I have been thinking about Unhinged for some time because I have come to understand that there is simply too much history, too much complexity, and too much I am still learning about trauma, gaslighting, coercive control, motherhood, and my own behavior to fit into one book. I am not writing Unhinged yet, but over the past several days I have had the strange realization that parts of that book are continuing to unfold in real time.

This is going to be a two-part essay because I realized there was no honest way to tell one side of what is happening without telling the other. In Part One, I want to go back to where this story actually began and why the chronology matters so much, especially now. Next week, in Part Two, I’m going to talk about the much harder part for me personally: my children, what they witnessed, what they could not have known was happening inside our marriage, the manipulation I believe shaped our family over many years, and my responsibility for the ways I sometimes reacted to all of it.

There is something I want to make clear before I say anything else, particularly for my children.

I waited years and years to speak publicly about much of what happened inside my marriage and our family, and one of the most important reasons I waited was because my children were still children. They did not choose their parents’ marriage, and they had already lived through enough of its conflict. I could not bring myself to publicly tell an adult story while they were still young enough to be caught in its consequences, so I remained silent about a great deal of what happened to me.

I also stayed silent because I was begged to and threatened by him many times, so I believed speaking could affect his job/career as a pastor and our family’s livelihood. I carried that responsibility for years.

They are adults now, which is one of the reasons I have finally allowed myself to begin telling my story. I am also learning that their adulthood does not make hearing it any less painful for them. I hate that. I hate that something I need to do for myself can hurt people I love, and I especially hate that they are once again finding themselves anywhere near the middle of something between their parents.

But I need to be very clear about how they are being brought into this now.

Since I started writing publicly, my ex-husband has been contacting my children and people who support me and attempting to arrange conversations with people in my life about me, my story, our marriage, and my relationship with our children. I know this because people have come directly to me and shared communications from him, which I have preserved. He is now trying to take legal actions, to not only twist and put the light of what he did now on me in some way, to once again try and silence me, which I want to reiterate: I will not be silenced, intimidated, manipulated or threatened by him or anyone.

He is the person referring to what happened “40+ years ago” as if to minimize or belittle his actions and responsibility for what he did. He is the person attempting to meet privately with people. He is the person talking to our children about what I am writing and posting. From what has been shared with me, he is also disputing the chronology and details of what happened to me as a teenager and redirecting the conversation toward my parenting, my emotional reactions, and my current relationship with my adult children.

That distinction matters enormously.

I am 53. Bride and Groomed begins when I was fifteen years old. It is about what happened when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, and about the years that followed. It is about an adult man nearly a decade older than me, in a position of trust and authority, and what I experienced during those years.

Calling it something that happened “40+ years ago” does not make it less serious. The reason it happened so long ago is because I was a child.

I have heard his variations of this from him for years: It happened so long ago. Why can’t you let it go?

Because time does not change what happened.

There is another part of what is happening now that I need to address clearly. He is not simply saying that he remembers our first sexual encounters and marriage differently. He is telling people that things did not happen the way I say they happened. He is disputing the chronology of what happened between us when I was a teenager, and I believe he is minimizing the seriousness of those years.

One example is the claim that our intimate relationship did not begin until I was nineteen. That is not the truth or my history.

We first had actual penetrating intercourse when I was eighteen. I became pregnant, miscarried approximately two months later, became pregnant again about a month and a half after that, and gave birth to our first child on May 27, 1993, when I was nineteen.

Those dates are part of the chronology of my own life and cannot be disputed.

But focusing only on when full intercourse occurred completely misses the point of what I am saying happened before that. From fifteen until eighteen, there were years of pursuit, grooming, secrecy, emotional entanglement, physical contact, and sexual boundaries being crossed.

The first significant boundary crossing happened when I had known him for only about a month and I had just turned 15. I remember where I was, what happened, and how confused I felt.

I have already written about the garage apartment, and I am going to address it once more because I understand that a different version of that night is now being told to people privately.

I was fifteen. I had known him for approximately a month, maybe two. This was not his going-away party, and it was not after the later Windy Gap trip. Those events occurred months afterward.

That night, a group of teenagers had been at his garage apartment. My boyfriend was among them. I remember the boys leaving and the girls remaining. I remember being taken to his bed, and I remember an adult man crossing physical and sexual boundaries with me there.

I am deliberately not telling the rest of that scene here. The complete account belongs in my book Bride and Groomed, where I can tell what happened before, during, and afterward in its full context.

But I will not remove the event from my own chronology simply because another version of it is now being told.

I was fifteen. That is where this story begins.

I remember those few months after leading up to Young Life camp. He had mixed gender campaigners, which is Young Life’s term for small group talks about God with high school kids and a “trained” Young Life leader, at that apartment on Davis Island. Typically they are separate guys and girls campaigner groups with same gender leaders.

Several times we all met there and he talked to us about sexual purity and treating our girlfriends and boyfriends we were dating as if we would want others to be treating our future wives or husbands one day, pretty much deterring us from having sex, which is ironic from what I remember happening with him and equally confusing, because he was having sex with single women at that same time he was telling us to abstain.

He told me of these girls by name and the encounters in detail later. Why would he tell me these things, like that he almost raped a girl at beach week when he was in high school while he was drunk and chasing her down the beach, or describe and name the other older girls he had been with in great length and detail and wonder why I might be jealous or criticize me for being insecure?

It is called emotional abuse and gaslighting. And it was the beginning of what I now understand as narcissistic manipulation and emotional abuse that started with me at a very young age and lasted for over 30 years.

What truly matters here is the fact I was fifteen, and I had only known him for approximately a few months. He was an adult who occupied a position of authority and trust in my life who crossed a sexual boundary with me. His pursuit of me continued afterward.

Approximately four months after we met, he secured and presented me with a full scholarship to attend Windy Gap, the Young Life winter camp, which I was completely not expecting. Shortly after that camp was over he announced his move to Atlanta, but then returned to Tampa some months later, resumed being involved as a leader with Young Life, and continued pursuing me.

At sixteen, he picked me up and took me places around Tampa. We spent long periods of time alone together. There are memories from those encounters that remain extraordinarily difficult for me to write about.

That entire year he picked me up, alone, took me to Sam Ash Music, to Caesars of New York, to Sunshine Bagels and many other places. We sat in his car for hours and that is where he touched my entire body without kissing me for over a year. And had me “rub his tummy.”

Seriously, that phrase to this day gives me PTSD flashbacks just typing it. I have a chapter in my book with that as the title and it’s very disturbing. One of the hardest for me to write.

At seventeen the kissing began that he tried then to blame on me. I left Plant High School my junior year, in hopes we could date publicly and not keep this secret I was so terribly ashamed of and tired of holding, any longer.

He invited me on a trip to Jacksonville for his best friend’s wedding. He was twenty-seven. I was not attending the wedding and was expected to remain at the house while he attended it. When he returned pretty late that night, alcohol was purchased by him that he gave me and he also consumed. We went to the beach, and additional sexual boundaries were crossed of everything “but” actual full penetration during that trip.

Again, I will tell the complete details myself, in my book. I have pictures of this trip and many letters as evidence.

The history does not disappear because full intercourse happened later. The access he had to my entire body and his orgasms from it do not dismiss the sexual nature of our relationship nor the intense emotional abuse I endured.

It also does not become less significant because, after years of pursuit and emotional attachment, I had feelings for him, wanted his affection, or believed I was in love with him.

That is precisely why the timeline matters. I was fifteen when this began. He was an adult. By the time I was eighteen, three years had already passed.

What happened during those years shaped everything that came afterward. I experienced those years as grooming, sexual and emotional abuse and as the beginning of a relationship characterized by an enormous imbalance of age, authority, and emotional power.

The story also did not end when I became an adult. I believe the patterns changed form and continued throughout decades of our relationship and marriage.

So when he contacts people now and tells them that things happened differently, I am not going to pretend this is simply an insignificant difference in memory. I believe he is minimizing what happened, disputing the chronology, and redirecting attention away from what I am describing and onto me.

And one of the most effective ways to redirect that conversation is to make the subject my relationship with my children.

A blogger recently wrote about my story. My ex-husband contacted her and, according to what she told me, strongly challenged the piece and threatened legal action. After speaking with him, she removed the original post and publicly stated that she had heard another side of the story and would not continue writing about it.

My children were then brought into the conversation as well. I was told that three of them completed questionnaires about their relationship with me.

And I keep returning to the same question: What does my present-day relationship with my adult children establish about what happened between an adult man and me when I was fifteen?

Those are separate issues. And issues I am willing to deal with them in therapy.

Whether my children are angry with me today does not determine what happened to me at fifteen. Whether I became emotionally unhinged at times as a mother does not determine what happened when I was sixteen. Whether my children believe their father, defend him, disagree with my writing, or choose distance from me does not alter what happened when I was seventeen or even years after.

My parenting and my teenage years are not interchangeable subjects.

I know what happened to me. I know the chronology of my own life. I will take responsibility for what belongs to me. I will not take responsibility for what does not.

And I will not allow everything that happened afterward to be used to rewrite where this story began.

I was fifteen.

That is where this story begins.

Next week, I want to talk about what happened after that story became a marriage, a family, and eventually a divorce—and what I mean when I talk about the manipulation or grooming in the family dynamic, that continued for decades. I also want to talk honestly about what my children witnessed, what they could not have known was happening behind closed doors, and my own responsibility for the ways trauma changed me as a mother. Their experiences are real, and so is mine, and understanding how both can be true is becoming the beginning of another story I know I need to tell: Unhinged.

The first read:

“The power of a smear campaign is triangulation. If enough people can be convinced the victim is the abuser, every accusation the victim later makes sounds like retaliation instead of self-protection.”

The second simply said:

“Abusers don’t just groom victims. They groom the people around them.”

Those two statements explained something I have spent years trying to understand.

For a long time, I believed grooming ended when the child grew up. I thought it was something that happened between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Looking back now, I realize that was only the beginning.

The relationship started with grooming, but the years that followed were shaped by manipulation, triangulation, image management, and carefully crafted narratives. The same skills that allowed a twenty-five-year-old Young Life leader to gain the trust of a vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl didn’t disappear when I became an adult. They simply evolved.

Manipulation rarely stays confined to one relationship.

It spreads into families, friendships, churches, and entire communities. It shapes perception long before anyone realizes they’re hearing only one version of the story. A smear campaign isn’t usually built on one dramatic lie. It’s built through countless small moments—a carefully edited story, an omitted detail, a conversation designed to create sympathy, or a subtle suggestion that someone is unstable, bitter, or vindictive. Eventually, those moments become accepted as truth.

By the time the victim finally speaks, the story has already gotten there first.

Not because it was true but because it was repeated.

Recently, someone shared conversations they’d had with people from my former husband’s church. They told me several believed I was lying. Some pointed to my children and suggested that because they struggled with my decision to tell my story and in his words “they are not talking to her”, it somehow proved the story itself wasn’t true. What that person said from my ex husband’s church about my children not talking to me is not true. Obviously that is what their father is conveying to others. I just talked to two of them yesterday and one texted as they were working. My youngest child texted me as well although he has gone through moments of not communicating with me. I’m sure they will continue to struggle and go through times of distance with me through this process and that’s ok as I’ll always be here for them when and if they choose to need me or just connect.

I have written a letter to my children that will be included in my book in hopes they will all one day see past the smear campaigns and manipulation and just see me, my truth and my story.

One person asked a simple question to that person from his church:

“Did you know he was twenty-five years old and she was fifteen when the relationship began? Did you know he was her Young Life leader and held spiritual authority over her?”

The conversation stopped with no response. Silence.

Because once those facts are spoken aloud, there is very little left to defend.

No one argues that it was appropriate.

Instead, the attention quietly shifts away from the abuse and onto the person exposing it. The questions become about timing, motives, and whether speaking out is somehow causing more harm than remaining silent. The focus moves from what happened to why it’s finally being named.

For years, I wanted to believe people simply didn’t know.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I believe many people, including people within the church and Young Life, know enough to recognize what happened and still choose to protect it.

Once someone understands that a twenty-five-year-old man pursued a fifteen-year-old girl while serving as her Young Life leader, minimizing it, excusing it, or redirecting the conversation becomes a decision.

Sometimes they’re protecting a family member. Sometimes a church, a friendship, or a reputation built over decades. Accepting the truth would require confronting painful questions about someone they admired or trusted, and that can feel easier to avoid.

The outcome, however, is always the same.

Every excuse, every dismissal, every attempt to redirect the conversation adds another layer of protection around the person who caused the harm.

That is how abuse survives.

Not only because of the person who committed it, but because enough people decide protecting him is less uncomfortable than confronting the truth.

Looking back, I also realize the grooming didn’t end with me.

The manipulation extended to the people I loved most.

My children grew up loving both of their parents, as every child should. They didn’t choose to be caught between competing stories or carry loyalties they were too young to understand.

But narcissistic abuse doesn’t stop because children are involved.

