My Story: From Darkness to Freedom

Introduction: A Journey of Restoration

Hi, I’m Joey.
I’m a wife, a mother of six, a missionary, and a follower of Jesus Christ. But for decades, I was also a woman silently carrying the wounds of a painful past—until the grace of God broke through and set me free.

This is my story.
It’s raw. It’s real. And it’s proof that no one is too far gone for the healing power of Jesus.

“He brought me out into a broad place; He rescued me, because He delighted in me.”
— Psalm 18:19 (ESV)

The Weight I Carried

I was raised in a home marked by trauma. Sexual abuse, neglect, and emotional abuse became my norm from a very young age. My abusers? My parents. There were no boundaries, no safety, and I believed no love. My father began to sexually abuse me at the age of four. I told my mother when I was seven, unable to keep it a secret any longer. I remember it as clearly as though it were yesterday. She came to tuck me in, and I told her. She listened to me share with her details that no seven-year-old should know, and told me she was going to talk to him. I waited, excited, believing that finally the abuse would end. She came back into my room and told me she hoped I was happy, that I had made my father cry. I knew, in that moment, that there would be no help coming from my mother. More importantly, he knew he was free to do as he pleased. He came back into my room that very night and assaulted me again.

Until that night, I felt like I just needed to be careful around my father, but something changed in my mother that night. As an adult looking back, I think she viewed me as a threat to her marriage rather than a victim of her husband. It changed how she treated me, and we never recovered. I know that hearing something like that from your child about the person you married has to be difficult, and I can’t judge her for not knowing how to react. There is shame, and guilt, and a personal weight that comes with acknowledging that you have allowed this kind of person into your life. But my mother went beyond a silent observer and began to facilitate the abuse.

When I was in 3rd grade, my mother pulled me out of school for several days. My father was a long-haul trucker, and she sent me on the road with him, alone, to Little Rock, Arkansas. Without going into specific detail, something inside me broke that first night, and I screamed for him to leave me alone, and I jumped out of his truck and ran into the truck stop bathroom. I knew he couldn’t come into the lady’s room, so there I sat, on the floor, all night. But morning comes and what can I do? I am an 8-year-old stuck in Little Rock, Arkansas. So out I went, and he was sitting there drinking coffee. I felt sick walking up to the table, to be dependent on him, to require him for my safe return home.  In my 8-year-old brain, going to the person who had harmed me because that was my safest option really skewed things for me. In that moment I swore that I would never trust anyone for anything again.

The abuse from my father continued for nearly a decade. I tried a few more times to get help. Told my elementary school counselor, told my adult cousin, told my grandmother. Back then, it wasn’t a thing that was discussed or addressed. It was just kept quiet.

My mother and father finally divorced when I was in my early teens. The day she told me and my brothers, I must have smiled or shown some kind of joy at the news, because she looked right at me and told me it was not because of what happened with me. I didn’t care, he was going to be gone. And just like that, he was. I was sure that things would get better, change, suddenly my life would be normal. Man was I wrong.

My entire early life I felt isolated and alone. I never felt like I was part of anything or any group. I was pretty sure my classmates weren’t doing what I was doing, and I felt like I didn’t deserve to be part of their normal lives. Alone was better, alone was safer. I always did well in school, I think that maybe I was trying to show that I had value and worth. Between my father’s abuse, and my mother’s emotional abuse and neglect, I regularly felt like I was just worthless, but I was smart.

By the time I was 12, I was running away on a regular basis. When I became a teenager, things escalated. I didn’t value my body, because I had already lost the thing that I was supposed to cherish and keep until I got married. There was no self-esteem or self-worth in me. I never felt safe either. It didn’t matter who I was around, I didn’t trust anyone. I couldn’t, because the people who were meant to protect me did the opposite. I lived in a constant state of fight or flight. I didn’t have the chance to develop healthy habits or problem solving skills. I relied wholly on instinct.

Mark and I were out one evening, and he knew I had run away. He told me we were going back to his house, but he turned down the road to my house and I knew where he was taking me. Of course he had no idea what was happening at home, he was doing what a responsible person should. I jumped out of his moving car and took off. He must have thought I was insane.

