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145 pages

English

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Description

The journal entries of a victim of sexual assault intertwine with her daughter’s journey of self-discovery to share a candid, inspiring story of survival, hope, faith, and unconditional love.

Heidi Ramer’s mother, Karen, was raped for the first time in 1979. She was sexually assaulted at least twelve more times by the same man over the next three years and emotionally tormented by him for the next twenty. After harboring her secret for years, she eventually sought help through counseling and her faith. After Karen’s untimely death in 2001, Heidi’s father handed her a canvas bag full of handwritten journals. In that bag, Karen left a story that needed to be told.

In a candid presentation that intertwines entries from Karen’s journals with Heidi’s personal reflections, readers are led down the uniquely painful path of sexual abuse and its wider impacts. Emerging from an era when women were groomed to seek praise and approval from men, Karen chronicles her experiences from realization through forgiveness, openly expressing how the trauma affected her life, health, and peace of mind. Heidi documents the ways in which her mother’s pain was intrinsically connected to her own and how her mother’s words eventually inspired her to navigate her own brokenness. Their stories are powerfully woven together to reflect the tragic yet beautiful integration of their lives and the transformation of two women, formerly defined by pain, into a compassionate legacy now carried on by a secondary survivor.

Her Words, My Voice merges the journal entries of a victim of sexual assault with her daughter’s journey of self-discovery to share an authentic, inspiring story of survival, hope, faith, and unwavering love..

Sujets

Sexual Assault

Personal Memoirs

Relationships

Biography

Journaling

Forgiveness

Healing

Relationship

Autobiography

Trauma

Scrapbooking

Informations

Publié par	LifeRich Publishing
Date de parution	29 décembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781489745316
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

HER WORDS, MY VOICE

HEIDI RAMER

Copyright © 2022 Heidi Ramer.
Cover Design by:
Heidi Ramer
Matthew Doudt
matthewdoudtphotography.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

LifeRich Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.liferichpublishing.com
844-686-9607

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-4530-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4897-4532-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4897-4531-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022921618

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 12/21/2022

To my mother.
You knew that someday, in my own time, I would take this journey with you.
I have always heard your voice, and now the world will too.
Thank you for trusting me to be your vessel.
I pray this is the story you would have wanted me to tell.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Prologue

Chapter 1 May 3, 1986
Chapter 2 Journal #1
Chapter 3 Disaster in Waiting
Chapter 4 Write On
Chapter 5 Resistance
Chapter 6 Leaving
Chapter 7 Where Am I Now?
Chapter 8 Summer of Nothing
Chapter 9 Confrontation
Chapter 10 Therapy
Chapter 11 Former Assaults
Chapter 12 Anger, Trust, and Confession
Chapter 13 The Little Girl
Chapter 14 1988: A New Year
Chapter 15 Worried about Heidi
Chapter 16 Living with Pain
Chapter 17 Lumps and Blood Tests
Chapter 18 Perspective
Chapter 19 CFS: A New Beginning
Chapter 20 Disappointment
Chapter 21 Days of Grace
Chapter 22 Breast Cancer
Chapter 23 Irene and the Organ
Chapter 24 Dear Karen
Chapter 25 My Role as a Mother
Chapter 26 Mothers and Daughters
Chapter 27 The Joy of Music
Chapter 28 Opportunities and Challenges
Chapter 29 Dreams and Nightmares
Chapter 30 A Time for Healing
Chapter 31 Warning Signs
Chapter 32 The Chemo Journey
Chapter 33 Fear and Acceptance
Chapter 34 Decisions
Chapter 35 The Annual Baptism
Chapter 36 Coming Home
Chapter 37 A Wedding
Chapter 38 And a Funeral
Chapter 39 Lost
Chapter 40 The Connection
Chapter 41 Reading and Writing
Chapter 42 The Perfect Season

