Jane’s Story

This is a story of hope, healing, and redemption.

Nightmare

One afternoon, when I was a young adult living with my family in Vallejo, California, my little sister Erin Phoenix accidentally locked herself in the upstairs bathroom of our Victorian house. She started screaming hysterically when she couldn’t get out. From downstairs in the kitchen, I heard her, and an instant rush of adrenaline surged through my whole body. I sprinted upstairs to find our mom had opened the door, let Erin out, and was now kneeling down in front of her to comfort her. I stared at what I saw, my heart still racing. I realized I had been terrified that a man had broken into the house and was sexually assaulting my sister.

That same night, when I went to sleep in the room I shared with my teenaged sisters Anne and Terra, I had a terrifying nightmare. I saw a man, with blond hair and dressed in black, standing at the foot of my bed. He was absolutely real to me. I woke up screaming so loud that I startled my entire family out of their sleep and their beds. My sister Anne was instantly by my side telling me to wake up—it was a dream.

I thought about this hallucinatory nightmare for many years. I could not understand why I had seen it or why I was so afraid. It wasn’t like a normal nightmare, with a scary plot and frightening images. It was just a man, standing at the foot of my bed. Why would I be afraid of that?

Pain

In 1999, I went to Washington, D.C. as a graduate student to teach for the University of California and do literary research at the Library of Congress and the Folger Library. While there, I became very ill with digestive pain—to the point where one doctor recommended an exploratory surgery to check for esophageal and stomach cancer—as well as chronic lower back pain. At that time, I remember walking home from the metro station to my home in Alexandria, Virginia in the snow one afternoon and stumbling as I asked God why He had allowed me to be sexually abused as a child.

I returned Davis, California where I was completing my doctorate in English Literature and began seeing all kinds of medical specialists for help with my physical pain. Despite all kinds of time, money, and medical effort, I made little progress in alleviating the chronic symptoms. It was painful to walk, to sit, to ride a bike. I never knew when eating might result in painful esophageal spasms that felt like heart attacks. Eventually, I was diagnosed with acid reflux and with misalignment problems in my right hip socket and vertebrae in my lower back—both of which resulted in an uneven gait that caused pain when walking or sitting for extended periods. But even before these diagnoses, I noticed that the pain in my body was aggravated by stress and particularly by thoughts and memories of sexual abuse. I decided to seek counseling to help relieve my psycho-somatic (mind-body) symptoms.

In 2002, I did find one Christian counselor in Sacramento, California, whom I visited a few times, but the more I talked, the more emotion got stirred up inside of me. I came home from one session and kick-boxed the air for hours. I wanted to kill myself. I had terrible nightmares. I hated how I felt, and I was afraid it was going to get worse. I recall kneeling down by bed and praying to God, saying: I know there is more, but I don’t want to remember. Then I stopped going to see my counselor.

Counseling

In 2004, after finishing my Ph.D, I was invited to join the faculty of the English Department at Wheaton College in Illinois. Once in the Chicago area, I met a man I wanted to marry, and I realized that if I was ever going to have a good relationship with him, I needed to deal with what had happened to me as a child. By the grace of God, I found another Christian counselor with years of experience helping adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and I started meeting with her.

I had clear memories of a girl from the church my family had attended between 1980-86 who sexually inappropriate interactions with me and a number of other children in our church. So I started talking about those experiences. I concluded that the girl had herself been sexually abused, since she knew and did things she could have only learned from an adult or explicit pornographic material, and I forgave her for what she had done to me.

Then I began talking about the nightmare I had the night after my sister Erin had locked herself in the bathroom. I had an absolute certainty that the man from the dream was a real person. And I changed the prayer I had prayed in 2002. Now I prayed that the Holy Spirit, by His power, would help me to clearly remember what had happened to me so that I could be healed from it. One afternoon in March of 2006, I stood out on a hill by a tree in a wind-storm and called my counselor to tell her that I knew something had happened to me at the home of my best friend in Martinez, California when I was a child—I could see the house in my memory—but it was like an invisible bubble was over the house and I couldn’t get inside of it to remember what had happened there.