That’s the rub though. The abuse we suffer changes us, we act out, we act a little crazy, we become what others call unreliable, which allows them to doubt our story. The abuse that we suffer turns us into people that others can easily discount.

And my mother hitched her wagon onto that. She talked openly to me about the abuse, always saying “she did her best.” But she denied it to everyone else, painting me as mentally unstable. I suspect this holds true even today. We went to a few counselors over the years, but the moment they rejected her statement of doing the best she could, we never went back to that counselor.

I spent the rest of my adolescence and most of my adulthood trying to find stability through achievement, discipline, and control. I joined the Navy as an intelligence specialist, worked for the police in two different cities, obtained my Bachelor’s and my Master’s Degrees, and was even admitted to SMU Law School, although my law school endeavors ended after the first year. On the outside, I was strong. Inside, I was a shattered girl screaming for help.

The Shallow Wells of the World

I searched for healing in all the places the world said would make me whole—psychology, therapy, medicine, even theology and ministry. But despite all the knowledge and effort, the trauma never left me, keeping me an angry and bitter woman unable to find peace or joy.

I believed in God—I was even saved as a young girl during an FCA basketball game in 7th grade. Although I walked down that aisle and said the right words, that magical feeling didn’t come. There was nobody in my life who could or would teach me what it meant to be a Christian. I saw others whose lives were changed, I heard people talk about how God had spoken to them, but he never spoke to me. I didn’t know what it meant to give God everything—my pain, my past, my heart.

The Day Everything Changed

My life was in tatters, my image shattered, I looked at myself and saw someone with no value, no worth, nothing that I had done to prove I was special had worked. I had no hope. My marriage was struggling. We were not going to divorce, but we were not happy either. My family was falling apart, and I had given up. I knew that no matter what I did, I was always going to be that damaged, angry, bitter person that could not overcome what had happened. I had tried everything, counseling, medication, meditation, at one point I even went to psychics, who told me I had a demon attached to me and, for a nominal fee of course, they could expel that demon from my life. I remember lying in bed, too depressed to get out from under the covers, and crying. This was it, this was where my life had come, to nothing. All of the things I had tried failed, I couldn’t think of a single other thing that would work. I was like a tea cup that had been dropped, shattered on the ground. There were too many pieces lost. I believed I was beyond repair. It was in this very moment, the moment of my greatest weakness, that I heard God call my name. “Get up, Joey.” I listened, questioning myself. He called me again “Get up, Joey.” I sat up, and I looked around my room. I felt a presence there with me. I felt comfort, and fear. There was no way that I could be put back together. It was impossible. It could not be done. But God told me there, that night, that He could do it, if I would just ask. Up until that night, I thought of God as this semi-absent presence that people wrote about, that a lot of people seemed to love, but for me, He was more an ideal that a reality. He had never spoken to me, after all. He had never protected me. That night God promised me that if I would be faithful to him, and follow him, he would do for me what I could not do for myself. He would put me back together, better than I was before. I broke down, I gave in, I gave up, but I was still not sure how he was going to do it. I had completely isolated myself, that wall, that impenetrable wall, was never coming down.

He told me to go to Calvary Chapel. His words were to return to the church. But I knew, there was just one church I had been to, and that was Calvary Chapel many years before. We had dropped in for game night one New Year’s Eve, spent maybe 15 minutes there, then left. He wasn’t talking about a general “go back into fellowship,” his instructions, I knew, were to go back to that church. So I did. God was putting me into a family that I could trust, that I could depend on, that I could rely on, that wasn’t going to harm me. God gave me a safety net, surrounded me with women who would lift me up in prayer and protect me when I needed it. It was also my first act of obedience, which turned into another act of obedience, and another, and another.

That was the beginning of everything.

