Chapter One: Valley & Stone 2 of 5

THE VALLEY OF EARLY TRAUMA

My earliest memory of harm came when I was about three years old—judging by what I could see at eye level the day my dad called me into his room. He told me to get on the bed, and from where I stood, the mattress seemed impossibly high. I couldn’t climb onto it without help. Back then, I believed I was Daddy’s favorite. You might think that day would have altered something in me. But there was no rupture, only familiarity. Whatever I endured that day had already found a home in me, though I can’t remember when or how. When I try to follow trauma back beyond age three, I encounter only confusion and questions a child should never know. So, I choose to trust that what has been hidden is safer hidden still.

THE STONE OF GRACE - The God Who Sees What’s Hidden

For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with that memory. It disturbed me less because of what happened and more because of what didn’t happen. There was no shock, no internal alarm, no moment where my body registered, this isn’t right. There was familiarity. That’s what unsettled me as an adult. What does it mean when harm doesn’t feel new?

When I first started walking seriously with the Lord and reading Scripture with hunger instead of obligation, I kept circling back to one story in Genesis. Hagar. A woman used, discarded, and sent away. A woman with no power in her own story. After she fled into the wilderness, the angel of the Lord found her. Not Abraham, not Sarah, but the Lord. And she gave Him a name: “You are the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). That verse unraveled me. Because for years I had wondered: Who saw? Who knew? Who understood what was happening before I had language for it? God did! Not later, not when I could articulate it. Not when I brought it to Him in prayer as an adult. He saw the three-year-old. He saw whatever preceded that memory, even the parts my mind mercifully concealed.

Scripture tells us that there are things hidden from us that are known fully to Him. And instead of being disturbed by that, I’ve learned to rest in it. I don’t need every detail unearthed to heal. I need to know that none of it was unseen.

What once felt like evidence of damage, the familiarity, I now understand differently. Children normalize what they must survive. That wasn’t consent. That was protection. And God, in His mercy, allowed my mind to forget what my body couldn’t process.

There are questions I could chase. Timelines I could try to reconstruct. But I’ve come to believe that some hidden things are hidden for kindness. The God who sees is also the God who shields.

Today, when I sit with women who carry their own early trauma, I don’t speak from theory. I know what it is to feel confused by your own lack of outrage. I know what it’s like to question your own responses.

And I also know this: Being seen by God is more powerful than remembering everything. The valley holds memory. The Stone holds truth. I was never invisible.

And I was never unguarded, even when I didn’t know I needed guarding.