Triangulation, guilt, victimhood, image management, and subtle manipulation become woven into everyday life. Over time, children can find themselves protecting the parent who caused the harm. Not because they lack compassion or intelligence, but because they’ve spent years being conditioned to see that parent as the one who needs protecting.

That realization has been one of the deepest heartbreaks of my life.

It hurts that some of my children have struggled to acknowledge the beginning of my story, not the marriage or the divorce, but the simple fact that a twenty-five-year-old man pursued a fifteen-year-old girl while serving as her Young Life leader.

He has acknowledged those facts to me and to family members and others over the years.

Yet the words I’ve longed to hear have remained largely unspoken:

“Mom, what happened to you was wrong.”

I don’t need anyone to choose sides.

I don’t want revenge, and I don’t want my children’s relationship with their father destroyed.

I only hope they can recognize that acknowledging the truth doesn’t require rejecting the person who caused the harm.

Those are not the same thing.

Calling something wrong doesn’t erase love.

It simply honors truth.

From the beginning, I’ve said I’m telling this story because I don’t want another fifteen-year-old girl to spend decades believing that what happened to her was romantic, normal, or somehow her fault.

If my children someday understand that, everything I’ve risked in telling this story will have been worth it.

For years, I believed the greatest thing he took from me was my adolescence.

It has taken much longer to understand that he took far more than that.

He shaped the way I entered adulthood, the way I understood love, the marriage I accepted, the friendships I built, and even the business I devoted years to creating. Those losses happened so gradually that many of them were invisible until I looked back over my life as a whole.

The hardest realization has been understanding that the consequences didn’t end with me.

They reached into the lives of the people I love most, my children.

For years, I believed my silence was protecting my family.

Now I understand something different.

My silence wasn’t protecting my family.

It was protecting the story that got there first.

I didn’t choose that title because it’s one of my favorite songs. I chose it because I don’t think I’ve ever heard another song that so accurately describes the dynamics of grooming, manipulation, secrecy, and the decades that follow.

I’ve listened to Hands Clean for years.

But I didn’t really hear it until I began writing this book.

Some songs entertain us. Others help us understand our lives. This one did the latter.

Years after the song was released, Alanis Morissette became the very first celebrity customer of my first company and brand, Primal Pit Paste. At the time, I thought it was simply exciting that someone whose music I admired was using something I had created. Looking back now, it feels like one of those remarkable full-circle moments. A woman whose lyrics unknowingly gave voice to parts of my own experience would later become part of my story in a completely different way.

“If it weren’t for your maturity none of this would have happened

If you weren’t so wise beyond your years I would’ve been able to control myself”

The first time I really listened to those words, I immediately recognized the excuse.

I heard some version of it throughout my relationship.

I wasn’t like other girls my age.

I was mature.

I was wise beyond my years.

The implication was always the same: I somehow wasn’t really fifteen.

That is one of the oldest justifications used by adults who cross boundaries with children. Instead of accepting responsibility for their own choices, they convince themselves, and eventually the child, that maturity changes the equation.

It doesn’t.

No amount of maturity changes a child’s age.

No amount of wisdom turns a teenager into an equal.

Those aren’t explanations.

They’re rationalizations.

“If it weren’t for my attention you wouldn’t have been successful and

If it weren’t for me you would never have amounted to very much”

This verse hit me in an entirely different way.

One of the most persistent messages throughout my marriage was that whatever I accomplished somehow belonged to him.

When my first company became successful, I don’t remember hearing much celebration over the years of work, sacrifice, and risk it had taken to build it. Instead, the success was often reframed as something I owed to someone else. At one point, he even suggested it really came from his mother, who had passed away, and was making it happen from heaven, as though the company I’d built with my own hands somehow belonged to her legacy instead of mine.

It was a strange thing to witness.

Looking back, I don’t think he knew how to celebrate my success without feeling diminished by it.

There was often an undercurrent of jealousy whenever opportunities came my way. If I was being interviewed, featured in a newspaper or magazine, invited onto television, or given the opportunity to tell my story, he wanted to be part of it. It seemed difficult for him to simply celebrate from the sidelines. He wanted to be included in the interview, recognized in the story, or somehow share the spotlight.

One memory has stayed with me for years.

I was meeting with an investor in Austin and he insisted on being in the meeting. The meeting was about the company I had founded, and I was being asked to tell my story—how it started, why I created the product, and where I hoped to take the business. It’s a well known process called a pitch that is for the founder to tell their story and in essence impress them enough in the pitch that they want to entertain investing.

Before I could finish, he interrupted.

He became visibly frustrated and asked, “What about me? What about what I’ve done?”

I remember sitting there thinking, This isn’t your story. And I remember the investor being visibly shocked and of course that investment did not end up happening.

At the time, I couldn’t explain why that moment felt so unsettling.

Now I can.

Narcissism struggles to applaud when someone else is standing in the spotlight. Instead of celebrating another person’s accomplishments, it often searches for a way to become part of the story or, better yet, the reason the story exists.

That’s why this lyric feels so haunting.

“If it weren’t for my attention...”

The implication is clear.

You owe me.

You became successful because of me.

Without me, you would never have become who you are.

For years, part of me believed that.

Today, I don’t.

My success didn’t happen because someone gave me permission to have it.

It came from years of work, resilience, failure, persistence, and the willingness to keep going long after it would have been easier to quit.

No one gets to rewrite that story.

“Ooh this could be messy

But you don’t seem to mind

Ooh don’t go telling everybody

And overlook this supposed crime”

Grooming survives in secrecy. If no one knows what’s happening, no one asks questions. No one interrupts the relationship and no one protects the child.

Looking back, I don’t remember silence being presented as a single request at first, until later when the admittance and apologies started as I voiced my shame and sadness. It became an expectation woven into the relationship itself. Certain conversations never happened. Certain people could never know. Protecting the secret gradually became part of my role and then the ongoing expectation and at times a manipulating threat. I did tell him and remind him many times later during our difficult moments, separations and divorces, when the excuses or even denial started happening, that what he did, did indeed happen and was punishable by the law and a crime with serious consequences. That is not my intention or goal for him to be punished now criminally or for his job or livelihood to be jeopardized, as I’ve said so many times, but it needs to be stated and acknowledged for myself and other victims.

“We’ll fast forward to a few years later

And no one knows except the both of us

And I have honored your request for silence

And you’ve washed your hands clean of this”

Those words may capture the passage of time better than anything I’ve ever heard.

Life keeps moving. People get married. Children grow up. Careers are built.

Churches continue meeting and entire communities move forward.

Yet one person carries the weight of remembering while the other simply moves on. For more than thirty years, I honored the silence. I carried the memories, the questions, and the responsibility while the story quietly disappeared from public view.

“What part of our history’s reinvented and under rug swept?

what part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?

what with this distance it seems so obvious?”

That question sits at the heart of why I finally decided to write this book.

History doesn’t always disappear.

Sometimes it gets rewritten and details become softer. Timelines become blurred.

The uncomfortable beginning is quietly replaced by a version that feels easier for everyone else to accept.

Over time, enough people repeat the revised story that it begins to sound like the truth.

Except it isn’t.

“...under rug swept?”

That phrase deserves its own conversation.

What gets swept under the rug doesn’t disappear.

It simply becomes easier for everyone else to ignore.

Communities, churches, families and organizations do it.

The cost of preserving comfort is often paid by the person carrying the truth.

Eventually, someone has to lift the rug.

That is what writing Bride and Groomed has been for me.

“What part of your memory is selective...”

Trauma, narcissistic gaslighting and abuse has a way of making survivors question themselves.

I spent years asking whether I remembered things correctly.

Then I started looking through journals, letters, photographs, calendars, and conversations.

I talked with people who had witnessed pieces of the story.

The more I examined it, the more confident I became.

Truth doesn’t fear being examined.

Selective memory does.

“Just make sure you don’t tell on me especially to members of your family

We best keep this to ourselves and not tell any members of our inner posse”

That lyric may be the hardest one for me to hear.

The request isn’t simply to stay quiet.

It’s to protect the people, relationships, and community surrounding the person who caused the harm.

You don’t want to hurt the family. You don’t want to divide the church.

You don’t want friends to feel caught in the middle.

So you convince yourself that remaining silent is the loving thing to do.

I believed that for decades.

What I’ve come to understand is that my silence protected systems, reputations, and the people who held the power.

It never protected me.

When I hear Hands Clean today, I no longer hear someone else’s story.

I hear echoes of my own.

Maybe that’s why it became the title of a chapter in Bride and Groomed.

Some songs become part of the soundtrack of our lives.

Others quietly hand us the words we’ve been searching for all along.

This birthday surprised me. My phone seemed to buzz all day with messages from friends who have known me through very different seasons of my life, family members, people I had not heard from in years, newer friends, and many of you who have begun following my writing here. I read every message and felt genuinely overwhelmed by the kindness behind them. All four of my children reached out, which meant more to me than anything that could have arrived wrapped in a box. No matter how old your children become, hearing from each of them carries its own kind of tenderness.

While taking in all of that love, I began wondering why birthdays had mattered so little to me for such a long time. The answer was painful, although not particularly difficult to find. Most holidays and special occasions during my marriage carried an undercurrent of tension that eventually became so familiar I barely recognized it. Birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas mornings, Mother’s Day, vacations, and even the births of our children somehow required me to manage another person’s needs and emotions. An occasion intended to celebrate someone else could still become centered around him, whether through his disappointment, his mood, the gifts he selected, or the attention he needed in that moment.

Living with a narcissist changes the way you experience celebration. The damage does not always arrive through one spectacular argument or a holiday ruined in a way everyone around you can clearly see. Much of it happens through the slow conditioning of learning to anticipate a reaction before it comes. You remember every preference, monitor every shift in mood, replay conversations, and work increasingly hard to create the right experience, hoping that enough thoughtfulness will prevent the day from going sideways. Over time, celebration becomes less about joy and more about emotional preparation.

Even the gifts reflected his interests rather than anything personal to me. When I was seventeen and eighteen, I received things like a juicer wrapped in old green towel and waterless cookware. I was still a teenager. I can assure you I had not spent my time dreaming about owning either one. Those gifts made sense within the life he imagined and the things that mattered to him, but they had very little to do with who I was. I smiled, thanked him, and accepted them as thoughtful because I had already begun learning that being a good wife meant appreciating whatever I was given. Only much later did I recognize how easily my own birthday had become another extension of his preferences.

The memory that captures the dynamic most clearly involves a cake I made for him, not one he made for me. One year, I spent the afternoon baking a homemade chocolate birthday cake from scratch. I was proud of it and excited to surprise him. His response was, “Chocolate? You know vanilla is my favorite.”

The comment stung, but I treated it as evidence that I had failed to remember something important. I made a mental note and carried it with me until his next birthday, determined not to disappoint him again. That year I baked a beautiful vanilla cake, feeling pleased that I had listened and remembered what he liked.

“You know chocolate is my favorite.”

I can laugh at the absurdity now, but I did not find it funny then. Rather than questioning how his favorite cake could have changed so conveniently, I questioned my own memory. Perhaps I had misunderstood him the year before. Maybe I had not listened carefully enough. I assumed the mistake belonged to me and added it to the growing list of things I needed to do better.

That is one of the most destabilizing parts of narcissistic abuse. Reality shifts just enough to keep you working harder while doubting your own perception. You begin to believe that the problem lies in your memory, your effort, your sensitivity, or your inability to love someone correctly. The possibility that the rules are being moved deliberately—or that there may never have been a correct answer—does not occur to you when you are still trying desperately to succeed within them.

Years later, I understood that neither the flavor of the cake nor the usefulness of the gifts had ever been the real issue. What mattered was keeping my attention focused on him: whether he felt properly understood, sufficiently celebrated, or disappointed enough to make me try harder the following year. Even occasions that belonged to me could be redirected toward his wants, leaving very little room for me to receive anything without first considering how he might respond.

That realization helped me understand why birthdays had gradually become little more than another day on the calendar. Expecting less was easier than experiencing disappointment, and avoiding attention felt safer than wondering how it might be redirected. Yet this year, as message after message appeared on my phone and my children each reached out, I allowed myself to receive the affection without minimizing it, questioning it, or worrying that someone else needed to become the center of the day.

A few days after my birthday, while I was still thinking about why it had felt so different from so many birthdays before it, I found myself scrolling through Instagram when one of those Subway Takes videos stopped me.

If you’ve never seen them, They are getting peoples takes on certain subjects while riding on the New York subway, and every once in a while someone says something that lingers long after you’ve finished watching.

This woman did exactly that.

“I think we should blow up our lives more.”

I laughed.

What does that even mean?

Then she kept talking.

She explained that blowing up your life sounds scary—and it is. It doesn’t always work out. But betting on yourself can inspire other people to do the same, and what she described as the law of attraction has a way of bringing opportunities back around that never would have existed if you had stayed exactly where you were.

I found myself replaying that part more than once.

Not because I suddenly believed life magically rewards every difficult decision. Mine certainly hasn’t. There have been seasons of grief, uncertainty, financial loss, loneliness, and more moments than I can count when I wondered whether I had completely lost my mind.

