Mourning

What I lost and what I’m finally giving myself permission to grieve.

Lost In Loss

I never knew there was a name for the grief I was carrying. I thought grief only belonged to funerals and headstones, to flowers on caskets and the quiet drive to a cemetery. But I was wrong. Grief lives in the body. It takes the place of what’s been lost. In my story, grief is what fills the silence. It has taken root in the absence of acknowledgment—in the loss of a church family, in the slow unraveling of safety, in the daily effort to reorient every part of my physical, emotional, and social world.

Grief is here. It’s the air I breathe right now.

There’s a term for my gray grief. Disenfranchised grief. It’s the kind of grief no one sees. The kind society doesn’t recognize or validate. There are no sympathy cards, no casseroles, no rituals to hold it. And for survivors of sexual abuse, both children and adults—it’s everywhere.

It’s the grief that’s real but unrecognized. The kind that lives in the shadows because culture…or religion, or your family, or leadership, refuses to make space for it. It’s in the loss of safety. The loss of innocence. The loss of trust in people who are supposed to protect you. It’s in the quiet mourning of what you thought would be but isn’t and never will be. The relationships that were fractured. The version of yourself that was taken before you ever realized they were gone.

I didn’t have a word for it until I was already living it. Until the abuse stopped but the grief stayed. Until I realized I was grieving so many things at once.

This was one of the moments that brought me face to face with it. With the grief. The silence. The unraveling. It’s not the only part of my story that did, but it’s one that stayed lodged in my chest longer than most.

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The Fall

My husband submitted his resignation a few weeks ago. Last Thursday was his final day with the team at the church we used to call home. Last Thursday, he closed a chapter that spanned fifteen years of his life. Six of those years, we served there together as a family.

In October of last year, I sent an email detailing the abuse I endured at the previous church campus I worked at and was still attending. It wasn’t easy to write, but after sharing bits and pieces with my campus leader’s wife, she encouraged me to share what happened to me. It felt like the right thing to do—naming the truth and handing it to people I believed I could trust.

I forwarded that email to my campus leader’s wife and to two other staff members our family was in a small community group with. Time passed and I thought it was really odd that my campus leader never acknowledged what I had shared with his wife. I finally asked her in person and she confirmed he knew what I shared with her; she told him about the email. More time passed and I finally asked her via text who she spoke with about the abuse. She texted back and confirmed she had talked with him and a mutual friend who was also on staff about what I shared.

I know. The details probably seem insignificant to most. Maybe silly. Petty, even. Except the reality is that these small details confirm the grief I’m trudging through today.

Because for months, a campus leader knew about abuse and said nothing. Nothing. Not a single word to me. Not a word to my husband. We still saw him at church. We still served. Silence was the only response we got from him. His wife wasn’t silent; she carried it for a while, but eventually, tried to rewrite the story once I wrote about it on a blog.

And strangely, I don’t blame her at all. I understand fear and its capabilities perfectly.

When we decided to leave that campus, another staff member, someone who works directly under this campus leader, confirmed that the campus leader himself had told them about my email before we ever said a word.

Again. He knew. He knew and did nothing. I know. I know. I’m getting a bit repetitive.

Welcome to my grief. Welcome to processing trauma. Welcome to the healing journey I’m on.

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Never Say Never

Twenty days before we left his campus, this same campus leader texted me.

“Hi.” Then, “We know each other.”

I stared at my phone, confused. This man had ignored my pain for months—ignored the email I sent to his wife many months earlier, where I laid out the abuse I endured under his leadership… and now he was popping into my messages with small talk and gifs.

I played along because I didn’t know what else to do. We traded a few gifs, and then he asked if I was applying for a job at “LC” without telling him.

I said, “I thought you knew. I told your wife. Does that not count?”

He replied in all caps: “NEVER COUNTS!”

And just like that, my chest tightens. My hands shake. I have to clench my jaw and let myself come undone for a moment because the pain is so loud, my head starts to ring.

The audacity of that message still makes my stomach turn. His wife is the one who encouraged me to apply for that role. She knew I was just laid off from my job with a local nonprofit and texted me about an open role her friend was hiring for at the church. She said it could be a great fit and nudged me to submit an application. My husband still worked there and per usual, I thought: Maybe it’ll be different. Maybe God is making a way for us to find healing here. Maybe we don’t really have to leave. Maybe I heard God wrong.

So, I did. I applied. She was thrilled.

Yet here her husband was, calling me out for not telling him I applied for a job at the church.

So, let me get this straight.

It was perfectly acceptable for me to send his wife a detailed account of the abuse I endured under his campus leadership…hand her the ugliest, heaviest thing I’ve ever lived through, and he could say nothing. He could sit in silence for months. Months. And let me carry that weight alone, and act like I didn’t exist.

That “counted.” That was fine.

But the moment I applied for a job (his wife’s idea, her encouragement, her counsel) suddenly, I was in the wrong. Suddenly, I owed him a conversation. Suddenly, his ego and authority were the priority.

