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SocietySeptember 11, 2023

Dear Jane: Coming to terms with my teenage trauma

Guest writer
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Jane was 13 when she joined a church youth group. Within a year, she was in an intimate relationship with her mid-20s group leader. She shares her experience in Dear Jane, a limited series podcast out today.

Dear Jane is made by The Spinoff Podcast Network with the support of NZ On Air. All five episodes are available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. The series contains strong language and features, themes of sexual abuse, as well as explicitly sexual material and mention of suicide. Please take care.

It’s an odd choice, I know, to face my trauma head on in a podcast. Especially when, for decades, I’d sought to wipe that teenage chapter from my life story. Whenever friends reminisced about their youth – talking about concerts they went to, mutual friends they dated and boundaries they pushed – I shared absolutely nothing. 

What would I say? That I was only allowed to listen to Christian music, I did Bible exams for fun and the only boundaries I pushed were sexual ones with my youth group leader who was a decade older than me? That was the truth, but I wasn’t about to share it. I was embarrassed by my teenage years, even before I understood how damaging they truly were.

I was 13 when the main leader at my youth group confessed he had feelings for me. He was in his mid-20s and I didn’t see it coming. The attention was alluring, I felt chosen and special. Here was this amazing man of God I’d looked up to – a man who was funny, charismatic, kind – and he wanted to be with me. 

We began dating in secret and within a year, when I was 14, the relationship turned sexual. We both struggled with guilt around that side of things, but not because it was illegal. We didn’t much consider the law, because we were special. We were ordained by God and planned on getting married and starting a family together. We were even so bold as to eventually make our relationship – though not the extent of it – public to friends and family. People were uncomfortable, but not for a second did they imagine we were having sex.

Dear Jane

1: Jane

Meet Jane, a mum in her forties who has recently come to realise she is not to blame for the connection she had with her adult youth group leader during her teen years

I lived in a fog of guilt and shame and over time went from feeling special to feeling like a dirty little secret. In my mind, I was corrupting this man of God. He was extremely vocal in his faith, insistent that I wear modest clothing, blacklist secular music and refrain from shopping on Sundays. I saw him as holy and myself as fundamentally flawed.

He was devastated when I broke off the relationship four years later, just before I turned 18. In the decades that followed, those complex layers of believing I had been mature for my age, in what seemed like a loving relationship that had the blessing of those around us, meant I didn’t see it for what it was. A non-consensual sexual connection, brought about by a power imbalance. It turns out 14-year-olds can’t legally consent to sex, even ones who are told they’re mature for their age. 

As an adult I found relationships hard. I felt a sense of loss for the ordinary youth I never had. I suffered through some severe mental health challenges. I can’t categorically say what happened to me as a teenager was directly responsible for these hardships, but it makes sense that being exposed to abuse during foundational years can have a serious impact on someone’s sense of self-worth and ability to navigate relationships in the long term.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that I began to understand that what happened to me wasn’t the result of decisions I’d made. I wasn’t complicit in the harm that was done to me. It wasn’t my fault. Through that realisation, the noise of anger, hurt and need for answers became louder. 

Jane (left) and friends at youth camp (Image: Supplied)

Looking back now, I understand the abuse and the power imbalance is quite black and white. But the decades of telling myself narratives that I had been a stubborn teenager and an “old soul” embedded this idea that I’d somehow contributed to what happened to me.

That’s where the complexity comes in, woven with lots of feelings of guilt, shame and embarrassment. Because to me, the abuse looked, and even felt, a lot like love. I know there are others who have spent years grappling with what seems like grey areas in their own stories. What I’ve learnt in this process is that recognising you’re not in any way to blame is the first necessary step in addressing the trauma. If sharing my story helps others realise they’re not responsible for harm done to them, if it helps validate and give voice to anyone who has been in a similar situation, then I feel a sense of responsibility to speak up to help others. 

The idea to share my experience in a podcast came because I believe podcasts are powerful. They have a unique ability to draw focus into the world being presented and I find that intimacy incredibly affecting – especially when hearing the voices of those involved in personal stories. 

In telling my story in this way, we didn’t need to worry about word count limits or lighting and background scenery. There was very little faffing involved in the recording process, which paved the way for a really authentic storytelling experience. For the most part it was just me and the producer, Noelle McCarthy, tootling about with microphones, capturing very real and raw accounts and emotions.