What stayed with me wasn’t the promise that everything would work out.

It was the reminder that nothing new ever has the chance to happen if fear keeps making every important decision.

As I looked back over my own life, I realized something I had never connected before.

Every chapter that has changed me began with a decision that scared me enough to wonder whether I was making the biggest mistake of my life.

Most decisions I make come with lots of weighing and overthinking but I also can be very spontaneous and sometimes even impulsive.

If anything, my pattern has always been more of the opposite. I stay too long. I keep hoping. I keep believing another conversation, another year, another effort might somehow change the outcome. By the time I finally decide to leave, I’ve usually exhausted every possible reason to stay.

Looking back now, though, I don’t remember regretting the decisions that changed my life.

I remember what they gave me.

Walking away from my marriage the first time didn’t look like courage while I was living it. It looked like a young mother trying to figure out how she was going to raise her child and put herself through college. Somehow, that season became one of the richest chapters of my life. I discovered strengths I didn’t know I possessed, earned a full scholarship, found extraordinary mentors, and was accepted into graduate school. None of those opportunities were visible when I was standing at the beginning of that road.

Years later another leap arrived through my business. Building my former company eventually led me to move my family to Austin, trusting that saying yes to an opportunity I couldn’t fully see was better than wondering forever what might have happened if I hadn’t taken the chance. Looking back, that decision shaped both my family and my career in ways I never could have imagined.

Then came the hardest decision of all.

Thirty years after saying “I do,” I finally accepted that love alone could not fix a marriage that one person had been trying to carry for decades. Walking away for the second and final time wasn’t exciting or empowering. It was heartbreaking. It was also necessary.

Not long afterward, life shifted again.

My former company was gone.

Sadie our only dog of 16 years was gone.

My children had grown into adults and were building lives of their own.

Asheville wasn’t part of some grand strategy. It felt more like a quiet invitation to begin again. I packed everything I owned, drove to a city where I knew almost no one, and trusted that if every other frightening decision had eventually led somewhere meaningful, perhaps this one would too. I have to say the people and relationships personally and professionally that I have cultivated here so far in the last 9 months is confirmation enough this blow up is for the better.

Purefill, my new startup grew out of that season.

So did a deeper trust in myself.

As I thought about that subway take on blowing up your life, I realized something they probably never intended.

The biggest leap of my life isn’t behind me.

It’s the one I’m living right now.

Writing my book and this blog Bride and Groomed has stretched me in ways I never expected. Moving to another city, rebuilding after divorce, starting businesses, or beginning again all came with visible challenges. People understand those kinds of transitions. They can see the moving truck, the new address, the career change, or the wedding ring disappear. Writing a book like this happens almost entirely in private. The hardest part isn’t putting words on a page. It’s deciding whether you’re willing to live with what those words may change.

For years I believed silence was the kinder choice. I told myself I was protecting my children, preserving relationships, honoring my faith, and allowing everyone else to move on with their lives. That story became so familiar I stopped questioning it. Only after beginning this book did I realize that silence wasn’t protecting me at all. It was simply asking me to continue carrying something that had never belonged on my shoulders in the first place.

The fear wasn’t imaginary.

Before publishing my first essay, I had already imagined every possible outcome. I wondered how my children would feel reading it one day. I thought about extended family, former friends, church communities, people from Young Life, and those who only knew fragments of my story. Once something is spoken publicly, there is no gathering it back together. That realization sat beside me every time I opened my computer.

Then the first blogger who shared my story received legal threats, and the post disappeared almost immediately.

For a few days I questioned everything.

Maybe this was a sign to stop.

Maybe thirty years of silence should simply remain thirty years of silence.

Instead, I opened my laptop again.

Looking back, I think that decision changed my life more than I understood at the time.

Women began writing to me from all over the country. Some shared experiences they had never spoken aloud, even after decades. Parents told me they looked at their own teenagers differently after reading my story. Friends from high school reached out with memories they had carried quietly for years. Complete strangers trusted me with some of the most painful parts of their lives because they recognized pieces of themselves in mine.

Those conversations led to opportunities I never could have predicted when I wrote my first Substack post. Journalists reached out. An investigative filmmaker contacted me while researching the systemic issues surrounding Young Life and the experiences of women whose stories closely resemble my own. None of those doors existed while I was trying to decide whether I should remain silent. They only appeared after I had the courage to walk through the first one.

That’s the part of the Subway Takes video that continues to stay with me.

She said blowing up your life sounds scary, and she’s right.

It does.

She also said it doesn’t always work out, but betting on yourself can inspire other people to do the same. She described it as the law of attraction—that opportunities somehow find their way back to you after you’ve been willing to choose yourself instead of fear.

I don’t know that I would have used those exact words before hearing her say them.

Now I understand the idea behind them.

Every meaningful chapter of my life has begun with uncertainty. Leaving my marriage, returning to school, building a business, moving my family to Austin, beginning again in Asheville, and now writing this book all felt frightening while I was living them. None came with guarantees. Every one required faith before there was evidence things would work out.

Looking back, every life I’ve been afraid to leave has been smaller than the one waiting for me on the other side.

That thought has stayed with me all week.

Maybe that’s the real reason this birthday felt different.

The messages filling my phone weren’t celebrating perfection. They weren’t celebrating success or a milestone birthday. They were reaching the version of me that finally stopped hiding. For the first time in many years, I wasn’t measuring the day by whether someone else felt disappointed or whether I had overlooked some detail that might ruin the celebration. I simply accepted the kindness people were offering.

Receiving it without guilt may seem ordinary.

To me, it felt like freedom.

I’d love to hear your story as well if you want to message me or simply comment.

Have you ever blown up your life or made a decision that completely changed the direction of your life? Maybe you walked away from a relationship, changed careers, moved somewhere new, started over after losing something you loved, or finally spoke a truth you had carried for years.

What happened?

And if you’re standing at one of those crossroads today, what’s keeping you from taking that first step?

For months, I’ve been working on an essay for New York Times Modern Love. I rewrote it more times than I can count, hoping it might become the first public step toward the memoir I’m writing, Bride and Groomed. Like every writer who sends something out into the world, I imagined opening my email and finding an acceptance. Instead, I received a gracious rejection from editor Daniel Jones. I was disappointed, of course. I had convinced myself that if this essay found a home there, it might open the door for everything that comes next.

What happened instead was something I never could have planned.

Only a few days later, I was contacted by an investigative writer researching the systemic abuse allegations surrounding Young Life for a documentary project connected with HBO and Netflix. They had come across my story and wanted to learn more. I sat there staring at the email, struck by the irony of the timing. After spending months hoping one door would open, another appeared that I hadn’t even known existed.

The truth is, writing this memoir has become a story of its own.

I thought the hardest part would be remembering what happened more than forty years ago. I was wrong. Remembering has been painful, but deciding to tell the truth has been even harder. Every chapter forces me to revisit memories I spent decades trying to pack away, while also asking myself what telling this story might cost the people I love most.

Nothing has weighed on me more heavily than my children.

I have four children, and they have each experienced this journey differently. Some have been incredibly supportive from the moment I decided to write this book. Others have struggled with the decision, and one is no longer speaking to me. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about them, wonder if I’m doing the right thing, or question whether staying silent would somehow spare them more pain. Those questions follow me into every chapter I write, and I suspect they will stay with me until the manuscript is finished.

Over the past several years, I’ve also had to come to terms with what I now believe were patterns of manipulation that extended far beyond our marriage. Learning about narcissistic abuse, coercive control, and the ways children can become caught between competing narratives has forced me to look at parts of my own life with new eyes. I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, but I can say that understanding those dynamics has helped me make sense of relationships that once left me confused, heartbroken, and questioning my own reality.

When I published my first post, another blogger who had shared my story received legal threats after writing about it. The post was taken down, and for a moment I wondered if that would be enough to silence me as well. Instead, it had the opposite effect. It reminded me that if this story was going to be told, it needed to be told by the person who lived it.

The Modern Love rejection didn’t change that.

Neither did the unexpected email from an investigative writer.

If anything, both reminded me that I don’t get to control the path this story takes. My responsibility is much simpler than that. I have to finish the book, tell the truth as honestly as I know how, and trust that it will find the people who need to read it in whatever way it is meant to.

That’s what I want this Substack to become.

Not simply a place to revisit the past, but a place to share the very real, often messy, and sometimes surprising journey of writing Bride and Groomed. I’ll share the setbacks, the unexpected opportunities, the difficult decisions, and the moments that make me question everything, because those have become just as much a part of this story as the memories themselves.

Thank you for walking this road with me. Tomorrow I’ll sit back down at my computer and continue writing the next chapter.

Did you know it was sexual assault when you were going through it?

I read through the responses longer than I planned to, partly out of curiosity and partly because something about the question felt heavier than it looked at first. One woman shared that she was 14 when it happened but didn’t understand what had actually happened to her until she was 41, and the way she said it didn’t feel dramatic or exaggerated. It felt settled, almost like something she had come to terms with quietly over time.

I knew exactly what she meant before I even thought about it.

I responded:

“I was 15 and same. Started seeing the truth also in my 40’s. When my daughter turned 13 I was like … in 2 years she could have a 25-year-old grooming her too and that was the lightbulb moment.”

There’s something strange about typing that kind of realization into a comment box while sitting in the middle of an otherwise normal day. You’re scrolling, adjusting your phone so you can read it clearly, not thinking too much about what you’re about to say, and then suddenly you’re putting words to something that took years to understand.

It doesn’t feel like a big moment when it happens. It just comes out. The answer for me is no. I didn’t know.

But that answer doesn’t feel simple when I sit with it, because when I think back to being 15, I don’t remember feeling like something was wrong in a way I could name. What I remember is a relationship that felt important and attention that made me feel seen in a way that stood out from everything else in my life at the time.

Being treated like I was older than I was didn’t raise questions for me. It felt like confirmation that I was different in a good way, like I had stepped into something that set me apart. At that age, it’s easy to confuse attention with meaning, especially when you’re still trying to figure out where you fit and what makes you matter.

That’s the part that’s uncomfortable now, not because it’s confusing anymore, but because it isn’t.

There’s a clarity that comes with distance that makes it obvious in a way it never was at the time, and that gap between what I believed then and what I understand now is where a lot of the weight sits.

The first night things crossed a line, I had been drinking with friends, and that detail has stayed with me because it shaped how I experienced everything that followed. I wasn’t grounded or clear-headed, and I wasn’t stepping back to evaluate anything. I was reacting in real time without the awareness or language I have now.

What I remember most clearly isn’t something I can lay out in a clean sequence.

There were other friends there that night and for them it was just another night of high school drama and partying. For me it was the night that changed everything and I remember it vividly.

There was a moment where something didn’t sit right, and even now I can feel the trace of it when I think back. It didn’t arrive as a clear thought or a decision. It felt more like my body registered something before my mind had any way to interpret it.

I remember thinking, “Uh-oh,” but that didn’t turn into action or clarity. It didn’t stop anything from continuing. It didn’t become something I could explain to someone else.

It just existed briefly and then got absorbed into everything else.

That’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone looking at it from the outside with adult understanding. There’s an assumption that recognition and response happen together, as if feeling something is enough to immediately understand it.

That isn’t how it worked for me. The feeling came first. Understanding didn’t show up until much later.

At that point in my life, I didn’t have the language or the awareness to make sense of what I was experiencing. No one around me was talking about grooming, no one knew about the sexual abuse and I wasn’t thinking about power or intent or why an adult would be interested in someone my age. That question didn’t even occur to me in a meaningful way.

I eventually believed I was in a relationship, and that belief became the lens through which I interpreted everything.

It shaped how I remembered things and how I explained them to myself, and over time it settled into something that felt stable enough not to question, even when parts of it didn’t fully make sense.

There was also shame woven into it, and that complicated things in a way I didn’t recognize at the time. It didn’t push me to examine anything more closely. It did the opposite. It softened the edges just enough to make it easier to keep moving forward without asking questions I didn’t have answers for.

Years passed, and I built a life with my predatory abuser, that didn’t require me to revisit that time in any intentional way. It wasn’t something I actively avoided, but it also wasn’t something I reexamined. It existed in the background, already explained away in lie I had to keep and make myself believe was true, in a way that felt necessary at the time.

Then I became a mother.

That didn’t immediately change how I saw my past. Motherhood tends to fill your attention in a way that leaves very little room for reflection on things that feel distant. There are constant needs, constant movement, and a level of presence that keeps you focused on what’s in front of you.

But something about raising a daughter changes your perspective over time, even if you’re not trying to analyze anything.

When my oldest daughter turned 13, nothing about that day stood out as particularly meaningful in the moment. It was a birthday like any other, one more year marked and celebrated.

The shift happened later, in a way that felt almost accidental.

I found myself doing the math.

In two years, she would be 15.

The same age I was.

That realization didn’t feel like a breakthrough. It felt more like running into a thought that didn’t fit with what I had always believed.