When I next met with my counselor, she handed me a piece of paper and told me to draw my best friend’s house. I drew the outlines of all the rooms on the ground floor, upstairs, and downstairs, describing each place as I drew. Then I handed the paper to her. She looked at it and then at me, and she asked, “Where is the bathroom?” I had drawn an entire house without any bathrooms.

Flashback

Then I experienced what is known in the psychological literature on trauma as a flashback. I re-lived the experience of being sexually assaulted when I was eight years old. I saw and heard and felt in my body all the terror and the pain of it.

When I was eight years old, my brother Jimmy and I went to stay the night at my best friend’s house. My best friend and her sister lived in the downstairs apartment of their house, and that night, their uncle, Johnie Dale Damron, was visiting them. In the middle of the night, when I thought everyone else was asleep, I got up and went to the bathroom. That was when Johnie Dale Damron, a man with blond hair and dressed in black, appeared in the doorway of the bathroom. I was completely undressed when he held my head down where the wall met the hard floor and ejaculated in my mouth. I remember his beard scratching against my left ear when he whispered terrifying threats into it. I remember rolling onto my left side, gagging as I spat semen up on the floor.

I also remember dissociating from the experience when it was happening. Because sexual assault is so traumatic, children cannot remain fully psychologically present when the assault is happening. Instead, many children feel themselves leaving their bodies, floating up to the ceiling or disappearing into the flowers on bed sheets. When I was sexually assaulted, I clearly saw Jesus, dressed in white, appear in the corner of the bathroom. I felt my soul leave my body, become tiny like an infant, and curl up against his chest where I hid my eyes from what was happening to my body on the floor until it was over.

After re-living these traumatic memories, I was furious, and I wanted to kill the man who had attacked me. I did my homework, and I found out that Johnie Dale Damron has a long list of felony convictions in the state of California. He is also a registered sex offender in the Ohio state eSORN (electronic Sexual Offenders Registration Network) database. I considered buying a gun, driving to the town he lived in, shooting him four times in the head, and then turning myself into the police. But then I realized that I did not want to stand before God on Judgment Day and explain why I had murdered a man whose life God had not yet seen fit to end. I asked God why my attacker was still alive, and I heard God say it wouldn’t help me or others he had attacked if he were dead. And I accepted this.

Reporting

In July of 2006, I returned to Martinez, California, the jurisdiction where the assault had occurred in 1983. I met with Police Detective Lisa Maloney, and I reported the assault, which, I had learned, was legally categorized as Aggravated Sexual Assault of a Child, a violation of Title 9, Chapter 1, Section 269 (a) (4) of the California Penal Code, which states:

Any person who commits any of the following acts upon a child who is under fourteen years of age … that person is guilty of aggravated sexual assault of a child: …oral copulation, in violation of Section 288a, when committed by force, violence, duress, menace or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the victim or another person … Any person who violates this section is guilty of a felony and shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for fifteen years to life.

However, though the law clearly stated my assailant was guilty of a felony and subject to a prison term, the statute of limitations in California made it impossible to prosecute incidents of child abuse and sexual assault that occurred before 1984. The District Attorney in Martinez would not take the case. Two other adults who had been sexually assaulted by Johnie Dale Damron as children came forward and related their experiences to Detective Lisa Malony at this time as well, but as the sexual assaults against them also took place before 1984, nothing further was done.

Another nightmare

In the course of making my report to Detective Malony, she asked me if I had ever been sexually abused or assaulted by anyone else. I told her about the girl from church. She asked if I had ever been sexually abused or assaulted by another man. I thought not. But that very night, when I went back to Vallejo where I was staying with my family, I had another nightmare.

I was sleeping in a room with my sister Anne, and in my sleep, I saw a man appear by the window of the room. He was a fat man with a round face, a balding head, and a black mustache. In my hallucinatory nightmare, I was terrified that he was going to hurt my sister. I woke up screaming so loud that everyone in my family was, again, startled out of their sleep and their beds. They came running to me and my sister, every one of them thinking that we were being attacked by someone who had broken into the house.

I wondered what this nightmare could mean. It was far too similar to the one I had before. But the man I had seen in this nightmare looked nothing like Johnie Dale Damron. This was a different man. I felt sick.

