We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rachel Timothy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rachel below.
Rachel, appreciate you joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.
I had been owned off and on during my life. It began when I was nine by my grade school basketball coach when he began to sell pictures of me, as well as, sell me to other men. It became a life I couldn’t get out of even as an adult. My body was owned by other men and all control was stolen from me. I learned to live a dual life where I kept the secrets of what was happening to me while maintaining the facade as best I could that everything was okay. I was 31 years old before I felt seen by someone who decided I was worth saving.
A woman from my church took notice of me and became a friend who was willing to listen to piece by piece of my story as I felt safe enough to divulge it. Before long, she recognized that I was still owned and needed major help. I had four small children and a husband, but was living two separate lives as I learned to do starting at the age of nine.
This woman was like no one I had ever met. She wasn’t fearful of the situation I was in. She wasn’t judgemental of the decisions I had made in pain and trauma. She didn’t give up on me when I balked at her belief that I could ever be safe or free. It took years before I began to see freedom, with many high and low moments in the midst. Despite the tough worldly situations that being a friend to me brought her, she never quit.
For the first time, I began to understand how God loved me. It was through her willingness to be the Hands and Feet of Jesus that I could experience a touch of how God felt about me. He wasn’t giving up on me either. He wasn’t turning His back on me or casting judgement on me for poor past decisions. He had been right there all along.
As I began to see my worth through the eyes of my Heavenly Father, things began to shift for me. I began to let go of the tight grip that I had on unhealthy coping skills. More specifically, an eating disorder that was moving toward being the death of me if the trafficking didn’t do it first. I began to see a reason to wake up in the morning. I began to learn who I was outside of my trauma. My eyes began to be opened to the possibility of a life of a freedom. Of being a wife and mom that didn’t have to fear for her life.
Being seen, heard, believed, and action taken by this woman in my church was the defining moment for me to begin fighting for myself, and now years later being able to fight for other abuse and trafficking survivors, as well.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Having such a deep history of trafficking, abuse, and now complex trauma, I am able to connect with other survivors in a way that feels priceless and beautiful. There is a compassion and understanding there that can’t be taught in books or explained in videos. When Stop Suffering in Silence was founded by me and my good friend Denise Walsh, we knew that her background of clinical psychology and my background of living the abuse would together bring an environment of healing for women who are currently suffering in silence with debilitating trauma.
Every woman has experienced abuse that is unique to them, and yet so much of the trauma and the response to trauma is similar. It isn’t until you feel safe enough to express the trauma you’re living in do you realize that you’re not only not crazy, but you’re not alone.
When I wrote my story, Open Blind Eyes, and had it officially published, I was perceiving it to be a book that would help open eyes to the type of trafficking that I experienced right here in America under the hand of a man who was a teacher, coach, and elder of a church. What I didn’t realize was that so many victims would for the first time feel seen in their own story by reading mine. They would feel validated and believed where they hadn’t experienced that before.
Knowing how important it is to not suffer in silence, and how healing comes easier in community and in facing the truth rather than avoiding the truth, we knew that Stop Suffering in Silence needed to be that safe place for survivors to find just that.
We provide group programs where women from all over the country join us through zoom to process both their trauma, and begin figuring out what life after trauma can look like. We not only help walk them through the pieces of their story that need healing, but we also equip them to see who it is that God created them to be. We help them find their spark or the calling that God placed inside of them long before the traumatic events started in their life. We then encourage them to take action on their calling. We have had survivors go back to school, buy their first car, get out of an abusive relationship, stop self-harming, become sober, start businesses, begin writing books, and more.
We also find it is important to not only have the community weekly to meet but to also provide our survivors with a special retreat a few times a year where they get a chance to meet in person and go even deeper in their healing. We take them to what we call a “Dream Dinner” where they come as if it’s five years down the road and they have followed their calling and are experiencing the fruit of saying yes to taking action on their purpose. It is incredible to witness these women walking into the room discussing the book they had just published, or how they had just graduated from college, as if it had already happened and they were living out their dreams. Them envisioning that success and healing has given so many of them the strength to sign up for college classes and begin the first chapter of the book they had talked about writing for so long.