I looked at her and saw someone who was still very much in the process of becoming who she was going to be. She was capable and thoughtful, but she also needed guidance and protection in ways that were obvious to me without having to think about it.

When I tried to picture her at 15, nothing about that changed in a way that made her feel older in the way I had once thought of myself.

That’s when the comparison stopped being abstract.

It became personal.

The idea of a 25-year-old man being interested in her didn’t feel like something that required context or interpretation. It didn’t feel like something that could be explained differently depending on perspective.

It felt wrong in a way that didn’t leave room for negotiation.

That was the moment everything shifted.

Nothing about what had happened years earlier changed in that moment, but my ability to see it clearly did. I wasn’t looking at it from inside the experience anymore. I was looking at it from a place that allowed me to understand what I hadn’t been able to understand then.

That difference changed everything.

There is a chapter in my book called 15 that explores this more deeply, not just in terms of what happened but in terms of what it means to revisit something years later and realize you understand it differently.

It’s less about uncovering something hidden and more about recognizing that the perspective I had at the time was shaped by what I was capable of understanding then.

Reading through that online thread, I started noticing how many women were describing something similar, even if their stories were different in every other way.

There was something about that shared experience that felt grounding.

It didn’t make anything easier, but it made it feel less isolating.

It made me realize how common it is for understanding to arrive long after the experience itself.

Not because anyone is avoiding the truth, but because they didn’t have the context to see it clearly at the time.

There is a kind of grief that comes with that realization, and it doesn’t sit in one place.

It has to do with what happened, but it also has to do with recognizing how young I was in a way I couldn’t see then, and how much of my understanding was shaped by that.

It has to do with how easily a story can take hold when you don’t have the language to question it, and how long that story can stay in place without being revisited.

That isn’t something people talk about often.

You can sense that something isn’t right without being able to explain it.

You can move forward without fully understanding what you experienced.

You can carry a version of a story for years before realizing it isn’t the only way to see it.

I still think about that question.

Did you know it was sexual assault when you were going through it?

For me, the answer is no.

I remember the feeling that something wasn’t right, even if I didn’t know what to do with it at the time. I also remember how important that relationship felt to me, and how confusing it was to hold both of those things at once.

Understanding came later.

Not because anything new appeared, but because I was finally able to look at the same experience from a different place in my life.

That shift began with a simple realization.

In two years, she would be 15.

The same age I was.

That was the moment everything changed, and once I saw it from that perspective, I couldn’t return to the version of the story I had carried for so long.

That is a strange thing to admit now, considering the life I eventually lived and the things I eventually accomplished. But when I look back honestly, I can see how limited my understanding of myself really was. I did not grow up with a broad vision of what my future could become. I was not surrounded by conversations about entrepreneurship, leadership, financial independence, graduate school, or building wealth. Those things were not dreams I rejected. They were possibilities I had barely been taught to imagine.

Marriage and motherhood, on the other hand, were familiar ideas. They were values I understood. They were presented as meaningful, honorable, and central to a woman’s life. I still believe those things can be meaningful and honorable. The problem was not that I valued family. The problem was that I did not yet know how many other parts of myself were also worth developing.

After three years of being groomed, from the ages of fifteen to eighteen, the relationship eventually became public enough that it could no longer be fully contained. Over the years, many people have come to me with their disappointment and apologies, telling me they knew something was happening at the time and wish they had spoken up.

I was dating my youth leader who was 10 yeas older than me.

Then I got pregnant, married at eighteen, and became a mother at nineteen.

I remember gathering my bags and pillows and driving away toward a city and campus I had never visited. Before we left for Atlanta and Columbia Seminary, I had just had a miscarriage after eloping, which meant there was yet another secret to carry and another version of the story to manage.

That chapter is one for the books. Actually, it is in my book, so one day there will be more to say about that season of my life in all its painful, complicated detail.

For now, the backdrop is this: I was eighteen years old, married to a twenty-eight-year-old man, and arriving at seminary alongside students mostly in their thirties. The age difference was obvious enough that some people seemed unsure what to make of me. At times, I felt as though they were wondering whether I was his wife or an adopted child he had brought along for orientation.

It was awkward in a way I did not yet have the language to explain.

He would take me to campus parties, where I could not even legally drink because I was not twenty-one. I remember the looks. They were not always unkind, but they felt knowing. It was as if people could see straight through the version of the story we were presenting and sense that something about it did not add up.

That was the beginning of the story I learned to tell, and then kept telling in some form for more than thirty years. A softened version. A protected version. A version that made the situation easier for other people to accept and easier for him to survive.

It was not the full truth.

At an age when many people are still figuring out who they are, I was already building a family and trying to become the kind of wife and mother I believed I was supposed to be. When my oldest son was about six months old, I completed my first half marathon. During those years, I also participated in races and triathlons while raising a young child and navigating a marriage that was far more complicated than I understood at the time.

I did not think of those accomplishments as evidence of anything significant. They were simply things I did. Looking back now, I see them differently. Training for endurance events while raising a baby required discipline, consistency, planning, and mental strength. I had those qualities long before I knew how to name them.

After my first divorce, while raising my oldest child as a single mother, I returned to school and earned a college degree on a full scholarship. During that same season of life, I completed my first two full marathons, which were two of the five marathons I would eventually complete before turning forty.

Even writing that feels uncomfortable. I have spent much of my life minimizing what I have accomplished, partly because I was never taught to view myself that way and partly because humility can become tangled up with self-erasure if you are not careful. I still do not want to sound like I am bragging. At the same time, I can recognize now that putting myself through college on scholarship as a young single mother while training for and completing marathons was not ordinary.

If another woman told me that story, I would immediately recognize the resilience it required.

That has been one of the more difficult lessons of my life. I have often been able to see strength in other women long before I could see it in myself.

During that period, I succeeded academically in ways I never would have predicted when I was younger. I graduated Summa cum laude from college as a single mother with a preschooler. I earned numerous scholarships and was eventually accepted into graduate programs at both Emory and Vanderbilt. If someone had described that future to me when I was a teenager, I would have assumed they were talking about someone else entirely. Coming from a student that rarely picked up a text book, wrote a paper, took notes, studied or turned in homework. I left high school to get my adult day school diploma at 17 because of a lot of the hiding and the shame was too much, in hopes that I wouldn’t have to be kept a secret any longer in that relationship, but that was not the case. I did not know I would be keeping a form of that secret to some extent for over 30 years.

The young woman who once believed marriage would likely be her primary path through life had abilities she had never been encouraged to explore. She was disciplined. She was intelligent. She was capable of enduring difficult things and continuing to move forward. She could study, compete, mother, work, rebuild, and keep going.

The hard part is that I did not fully understand that yet.

Part of the reason it took me so long to recognize my own resilience is that I had spent years hearing a very different story about myself. At various points in my life, I was made to believe that I was incapable of surviving on my own, that I needed someone else to take care of me, and that without that support I would fail. One statement, that I may have previously shared, in particular stayed with me for years: that I would be dead on the side of the road or a in a ditch, if it weren’t for him.

What stays with me now is not only the cruelty of the statement. It is how long I carried it as though it might be true.

The evidence eventually told a very different story.

I put myself through college. I earned a degree on a full scholarship. I completed marathons. I earned admission and scholarship offers from graduate programs that would have seemed impossible to the younger version of me. I supported my child. I learned to keep going under circumstances that were far from easy.

The decision not to pursue those graduate opportunities is a story for another day. It involves religious culture, guilt, reconciliation, manipulation, trauma bonding, and the complicated psychology of returning to a relationship after leaving it. I can see now that those choices were shaped by more than simple love or simple forgiveness. They were shaped by years of conditioning, spiritual pressure, family expectations, and the deep confusion that can come when your sense of duty has been used against your own well-being.

That chapter deserves its own essay.

What matters here is that the experience revealed something I had not fully understood before. The limitations I had accepted about myself were not the truth. They were the result of a narrow world, a painful relationship, and years of being told who I was by people who did not fully see me.

Eventually, entrepreneurship became another part of that discovery.

My first company was not just a business. It became my path toward financial literacy, confidence, and independence. Building it forced me to learn things I had never understood during my marriage. I had to learn about taxes, credit, cash flow, contracts, risk, negotiation, operations, and decision-making. I had to learn how to solve problems instead of waiting for someone else to explain them, manage them, or make them disappear.

I started from a place that now feels almost surreal to describe. I went from stretching grocery money for my family to building a multimillion-dollar company that eventually generated close to $6 million in annual revenue.

That number is not the point, although I have had to learn not to dismiss it. The point is the contrast. The woman who had once been led to believe she would never survive on her own built something real, profitable, and impactful. She created jobs. She made decisions. She carried responsibility. She learned what she had to learn because there was no one else coming to do it for her.

For a long time, I thought I was dependent because I needed someone else. What I eventually discovered was that I had been capable all along. The strength, intelligence, discipline, creativity, and resilience I needed were already there. What was missing was not ability. What was missing was the awareness that those qualities belonged to me.

That realization has changed the way I think about young women, especially those who are being encouraged to define themselves too narrowly. Marriage and motherhood can be beautiful parts of a woman’s life. They were certainly meaningful parts of mine. But they should never become the only lens through which a woman understands her worth, her future, or her identity.

I sometimes wonder how differently I might have approached my life if someone had helped me see myself more clearly when I was young. Not as someone destined only to serve, sacrifice, and support, but as someone capable of building, leading, learning, earning, creating, and standing on her own feet.

That is not a rejection of family. It is a fuller understanding of womanhood.

I want young women to know that their gifts may be larger than the world around them has allowed them to imagine. They may be more intelligent, more resilient, more resourceful, and more capable than they have been taught to believe. Their future does not have to be limited to the roles that feel most familiar, even if those roles are meaningful and good.

Looking back, I can see that I was never the helpless woman I was told I would be without someone else. I was simply a woman who had not yet learned to recognize her own strength.

Once I did, everything changed.

When I see young women embracing the trad wife movement, my reaction is more complicated than either admiration or criticism. I understand the appeal because, by most modern definitions, I was a trad wife long before anyone was calling it that. Back then, in religious circles, it was just called being a wife.

I married young. I became a mother young. I built my life around marriage, motherhood, faith, and family. I spent years raising children, supporting my husband, and investing my time, energy, and identity into creating a stable home and meaningful life for the people I loved. Much of that experience was beautiful, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. Some of my most treasured memories come from those years.

What concerns me is not the desire for marriage, motherhood, homemaking, or a family-centered life. Those choices can be deeply meaningful. What concerns me is how little discussion there is about the risks that accompany those choices when they are made without preparation, education, financial literacy, or a clear understanding of what is being exchanged.

If I am honest, my story did not begin when I got married. It began much earlier.

When I was in high school, I found myself in a relationship with an older man that existed largely in secrecy. Looking back, I can see how young and uncertain I was. I did not have a strong sense of who I was or what I was capable of becoming.

At the time, I did not think of myself as especially smart, ambitious, or destined for anything remarkable. More accurately, I had never been encouraged to see the full range of possibilities available to me. College, entrepreneurship, financial independence, leadership, business ownership, or building wealth were not simply goals that felt difficult to attain. They were not really part of my worldview at all. Those paths were not being discussed around me, modeled for me, or presented as realistic possibilities for my future.

The values I absorbed growing up placed tremendous importance on marriage, motherhood, faith, service, and family. Those are still values I respect today. The issue was never that those things were valued. The issue was that they often occupied so much space that other possibilities were barely visible.

As a result, I entered adulthood with a natural openness to a traditional life. Marriage did not feel like one option among many. It felt like the most likely path because I had never spent much time imagining alternatives. I was not consciously rejecting other futures. I simply had not been taught to see them.

Every meaningful decision involves trade-offs. The challenge is that some of those trade-offs remain invisible until circumstances force you to confront them.

When I was younger, I viewed my role as an investment in my family. I believed I was helping to build something that would last a lifetime. What I did not fully appreciate was that while I was investing heavily in my family, I was investing very little in my own financial independence.

As a pastor’s wife, I existed within a culture that emphasized service, sacrifice, and commitment to a shared purpose. Financial security was not something I was taught to prioritize for myself. Building personal wealth was rarely discussed. Maintaining independent access to money, credit, or capital did not feel urgent because I assumed the marriage, the family, and the future we were building together would remain intact.

Looking back, I can see that I was operating without a Plan B. At the time, that did not feel irresponsible. It felt faithful, committed, and aligned with what I understood a good wife and mother was supposed to do. What I did not understand was the difference between commitment and dependence.

The reality of my situation did not become fully visible until my life changed in ways I never expected. Suddenly, I was a mother of four children facing practical questions I had never seriously prepared to answer. I had very little access to capital, limited financial resources of my own, and few of the financial tools necessary to create stability on my own.

That experience forced me to confront a difficult truth: I had spent years helping to build a life, but I had not built enough financial security for myself outside of that life.