And it needed to be powerful, because talking publicly about my experience is a really big deal to me. I knew if I was going to do this, open up and expose the deepest, darkest parts of myself, I had to make it count. I knew what I wanted to share might serve as a voice for other survivors, but also as a resource for churches and other organisations with young people in their care. For me, a podcast series was the best way to impact people while also giving myself the time and breathing room to tell my story properly and in a way I was comfortable with. 

Being so at home talking to Noelle, and joined in conversation by people I love and trust, was critical to making myself vulnerable and able to speak candidly. I also had regular therapy sessions with a clinical psychologist throughout the process, which was invaluable support during what was ultimately a very confronting experience. 

In scoping who we could and should talk to for the project, I realised how far the roots of betrayal had spread. So many years after this all happened, I was not the only one trying to process the events and their impact. There were three key people close to me that I knew we had to hear from. My mum, my best friend from the time, and my sister who was also a leader in the youth group I attended. 

I was confident Ange, my childhood friend who joined the church with me and knew about my relationship with our youth leader from the start, would be willing to help. Over the years she’s hinted at being on standby should I ever feel the need to go to the police or share my story some other way, but only when I was ready. 

I was much less confident about asking my family to put their voices to my story. For my mum and sister, the full extent of the relationship I had with my youth group leader is reasonably recent information, which means they are still wrestling with their own feelings of guilt and betrayal. They’re also both very private people, contributing to a podcast isn’t something they’d ever put their hands up for, let alone to speak about such deeply personal stuff.

It didn’t take long for Mum to agree to be involved, but for my sister the decision was harder. The parish at the centre of my story is one she spent much of her adult life in and while she no longer attends that particular church, she is still devoted to her faith. Contributing to a project that could cast a dark shadow on an institution that is dear to her meant she had some intense soul-searching to do before agreeing to participate. 

Ultimately, my sister recognised this happened right under the noses of a loving and well-meaning community and that there are countless other survivors who have suffered under the watch of a variety of organisations who could be helped by hearing a story like mine. Feeling a responsibility to support her baby sister and in the hope of helping others, she too agreed to contribute. 

Most of my family still live nearby to where my teen years played out. That means I’m back in the neighbourhood regularly, and have even been to funerals and baptisms at the church I attended all those years ago. It hasn’t served me to sit in my memories when I drive past his house and the church building, or down roads where he’d park up so we could fool around. In order to keep visiting my family, I had become pretty good at disconnecting the places from the pain, but in making this podcast I had to join the dots back up.

Going back to those locations with the express purpose of revisiting what happened to me wasn’t easy. Talking about specific traumatic events while standing right where they took place was like a portal to the past. One I had avoided for so long, and for good reason. But it felt necessary. For too long I had played down the significance of what happened to me, and facing the true gravity of it all meant confronting the ugliness head on, right where it all happened. It was as if I was going into battle on behalf of my younger self.

As well as talking to people who were there at the time, we also spoke to a clinical psychologist and lawyer, both of whom are experienced in the complexities of cases like mine. Both of whom shared incredible wisdom to help me understand what happened to me wasn’t my fault and what my options are in terms of navigating the complaints process. They also helped us prepare for reaching out to the man at the centre of all this, to offer him the opportunity to speak with Noelle, and ultimately meet with me. 

Making this podcast was hard. Hearing my family talk of their hurt, realising how my best friend was also a victim in this, and confronting the realities of making a complaint. Reaching out to the church to find out how this was allowed to happen on their watch and also making contact with the man responsible for this whole mess. It was hard, but I’m glad I did it. After so many years of having my narrative controlled by someone else, I’ve finally been able to tell my story in my voice and with my words. 

And it is my voice you’ll hear on Dear Jane, but I don’t use my full name. I’m no longer ashamed of my past, but I want to protect the privacy of my children. We’re also not using the former youth group leader’s real name because this isn’t an exposé.

I can’t write about taking part in this podcast without acknowledging the care that was taken by the incredible people who played a role in putting it all together. Every person who contributed, both on mic and off, did so with the greatest of sensitivity and care. I have felt heard, believed and unquestionably supported – for that I feel extremely privileged and grateful. 

I know not all survivors are as fortunate when it comes to being believed and supported. Not all survivors are ready to face the reality of things that have happened to them. This podcast is for those brave women and men. So they can hear their own voices in mine and know they’re not alone. 

Dear Jane is made by The Spinoff Podcast Network with the support of NZ On Air. All five episodes are available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. The series contains strong language and features, themes of sexual abuse, as well as explicitly sexual material and mention of suicide. Please take care.

