#214: Untold Stories Don't Heal with Mary DeMuth
Struggle Well School
Emily Thomas
5.0 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2019
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How can I talk to my kids about sexual abuse? How do I know if what I encountered is abuse? Is my church a safe place for my kids? All of these are important questions and we talk about the hard stuff today with my guest Mary DeMuth. Her best advice for us? Speak up, and persevere anyway.
If you met Mary DeMuth today, her joy might confuse you. Who she has become in light of tragedy is a testimony of Jesus’s ability to transform a broken life. A child of three divorces, a victim of repeated sexual assault at five-years-old, with a father who died when she was ten, Mary wanted to end her life in her teens. In the tenth grade, she heard about Jesus, and she knew she wanted to chase after Him for the rest of her life. Thankfully, He chased her.
Mary is the author of forty books, including her latest: We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis. She has spoken around the world about God’s ability to transform a life and planted a church with her family in southern France.
Her best work? Being a mom to three amazing young adults and the wife of 28 years to Patrick. She makes her home in Dallas alongside her husband, an energetic chocolate lab, and a fuzzy black cat.
WHAT WE CHAT ABOUT:-
Mary’s history of sexual abuse and finding Christ
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how Mary reconciles her faith in a good God who allowed her to be abused
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how Mary’s experiences have affected her parenting
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what lead Mary to focus on the abuse happening in the church
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how Mary is using the stories of other survivors to help fuel her advocacy
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the power of sharing your story
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key factors of a safe church
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how to recognize when you’ve been abused and how to begin to heal
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Mary’s encouragement for survivors about the process of healing
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confronting your abuser
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educating your kids about sex and abuse
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what Christians can do to help bring justice for victims
21 Days of Healing The Child Safeguarding Policy for Churches and MinistriesGod Made All of Me: A Book to Help Children Protect Their BodiesLifeIsBroken.com
CONNECT WITH MARY:website | instagram | facebook
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Bum, um, |
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| 0:11.0 | ... ... ... Hey welcome back ladies I'm Emily Thomas and you are listening to the |
| 0:19.7 | Mom Struggling Well podcast the podcast that helps you love your actual life so you do not |
| 0:24.3 | need to keep trying to run away from home. Each week we talk here about how |
| 0:27.8 | perfection is nonsense. I'm still trying to believe that. I mostly do now and the peace is a perspective shift away. |
| 0:37.3 | So I had a perspective shift this week. |
| 0:39.0 | A lot of them actually, my precious little darlings have been home from school. You know, it's been the |
| 0:45.5 | Thanksgiving holiday and where there are children there are shenanigans. |
| 0:49.8 | This particular break involved lots of destruction of property. |
| 0:55.9 | Not on purpose, my kids are lovely, but sometimes they break things, sometimes they light things |
| 1:02.2 | on fire. |
| 1:04.1 | It was a really funny, a very good moment of parents just commiserating |
| 1:11.2 | when at my home on Thanksgiving nights one mother stated I |
| 1:17.3 | think my children just don't make good choices like I don't understand what's |
| 1:21.9 | actually going on inside their brain and at that very |
| 1:24.7 | moment I did not know this but there was a child inside the dryer hiding for hide and seek |
| 1:31.6 | so let's not do that. But then one of my children thought I |
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