One of the things I have come to understand is that marriage has historically functioned as an economic arrangement as much as a romantic one. For much of human history, marriage was tied to survival, property, inheritance, alliances, labor, and financial security. Women were often moved from one household to another through dowries, arranged marriages, and family agreements because they had limited access to property, income, education, and the legal rights necessary to support themselves independently.

Modern women understandably reject the idea of being treated as property, yet I sometimes wonder whether we fail to recognize how easily economic dependence can still shape relationships. The modern trad wife movement may look softer, prettier, and more voluntary than the arrangements of the past, but some of the underlying questions remain the same. Who controls the money? Who has access to resources? Who has the ability to leave if circumstances become unhealthy or unsustainable? Who bears responsibility when financial decisions are made in both names?

What concerns me is not traditional marriage itself. Healthy traditional marriages absolutely exist. What concerns me is the assumption that dependence is somehow synonymous with devotion.

A woman who leaves the workforce for years is not simply choosing to stay home with her children. She may also be stepping away from professional development, retirement savings, earning potential, business opportunities, financial literacy, and the ability to generate income independently if she ever needs to do so. That does not make her choice wrong, but it does mean she deserves to understand the full picture before making it.

Too often, social media presents the rewards while ignoring the risks. The conversation tends to focus on homemaking, femininity, children, and provision while giving far less attention to credit, taxes, savings, investments, estate planning, life insurance, ownership, and debt. Those subjects may not be romantic, but they become very real when life does not unfold the way a woman expected.

One aspect of this conversation that rarely gets discussed honestly is the economic value of the work performed inside the home.

After my divorce, I occasionally heard comments and remarks from him suggesting that I had been fortunate because I had been able to stay home and not work. The implication that somehow I owed him now that I had my own money and was successful, and that I had somehow been given a gift, as though those years existed outside the realm of labor or contribution.

That perspective has always fascinated me because it depends entirely on pretending that everything happening inside a home somehow appears by magic.

For well over 20 years I did not build a career or resume. I rarely did things for myself besides working out or running as we just could not afford babysitters. I occasionally could get my hair done, but rarely had extra for mani pedi’s etc, until I was able to pay for them myself. One of the first pedicures I got when I started my first company is one I will never forget. I left the factory a little early that day and went with a friend to experience what she had on the regular. About half way through I see my ex husband walking in. I am like how did he know where I was? That is the first time I found out he was tracking me on his phone. I did not even know that was thing. He found out where I was and came there. I remember that look on his face as he questioned me like a shameful child of where I had been and what I was doing while panning the scene of foot and leg massages and saying things like, “wow it must be nice”. I knew he would not let it go and somehow this scene would not be the last regarding this service I had. A week later I was in an important meeting at my office/factory and my daughter calls and says, dad is late picking me up and I am supposed to go to the doctor, and he wont answer the phone. She had an the back of an earing stuck in her ear lobe that she needed removed and it was the only appointment that day I could get and he agreed to pick her up from school and take her. I excused myself from my meeting and called him. He proceeded to tell me he was running late and finishing a pedicure and was at the very same salon I had gotten my pedicure the week prior. He had never had, nor mentioned ever wanting one since I had known him, nor since I had gotten one. That is one of many similar stories of him having to do something or have something I did. It is why he was nick named Tit for Tat by another youth leader peer of his at a church when we lived in Maryland. It is a classic narcissistic trait as they cannot stand when you do something or have something and then they want it and have to have it as well.

Before I started the company I tended to all the things. The children were cared for. The meals were cooked. The groceries were purchased. The laundry was done. The house was cleaned. Appointments were scheduled. School activities were managed. Clothes were ironed. Church responsibilities were fulfilled. Sick children were cared for. Holidays were planned. Emotional needs were met. The endless stream of invisible tasks that keep a household functioning happened every single day, 24/7. Not just Monday -Friday 9-5.

None of those things happened because tiny domestic elves showed up in the middle of the night. They happened because someone was doing the work.

When people talk about a stay-at-home mother not working, I often wonder what exactly they think would happen if she suddenly disappeared for a month. Most families would very quickly discover the market value of everything she had been providing for free. My guess is they would also discover how many things they assumed happened automatically.

Childcare alone for four children would have represented a substantial expense. Add housekeeping, meal preparation, transportation, household management, shopping, scheduling, and countless other responsibilities, and the value quickly becomes significant. The irony is that many of the same people who dismiss domestic labor would never hesitate to pay someone else to perform those exact services.

What made this dynamic especially complicated was that the work was not only expected, it was often scrutinized.

There were questions about what I had accomplished that day, when dinner would be ready, how I was spending my time, and whether I was doing things correctly. Looking back, some of the moments feel almost absurd.

Early in our marriage, I can remember standing in the kitchen preparing dinner while my husband hovered over me, asking whether I was timing everything correctly, whether I had measured the ingredients properly, whether I was using the right amount of spices, and whether I was following the recipe accurately.

At the time, I treated those interactions as normal marital conversations. Looking back, I find them slightly hilarious.

Most people who know me know that food has always been one of my passions. I have spent years cooking from scratch, experimenting with recipes, obsessing over ingredients, and feeding anyone willing to sit at my table. Friends and family have complimented my cooking far more generously than I would ever compliment it myself.

Yet there I was being questioned about whether I remembered to measure the garlic.

The funny part is that it was not really about garlic. The garlic was innocent.

The issue was the gradual message that someone else was better equipped to make decisions than I was. When someone consistently questions your judgment in small matters, you can begin to question your judgment in larger matters as well.

Beyond the practical responsibilities, there was another cost that is harder to measure.

Much of my schedule was not really my own. Decisions about vacations, church commitments, social obligations, and family priorities were often made without much consideration of what I wanted independently. Over time, my world became increasingly centered around the marriage, the family, and the community surrounding them.

When I look back now, I realize how little of my life existed outside those structures.

Part of that was circumstance. I had married young and lost touch with many of the friends I had grown up with. There was shame attached to some of those relationships, and over the years the distance grew until reconnecting felt increasingly difficult. By the time I might have wanted those friendships back, many of them had simply faded away.

The more complicated part was that I never really developed a separate social life from my husband. If I formed a new friendship, it often felt as though it quickly became our friendship rather than mine. There seemed to be very little room for relationships that belonged solely to me.

Looking back, some of those dynamics feel genuinely strange.

There were times when friends I had introduced would later receive invitations from him to meet for coffee or spend time together even when I was not present. I remember one particular friend calling me when I came back from out of town and saying, “I just want you to know that he called and wanted to have coffee with me while you were gone, and I felt very uncomfortable.”

At the time, I struggled to explain why it felt uncomfortable for me. I simply knew that I rarely had relationships that existed independently from the marriage itself. Even writing that now feels strange. I had become so accustomed to these dynamics that I barely questioned them. Looking back, it sounds less like a friendship and more like a very confusing networking strategy.

What I lacked was not simply free time. I lacked a space where I existed as a separate person.

Healthy marriages naturally involve shared friendships, shared communities, and shared experiences. What they should also allow for is individuality. Each person should be free to maintain relationships, interests, and parts of their identity that belong to them alone.

Over time, I had become so focused on being a wife, mother, pastor’s wife, and supporter of everyone else’s priorities that I gradually lost touch with the parts of myself that existed outside those roles. The loss happened slowly enough that I barely noticed it while it was occurring.

It was only after the marriage ended that I began to understand how much of my identity had become intertwined with someone else’s expectations, schedule, priorities, and social world.

One area where my lack of preparation became painfully clear was financial literacy.

Throughout my marriage, I was not actively involved in our finances. I was not reviewing tax returns, tracking obligations, asking questions about what was owed, or making sure I understood how money was being managed. Like many women in traditional marriages, I trusted that those responsibilities were being handled appropriately by my husband.

To be fair, I did occasionally ask questions. Usually this happened after something minor, like the electricity getting shut off, a bill going unpaid for months, or one of those moments that might cause a reasonable person to wonder whether a conversation about finances would be helpful.

Whenever I raised concerns, I was generally reassured that I did not need to worry about it because he was a math major. That fact was presented with such confidence that it was apparently supposed to settle the matter entirely. A constant reminder he was the smartest guy in his class and tutored all of his wealthy dot.com rich friends.

He understood numbers. Case closed.

Looking back, I am not entirely sure how being able to solve calculus or trig problems qualified someone to manage another person’s financial future without their involvement, especially while various bills were periodically staging small rebellions against being paid, but at the time the logic seemed convincing enough.

What I failed to understand was that trust is not a substitute for knowledge. At the time, I knew considerably more about feeding a family than I did about reading a tax return. That turned out to be a very expensive educational gap.

I had a student loan payment of roughly fifty dollars a month. Years later, I learned that those payments had simply stopped being made. No conversation. No discussion. No heads-up. The loan eventually went into forbearance and accumulated roughly four thousand dollars in additional costs.

When I asked why this had happened, his response was simple: “It’s not my loan. It’s not my problem.”

Apparently that philosophy applied selectively because his student loans somehow remained everyone’s problem until they were paid off. I have since taken care of that debt and paid off my student loan myself, but it cost me an extra four thousand dollars.

Years after my divorce, I discovered just how vulnerable that lack of understanding had made me. There are very few experiences quite like discovering a debt you did not know existed several years after a divorce. It is a little like finding out you have inherited something from a distant relative, except instead of money it is a tax bill and nobody sends flowers.

I was hit with a tax bill of approximately $50,000 stemming from tax years during my marriage. Returns had been filed jointly in both of our names, and taxes had not been paid. Because I had never been involved in the preparation of those returns, I had little understanding of what had happened, what was owed, or even that a problem existed.

The shock was not simply the size of the debt. It was realizing that I was legally responsible for obligations I had never fully understood and decisions I had never actively participated in making. After the divorce, that debt became something I had to address while rebuilding my life and creating stability for my children and in order for my company to continue to run, as it was an llc where my personal taxes carried through, so I had to pay the entire tax bill including his portion.

That experience changed the way I think about partnership. Financial dependence is not only about income. It is also about information. If you do not understand how money is being managed, how taxes are being filed, what debts exist, what assets are owned, or what obligations are attached to your name, you are carrying legal and financial risk whether you realize it or not.

A healthy marriage does not require both spouses to manage every financial detail equally, but it does require both spouses to understand what is happening. Every woman should know where the money is, how taxes are filed, what debts exist, what assets are owned, what accounts are open, and what obligations are attached to her name. That is not distrust. That is stewardship, maturity, and self-protection.

My experience also taught me that losing financial independence affects more than money. It affects options. When a woman does not have access to resources, credit, income, or financial knowledge, every major decision becomes more difficult. Leaving a harmful situation becomes harder. Rebuilding after divorce becomes harder. Providing for children becomes harder. Even imagining a different future can feel overwhelming when you do not know where to begin.

For me, entrepreneurship eventually became the way out.

My first company was not just a business. It became my path toward financial literacy, confidence, and independence. Building it forced me to learn the things I had not understood during my marriage. I had to learn about taxes, credit, cash flow, contracts, risk, negotiation, and decision-making. I had to learn how to solve problems instead of assuming someone else would handle them.

That business gave me more than income. It gave me evidence that I was capable. It helped me rebuild my financial life, support my children, and repair things I had not even known were broken until they became my responsibility.

That is why I feel so strongly about this conversation.

Some of the most meaningful parts of my life came through raising children, building a home, and investing deeply in the people I loved. My concern is with the way young women are sometimes encouraged to make these choices without fully understanding the financial, legal, and personal consequences that can accompany them.

There is a difference between choosing a family-centered life and placing yourself in a position where your future depends entirely on circumstances outside your control.

I want young women to know that they can be devoted wives, loving mothers, and deeply feminine women without abandoning their own growth, education, earning power, or financial understanding. Those things are not threats to a healthy marriage. In many cases, they strengthen it.

If a woman wants to stay home with her children, she should understand the financial implications of that choice. If she wants a traditional marriage, she should still know how money is being managed. If she trusts her husband, she should still review tax returns before signing them. If she is building a family, she should also maintain some ability to stand on her own feet if life requires it.

A healthy partnership allows both people to contribute, both people to grow, and both people to remain capable adults within the marriage. It should not require a woman to become financially or intellectually passive in order to prove her loyalty.

Looking back, I do not regret the love I gave my family. I do not regret raising my children. I do not regret the years I spent investing in the people who mattered most to me. What I regret is not understanding sooner that devotion does not require financial ignorance, and sacrifice does not require self-erasure.

If I could offer one piece of advice to young women drawn to the trad wife lifestyle, it would be to build the life you want without the tradeoff of losing sight of yourself in the process. Learn how money works. Understand your taxes. Build credit in your own name. Know what you are signing. Continue developing your skills. Invest in your future with the same seriousness that you invest in everyone else’s.

And if someone tells you not to worry about the finances because they have it covered, worry a little anyway.

Love is one of the most beautiful parts of life, but it should never be the only foundation upon which a woman builds her future. The strongest partnerships are created when two capable people choose one another freely, while each retaining the knowledge, confidence, and ability to navigate life should circumstances ever require it.

