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Why did she heal?
What motivated a woman who was a size 0, undernourished, had been abused horribly to decide it was worth the challenge to heal?
How did she heal and now have a thriving intimate life with her husband?
Catherine gives us insight, hope and practical tools for you. You too can be healed, by God’s grace.
Whether you were abused or your spouse, this will be helpful to understand the process and know that complete healing and restoration is possible for you!
Catherine is incredibly inspiring and has used her story to bring light and safety to so many through her organization Stop Trafficking Us (stoptraffickingus.org) which helps people out of being trafficked.
If this resonates with you and you’d like some additional tips on how to stay present during intimacy, I’d love to also give you a free resource: “8 Secrets to Stay Present during Intimacy”.
You can get it here: delightyourmarriage.com/present
transcript
0:02
Welcome to the delight your marriage podcast. You’re joining me belah rose as I dive deep into the beauty, power and truth about intimacy, learn not only the practicals, but the heart behind what making love is all about. delight your marriage. So I am really grateful that you are joining me, my name is belah rose. And if this is new for you to be on this podcast, I want to thank you. This is actually my second part to my interview with Katherine Wilson. And we’re talking about healing from sexual abuse or sexual trauma. Catherine Wilson runs an incredible nonprofit where she helps and supports women who have been sexually trafficked, who are really being used a sexual slaves at this point, because she was in that spot. And yet, where she is now is a healed woman, a mother, a wife, a woman who is free sexually with her husband, she process she moved through it. So I think she gives us not just a lot of hope, which she gives, she gives a ton of hope in this in this journey. But then also, she gives very practical tools on how to move through this how to heal. And you know what’s beautiful, as she says, at the very end, she, she says that, had she not done her work to heal, some of the most beautiful things in her life wouldn’t have come to pass. So I want to invite you and encourage you. If you’re one of the one in four women or one in six men who have been sexually abused. I want this to give you hope that you can heal that God can completely heal and restore you. Let’s go ahead and listen in.
2:11
Okay, and we’re back. And I’m so excited. There were a couple of things in our first conversation part here that I wanted to just circle back to Katherine about is one thing you said is do your breath work? I wonder if you could explain that?
2:30
Sure. So when we are nervous, afraid, triggered, what we tend to do is we tend to take a quarter of breaths, right? So if you imagine the the full length, the full length of a lung, when we breathe, we only breathe into the top half. And what happens with that is it exasperates are all of those yucky physical symptoms. So it doesn’t calm us down. It doesn’t help us get centered. It doesn’t, you know, what it does do is it puts a little fuel on the fire. So if when we’re getting triggered, and then we’re we’re shaming and blaming ourselves. So let’s say we’re being intimate with our husband, and we feel that feeling starting to come. And then we Immy and we’re breathing shallow breaths, and we sort of spiral down instead of spiraling up and out of what’s happening, right? Because what we want to do is we want to move through and out of what’s happening. We don’t want to sink into it and go deeper into the upset right? Hmm. So one of the ways there’s a couple named gay and Catlin Hendricks, who are well known authors, and they work do a lot of breath work. And a really a wonderful tool that I learned from them is imagining a balloon, a balloon that you know, that would blow up for a party or something. Imagine that the opening of the balloon is your belly button. And then imagine a little mouth on that opening of the of the balloon and just breathe in filling up your lower part of your lungs all the way up to the top of your lungs. So the way to do that is imagine that balloon behind your belly button and breathe in through your nose and just fill until you feel that the top of your chest and then slowly let that out. Right. And if you do that, like three times, you know, I’m right here. I’m right now let go of the judgment. And one of the coolest Wait, there’s two. Well, three interesting ways of letting go of that negative talk that’s happening. One of them is you can have Imagine it. And it’s your preference. But here’s a couple of suggestions. You can imagine a railroad train with boxcars, and you’re doing your breath work and you’re hearing this negative narrator in your head, beating yourself up, you can, you can imagine those words. And just imagine them going into the boxcar and say thanks for sharing. You can imagine them in a balloon and the balloon flying up with helium, thanks for sharing, letting go. You can imagine a leaf on on a nice babbling brook. And imagine, you know, thanks for sharing. It’s just a method of being able to let that negative stuff go. Yeah, I would. For me, back in the day, I would just, you know, I release things power on me in the name of blood of Jesus Christ. You know, I mean, I would just do an excerpt, I would do an exorcism. On every every thought, you know, and I can’t tell you how much time I spent in, you know, in Psalms, just, you know, what, whatever tool works, and you just sort of have to be a scientist for yourself. You know, is it is it scripture that, you know, that helps let that go. But in the moment, you’re in your bedroom, you know, stuff is coming up, you do your breath work, try that breathing. For me, having my feet on the ground always helped me. And then
6:40