The hypocrisy is nauseating, but the truth is clearer than ever:

My pain could be ignored. My abuse could be buried. But my career move? That required his attention. That deserved all caps.

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Buried Alive

It was never about pastoring or caring for people—it was and is all about control. Self-preservation. Perception. Looking out for number one.

When I first shared my story publicly, his wife claimed he never actually read my email, as if that somehow made it better. As if ignoring my pain could be excused because his eyes never scanned the sentences that held it.

The lack of acknowledgment was still worse than the dishonesty.

I kept showing up to the same campus where my body had been treated like an object, where my heart broke in ways I’m still untangling. He was the campus leader. He knew what happened to me. And yet he said nothing. No apology. No acknowledgment. Nothing. And I stayed for a while.

I kept showing up in that silence, trying to convince myself it was fine. That I was fine. But the longer I stayed, the more it felt like laying flowers down at a grave. Except the person I was grieving wasn’t dead. He was standing just a few feet away, fully alive, fully aware, and completely unwilling to acknowledge the harm that happened under his leadership.

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Missed Expectations

For a long time, I questioned if I was expecting too much. But I wasn’t. I’m not.

I’m not wrong for expecting acknowledgment.
I’m not wrong for needing the one in spiritual authority over me to say something.
I’m not wrong for telling the truth about his silence.

Especially when the man he gave both spiritual and professional authority over me, abused me, manipulated me, and sexually assaulted me while working under his campus leadership.

He was and is the campus pastor of that church location—a position of both spiritual and professional authority. He leads an entire campus, a staff team, volunteers, and thousands of attenders. People look to him for guidance, care, and accountability. And he knew what happened to me. He knew. And he stayed silent.

That isn’t neutrality. That’s complicity.

I wasn’t asking for perfection. I wasn’t asking for a rescue. I was grieving a very specific betrayal—that a man with power heard the truth and chose not to carry it. Not with me. Not with my husband, a person he claims to be one of his only friends. Not with our family.

Not at all.

And when a pastor refuses to acknowledge abuse under his watch, it leaves the wounded to tend the wound alone. That’s spiritual abandonment.

So no, I’m not overreacting. I’m being honest about the kind of “pastoral care” and “church leadership” that has hurt thousands of people—the same care and leadership that hurt me.

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Disenfranchised

It doesn’t just fade with time, it burrows in. It becomes something you carry without knowing how to describe. Until one day, you do.

That’s when I found the words for what I was experiencing…Disenfranchised Grief.

It’s the kind of grief that isn’t allowed to exist. Grief that lives in silence. Grief that people would rather rewrite than confront or acknowledge. The kind that gets punished instead of supported. The kind that doesn’t make the prayer list. That doesn’t get meals dropped off. That doesn’t get a response at all.

Dr. Tashel Bordere describes the hidden losses that abuse survivors carry. Most are invisible to others—but not to us. She writes that victims often lose their sense of innocence, worldview, trust, self-worth, identity, freedom, independence, safety, and even their ability to experience intimacy without shame.

And we mourn all of it. Quietly, painfully, without permission.

Here’s what I’m realizing I’ve lost—and what I’m finally allowing myself to grieve.

I’m grieving the loss of my innocence.
Not just sexual, but psychological. The ability to exist without hypervigilance or chronic self-doubt. Before the abuse, I didn’t second-guess my safety. I didn’t filter every interaction through a lens of threat.

I’m grieving the loss of my worldview.
The death of the lens I once used to make sense of everything—the world, people, myself, even God. It’s more than sadness. It’s the disorienting, gut-level shattering of what I thought was good, true, or sacred. It’s grief for the story I thought I was in.

I’m grieving the loss of my self-worth and identity.
Abuse didn’t just happen to my body. It happened to my mind, my instincts, my voice. It told lies about who I am and made them feel like facts. Abuse didn’t just take something from me. It took someone from me.

I’m grieving the loss of my freedom and independence.
Because even now, I feel the need to explain myself. To soften my “no.” To downplay when it hurts. I scan conversations for signs of disapproval, wondering if speaking up makes me difficult. Still asking permission to take up space in a world that taught me I was easier to love when quiet.

I’m grieving the loss of my safety and security.
Not just physically—but neurologically. My body prepares for impact even when no threat is present. I walk into buildings and feel myself fold in. Even when I know I’m safe, my nervous system doesn’t always believe me.

I’m grieving what trauma did to my marriage bed.
How shame gets there first. How memory lives where desire should be. How even with someone I trust and love deeply, my body still forgets that it’s mine.

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My grief. It’s invisible. Unrecognized by society.

I get it. Grief like this is uncomfortable for most. Too expensive. Too dirty.

We love to help the widow and the orphan—but the prostitute? She’s unclean.

And that’s exactly what makes it disenfranchised. Not that it didn’t happen. Not that it isn’t real. But that my “friends,” my “church family,” and not even my “pastor” could bear to grieve it with me.

But God.

He’s closer than ever. He grieves with me. Through the valley. Through the night. Straight on ‘til morning.