Freeing a Life Steeped in Trauma
“I remember I ran up and down the street just over and over and over again.”
It was a hot, summer day in rural Alabama when an 8- year-old, Pam Whitehead, learned her father had brutally killed her mother. He was later sentenced to 50 years. “Just screaming, and running up and down the street,” recalled Pam.
Eight years later Pam would see another violent man go to prison – the foster father who’d taken her and her younger siblings in after her own father went to prison. It was Pam who reported him to police for beating and sexually abusing them.
Pam said, “The anxiety that was in me, I could not hold down a lot of food. I was so scared. That 10-year-old girl that I see in that picture, so scared.”
Pam was 11 when she figured out alcohol made life bearable. “I liked it, and it took away the feeling, the pain, and so I knew from that moment that if I didn’t want to remember anything, I didn’t want to be responsible for anything, I could just drink,” she said.
She did hear about God and Jesus occasionally when her foster mom took Pam and her siblings to church. “I didn’t think He cared about me. I didn’t think He saw me. If you cared about me. How? Why would you allow all these things to happen to me?”
Pam had endured the hell for 8 years before finding the courage to go to authorities. Now 16 and an alcoholic, she took little comfort when her foster dad was sentenced to twenty years and decided swallowing a bottle of pills was her only chance for peace.
Pam said, “I needed help. I was depressed. I was anxious. I couldn’t eat. I felt terrible because my brother and my sisters were being separated and all of that coupled with the trial for my foster father led me to suicide.”
After the failed suicide attempt that earned her a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital, Pam would continue to fight depression, suicide attempts, and alcoholism for years to come. Her numerous trips to rehab were unsuccessful. Pam said, “Not drinking, never crossed my mind, like, how could I live without it? I just thought, this is how I have to live the rest of my life.”
Pam’s twenties would be a string of disappointments and failures. She joined and got kicked out of the army. A marriage ended in divorce in which she lost custody of her son. She got pregnant again and had an abortion. To fight the depression, she used alcohol and cocaine to fight the loneliness and fear of being alone. She also turned to sex. “I had a lot of rage and a lot of anger, and so the idea was, I’ll get you before you get me, because I didn’t trust anybody,” said Pam.
Her friends tried to talk to her into getting help, but Pam wouldn’t listen. Now approaching 30, she felt beyond anyone’s reach including God’s. She said, “There’s no way I can come back from the things that I’ve done, the lies that I’ve told. The secrets that I have that nobody knows about. He knows that, there’s no way.”
Then one night, at a party she couldn’t get drunk, no matter how much she drank. “And this voice comes out of nowhere and says to me, ‘This is your life. You’re always on the outside looking in. Even in a room full of people, you still feel all alone. But I am with you.' And I was like, who is that? I didn’t know that voice and I got mad because it was the most honest thing I’d ever heard in my life. It was so true. No matter where I was, no matter what room I was in, no matter who was there, I was still alone.”
Pam again went to AA, and this time got sober. Still, she refused to let God into her life. Four years later that would change. Now 32, on the verge of another divorce and raising a daughter, Pam was again facing her childhood pain and fears that no one wanted her. She agreed to go to church with a friend who told her she’d find everything she needed through Jesus. Sitting in the service, Pam realized her friend was right.
Of that moment Pam recalled, “I want you. I did. I want you and I need you. And that day I asked Him to come into my life and I surrendered.”
Pam said, “Yes. He gave me hope cause I didn’t have any, I had none.” Pam says as she poured over God’s word, the depression lifted. She was also able to forgive the men who caused her so much pain and found the freedom to move forward with her life.
“I wanted nothing more than to be rid of my old life and so the scriptures came alive to me and I believed them, and I’ve studied them, and they’re written on my heart. And, now for me that’s, it’s alive in me. It’s everything.”
Today, both Pam and her husband, Robert, are following Christ and are happily married. She is the executive director of Prolove Ministries and leans on what Jesus did in her life to help others feel loved and find their way.
Pam said, “Oh, I can’t even imagine not walking in this freedom. Man it’s the best place to live. It really is! That hope that we have in Jesus Christ, and knowing that this isn’t all there is. This life right here is not all there is. There is more, there is more.”