just having that same kind of loving compassion for yourself, and for your partner, that you would have for a child, learning how to walk. No, we just have, we have the patience of Job with everybody else, but ourselves. So just being able to give yourself a little space, a little room and allow for God’s grace, you know, when your head start saying, you know, this is the eighth time this, you know, this week that this has happened or whatever, and you’re really judging yourself to just just to kindly lovingly remind yourself, that God’s grace is at hand here, you know, trust the process, and a way of helping the process is through loving kindness, you know, prayer and supplication, all things, you know, let let your requests be known to God, God when it I know this is not your will for me to be in this situation. And we’re just going to trust you that this will just like on a foggy morning, you know, I live here on Sebago Lake. And sometimes the fog is so thick, that you can’t see across the lake. Then when the sun comes up, the fog dissolves. And the beautiful light of day is born, right? Issues are just like that. It’s just fog. It’s just whether it will pass in its time. And it passes faster with the love and light of our Lord and Savior. And we can implement that through Scripture through prayer, through seeking help with a with a Christian therapist, to help us use the word to help us go to the word for the help through this situation. Just make sure that whoever you’re seeking is, is qualified, you know, because I have seen therapists who worked and you know, and I call them wounded healers, just because someone is a pastor just because someone is a Bible study teacher. So just because somebody fill in the blank, doesn’t mean that that’s the the appropriate person. And again, yeah,
8:57
well, if you don’t mind me interjecting, I wanted to ask you because this has been such a humongous, and I guess I’ll just kind of reiterate. I and my team member actually listened to the interview, because we were, you know, trying to kind of pare it down our first interview four parts. And both of us were so significantly impacted by your story. And that’s really the work that you’re doing to help so many others now. But before, what I want to ask you is for anyone out there that has really, really suffered sexual trauma, I want to know what motivated you to heal. I mean, why didn’t you just roll over and play dead? Just decide, You know what? Life really screwed you it’s not fair. Like how did you decided that this was something you were going to conquer and heal from?
9:53
My children you know, I wanted to and it’s so funny because after my second child, I developed Stage Two plus cancer and had to have a hysterectomy. So if I hadn’t had the children when I did, I would not have been able to have children. So my children were yet another gift from God. And I wanted to live for them. I wanted to, but But before that, let’s go even before I had children, um, you know, I wanted to die. And I remember having that heart to heart with God and just saying, Listen, I don’t know if hell is real. I don’t you know, I don’t know. If it is, and I kill myself, am I going to go to hell is reincarnation real? If, if it is and I kill myself, am I going to come back in a worse situation than I am? So I confessed to God that I did not want to live. And, and, and I mean that like, without a doubt, without a question, I did not want to live. You know, I wasn’t menstruating, I was so malnutrition, I was, you know, zero size zero. And I wanted to die. And I said, I don’t want to live, but I’m afraid to die. Please help me. And that’s when the journey began. And I I guess the gift that the Holy Spirit bestowed upon me, probably right, in that moment, was hope. I had hope. And without that, I don’t think, you know, I don’t think that life, I don’t know if I would be alive if it wasn’t for hope. And God, you know, I call it God winks, you know, those little things that happen that God, just let you know, it’s like, a little communication between you and God that says, I’m here, you know, I want you to know that I’m here. And there would be these wonderful things that would happen that God would speak to me in a language that he knew I would get, and it would just keep me going, you know, and then my life started getting better and better. And so you would say, Okay, so I’m going to have to do healing work. And that’s no fun. What if and same thing in marriages, it’s like, Okay, what if I invest this amount of time, five years, three years, two years, whatever amount of time, and I really do my work. And then I have 20 years of ever being fantastic. You know, would it be worth it? Would it be worth it? If I, if I just said, okay, and I just did what I needed to do I have the patience and tolerance with my wife, you know? And that equals a healthy, loving, intimate, sexual life with my wife later on, would it be worth all of these experiences of, you know, helping her get through this over and over again? You know, the husband would have to answer that, but I would hope it would be yes. Ah, right. And if the if the wife said, okay, you know, I have to sort of be honest with him over and over and over again, and I’m gonna have to do my work and, you know, yada, yada, yada. But three years later, I’m in my own skin, and I’m healthy, and I’m happy and my husband is happy. And, you know, life is good. Would it be worth it? So, yeah, you know, I never could have imagined coming from where I come from, to have gone on to make a six figure income and as a national sales manager to buy my own house as a single woman, you know, $350,000 house on five feet off the lake to meet my second husband so much better. You know, I never would have left my husband, you know, I would have stayed with him. You know, he left and then God brought me Charlie, you know, and to do the work that I do. And I have so much fun. You know, I’m jumped on paragliding and San Diego off the Torrey Pines. Doing the glider plane over Arcadia National Park peak fall foliage. I get to be of service. God takes my story and helps other people. How awesome is it? He didn’t just heal me, but now uses me to help others. What greater purpose, you know is that
