Pathway to Healing: My Personal Journey to Healing and Deliverance

By Mina R Raulston

Have you ever been so hurt that you couldn't imagine ever being whole again? Do you know someone who is so broken that all the pieces to their puzzle no longer exist? Do you know what it feels like to have all your hopes and dreams collapse with little to no hope of ever seeing them come to fruition? Mina Raulston found herself in just that

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hat Rack Books, LLC
• Release date: Oct 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732801110

Mina R Raulston

Mina R Raulston has been a freelance writer since the mid-1990's. She has been published in a variety of newspapers, magazines, websites, wrote speeches, and self-published her first book. This book is the first book published by her own publishing house, Hat Rack Books, LLC.

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PREFACE

I see and read about so many women who have experienced spousal abuse. As thrilled as I am for the women who escape, many of them never find total healing and wholeness, if they ever knew what that meant. Many of them may have gone into the abusive relationship already broken from childhood abuse or neglect, so they don’t know what normal is supposed to look like. My goal for this book is to help those who have been abused to step into my shoes and see that God can truly heal their heart, mind, and spirit. They don’t have to walk through life with a spiritual limp. They can know joy; they can have a life; and they can make plans and dream again, or maybe for the first time.

In 1975, at the tender age of 19, I met and married my husband. I met him in church and I thought he was a Christian, even if a baby Christian. In 1989, I divorced him after 14 years of emotional, physical (including sexual), spiritual, societal, and financial abuse. For four years after my divorce I was a post-traumatic mess, even though that diagnosis wasn’t applied to divorce or abuse back then.

I eventually got better, but I didn’t get better with medication and counseling, although I took advantage of them to help me cope for a time. I got better when God healed and delivered me. My first book, Home Should Be Safe: Hope and Help for Domestic Violence, teaches about domestic violence. This book tells my story of healing and deliverance and how you, too, can receive God’s healing and deliverance.

1

A LITTLE HISTORY

Childhood frames a part of the person each of us grows up to become. My childhood ended when I was eight years old, in 1963, when my mother had her first mental breakdown. Over the next three years she had three separate mental health hospitalizations.

I have always been an introvert and a book worm. When everything was happening with Mom, I buried myself in my books to escape. It was the only escape possible for me. My memories of those three years are bits and pieces of events: a first grade school program; singing in the children’s choir at church; memorizing the Gettysburg Address and performing it before my fourth grade class; trying to be in Girl Scouts but being shuffled between troops until I had to quit; and trying to attend vacation bible school but not being allowed to because of Mom’s behavior. And last, but not least, I remember visiting my mom at the state mental hospital. That visit was traumatic and unforgettable. The last big thing that happened during that time of my life was on Christmas Eve 1965. First Mom allowed me to go with my choir director to church to sing. Later, Mom interrupted the service to demand I leave with her, which at the age of ten I had no choice but to obey.

Throughout my childhood I would try to speak out to the adults around me, my dad and my aunts and uncles, even to other adults years later when I had become an adult and was taking care of my mom after Dad passed away. Without fail they would say to me, "But, Mina, your mother had a mental illness. You have to understand. She can’t help herself." Well, as a mature woman I can say that I completely understand that my mother was mentally ill and couldn’t help herself. I have no ill feelings toward my mom. I loved my mom. But, I couldn’t make anyone understand that during the time they insisted I had to understand, I was a child and they were the adults. It was their job to take care of my needs, not mine to take care of myself. But, as a child, they just believed that children obeyed their elders, and children were to be seen and not heard. Yet, aside from my physical needs of food, clothing, shelter, and school, none of them thought I had emotional needs, or if they did, they didn’t address them. Maybe they didn’t know how because they were too busy dealing with their own emotional needs. I just know I had to figure out how to work through that season on my own. I only made my way through it with God’s help.

We moved away a while later and I found a new church, one that was spirit filled. I remember attending my first service, an evening service. I was scared to death as I witnessed people speaking and singing in the spirit. God, I prayed. These people are crazy! Please get me out of here! Thankfully, God sent someone who took the time and cared enough to explain Pentecostal beliefs to me. I accepted Christ as my savior when I was 13 years old and was baptized when I was 14 years old. I had to go against my mom’s wishes and go behind her back to get baptized because when I asked her permission she promised that if I got baptized in that church she would see to it that I never returned.

All through my teen years my mom did all she could to stop me from going to church. But I was still determined to live out my faith. She complained about every friend I had from church and refused to allow me to take part in anything other than church services, and I had to get my own ride in order to attend. She also wouldn’t allow me to participate in extracurricular activities at school, have friends over to our home, or go to my friends’ homes. She trusted no one except immediate family.

My father supported whatever would make her happy. I don’t think he ever got over the amount of time she spent in and out of mental hospitals during my childhood. I remember that he had felt so helpless and had no way to help her. The one after school activity I was allowed other than a part-time job, was participation in Junior Achievement because that was business related and could help a person learn how to earn a living. For the most part, I lived a very isolated life because of my mom’s restrictions.

As a young adult after high school I became even more isolated as all my friends either married, left for college, or joined the military. In the 1970s it was still rare for a woman to seek a career. At 19 years old, I was constantly being teased and called an Old Maid because I didn’t even date. I had dated one older guy in high school but I broke it off because he stopped going to church and started getting in trouble with the law, a life he had said he’d left behind. I also spent much of my childhood and adolescence being mercilessly teased for being overweight, for wearing glasses, for getting good grades, for singing, and about anything else my brother, male cousins, and the boys at school could imagine might bother me. My brother used to tell me to quit using those big college words, which meant anything with more than two syllables to him. And my father refused to allow me to even take college prep courses in high school because he had no intention