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor
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SocietySeptember 10, 2023

The Sunday Essay: Ghosts

Guest writer
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Sharing a home with spirits isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Sofia Drescher.

When I was 11, my mum became convinced we had a ghost in our house. 

She’d heard the voice of a small child calling out again and again for his mother. Both our neighbours had teenage children and there was no one obviously outside on the street. It’d been a school holiday afternoon and my siblings and I had heard it, too. But having inherited our dad’s skepticism, our mum was the only one who dared to acknowledge the possibility of a ghost out loud. 

It wasn’t my mum’s first encounter with the supernatural. In fact, despite being both a trained lawyer and an atheist, she’d developed somewhat of a penchant for psychics over the years.

For a while she became a semi-regular patron of the spiritual guide, Charlesh. According to his website, Charlesh actually lived during the era of the Sumerian people, some time between 4100 and 1700 BCE, but is now channeled by a man called Brent and available to give personal readings out of a Mt Victoria villa. A painted portrait of Charlesh in his original form depicts him as a more tanned and windswept Rasputin. Even as a child, it struck me as unusually fortuitous that, if one had to share their body with another, it happened to be a highly monetisable, 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian psychic, and not an 80-year-old retired panelbeater from Lower Hutt.  

According to Mum, Brent would greet her at the door and usher her into his nicely furnished sitting room. I imagined draping red velvet curtains and a plump chaise lounge nestled over a Persian rug. He’d then close his eyes, twitching and sweating, until Charlesh arrived, ready to provide sage advice. 

In the evenings, when my dad was still at work, she’d tuck herself away in the lounge with a glass of wine and re-listen to Charlesh’s recordings. “Alex is a bit of a bitch, isn’t she?” I once heard Charlesh say of me as I crouched in the hallway, my ear pressed up against the door. It seemed such a cruel way for an adult to describe a nine-year-old, especially one with the anal-retentive personality of the oldest child and a mild anxiety disorder. On another occasion, I heard him cautioning that my grandma only had a few years left to live. I resented Charlesh and his supposed insights.  

It was validating, however, when Charlesh later asked my mother why she never pursued a career that harnessed her musical talents. In a family of terrible singers, my mum easily stands out as the worst. On special occasions, for a laugh, she treats my siblings and me to her warbling rendition of Donny Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’, a version so off none of us recognised the original song when we first heard it. She stopped visiting Charlesh after that.    

It wasn’t until years later, when I was living in New York and in a relationship I was starting to suspect I desperately needed out of, that I began to feel some sympathy for my mum’s psychic curiosity. Unemployed, with my boyfriend working late, I’d take my camera and stroll around the West Village and Manhattan Chinatown, photographing the neon-lit signs advertising psychic walk-ins and tarot card readings. Stuck in a rut and feeling lost, spending the last of my savings to get some answers didn’t feel like a terrible option. 

And in fairness to my mum, her concern that the ghost of a small child might be inhabiting our family home wasn’t totally out of left field. 

My parents had bought the house a few years earlier from an elderly woman who had lived there with her 50-something daughter and her daughter’s husband. The woman had purchased a place in a nearby retirement village, and the three of them were going to move there together. The fact that two 50-somethings would opt to live with their mother and mother-in-law in a retirement village baffled my parents and became a hot dinner table topic.

My parents treated us all to fish and chips our first night in the house. We ate them outside in the overgrown garden because the house itself was practically uninhabitable. Before moving in, my mum had emphasised that the house had “a lot of potential,” and thought we’d all enjoy having a project to work on. It’d be just like Changing Rooms, she reassured us.

The house was unchanged from the 70s when the woman ran it as a boarding house. The floor and walls of the kitchen were still covered with a deep red carpet patterned with mustard swirls. This carpet spread throughout the rest of the house, like a fungus on an indoor houseplant, infecting every branch and leaf. Even the bathroom floors were plastered in a bright green carpet that made me think of AstroTurf on a mini golf course. The only exception was the upstairs walls, which were covered in a faded yellow tongue and groove. On weekends, Mum took deep satisfaction in prying off the dated wood panelling. 

In the kitchen sat a metal safe in the place where a fridge should have been, with a vent to the outside. My siblings and I took delight in buzzing a maid bell that connected the kitchen to what was once a master bedroom halfway across the house. I soon realised it wasn’t just the carpet that permeated the house – every room smelt vaguely of stale cheddar crackers, as if the windows hadn’t been opened in decades. 