My next blog gives more context to how I became a trad wife and the systems and beliefs that contributed to it from an early age. As always, thanks for following and listening. Feel free to share this with someone you might think it could help who might be contemplating this life choice or be in a similar situation.

If someone had used that word around me when I was fifteen, I probably would have thought they were talking about dogs.

Seriously.

I had absolutely no framework for understanding what grooming was, what narcissistic abuse was, or how the two can become intertwined.

What I’ve come to understand over the years is that one of the reasons grooming can be so difficult to recognize is because it often feels a lot like love bombing.

It feels like attention. It feels like being chosen. It feels like being included.

It feels like someone seeing something special in you.

And if you’re fifteen years old, that can be a pretty powerful thing.

I grew up a pastor’s kid in South Tampa. My parents were wonderful parents, and we always had what we needed, but if you’ve ever lived in South Tampa, you know there can be a pretty wide range between “having what you need” and “having what some of your friends have.”

There were camps I couldn’t always afford.

Trips I couldn’t always take.

And there were definitely restaurants I wasn’t regularly eating at.

I remember not being able to afford Young Life camp one year. Then somehow, almost at the last minute, he made sure I was on that bus. A scholarship appeared, and I found out I could go practically the night before.

Now, I want to be careful here because helping a kid get to camp isn’t automatically a bad thing. If that were the only thing that had happened, I probably wouldn’t even be writing about it.

But when I look back at the larger pattern, I don’t think it was just about making sure I got closer to God.

There was a lot of making sure I was there. A lot of making sure I was included.

A lot of making sure I was around.

And that’s where things start to look different through the lens of adulthood than they did through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl.

Looking back now, I realize how much time we spent in that car.

What started as a ride somewhere usually turned into something else.

Maybe we’d stop by Sam Ash music because he wanted to look at music equipment.

Maybe we’d stop by Sunshine Bagels, where I’d get a bagel and he’d get his bran muffin. Every time.

Maybe we’d end up at Caesar’s of New York on the way home because apparently he hadn’t been there in the last twelve hours.

The owners knew him well, and every single time we walked in there he would point out to me or someone in the there, that there was something on the menu named after him.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Sometimes it was frozen yogurt.

Sometimes it was a cheesecake brownie, from the mall.

Sometimes a cuban sandwich, with black beans and rice from Hugo’s.

The funny thing is I can remember the food better than I can remember some entire years of my life. But the first night he touched me, having only just met him a few times prior, I will never forget. It was not just another high school party night for me. It changed my life forever.

I think that’s because those things mattered to me.

Not because I was obsessed with bagels and brownies, although I wasn’t exactly turning them down either.

It mattered because I couldn’t afford to live that way.

For me, eating out was a treat.

For him, it seemed to be a lifestyle. Looking back, I realize how grateful I felt.

And also how awkward I felt. Both things are true.

I was grateful because I never would have been able to afford to eat out that often on my own.

But now I can also see that those meals, those rides, those errands, and those invitations weren’t isolated events. They were creating access, familiarity and opportunities.

And that is where grooming and love bombing can begin to overlap.

One thing I think people struggle to understand is that grooming doesn’t always feel scary when it’s happening.

Sometimes it feels flattering. Sometimes it feels exciting. And sometimes it feels like someone genuinely cares about you.

And that’s exactly why it can be so confusing.

The inappropriate behavior in my story didn’t start in the car. In fact, some of the earliest inappropriate experiences happened within just a few months of meeting him, long before I understood what was happening or had language for any of it.

But the car rides became one of the places where much of the inappropriate behavior continued throughout the years I was a minor in high school.

That’s why I can’t separate the rides from the story.

The rides themselves weren’t the issue.

What happened during them was.

One thing that has become increasingly frustrating over the years, especially since I started speaking publicly about my experience, is hearing the suggestion that I was somehow the one pursuing him.

I’ve heard different versions from him of that story for years now.

And honestly, the older I get, the less sense that explanation makes.

Of course I accepted invitations. I got in the car. I went to Sunshine Bagels, Caesar’s, Sam Ash, and all the other places we frequented.

But I wasn’t forcing him to pick me up and I did not strap my self to the front of his car. He contacted me and asked me to go and came and picked me up and dropped me off.

I wasn’t creating the opportunities. I wasn’t arranging the rides. I wasn’t inviting myself into his life. I wasn’t the adult.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Because if a fifteen-year-old girl is truly pursuing a twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven-year-old man, and there was plenty of time to communicate that to me along the way and to get other adults involved. This was a 3 year process, not a one or two time instance. The adult had options.

A lot of options.

He could tell her parents or tell church leaders. He could create distance.

He could stop offering rides.

He could stop arranging time alone together.

He could stop inviting her into increasingly personal parts of his life.

He could set boundaries.

None of those things happened. Instead, the invitations , the rides, the meals and the touching all continued.

There was bringing him homemade lunches to St. Mary’s, where he worked as middle school teacher.

There was cleaning his apartment.

There was picking up his younger brother from school.

Looking back now, I find myself wondering why any of that was considered normal.

And perhaps more importantly, why I thought it was normal.

The answer, I think, is that grooming rarely announces itself.

It doesn’t walk into the room wearing a name tag.

It often arrives disguised as generosity, attention, mentorship, kindness, opportunity, and special treatment.

And when narcissistic traits are involved, those same behaviors can later be rewritten, denied, minimized, or blamed on the very person who had the least power in the situation.

That may be one of the hardest parts to untangle.

Because years later, after all of it, I found myself carrying responsibility that never belonged to me in the first place.

Today, I see it differently.

I can appreciate that some things felt fun. I can acknowledge that I enjoyed the attention. I can admit that I felt grateful.

And I can also recognize that gratitude does not equal responsibility.

A teenager accepting invitations is not the same thing as an adult creating them.

And that’s a distinction that took me decades to fully understand.

As I continue writing about the high school years, I’ll be sharing more about what happened, how it affected me, and what I’ve learned about grooming, narcissism, manipulation, and healing along the way.

Because sometimes the most dangerous things don’t look dangerous at all when you’re living them.

Sometimes they just look like a bagel, a car ride, a camp scholarship, and someone making sure you’re always there, as an option.

If you have experienced anything at all related or similar weather it be with grooming, abuse, power dynamics or even narcissism or perhaps know some one who has, please feel free to share this with or to comment on my posts. I want this to feel like a place of support, if you need that from me too.

There are entire brands like Good culture, built around it—clean, high-protein, health-focused. People talk about it like it’s something to aspire to. I actually have always loved cottage cheese since I was a kid and to this day even without the trend.

If that had been the context of an influencer trend in 1999, maybe I would have heard the comment differently.

But it wasn’t. It was Cottage Cheese (But Not the Good Kind)

I was pregnant with my second child, my first daughter.

Like a lot of women, my body had changed. I had gained more weight than I had with my first pregnancy, and I was already aware of it.

What makes this even more important to say is that those who knew me then, and even now, know that I’ve always been someone who tries and takes care of myself. I’ve always been into health, wellness, and fitness—running marathons, organic local food, CrossFit, and hiking. Always staying active while trying new things, like surfing.

That is who I am at my core and mindset.

And still, what made it worse was that I had struggled with an eating disorder in high school. That wasn’t a secret. He knew that about me. To me this was just a season. A pregnancy that was a little harder physically than the first, with a lot of morning sickness and I gained significantly more weight than my first pregnancy, 6 years prior. His comments stuck with me in bedded in the back of my mind, as a constant reminder I was not enough, if I did not keep, what my girl Allanis Morrisette lyrics expressed in one of her songs a “firm body”. It propelled me even further into a state of feeling inadequate and into years of more disordered eating and extreme exercise, more for the sake of needing to please him, than myself or at least to stop the shameful comments. Morrisette’s lyrics from her 2002 song Hands Clean I feel I lived as well, almost to a T. I will be breaking down that songs lyrics, in a future post as it had such a profound part of my healing and we have a really cool personal connection that still blows my mind to this day.

One morning, I was changing, and he could see me from down the hallway and he said loud enough to where I could hear it, “Mmmm…I’m hungry for some cottage cheese.”

I was like.. did he just say that? But then I was like, of course he did, and I knew exactly what he meant, and it wasn’t a compliment.

At the time, it was framed as a joke—something I was supposed to laugh off, something I wasn’t supposed to take personally.

But I did.

It was devastating, not just because of the comment itself, but because of what it reinforced of prior years of so much struggle with extreme food control and exercise. And to top it off I was growing one of his children inside of me and there was really nothing at that point I could do about it, but plan my weight loss strategy to commence the day I came home from the hospital after giving birth.

There was another moment during that same season that stayed with me.

During that same second pregnancy, I had been asked by him—well really expected—to sing on the worship team at church he lead. I really didn’t want to. I never really liked being up in front of people, and I didn’t feel comfortable in that space. I had sung in church choirs and solos at church and one time in middle school to my friends at an end of the year talent show. But what most people did not and do not know about me, is I genuinely don’t like singing in front of others, accept to my children or by myself. I was asked to sing at various weddings and functions and did on occasion, but again, it was so out of my comfort zone, as why I closed my eyes the entire time.

But it was framed as something bigger than that. I was told I was “hiding a gift,” that God had given me something I was supposed to share, and that I wasn’t stepping into what I was meant to do.

So because I felt guilty and judged by him, and desperately wanted his approval, I did it. I always caved under his manipulation.

And one morning before church, standing in front of a small group of people, he looked at me, six months pregnant and said I looked like Mama Cass, and laughed. If you know, you know. Not her voice. Not her stage presence. Not her confidence.

He meant my body.

I was six months pregnant, standing on stage, singing, growing a human — and what he saw was weight.

Mama Cass, for the record, was a beautiful, powerful woman who didn’t fit the narrow mold the world demanded. But that’s not how he meant it.

He meant it as a critique. As a comparison. As a quiet way of telling me I had taken up too much space.

I am not sure if others laughed. I just remember everything going silent, almost a ringing in my ears and being so shell shocked and hurt with literally a somatic pain I felt in my heart, wanting to just shrink and disappear.

And again, it was positioned as always “just a joke” and “lighten up”.

But I knew what he meant, and I remember standing there already uncomfortable in my body, already in a position I didn’t want to be in, now about to sing in front of a 100 people feeling completely exposed.

That’s the thing about this kind of abuse—what both my sister and I experienced didn’t always look like abuse. We were not covered in bruises.

Most of the time, it looked like humor. Comments. Little digs that were easy to dismiss in the moment.

But over time, those moments add up, and they shape how you see yourself.

For both my sister and me, we experienced narcissistic abuse, but in very different ways—different dynamics and different levels of intensity. Our grooming predator pastor husbands were both narcissists. Two different types, with different forms of abuse. But what was consistent, though, was that most of it was verbal yet for me, subtle enough to dismiss or deny.

Another example that stayed with me that happened very early in our marriage. I was told by him, again laughing at me of course, that I danced like Elaine from Seinfeld. What that connotation meant of that particular character, was quite obvious to me and everyone at the time. Now I look at that, as a total compliment because I follow her podcast Wiser Than Me and think being compared to anything close to a character of Julia Louise Dreyfus is such an incredible compliment as she is a wonderful woman and human being, who has so much talent and obvious confidence to be able to portray a character that was meant to not dance very well, at least for that show. It was said casually, like humor, but I didn’t dance again for years after that. I think part of it had to do with the fact of also being so young and when you hear things like this when you already have so many insecurities during that time of life, it definitely was deeply impactful. I know that may sound silly, but after day in and day out of comments, digs, being made fun of sometimes, these things landed very hard on me.

And when I finally did dance—at a party much later, almost 20 years —there was yet again another comment from him. Another reminder. Another moment framed as a joke about my dancing.

And then there are the stories that get told.

The ones you don’t even know are going to be shared until they are.

Years later, after our youngest son was born, I got really sick at Gasparilla—for those of you who don’t know, it is an all day and night, Mardi Gras type parade with beads and pirates hosted every winter in Tampa, Fl. I ended up getting severe food poisoning. It was miserable and so embarrassing, something I just wanted to get through and move past. I honestly can’t go into the details because it was so traumatizing.

I didn’t think it would become a story.

But it did.

He shared it later in a small group setting in our church, telling it in a way that made it funny, at my expense. I remember sitting there completely mortified, not even knowing it was coming.

And it didn’t stop there. That story has been told over and over again, even years later, even of recent as a few month ago to people in my children’s lives —still treated like a joke. This wasn’t just the run-of-the-mill gaslighting tactic. This was actual public humiliation, which is another form of narcissistic abuse. If it is not smear campaigns its stories of humiliation.

That’s how it works. It’s not one moment, it’s a pattern—comments that chip away at your confidence, stories that make you smaller, and moments that get retold without your consent.

And when you’re hurt, it’s dismissed. “I was just kidding.” “Why are you so sensitive?”

That’s where it turns, because every time you feel hurt, it gets flipped back on you. There is never an apology. You become the problem, too sensitive, too emotional, too reactive—and eventually you start to believe it.