We are currently in the process of putting together a survivor book where our survivors are getting the chance to share their unique story in a chapter of this compilation book. They desire to have their voice heard and they are getting a chance to do just that. We also offer opportunities for them to be on our podcast to share their story as well as their healing journey. We provide a mentor program too that is called the Granny Program where we pair up a healthy christian woman with one of our survivors. This program is directly designed after the woman in my life who I call Granny that stepped in and mentored me and essentially saved my life from trafficking.
Stop Suffering in Silence is just over a year old but God has blessed us with the chance to minister to so many women already. We are getting more opportunities to go around and speak where I can share my personal story about trafficking in a small town, but also I can share the hope and the programs we offer to anyone who is suffering in silence currently. I would say that our greatest joy is to see a survivor who was once stuck and lost in her crippling pain from trauma, become free to live the life that God intended her to have all along. Seeing them feel passion about something and feel like they matter and belong in this world is incredible. It is similar to seeing a child learn to walk for the first time. There is nothing quite like it.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I met Denise Walsh two years ago while I was still struggling to find my place and purpose in life. She was essentially my life coach and not only motivated me to take hard steps forward, but she also was great about listening to me and letting me take full control of my life and the decisions I made. She waited patiently with me for a year before I decided I wanted to try her program called 90 Day U Turn where you take back control of your life and what you want to do in it. Denise talked a lot about following your dreams or your calling, and I specifically remember telling her that I’ve been stuck in fight or flight mode for so long that I don’t even know what my favorite color is, let alone what my dreams are.
Over time I began to trust her and began to take seriously the things she was teaching me. She believed that I had done a lot of the trauma work but now it was time to shift my focus on what’s next. I began to seek what it is that I love to do and feel passionate about. As I made my dreams louder than my past and my trauma, I began to feel more empowered and like I was finally taking control of my life. I began to learn what I wanted in life and what I didn’t want in life. What I didn’t want was trauma controlling my every move, and what I did want was living a life of purpose. In fact, I knew that finding purpose for my pain was what I was being led by God to do and that was manifested in helping other survivors find the freedom that God blessed me with.
Over the course of time, Denise and I realized that we had similar passions in helping survivors and we were able to combine her wealth of knowledge about psychology and my experiences of abuse to form Stop Suffering in Silence. It has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life getting to work alongside someone who is motivated and passionate, yet real about the difficulty of keeping the course and remaining true to yourself and God. Her partnership to this program is vital and one of the main reasons the survivors who come through our program are flourishing as well as they are.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Any resilience that has shown through in my life I feel like is a direct result of the community of people I’ve placed myself around, and my desire to trust God even in the “yuck” of life. As I share about this beautiful ministry that Denise and I are a part of, and the amazing healing that I’ve found, it doesn’t mean there aren’t still hard days.
I still battle flashbacks from my abuse, I battle triggers that feel debilitating at times, I still am working through feelings of shame and guilt. I battle imposter syndrome where I feel like this calling I have may have been in my head and I am really not worthy of helping other survivors. I have even battled the imposter syndrome when it comes to being a part of CanvasRebel. The wounds that were implanted in me so long ago and for so many years still impact me, however, they don’t control me like they used to. Healing is definitely a journey and will probably be a piece of my every day as long as I live. You can’t just simply “get over” being abused and trafficked. Yet, as I get stronger and have more good days than bad days, I find that all of it together is creating a resilience in me that I pray is never lost.
The survivors we work with will inevitably have hard days, so I never want to hide the fact that I myself am still on a healing journey. Some may say that still healing should disqualify me from entering the lives of survivors and helping them as I can. I feel like being on the journey myself shows hope for the other women. They can see me battle hard things. They can see me cry and break down or get angry. They can see how I feel the pain of what happened, but they can also see me get back up again and continue moving forward. That’s the atmosphere we want to continue to bring to Stop Suffering in Silence. The community aspect and being invested in other’s lives and their story helps you feel stronger in your own. Being a source of encouragement to someone else when they need it, and then learning to receive the encouragement from others when you need it is a part of the healing journey as well. We are going to experience let downs, struggles, and bad days, but our lives are not defined by those bad days. Resilience is born when we experience bad days but choose to still trust and hope in God that His mercies are new every morning, and His plans for us are just beginning.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.stopsuffering.org
- Instagram: @_stopsis_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StopSIS
- Twitter: @_stopsuffering
- Youtube: Stop Sufferin in Silence Podcast @StopSIS