In that space of worship, community, and teaching, God met me—deeply and personally. I cried more in those first few months than I ever had. Not from sadness, but from relief. I could finally let go. I could finally breathe.
And most importantly—I could finally heal.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
— Psalm 147:3 (ESV)

The kind of abuse I experienced is insidious. It gave Satan a powerful hold over me. That anger and that bitterness had me exactly where he wanted me. It was going to keep me under his control, bound in his chains. It changes how you view things, it seeps into every aspect of your life. How you interact with your children-am I hugging them too long, should I be bathing them? Your marriage–I had never truly been alone with my husband, my father was always in the room with us. I couldn’t trust, I couldn’t live, I couldn’t breathe. But slowly, one step at a time, God began to heal me. The healing takes years, and I am still working through a lot of the pain and the damage, but that first step of faith was crucial, understanding that what I needed I could not give myself. Reaching out for God, crying out to him, giving everything in my life to him, my pain, my sorrow, my love, my failures, my successes, nothing was my own, it all had to be given to God. Do you know what happens when you give everything to God? There is nothing left for Satan. Every single act that I carried out, everything God told me to do that I did, I could feel Satan’s hold over me getting weaker.

He had me do some things that made me so angry and confused I thought there was no way I could do them. God told me I had to forgive my parents. FORGIVE MY PARENTS. That was one of the hardest thing for me to do. But forgiveness isn’t a feeling, it isn’t an emotion, it’s a choice. It’s a decision to try to love someone. And it isn’t done for the person you are forgiving, it’s done for yourself. It was my freedom my forgiveness was buying. I started out begrudgingly saying “I forgive my mother and I forgive my father.” I didn’t mean it, but I said it, every single day, I said it, and after time, it became true. The next step was for me to pray for them. I had to pray for God to bless them. My father died when I was 17, so there was no blessing for him to be had, but I prayed for blessings over my family, and eventually, I meant it. When you start praying for blessings for people, it’s pretty hard to hold onto anger. I listened to God, I followed God, I trusted God, and now I seek God, I hear God, and I chase God. I realize he was there, all along, keeping me as safe as he could. He never left me, and he was always talking to me, I just couldn’t hear him over the screaming in my own head. Now he talks to me regularly, clearly, and sometimes it is to lift me up, other times it is to convict me, but all of his words are spoken in love with a goal of making me stronger, ready to do his work.

From Survivor to Servant

Healing didn’t come all at once, but it did come. God patiently peeled back every layer of hurt. He revealed the lies I had believed, the shame I had carried, and the anger I had buried. And then—He replaced it all with truth, grace, and love.

Today, I live in the freedom of Jesus Christ.
I’m no longer a prisoner of my past.
I’m a warrior for others still trapped in darkness.

After years of obedience and walking in fellowship with God, I finally reached the point in my journey where I no longer felt that anger simmering beneath the surface. Now, here I am, a few years down the road from that first whisper, and God has pieced me back together. I have peace that I have NEVER felt before. For 50 years I lived in turmoil, anger, bitterness, and terror. I gave everything in my life up to God, and God has been faithful and true to me. He has blessed me, he has blessed my family, and he has kept every promise he made. I know the Bible says when you are saved you become a new creation, but really, I wasn’t made new until I gave it all to God. I had to have nothing before He could give me everything. He is the great healer and the reconciler of all things. He has given me life, a purpose, and something I never felt before – joy. I can’t believe I lived 50 years without ever knowing what joy felt like. The enemy had me, truly had me. He had robbed me of half a century of my life. God was ready for me, waiting for me, but he also knew that I had to go down every other road and fail before I could turn to him, completely broken, and be healed. Now here I am, a warrior for God, ready to wade into battle and show others that it doesn’t matter what your past looks like, it doesn’t matter what anyone else says to or about you, it doesn’t matter how old you are, what choices you have made, GOD wants you. GOD loves you. God can heal you. Before, I could barely imagine living another day. Now I get up and praise God for another day. After the hard work, after being obedient in everything God told me to do, I knew there was more that God had in store for me. He called me to front line, fighting human trafficking and child exploitation in the red light districts and all across Japan. He had healed me, and now it was my turn to bring His healing to others who feel unseen, unworthy, and unloved. I walk the streets of Tokyo proclaiming light in the darkest places because I know what it’s like to live in the dark.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
— John 1:5 (ESV)

Why I Share This

I don’t share this for sympathy. I share this to glorify God.
If He can redeem my life, He can redeem yours too.

No trauma is too deep.
No soul is too broken.
No past is too ugly for Jesus.

Want to Talk? Need Prayer? You're Not Alone.

If anything in my story speaks to your heart—if you’re hurting, questioning, or simply need someone to listen—I would love to hear from you. You can contact me here. Let’s talk. Let’s pray. Let’s believe together that healing is possible.