Beyond the kitchen, and among the overgrown agapanthus and hydrangeas, was an outhouse that contained a toilet and metal tub for hand washing. My parents had hired builders to knock it down before we moved in, ahead of the rest of the renovations. The builders knocked down everything except the toilet, as it formed a good seat to perch on during lunch and smoke breaks.

My seven-year-old sister and I weren’t fooled by the fish and chips. We cried ourselves to sleep that first night on a mattress in the corner of what was to become our living room. We spent the next year having to explain to any friends we had over why there was a toilet in the middle of our garden. Our dad cried too that night, outside alone in the relative comfort of our Honda Odyssey. 

  

A few months into our new fixer upper, one of the neighbours told Mum that the couple had once had a son, who died when he was just seven, from meningitis. They’d lived there with the woman’s mother ever since, keeping it exactly as it had been when their son was alive, a physical manifestation of the loss that haunted them. It was as if, unable to move on from such a devastating loss, they’d chosen to sentence themselves to an early death, too.  

Curious and worried we were wrongly occupying someone else’s home, my mum’s dormant dalliance with the mystic was reignited. A friend of my uncle’s, who allegedly had a gift for speaking to spirits, performed a reading over the phone from Masterton. It wasn’t the ghost of a young boy, she said, but a woman whose own son was buried nearby and wanted to remain close to him. There was nothing to be scared of: she liked having us there and even enjoyed helping with the housework. Mum was relieved.

Still, Mum’s a strong proponent of second opinions, and this was no exception. She began making the rounds of Wellington’s paranormal community. She had a session with a psychic from the cold case whodunnit, Sensing Murder, and solicited numerous recommendations from her spiritual-but-not-religious friends. She was most taken with a Chinese psychic who was able to describe the shape of our home with what my mum felt was uncanny accuracy: square and with four external walls. Sharing a home with spirits wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he explained, but if my mum was worried, he suggested she light a candle in each of the four corners of our home and ask any negative spirits to leave. At least they were obedient.

This was decades before I found myself living on a windy street in southern Taiwan. Tainan is the island’s historic capital and remains its cultural and religious heart. In the evenings, I’d walk along North Gate Road, watching the local restaurants and hawkers prepare breakfast for the next day. In the terraced houses above the steady stream of scooters and street stalls, the magenta and gold from familial shrines would emanate, lingering in the thick, polluted night air. Taoist temples dedicated to the worship of various local gods were dotted down side alleys and between the throngs of Seven Elevens and Family Marts. 

On weekends, the streets became lined with tables covered with oranges, packaged snacks, and incense sticks; offerings to their dead. During the day, families would burn yellow wads of joss paper, or spirit money, in cast iron cauldrons and set off smoky firecrackers to bring about good fortune and ensure those already gone were not left wanting. No one was above ancestor worship and local gang members were some of the most devout temple goers. Spiritual life, and in turn death, was not just the domain of harassed stay-at-home mothers searching for answers, but infused with the everyday.

Despite my skepticism, the night my mum dimmed the lights in our house and carefully placed thin wax candles in each of its four corners, I became increasingly worried. I’d grown attached to the idea of a benevolent motherly figure living invisibly beside us, a non-judgmental witness to our early-2000s familial dysfunction. But more than this, I became anxious that perhaps my grandad’s spirit was with us, too. He’d died seven years earlier just before my twin brother and sister were born. What if we accidentally sent him away?

I didn’t let on about my concern, but my mum must have felt this, too. As she blew out the candles, I heard her whisper under her breath, “Dad, stay.” 

We grew to love this house. The builders became our family friends, and despite my mum’s conviction we were not the only ones there, it came to feel like our own. My parents spent weekends restoring the original wooden floors and stripping the stale yellow paint off the upstairs walls and banisters. The garden toilet was eventually knocked down, and in its place my parents built a deck and installed a basketball hoop and a barbeque, where we spent our long summer evenings.

I somehow convinced my parents to let me paint my bedroom fuchsia. From upstairs, it looked over the motorway below, and the painters joked people would be able to see it from across town in Seatoun. With each coat, they’d bring us up to make sure this is what we really wanted. 

My parents sold the house when I was 21, after they finally decided to separate. My siblings and I weren’t sad about their separation: it’d been a long time coming and, if anything, felt like a relief. But selling the house was devastating. I suppressed tears as my mum, her friend and I did the final clean one inconspicuous Wednesday evening.  

It’s strange driving past it now. The outside has been painted various shades of grey and my bedroom is almost certainly no longer fuchsia. But our old cat, Eddie, is buried in the garden, and I like to think there are other traces of us left behind.

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