Hi , I am a Rebekah survivor. Before going to Rebekah I had been abused badly, and sexually abused and tossed like a volleyball back and forth between family homes in my family system.
At the age of 14, (1977), after being tossed and ripped to pieces by my family war in my family. I tried to kill myself with slashing my wrists, my plea and silent scream for help. I did that in the high school bathroom. So, I know even tho I walked around living in a major world of depression , I did it in the school bath , I feel cause I was crying out for help and that seemed the most likely place to get help it seemed.
They put me in the regular medical hospital, and tried to evaluate me. Nobody knew that I had been sexually abused by an adult family male member and noone knew the torment I was hiding deep inside, trying to find my way thru it all. I got totally lost. (in the 70?s nobody talked about such things),..While in the hospital I did certain things to gain adult attention which I needed desparately. But to the doctors, I suppose it was odd behaviour, but if I were that doctor, now that I am adult, I would say, ?There is something not right, and its as if she is screaming for help?
Well, after 3 and a half weeks in that hospital, my parents had talked Roloff into taking me in and on. My parents did not have a lot of money, but Roloff took me in.
I recall sitting across from Lester Roloff in his dark office in the front of the church. I truly WANTED to go there, cause it seemed the only way out for me to be safe and not get tossed back and forth between homes. So I acted ?tough? and hard. I wanted him to see me in a way , so then he wouldn?t turn me out and away.
But, once I had gotten in, and as the year progressed, ?actually I had gone into my death camp, not a place to help me heal. It was not the safe haven I had hoped for. Not at all. My mother now tells me that she wishes with her whole heart that she had LISTENED to her gut reaction when she met the Camerons. But she instead ignored her gut reaction to them and just took their words on blind trust. She tells me to this day that she had been having gut instincts telling her something was not ?right? when she met Faye Cameron. But she ignored it and trusted them.
You see, Roloff and his mindset saw me as a girl who was rebellious and NEEDED to be TIED and needed to be mind controlled, and needed to be beat till my bottom was bleeding and blistered. But you see, he saw me all wrong, I was not a wicked jezebel, nor was I living on the streets, I was lost, you see?I had no clue how to be okay, I was hurting deep inside, and I acted out my pain in my immaturity. But they saw that as me being in need of reform and forced submission to God and them. They failed to see that I was sick and ill, with broken heart and ripped soul, and in need of a caring environment, not a ?juvenile facility?.
During my year there, many things transpired. I do not have clear memory of it all, especially the first six months, tho I am sure I was there, there is a lot of areas of time that are unaccounted for.
After getting out , I just cried in the back seat of the car all the long drive from Corpus back to our hometown. Just wept I did, to be going home, that they had really come to get me, and had really come and I was really really going home.
You see, a child cannot be something she is not taught. I was raised in a lot of chaos and improper boundaries, and I was not given proper boundaries, many of the adults in my child home were busy in a war of their own with each other and being the youngest I was like a volleyball. My dad was highly unstable, and very very violent. And my mom was depressed and very much pushed under the wieght of a large family and a husband like my dad.
After leaving Rebekah and after my year of Roloff treatment, I came home, but my soul never came to the surface again, I never smiled, never. I would walk the streets of our little neighborhood with a ghost town look of nothingness. Merely catatonic and without any thing showing for anyone to pull me out with.
I would sit and be a zombie and catatonic. I had not really any ability to think for myself. I had no expression on my face anymore, I was ghost town. And never could connect to others around me and relate to them, nobody understood, ..you see, I was BROKEN all the way to my core of my soul?and I did not realize I was this way, it just was. But BEFORE Rebekah Home for Girls under the wieght of the Camerons, before that?.I was not that way..I was depressed and was floundering, but I still could see the world around me and connect. Very much so?
I was in Rebekah home in 78. When I came home, I was never to be seen above the surface again. It appeared to any who looked at me that I had checked out and noone was there inside me anymore.