14:43
and it’s almost like if you the barrier to entry was the healing like if you had food, the healing that God wanted for you, you wouldn’t be able to do all of those things. That’s right. So I guess I want to just wrap this conversation with if you would pray For the listener potentially has gone through a really difficult sexual trauma and how can she or he because one in six men are also abused one. Right so how can they to move into that that healing journey in have hope for the other side
15:18
if you would you know what I what I would say to that is not only do you have to do your work I really like group therapy. I, you know, there, there’s definitely a time and place for individual therapy, what the recipe that I found is once a week one on one therapy once a week group therapy. And the reason why is there’s this thing about it sort of lowers your ego, it gives you a different perspective, when you see other people going through similar things. It just expedites the healing. And then the third, the third thing is giving back. So let’s say you’re a survivor of rape, maybe not when it’s fresh and raw. But at some point, there is such tremendous healing that comes from volunteering at a rape crisis center or something where it sort of puts your your trauma in perspective, because there are people who’ve gone through far less than you and people who’ve gone through far worse than you and being able to put your trauma in its in its proper place. Yeah, not less than not greater than just another awful thing that happens in life sometimes that we can move beyond and use it to glorify God in other ways. If that, if that makes sense. I love it. When I when I find women or men who are stuck. Volunteering is almost always what I tell them to do. Because it gets them out of themselves.
17:02
Yeah, that’s so important. I love it. Okay, well, only because of time, I would love to chat more. But, um, would you do a quick prayer for our listeners as well? Oh,
17:13
absolutely. Okay, I’ve got, um, I don’t know if you can, you can see I’ve got the ducks in the
17:21
row gonna pray together.
17:23
We’re all we’re all gonna pray together. Oh, god, thank you so much for Bella and what she’s doing. I know that, that you speak through her and that you are you are, you are helping her with her words. And you are also helping those listeners to have ears to hear the words. And the guests that she’s bringing on the show. I just thank you for her. And I bless her and her team that helps her and her husband who is so supportive, and the reach everywhere it goes. And you know, there are no accidents in life. And although the first one that we had was, was our trial. And now that we’re on our second, it’s because this is the time, you know, the people who are gonna hear it, then are maybe different are more or less than who are going to hear it now. And we know and trust that all things work together and your glory. And I want to thank you for using me as an instrument and I just pray that whoever is supposed to hear this story will go to the website, maybe the day feel hope you’ll feel less alone, that any any shame in them has been released. Any bind that you’re that these listeners have about judgment on themselves, or what their ability is or isn’t to heal and grow I just release that in the name of Jesus. So they know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can transcend whatever’s happened. And they will that is their destiny as a child it is it is it is in their inheritance to thrive, oh my God, and Jesus name we pray and we thank you in advance for the for the healing and the and the reunited love with husbands and wives in the in the bedroom. And we just thank you in advance for this and Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Man, thank
19:32
you so much Sarah and share just last thing is definitely share your website once again so everyone can jump down and
19:44
it stopped trafficking u s.org. And it’s a it’s a resource guide for parents to if they want to, you know help their keep their children safe and all that so it’s resource my stories there if they want to know more, and however I can help anybody there was Have my emails there, my phone number I think is on there as well. And everybody’s welcome to call reach out email, however I can be of support. I’ve got a great network. I’m happy to share.
20:11
Katherine’s amazing. She has been recently to the White House even talking on this. And yet,
20:17
the White House invited me to attend a meeting on sex trafficking. And then they asked if I would be a part of an ongoing council. So I’m, I’m really so honored. And just again, none of this would have happened if I hadn’t done my work.
20:32
Amazing. All right, thank you. God bless you. We’ll talk more. Amazing, thank you so much, Catherine. And I’m so inspired and grateful by you, listener, for going there and being willing to do the hard work for your family, for your spouse, for the work that God wants to do in your life. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me. And I look forward to speaking more with you soon. I do have a free resource for you in case in may be helpful. It’s called the eight secrets to remaining present in intimacy. It’s specifically for women. And you can go to delight your marriage.com/present. And I have eight specific things you can do if your mind is wandering while you’re making love, and maybe you don’t have sexual trauma in your past and these are just things that may be helpful for you to get out of your head and into the experience again, so I want to invite you to go there delight your marriage.com/p r e s e n t. Wonderful. Thank you again for joining. I’m looking forward to speaking to you next week. God bless