A silent epidemic of shame. That’s how one victim describes talking about issues like sexual trauma in the church. Author Heather Lawless told CBN News about her past pain, and how she’s helping other women speak up and heal.
In her book We Do Talk About It: Breaking The Silence On Shame, Sex and Redemption, Heather Lawless encourages honest conversations about subjects that can affect so many but that are often avoided.
Her story came close to ending before it even started.
“There was an abortion appointment scheduled to take my life,” Lawless said in an interview with CBN News. “On the way there, my mom got out of the car and didn’t go to the appointment, and she chose life for me.”
Although Lawless grew up in church, she admits she did not always live like a Christian.
“I was the girl that could quote all the scripture and sing all the songs and do all the emotions, but I was also the girl that was making out with boys in the janitor’s closet at the church,” she said.
During her junior year in high school, Lawless suffered a horrific night, becoming the victim of multiple sexual assaults while on a camping trip.
“We drank way too much, and somehow I ended up at the campsite alone, and a man entered the campsite and asked me to show him where all the alcohol was,” she explained. “And so I did. I took him into the woods. The next thing I remember was waking up in the woods, and I had been sexually assaulted.”
Two more attacks followed that night.
“About 15 minutes later, his friend came walking into the campsite, and I was still there alone,” said Lawless. “I woke up about thirty minutes later, and he had also sexually assaulted me.”
Her then-boyfriend also took advantage of her that night.
Broken and ashamed, Lawless shared her story with a female member of her church. “Their response was, ‘Well, that’s what you get for drinking so much,'” Lawless said.
Over the years, she tried talking about what happened to her with others in the faith community.
“The more I continued to talk about it, the more I saw that people’s response was, ‘This is uncomfortable. It’s too much. I don’t want to talk about it.'”
It was a wound Lawless carried for years and led to sexual promiscuity and several failed marriages.
Lawless believes that silence about sexual trauma and brokenness is detrimental to the church and that true healing can only begin through honest, often messy discussions.
“The church has to be willing to have hard conversations and hear hard things,” Lawless commented. “Girls don’t go out and make toxic decisions and destructive decisions because they just feel like it. It’s rooted in the fact that they don’t have worth and value — they don’t see their own worth and value.”
She believes that when the church allows space for both women and men to openly share their painful experiences, lives will be restored.
“When we step out of that silence and step out of being that sanitized, clean, pretty little bow package and we just get really messy, that’s when real healing and transformation starts.”
It’s a transformation that Lawless has experienced firsthand, and after fully surrendering her life to Christ, she began Reliance Ministries in Lewiston, Idaho.
Her ministry provides support and services to women considering abortion – an assignment God entrusted to her despite her past.
“He reminded me who I was in Him and how my worth and my value wasn’t dependent on what had happened to me or how many beds I had been in or how many partners I had had,” said Lawless.