It was not till I turned 30, that I began to unthaw?I had brought two babies into my world, two beautiful babies?and the cry of LOVE was pulling me to them, I kept thinking deep inside ?down in the shattered pieces of my soul that lay like broken glass at the bottom of a well?I kept thinking, ?I cannot abandon them, emotionally I can not NOT be here for them??.cause I knew somehow I knew that I was not out there with them, I was miles under in the broken soul that lay in shatters in me.
So began the call to heal, it came to me thru my babies?I had to come out to the surface of life for THEM?
And so I began my journey to healing, and it has been hard work, it has been scary, it has been intense, it has been filled with fear, with pain, with joys, with turbulence, but it has been worth it too, cause the day I began to heal and come out?and SAW my children from that level, from the more up to date dimension?I cried, cause I realized how beautiful they were, and how far down deep inside I had hidden for o so long?
But during my years of healing work, I went thru some rough PTSD. And there in those years of PTSD, lay memory fragments of hells untold yet. Of things from the Roloff Girls Home that pointed and indicated far worse things than they ever wanted to come to light.
I had many things come to surface during that PTSD phase, But I have not publicly spoke out. But today I am saying that there was more than meets the eyes there. Okay?
Today I am more healed than I ever thot possible, I am 41 now, and it has been a long duration between my 15th year and now. Long time to heal and become whole at what was done to me.
Roloff Enterprises and things done shattered my faith, like it was shipwrecked. I recall once during my early adult years, how I had watched the old film of days gone by called, ?The Sound of a Distant Thunder? I believe is the name of it, I watched it as a young married woman and a christian woman and a faithful churchgoer..I would watch it and I would sit there, and my legs would tremble badly, and I would say the sinners prayer over and over and over and over again, BUT I COULD NOT BELIEVE < I HAD BEEN RENDERED UNABLE TO BELIEVE AND GRASP GODS LOVE TO ME?
So I would go back to living my life of hermit in my house, and go to church three times a week, surely making Roloff a proud testimony of what he did for me, cause..gee?.I was ??DOING?? all the ?right? things?
BUT, I was a dead woman with broken shattered bones laying deep inside, hardly understanding normal reality around me, walking with unseeing eyes and never ever connecting to people around me. Having lost the connecting thead of TRUST when put into Roloffs Rebekah Home for Girls.
Now at the age of 41, God has come thru for me. I one day in the midst of trying to heal, right around the age of 31ish, I went to the altar of my church and I was not able to trust God , nor believe that he had good safe intentions to ME, but I had a couple of pages of scriptural prayers, and I prayed them daily for two weeks straight to God my Maker. I felt as if I were going to the King in charge of all the land, and I was the tenet and was wrecked and needed him to pay attention to ME and help ME. So, I approached God in this manner, with the first base being, that HE HAD MADE ME therefore HE WAS TO HELP ME and if he made me to begin with then he could certainly Remake me, for I was so broken and so shattered.
God has been very good to me, and he has indeed been busy remaking me and he has been bringing me out to the surface of Life and teaching me that he came to give me life and life more abundantly. To live and breathe and move and smile and link smiles from my eyes to others eyes, and to laugh and sing and ENJOY my life he has given back to me, for this is what God is REALLY all about. He did NOT come into the world to put us in ?jails?, and bound us up hand and foot, nor to whip us, or tie us to bedposts , or beat us with many stripes, nor make us sit and numbly memorize scripture without personal help and meaning. Nor constantly remind us how far bad we are?but he came to tell us the good news that he has an abundant life to show us for ourselves. A life filled with joy and happiness, a life that is Blessed and not cursed. A life where he can take them curses that were slew upon us and turn them around to a blessing for us and help us to become a blessing to others around us. To prove to us that the years of condemnation can and are to be made void and we are free to live a life of blessing and joy. Not a life of fear or mental illness.
Sincerely,
[email protected] ::rainbow::