The next day, I got up, and I went to the house of the girl from church who had done sexually inappropriate things to me as a child. Neither she nor her family lived there anymore, but a kind Italian couple did, and they proudly showed me their newly landscaped backyard. In one part of the yard, concrete had been poured, and in it, the family of the girl who had lived there before had written their name and the year “1982”—evidence they had lived there the year before I turned eight. While I was there, I had a memory flash across my mind of a window with sunlight shining through it. I knew it was the window of a room where something bad had happened to me.

Another flashback

I returned to my home in Wheaton, Illinois, and I went to see my counselor again. I told her about the nightmare and the memory of the window. She handed me a piece of paper and asked me to draw the room where this window was. I didn’t think I could because the window was all I could remember. So I drew the window first … and then a dresser … and then toys on the floor. I handed the paper to my counselor. She asked me, “Where is the bed?” I had drawn a bedroom without a bed.

Then I remembered the bed and the bedspread. I remembered being a small girl and doing summersaults on the bed in the afternoon in a shirt and my underwear. I remembered the man from my nightmare coming into the room, pushing me down on the bed, getting on top of me, and manually stimulating my clitoris. I remembered my legs feeling trapped by his weight. I remembered looking out of the window, which was full of sunlight, and wishing I could escape through it. I remembered the man getting off of me and bringing me a pair of jeans from the dresser. I remembered feeling so, so sad. I remembered looking at the man and wondering: why did you do this to me?

As I was remembering these things, I was crouched down in the corner of my counselor’s office, sobbing and covering my face with my hair. I couldn’t speak. I was caught in the flashback, seeing and hearing and feeling again everything that had happened to me before. It was terrible. But it was also a relief when the memory was complete. I felt like I had victory because I had remembered, because my memories were being fully integrated into my present reality, because I was becoming whole.

Later on, I remembered the man’s name: Stanley. I called up my brother Jimmy and described the man’s appearance to him, and he remembered him. As I eventually realized, Stanley Wacht was the grandfather of a friend of mine from the church I grew up in. His son, Junior, was known to have sexually abused my friend and her sister. Both of these men would have had access to a number of children in our church. Because the incident had taken place in Martinez, California, I notified Detective Maloney and gave her permission to add the information to my initial report. However, there was no need to investigate this abusive incident further because Stanley had died in the mid-nineties in Yountville, California, of a heart attack.

Recovering

The process of recovering from the traumatic experiences and memories of sexual abuse and assault has taken a long time. It has involved counseling, praying, and learning. I have remembered much more than I have written about here, and inwardly, the fragmented aspects of my psyche have become more whole and unified. In the recovery process, I have focused on understanding what has happened and asking God to heal me. And I have experienced healing as the power of fear has been broken in my life.

Though I believe that healing is an on-going process, I can say truly that the years 2004-2007 have been three of the most victorious, life-changing, and empowering of my life. I have grown stronger, and I have felt more joyful than ever before. I never knew how different my life and my feelings about it could be.

The power of the Holy Spirit working in my memories has transformed me and redeemed me. As God promises in the Scriptures, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32) and “Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5).

Ministry

I originally sought to deal with my issues because I wanted to be married, and I thought it wouldn’t be fair to my husband if I didn’t come to terms with my past experiences. Though I haven’t married yet, I have realized that God did not just heal me for my sake or the sake of my future family. There is an entire world full of people who have been devastated by sexual abuse, sexual assault, and sex trafficking who need the love and healing power of God so that they can be set free from what has happened to them.

As a child, I experienced more than ten separate incidents of sexual abuse and assault. But there are children, as well as adult men and women, who are sexually assaulted more than ten times per day. These are people who have been sold by their families, trafficked by mafia, and forced into prostitution. My heart is for the salvation and redemption of all people who have been sexually abused and assaulted, and it is especially for those who are being repeatedly assaulted because they have been trapped or trafficked. I pray daily for an end to these evils, and I ask you, who have read my story, to pray with me.

“For with God, nothing is impossible.” (Luke 1:37)

Dr. Jane Beal
JSASSN International