That’s what narcissistic abuse does. It distorts your sense of reality and teaches you to question your own reactions instead of the behavior that caused them.

From the outside, people ask why someone would stay in it so long , but from the inside it doesn’t feel like staying. It feels like, at first, normal living and tolerance—commitment, responsibility, family, and doing what you believe is right, and also what was taught that God would want. It’s a type of religious shame and pressure of years of growing up with different messages in the church.

And leaving isn’t just emotional. It’s logistical and financial.

I remember calling my mom many times during those years, crying and so depressed, desperately trying to make sense of what I was feeling. She would listen, and at one point she asked me a question that stayed with me: “What is your Plan B?”

At the time, I didn’t have one.

My sister and I both didn’t have a Plan B. There was no safety net. We were ministers’ wives with four and five children, and leaving meant asking a very real question: how do you support yourself and your children with nothing to fall back on, no way or financial means to leave.

My sister’s situation was different from mine, and in many ways it was harder. Her relationship was more overtly controlling and more deeply entangled. I’ll just stop there. I am sensitive of sharing too many details about her experience and the differences, as it is not my story to tell. She had five children, and even now she’s still living the impact of those years—still rebuilding and working to create something that is fully her own. I’m so proud of her strength and resilience and so glad she is finally free, as well.

For me, finding a way out meant slowly building something alongside that life—starting a company, creating something that could eventually support me and my children. It took time, risk, and uncertainty. Thank God it was successful in getting me out. It was what I referred to as my Plan P and later a phrase I used to name the journey of my first business, which I will talk about at a later time in this blog and definitely in my book. It was my lifeline that some women truly never have.

For a long time, I didn’t call any of this abuse, because I didn’t have that knowledge or language. I thought it was just part of marriage, part of communication, and part of learning how to be in a relationship as a “godly obedient wife.” Our stories of grooming and abuse from young teenager girls is different than most, as we both ended up marring them and staying married for over 30 years.

It took distance to see it clearly and to understand that what was being framed as humor was actually something else—something that made me smaller, something that stayed with me long after the moment had passed, and something that was always easy to deny.

That’s what makes it so powerful and so hard to break free from.

I still do struggle sometimes to dance publicly in front of others, but these days I’m embracing my own freedom and expression and remind myself to drown out the old voices in my head of his criticism.

Today, I’m choosing something different.

I’m choosing to dance.

And to keep dancing.

I feel free. I feel confident. I love the way I feel, and I don’t really care what he, or anyone else, thinks anymore.

And if you’re in that place, or finding your way there, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating that freedom.

The next several blogs I will be posting will be more of what took place when I was in high school, of what I call the grooming years. Some people do not understand the concept of grooming and I want to help them understand what I experienced and have come to know about it and work to heal from.

Thanks for listening and your continued support. It truly means everything to me.

I didn’t question it when I was 15.

I didn’t think I was supposed to.

The world I was in told me who to trust. It told me what was normal. And I followed that, the way you do when you’re young and everything around you reinforces the same message.

My sister and I grew up in that kind of environment.

Church wasn’t just something we attended. It was the center of everything. Our relationships, our friendships, our understanding of right and wrong all came from that world.

And within it, there were dynamics that felt ordinary at the time.

Older men in positions of leadership. Youth pastors. Bible teachers. Mentors.

They were trusted. Respected. Given access.

And as young girls, we were taught, directly and indirectly, to trust them too.

After thinking about my experience and the environment my sister and I grew up in, I’ve been thinking about something that took me a long time to understand. What I experienced wasn’t just personal. It wasn’t isolated, and it wasn’t random.

For a long time, I thought of it as my story, something specific to my life, my circumstances, and the people I was around. But the more distance I’ve had, the more I’ve started to see patterns that exist far beyond me.

There is a body of research around grooming, power dynamics, and abuse in religious environments that I didn’t know about at the time. Not because it didn’t exist, but because it wasn’t something that was talked about in the spaces I was in.

What makes these environments different is the role of authority. Leaders aren’t just seen as people. They are seen as mentors, spiritual guides, and moral authority. That makes questioning them feel wrong and, in some cases, even dangerous.

Grooming in these environments rarely looks obvious at the beginning. It doesn’t start with something clearly inappropriate. It starts with attention, connection, and someone older making you feel seen and understood. When you are young, especially in an environment where you are taught to trust leadership, that attention doesn’t feel like a red flag. It feels meaningful, and it feels like something you don’t want to lose.

One of the most difficult parts to understand later is how the story gets shaped, not just internally but externally through the language that gets used. I have heard versions of the same explanation more than once. “I just thought you were so much more mature.” It sounds harmless and even flattering, but underneath it something else is happening. The responsibility is being shifted from the adult to the child and from the person in power to the person without it.

Research on grooming describes this dynamic clearly. The person initiating the relationship reframes it as mutual, justified, or acceptable, even when there is a clear imbalance of age, power, and authority. That reframing doesn’t just happen in the moment. It continues over time and becomes part of the story you are told about your own life. When everyone around you accepts that version, it becomes even harder to question it.

There is another layer that took me even longer to understand, and that is how people around it respond. Years later, after therapy and distance, I reached out to people who had been in positions of leadership at the time. These were people who were supposed to create safety, set boundaries, and step in when something was not right.

What I expected, at least on some level, was acknowledgment. What I got instead were responses that placed the responsibility back on me, including statements like “I didn’t tell you to date him.” It was subtle, but it was clear.

What made that even harder to process was what I came to understand later. There had been concerns about him before I was even in high school. There had been warnings. People in leadership were aware, at least to some degree, of patterns that should have been taken seriously. And still, when I came back years later trying to understand what had happened, the response was not reflection or accountability. It was deflection.

Not everyone responded the same way. There were attempts at apology, but even those moments felt complicated because they existed alongside a system that, at the time it mattered most, did not step in.

He even would apologize to me early on in our marriage, but asked me to remain silent, even to my therapists, as it could affect our lively hood with his position in the church and our children’s as well. It is what I carried in silence not understanding the depression that I was seeking help for, that was a direct result of the confusion, secrecy, shame and narcissistic abuse. Of course those apologies were followed by classic gaslighting. Saying “You would be dead on the side of a rode or in a ditch somewhere if it were not for me” or “You don’t know how good you have it and what a good guy I am” , eluding to how aweful other guys were compared to him. Years later when we were getting a divorce I brought these things up to him and the response was the same “That was so long ago.. why can’t you let it go” or “I said that once or twice a long time ago”. Not only was I carrying years of paralyzing shame and depression, but I endured 30 years of gaslighting of my own reality, on top of that.

That is the part that is hardest to sit with. Not just what happened, but what did not happen. When leadership knows, or senses, or even partially sees something and does not act in a way that protects the person with less power, that is not just an individual failure. It is a systemic one.

There is also something else that shows up again and again in these environments, and that is silence. Not always intentional, but present. People notice something feels off, but they do not have the language for it. They do not want to assume the worst, and they do not want to challenge someone in a position of authority.

When something does come to light, the response is often shaped by the culture itself. Repentance, forgiveness, and grace are emphasized. These are important concepts, but in these situations they can be misapplied. They can be used in ways that prioritize moving on over fully acknowledging what happened. They can soften accountability and protect the person who caused harm rather than the person who experienced it.

This has been documented in multiple studies and investigations into abuse within religious institutions, including patterns of minimization, delayed response, and internal handling of situations that allow harmful dynamics to continue longer than they should.

For a long time, I did not have language for any of this. I did not have context for it, and I did not have enough distance to see it clearly. That understanding has come slowly, through time and perspective, and through being willing to look back at things I once accepted and see them differently.

This is not about one person or one situation. It is about a system, a culture, and an environment where trust, authority, and silence can intersect in ways that make certain dynamics not just possible, but sustainable.

Looking back now, what stands out isn’t just what happened.

It’s what didn’t happen.

No one questioned things out loud. No one named what felt off. No one interrupted the dynamics that, in hindsight, were clearly blurred.

Things existed in a kind of quiet gray space.

Subtle enough to ignore. Visible enough that people noticed, but not enough that anyone spoke.

My sister and I have talked about this more in recent years.

Different people. Different situations. But the same underlying feeling.

Something about it didn’t feel right. And yet it continued.

At the time, we didn’t have language for it.

We didn’t think of it as something that needed to be questioned.

It was just part of the environment we were in.

A culture where lines blurred without being named. Where authority and familiarity coexisted in ways that felt safe, until much later, when they didn’t.

It’s easy, looking back, to ask why no one said something.

But that question assumes clarity that didn’t exist at the time.

Because when something is normalized, when it’s woven into the fabric of a community, it doesn’t stand out the way it should.

It blends in.

For a long time, I thought what I experienced was just my story.

Something personal. Something isolated.

But the more I’ve stepped back, the more I’ve realized it wasn’t just me.

And in the past weeks, that has become even more clear.

I have been overwhelmed by the number of people who have reached out to me privately.

People who were there.

People who witnessed parts of what was happening.

People who, even at the time, felt that something wasn’t right.

Some have shared their own experiences with him—experiences that made them uncomfortable, that crossed lines, that didn’t sit right even if they didn’t have the language for it then.

Others have told me that leadership knew. That concerns had been raised. That this wasn’t something that existed in isolation.

Some have said that even years before I was part of that environment, there were girls who felt uncomfortable around him.

And then there are others—people who have reached out not about him specifically, but about their own stories.

Stories of abuse within the church.
Within families.
Within systems that were supposed to be safe.

Stories they’ve carried quietly.

Stories they are only now beginning to name.

That has been one of the most eye-opening parts of sharing this.

Not just the confirmation of what I experienced.

But the realization of how many people have lived inside similar dynamics—without language, without acknowledgment, without support.

It has made something very clear to me.

Telling this story is not just about me.

It’s about naming something that has been left unnamed for far too many and for far too long.

It’s about creating space for others to see their own experiences more clearly and have the agency and permission to speak it for themselves.

And it’s about understanding that what felt personal and isolated at the time was part of something much bigger.

A systemic problem in church culture and beyond, where it is time to be exposed, called out and owned with accountability.

Thank you to those who have reached out. I hope, in some way, a piece of that silence has lifted for you too.

I had been writing privately, taking my time, working through it in a way that felt thoughtful and intentional. This was something I had carried for decades, and when I chose to tell it, I wanted to do it carefully, in my own time, and in my own words.

But that changed.

A blogger began writing about my story. I did not share her work, and it was taken down almost immediately after she was threatened with legal action for defamation by my ex husband.

What I did share was that it was being stopped.
That it was being silenced.

And in that moment, it became very clear to me that the same pattern I had lived inside of for years was still happening.

An attempt to control the narrative.
To shut it down before it could be seen.
To keep it from being told.

So I spoke.

Not because I was fully ready in the way I had originally imagined, but because I was no longer willing to be silent.

What has unfolded since has been difficult, but not unfamiliar.

I made a very intentional decision about when to tell this story, and that decision was largely shaped by my children. I waited until they were adults, because this did not begin with them. It began long before they were born, and I never wanted them to carry something that was not theirs.

For years, I stayed quiet in part to protect them.

But what I am seeing now is that they are being pulled into it anyway.

They are being asked to engage with it, to respond to it, and to defend a version of events that they did not live and could not possibly understand from firsthand experience.

They are being placed in the middle.

That is something I will not accept.

And I want to be very clear about why.

This is not just about what is happening now.

This is part of a much longer pattern.

What I am witnessing is consistent with what I have come to understand as narcissistic abuse dynamics over time, including triangulation, manipulation, and control of the narrative within a family system.

For years, there were patterns of undermining, backbiting, and creating division, where one parent is subtly positioned as the problem while the other is elevated. A dynamic where I was often cast as the “heavy,” while he presented himself as the more fun, aligned, or understanding parent.

This is something many now recognize within conversations around parental alienation—not as a legal term, but as a behavioral pattern rooted in manipulation and control.

It creates confusion.
It distorts reality.
And over time, it can influence how children understand both parents, often without them realizing it.

What makes this even more complex is how these dynamics can lead to a kind of alignment or enmeshment, where children feel loyalty toward one parent’s version of reality and may defend it, even when they do not have the full context of what actually occurred.

For many years, well beyond our divorce, he played himself as the victim and made them feel sorry for him. Emotional manipulation and grooming is what my therapist of almost 18 years, who knew him, called it, and him “Magic Man,” meaning the fun, friend dad and thus I became the "heavy”. The one who tried to manage all the life lessons and discipline, their health and physical fitness /activity, their home responsibilities aka chores, as well as their academic/ grades health. These were certainly not always the fun things, but more, the harder and most important ones as a parent.