Acknowledgments
References
FOREWORD
For thirty-six years, I was the spouse of Karen, the mother in this book, until her untimely death in 2001. My wife was a victim of rape, and I became a secondary victim.
I’m also a retired teacher with thirty-three years of experience. In my second career, I was a chaplain in a retirement home and then a hospital and hospice chaplain for a total of fifteen years. I’ve been a spiritual director for eighteen years. I coauthored a children’s picture book, Maria’s Kit of Comfort , that shows how to use play experiences to help children express their fears and anxiety following disasters or traumatic experiences. I have spent a lifetime dealing with people’s feelings.
I am the father of the author, Heidi, as well.
I lived in the same home as Heidi and her mother, Karen, but I didn’t understand the depth of their anguish. I knew about Karen’s pain and sleepless nights, but through Heidi’s writing, I became aware of the deep suffering that Karen experienced. I knew Karen was absent for extended periods of time in our lives, but now I have a new understanding about the effects of such absences on Heidi.
Our family ate meals together, attended church regularly, and appeared to be a normal middle-class family. Heidi and I did dishes together and jogged together. I supported her by attending her cross-country meets, gymnastic competitions, and swim meets.
I taught elementary school while Karen worked as a consultant for the state and taught classes in early childhood education at the local college. Therefore, I was home during summers and school breaks to care for our children. I wanted to be a loving, caring parent who allowed my children to be independent, learning from their mistakes. I was not the parent who would ask questions to pry into my children’s relationships. I observed and listened to their comments concerning various friends. I approved of many of their friends, and never openly disapproved of their decisions unless I was concerned about their safety.
When Karen told me she had been raped she said, “Don’t ask any names or details.” She could not tell me then, but she journaled the details years later. The abuse was too painful to deal with, so her body simply chose to bury it. But the pain lurked there, waiting to be expressed. The children and I walked on pins and needles every day. We were captured by the fear that we would say the wrong thing, causing Karen to explode and fall apart. She never explained to us at the time what she was feeling. Instead, she wrote her deepest feelings in her journals. Karen was gifted with expressive words of feeling.
Heidi, our daughter, has the same gift of using words to weave thoughts together with feelings. She uses this gift to bring you Her Words, My Voice .
The book begins with the sexual abuse as recorded in Karen’s journals. At the same time, Heidi reflects how her mother’s abuse also affected her life. Karen engaged in years of counseling and contemplative spiritual prayer and reflection to regain health and sanity. Heidi writes eloquently and honestly about how she struggled with her anger and anxiety into marriage and motherhood. Heidi shares her vulnerability of being a secondary victim and how she has become a caring, compassionate secondary survivor.
The whole range of Heidi’s feelings—from anger and anxiety to love and compassion—comes through over years of counseling and reflecting in her own journaling. Heidi’s vulnerability witnesses that, while we can be close to giving up, with the help of ministers, counselors, and supportive friends, we can find peace and wholeness in this life through God’s grace.
If you have experienced trauma as a victim or as a secondary victim, you may discover part of your story in this book. To know that you are not alone and to hear how other victims learned to heal from the trauma may offer you hope.
With utmost respect, I offer my heartfelt thanks to Heidi for hearing the call to write her mother’s story woven with her own. Wounded souls reach out when they have healed enough to care for others.
With compassion,
David
PROLOGUE
My mother was raped for the first time in 1979. She was sexually assaulted at least twelve more times by the same man over the next three years—a man had she known and trusted long before the abuse. She was emotionally tormented by him for the next twenty. Upon her untimely death in 2001, my father handed me a canvas bag full of handwritten journals. He had not read them; nor did he want to. He had lived her story by her side and did not care to rehash it from her perspective. Somehow, he knew they were intended for me.
Trauma has a ripple effect. The body’s natural coping mechanism is to bury something that is too painful to deal with, but nothing is completely buried. It manifests in other ways, such as withdrawing from the people you love, the ones you cannot bear to witness your devastation. As the child who watched from the sidelines and lived in fear of losing her mother to this unimaginable pain, I earned the title of “secondary victim” and eventually “secondary survivor.” I have a story as well—one that is entangled with hers from beginning to end. It is painful, heart-wrenching, reconciling, and hopeful.
In 1979, rapes were seldom reported. Maybe if they were random acts of violence connected to another crime, but never when they happened behind closed doors, perpetrated by a coworker, supervisor, or family friend. In these cases, the act was strictly an abuse of power.
Women were groomed to be vulnerable to men, to seek their approval and need their praise. Male predators wanted their victims to view the relationship as a mutually agreed upon affair and rationalized the woman’s mute response as consent to do whatever he desired. Sometimes jobs were held in the balance, negotiated by being a quiet and seemingly willing participant. Almost always, these abuses of power were accompanied by a threat of physical harm, loss of employment, family ruin, or destruction of reputation.
During this era women endured repeated abuse, buried their trauma in the depths of their s