put yourself there. So it’s just very… It’s okay if it feels like it’s taking a long time. That’s normal.
Steve Sunshine:
This is going to be a hard question. Maybe it’s not, so I hesitate to ask it, but have you been able to forgive the people who hurt you?
Mary DeMuth:
I have. I actually wrote them a letter, and it can be found on wetoo.org. It’s one of the blog posts there. It was a very authentic letter. I actually think that we need to remember that forgiveness is a process. So when I met Christ, I heard that I was supposed to forgive everybody, so I chose to. But the working out of that took several years, and it turns out, after a bunch of very surprising and beautiful God coincidences, I was able to, through some help of other people and a librarian, to track down at least one of the two who harmed me.
Steve Sunshine:
Oh, wow.
Mary DeMuth:
Thankfully, this sounds horrible, but he was dead. He had died of cancer. I had carried around this survivor’s guilt of I should have warned people about him. But I was a little kid. I didn’t even know addresses. All I knew was, I couldn’t recall their names until a family member told me their names, which means they actually did know what was going on. That’s what caused me to be able to do all the research and find who at least one of them was. So yeah, I have chosen to forgive. It was a long journey. There’s still times, I have to say, I forgive again, re-forgive, because it just takes so, so long. I’m thinking to myself too, “These were teenage boys. What was going on in their home to think that that would be an okay thing to do? What was happening in their lives?” So not that I excused what they did. What they did was horrid. But over the years, I’ve understood a little bit more.
Steve Sunshine:
I want to maybe back up just a little bit. We talk about all kinds of things people go through, bad diagnoses, relationship issues, in this case, abuse, now infertility came up on one of our episodes. People suffer, and Jesus told us there would be trouble in this world, but He’s overcome the world. Have you wrestled with the why very much?
Mary DeMuth:
Of course, but, I think, just years and years of that. But now that I’m older and I see the ministry that God has opened up for me and that I get to be a part of someone else’s freedom story, I cannot describe the joy that comes from that. It is such a beautiful redemption that God allows your pain to be part of the pathway for someone else. It’s indescribable. But there are times I’ll say, “I wish I had a normal story.” And sometimes, as a little parlor joke, I’ll be like, if I meet someone, I’ll ask them the question, if they haven’t read my books, “What kind of upbringing do you think I have?” And they’ll say, “Oh, super stable, Christian upbringing.” And I’ll start laughing and then tell my story. They’re like, “Are you sure that’s your story?” I’m like, “Yes, that’s my story.”
All of that to say, it’s to the glory of God who rescued me from the pit, set my feet upon a rock, made my footsteps firm, rescued me. He was like the one who said, “I’m going to use the foolish, the broken-hearted, to shame the wise.” From that Corinthian passage. I just felt like I got rescued. I was plucked out, and now I have the opportunity. God has that ministry of reconciliation with us, and then He gives us the ministry of reconciliation with others.
Steve Sunshine:
That’s beautiful. Maybe the best outcome that suffering can have is that God is glorified, whether the suffering is something that ends or goes on. We talked about Job a couple of episodes ago, and God’s answer was, “You’re not God.” And that’s hard. That doesn’t mean… But that same God allows those complaints and the honesty, and my struggle is Parkinson’s, and I found that in drawing close to Him, that’s when I started being able to deal with what was happening was when I moved toward Him, and He will move toward you as you do that, and that makes a huge difference.
Mary DeMuth:
Oh, I just want to say to anyone out there in the middle of their story, a lot of us are in the middle of our story right now, that it is okay to be upset, and it is okay to be authentic about that. As I said earlier, God’s shoulders are big enough to take it. So instead of directing it inwardly, direct it upwardly, and like you said, sharing with the Lord how you feel about that diagnosis. That very hard diagnosis invites Him into the circle of relationship. That is really important.
Steve Sunshine:
It’s okay to admit to other Christians that it’s hard, but God is good, and it’s hard. Those two things can go together. So, where can we find your books, particularly Thin Places?
Mary DeMuth:
Sure. So my memoir is called Thin Places: A Memoir. It can be found wherever books are sold, of course, by Mary DeMuth, my name. Then my latest book is called the 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge. The subtitle is Read the Whole Bible, Change Your Whole Life. We talked in the beginning of the interview about how I started falling in love with the Bible the moment I met Jesus. So this is just an outpouring of that. You’ll walk through the Bible in 90 days, and it will change your life. I’m serious. It will. So you can find out more at marydemuth.com/bible.
Steve Sunshine:
My wife and I are going through that, and I hesitated when I first saw… When she first said, “It’s the whole Bible in 90 days.” And I said, “I’ve never been able to get it done in a year. I always take longer.” And there is value in taking a small portion of the text and digging into it. But the cool thing about doing it this way is, you see how everything ties together much better than when you looking at what’s granular. So I think it’s worth doing. Mary, thank you so much. Thank you for the courage to share a story that I think a lot of people would want to keep inside. By sharing what you’ve shared over the years, I know a lot of people have, it’s probably been a lifeline. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for joining us.
Mary DeMuth:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Steve Sunshine:
Thank you for joining us, and we’d like to see as many people encouraged as possible. You can help by liking, sharing, and subscribing to this podcast, and by just telling your friends. Find new episodes at purposely.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, and one more thing. If you enjoy Shaken, if you’re encouraged by it, if you think someone else would be, give us a good review.