He was also coined by others as “tit for tat,” as he has been known to be vindictive in the past, when being called out or exposed, wanting revenge and to control the narrative. Several years ago, when my former company, was trying to scale and we were about 3 million in annual revenue I was fighting a few legal disputes over trademark violations, that had been initiated by other brands, that we ended up winning. One brand fighting us, told a large trade show in Austin, were going to attend that I initiated the law suit with them and as a result we were contacted and told we were kicked out of attending and having our booth. It took me about 5 seconds to send proof that we were defending ourselves and that they had initiated the trademark lawsuit. They immediately apologized to us and our brand and booth for the show was reinstated free of charge. I never thought about it again, until one day about a year later, I not only got hit with a $100K lawsuit, but an email from Go daddy that we were in violation of what I found out could be called cyber squatting. Buying a domain name that was close to a competitors and redirecting it to another URL. I had no idea who had done it or what they were talking about, until I told my ex husband and he had an odd look on his face and immediately admitted he had done it and tried to defend himself saying there was nothing wrong with it and even his friends that were in business agreed with him. Well he was wrong and it cost me over $30K in legal fees to defend. This is one of many instances where he has done retaliation type, tit for tat tactics or even further continued to stalk me. He has tried to follow every account I have had from personal to business on social media since our divorce almost 10 years ago. Just recently in January of 2026 he attempted to follow my instagram again. I would not be surprised if he is subscribed to this very substack and is reading it honestly. This toxic behavior was very similar to his family of origins, he grew up in and what I experienced while married to him. There was constant manipulation by his mother to feel sorry for her and paint their father as the bad guy.

The siblings walked on eggshells around it and were in constant arguments, debates, and volatile fights with each other, with so much triangulation and enmeshment that he carried on these same patterns in our family.

His mother often told me that she was so sorry that he was so messy, and that if it were not for that one flaw, he would have been “perfect”. This type of parenting, putting children on pedestals, is exactly one of the ways narcissism is formed and fostered.

I am not saying his father did not have his flaws, as I know he did, as we all do, but this type of pitting the children against the other parent is what I have experienced for over 30 years, both while married and divorced.

Dr. Ramani, a narcissism expert you may have heard of, often speaks about this as a form of psychological influence or “brainwashing,” where the narrative becomes so consistent and reinforced that it is difficult to question.

That is what I am navigating now.

Not just the past.

But the continuation of these patterns in the present.

My children were not there when this began.

They were not part of what happened to me at fifteen.

And they should not be asked to defend, interpret, or carry something that belongs to a completely different chapter of my life.

For years, I protected them by staying silent, by carrying the weight of this privately, and by maintaining a version of reality where I tried to allow their lives to feel stable.

There were a few moments of such severe gaslighting that I did voice or hint at the abuse once they were teenagers and when I myself started realizing what had happened to me. I am not saying that was right, and there are plenty of times I messed up as a parent.

Staying silent, for the most part, was the only thing I felt I could do.

That came at a cost.

The statute of limitations was passing me by in my silence, but eventually lifted, and I tried to go back and revisit it. The statute of limitations in Florida has been lifted for all victims under the age of 16, which was true for me, except for any case prior to 2010.

The blogger who wrote my story put me in contact with an attorney in Florida, Boz Tchividjian, who is well known for fighting against churches and religious organizations for victims of this type of abuse—Billy Graham’s grandson, of all people.

After trying to look at my options regarding Young Life’s responsibility several years prior, he wrote me this letter a few weeks ago, which not only validated my experience but really explains it so well:

Dear Amy -

Thank you for reaching out and for the courage it took to share your story. We want you to hear clearly that what happened to you was abuse. You were a child when an adult in a position of spiritual trust deliberately groomed and exploited you. The shame of that secret was never yours to carry. The decades of silence, the PTSD, and the trauma of hiding what he did all reflect the gravity of what was done to you, not any failing on your part. We are deeply sorry for what you have suffered and for the profound betrayal by Young Life in allowing a man who had already been warned about “inappropriate” behavior with a minor to continue in a role with unrestricted access to young people.

It is with genuine regret that we must inform you that our firm cannot take your case. After reviewing what you have shared, we do not see a viable path to a civil claim against Young Life, primarily because any such claim would face a significant statute-of-limitations barrier under Florida law, the same obstacle other attorneys have identified for you. I wish we could offer a different answer.

I do encourage you to continue seeking other opinions as laws governing civil claims for childhood sexual abuse are continuing to evolve. Your voice matters, and your pursuit of justice is not in vain.

I wish you the best. You certainly deserve it.

Peace

boz

The more important point in breaking this long silence is not about receiving any legal compensation or wishing him to be punished—not to say I am not worthy of it. That time has passed.

But staying silent for other victims is not something I will continue to do at the expense of the truth. I will continue to seek change for new laws and even look back laws for other victims and abuse survivors.

This is not about harming anyone.

It is not about revenge or retribution.

It is about telling the truth of my lived experience after years of grooming, abuse, secrecy, silence, shame and carrying something that was never mine to hold alone.

There is a difference between telling the truth and attacking someone.

But telling the truth does not mean continuing to protect a narrative that depends on silence, distortion, or misplaced responsibility.

I cannot control how others respond.

I cannot control how the story is reframed. I cannot control any negative outcomes he received because of his actions.

But I can control this.

I can be clear.

I can be honest.

And I can refuse to participate in patterns that place my children in the middle or ask them to carry something that does not belong to them.

Breaking silence does not just reveal the past.

It reveals what is still happening in the present.

And sometimes, that is the part that is hardest to face.

Thank you for being here while I tell this story.

He was a Young Life leader—someone people trusted without question. He was admired by parents, respected within the church and Young Life and positioned as someone who guided teenagers through faith, identity, and belonging.

And I was a teenager in that world.

Being a pastors daughter myself, church wasn’t just something we attended. It shaped everything-how we understood relationships, what we believed about love, and who we were taught to trust. The people in leadership weren’t just adults. They were mentors. Authorities. People we were expected to listen to and follow.

So when he paid attention to me, it didn’t feel like something to question.

It felt like being seen.

There’s something that needs to be said clearly.

I was fifteen.

He was nearly a decade older than me, 25, in a position of trust and authority.

And no matter how it is framed now—no matter what is said about who pursued what or how it looked at the time—a fifteen-year-old does not have the capacity to understand or consent to that kind of dynamic.

Teenagers respond to attention. They are meant to. They are still forming their sense of self, still learning what love, trust, and connection look like.

There is nothing unusual about a young girl responding to attention from someone she has been taught to trust.

What matters is the responsibility of the adult in that situation.

That responsibility was not upheld.

And shifting that responsibility onto a fifteen-year-old, then or now, is something I will not accept.

Looking back now, I can also see that there was a clear moment when a boundary was crossed.

A moment I remember as clearly now, as when it happened.

He initiated physical contact that was not appropriate, and he placed me in a situation that should never have existed between an adult in a position of authority and a teenager. The details of this moment will be in my book. If it has not been clear until now, Bride and Groomed, the name of this blog, is also the title of the book I am writing.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to understand what was happening.

But I remember the confusion.

I remember the shift.

And from there, things continued.

Gradually. Quietly. In ways that became harder to question and harder to fully understand while I was inside of it.

What followed was not the love story it appeared to be.

Behind the image of a trusted youth leader was a relationship that began while I was still a teenager, one that continued under the protection of silence, reputation, and misplaced trust.

For a long time, I believed what I had been taught to believe.

That this was love. This was ok, because it was some how “Christian”.
That this was chosen.
That this was something I had stepped into willingly.

It would take years, decades even, to understand what I was actually inside of.

Because when something begins in an environment built on trust and disguised as Christian, and even Godly, it doesn’t immediately register as something harmful. It becomes part of the fabric of your life. It blends in with everything else you’ve been taught is good, right, and normal.

And when no one around you questions it out loud, you don’t either.

That’s the part that’s hardest to explain now.

Not just what happened, but how it was able to exist in the first place.

How something that, in hindsight, feels so clear could move forward without interruption.

How a system built on trust and authority could create space for something like that to continue unchecked.

The story didn’t end there.

It moved into adulthood.

Into marriage.

Into motherhood.

Into a life that, from the outside, looked stable. Intentional. Even admirable.

And yet, underneath it, there were patterns I still couldn’t fully see till almost 30 years later: Grooming, Sexual abuse, emotional abuse, depression, manipulation, gaslighting, control, humiliation, shame, lies and secrecy.. all what I learned to be a result of Narcissistic abuse, that led to severe PTSD. Authenticity had no chance to be expressed.

Patterns of power.
Control.
And a version of reality that had been shaped long before I understood how to question it.

For a long time, I thought this was just my story.

Something personal. Something isolated.

But the more I’ve stepped back, the more I’ve begun to understand that it wasn’t.

That what I experienced didn’t happen in a vacuum.

It happened within a system. Within a culture. Within an environment where certain things were normalized, certain people were protected, and certain questions were never asked. This unfortunately also happened to my older sister when she was in high school, with her bible teacher. Another subject and story I will write about at another time, as I want to give it the full attention it, and she, deserves. I am quite sure many other young women have stories similar in nature, still hiding inside the church culture, like me, silenced, even threatened, being too ashamed and wrapped in fear to speak out.

I also want to say something to those of you who are here reading this.

Many of you know me personally. Many of you were part of my life during these years, or have reached out prior or since I began speaking.

I see you.

And I appreciate you being here and choosing to listen.

Sharing this is not easy. But it feels necessary.

For a long time, this was something I carried quietly. Something shaped by secrecy, silence, and the belief that speaking about it would cause harm, to families, to my family, reputations, to lives that had been built around that silence.

But when efforts are made to continue that silence, especially as I begin to tell my story in my own words, it becomes clear that staying quiet is no longer the right choice.

This is not about harming anyone. This is not about not forgiving, nor is it about revenge or retribution.

It’s about no longer carrying something that was never mine to hold alone.

And it’s about telling the truth, clearly and honestly, after years of not having the space or agency to do so.

I’m writing this now as a mother, daughter, sister, as a business owner, and as someone who is finally able to look back with clarity I didn’t have then.

This is not just about what happened when I was fifteen.

It’s about what happens when something begins in silence—and is never named for what it is.

And what it takes, years later, to finally name it.

“What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander” -Elie Wiesel

I had the privilege to have Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Holocaust and 1986 Pulitzer Peace prize winner, as a Professor of mine for a January term in college and he forever changed my life with his words and wisdom, so you may see many quotes from him, along the way.

I will not be silent, and I hope this helps someone else find the courage to see and speak their truth.

Thank you for being here while I tell this story.

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There are stories you don’t tell right away.

Not because they don’t matter, but because you don’t fully understand them yet.
You don’t have the language.
You don’t have the distance.
And sometimes, you don’t yet have the safety.

This is one of those stories.

For a long time, I thought what I experienced was personal.
Something specific to my life, my relationships, and the environments I was in.

But over time—and with distance—I’ve started to see something else.

Patterns.
Systems.
Dynamics that go far beyond one person or one situation.

I’m currently writing a book about this.

About growing up in environments where authority, trust, and blurred boundaries coexisted in ways that felt normal at the time.
About relationships that didn’t become harmful all at once, but slowly—over time, in ways that are difficult to see from the inside.
About what it takes to recognize those patterns, find language for them, and begin to rebuild.

And as I’ve been writing, I realized I don’t want this to live quietly in a manuscript.

I want to share it as it unfolds.

That’s why Bride & Groomed exists.

What This Space Is

This isn’t just a newsletter.

It’s a place to talk about the parts of relationships we’re not usually taught how to see.

We’re taught how to plan weddings.
We’re not taught how to recognize power dynamics.
We’re taught how to commit.
We’re not taught how to question what we’re committing to.
We’re taught what love should look like.
But not how to recognize when something underneath it isn’t right.

Bride & Groomed is where I’m unpacking that.

Through personal experience, reflection, and research, I’m exploring:

• Grooming and power dynamics in trusted environments

• How certain relationship patterns become normalized

• Why these dynamics are so difficult to recognize from the inside

• What it actually takes to leave, rebuild, and understand what happened

If you’ve ever looked back on something in your life and seen it differently with time, this space is for you.

What You Can Expect

I want to be clear about what I’m building here:

• Weekly posts

• A series of connected stories and reflections that build over time

• Writing pulled directly from the themes of my book

You can expect:

• Personal stories and lived experiences

• Deeper exploration of relationship dynamics and power

• Research and context around grooming and systemic patterns

• Ongoing reflections as I continue to understand this myself

Free subscribers will get:

• All core posts in this series

Paid subscribers (coming soon) will get:

• Early access to book excerpts and drafts

• Deeper, more personal writing

• Additional reflections and behind-the-scenes of this process

This is not a finished narrative.

It’s something I’m still understanding—and choosing to share in real time.

Why This Matters

For a long time, I didn’t have language for what I experienced.

And without language, it’s very hard to question anything.

But once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it.

That’s what this space is about.

Not just telling a story—but understanding it.

And maybe helping someone else recognize something they didn’t have words for either.

Start Here

The first pieces I’m sharing begin at the beginning:

• It Wasn’t Just Me

• We Didn’t See It From the Inside

• This Didn’t Just Happen to Me

If you’re here, you’re at the start of this with me.

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