My Story
Please allow me to introduce myself before we go much further. My name is Anne Marie Miller, which I’m guessing you saw on the cover. I’m in my midthirties and have been married to my husband, Tim, a youth pastor, since 2013. I grew up in the church—the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister—with a passion for learning the Bible. I was the honors student, the athlete, the girl who got along with everyone—from the weird kids to the popular crowd. It was a good life. I was raised in a good home.
In 1996, I was sixteen, and the internet was new. After my family moved from a sheltered, conservative life in west Texas (think Friday Night Lights) to the diverse culture of Dallas, I found myself lonely, curious, and confused.
Because of my volatile life circumstances at the time—I was struggling with my new environment and dealing with the stress of my dad’s depression—I reached out to a local youth pastor. I needed help and went to what was familiar. I asked him for assistance in launching a Bible study, and he offered some materials for leading a prayer rally at my high school. A few weeks later our relationship changed, and for the next six months—most of my junior year of high school—he sexually abused me.
Sex was one of those things my family and my church kept in the dark. There was no talk about “the birds and the bees” for me. The combination of teenage hormones, the variety of new words I heard at school and on the radio, and the sexual nature of my abuse left me feeling lost and confused. I couldn’t ask my parents about it. I thought they’d ground me for life. Plus, pastors were (wrongly) godlike in my view, so I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone about what that youth pastor was doing to me. I didn’t want to get him in trouble even though I knew what was happening to me was illegal. I felt like I must have done something to “deserve” the abuse. And I couldn’t talk to my friends. Most of them were sexually active, and I was embarrassed about my lack of knowledge and experience. I didn’t know what certain words meant and was too afraid to ask.
Instead, I turned to the internet for education, and what began as an innocent pursuit of knowledge quickly escalated into a coping mechanism. Soon that coping mechanism—looking at online pornography—became a compulsive behavior.1 When I looked at pornography, I experienced feelings of love and safety—at least for a brief moment. But after those brief moments of relief disappeared, I felt ashamed and confused. Pornography provided me both an emotional and a sexual escape. It was medication.
I carried this secret and the heavy shame that accompanied it for years. I knew guys looked at porn—that was culturally common and even somewhat socially acceptable. But a girl? A preacher’s kid? Surely there was something wrong with me, something dark and perverted. Why else would the youth pastor take advantage of me? Why else would I seek out the images and videos I did? Why else would they make me feel better?
My Rock-Bottom Moment
As soon as I graduated high school, I found a successful job at one of the first dot-com companies. I took home a great paycheck, enjoyed all the luxuries it afforded, and was close to my friends and family. The year before, shortly after my nineteenth birthday, my longtime boyfriend had proposed to me, and I had said yes. I was engaged. But despite all that, my online habits were affecting my off-line life.
I’d reconnected with a male friend from high school through the internet. We chatted online at night and eventually met in person again. It had been two years since I’d seen him. I promised myself it was an innocent friendship and denied how my heart raced when I was with him. We began to see each other more and more—until one day, we were caught.
My fiancé knew I had a time-consuming job and was gracious about it. He worked at a law firm, and we had planned for me to cut back on my hours once we were married. He and I were supposed to go on a date one night, but I called him from work to cancel, telling him my colleagues were going out after work and I needed to be there. He understood. What I didn’t say was that “people from work” meant my old high school friend, a lie I justified by having him meet me at my office, so technically, he was a person from work. I assuaged my guilt in technicalities.
We went to see a movie. When my fiancé called my old Nokia cell phone during the movie, I thought I’d pressed the end button but unknowingly hit the talk button instead. He overheard the movie and the bits of conversation my “friend” and I were having.
Later that night, my fiancé confronted me. I confessed—yes, I’d been spending time with another man. Yes, we had a romantic relationship. When my fiancé asked if I loved this other man, I didn’t know how to answer. All I knew was that I felt really good around him. So I said yes. Yes, I loved him.
My fiancé and I sat in my living room. I gave him back our engagement ring. We cried. He kept asking, “Why? Why? Why?” And I kept saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” He left in tears. I never saw him again.
*Based on his present circumstances, there is a relatively good chance my ex-fiancé will read this book. If you do read this, please know how sorry I am for the way I mistreated you. I’m so glad you have found happiness with your wife and family.
That night, I stared at myself in the mirror. In some ways, it was like staring at a stranger. I remember touching my cheeks, wondering if the person in the reflection was me. All I knew was that something was wrong with my mind.
I knew lying was wrong. I knew cheating was wrong. I knew my selfishness was wrong. I knew the way I was living my life was wrong. I wondered where the good preacher’s kid went. I looked in the mirror and said out loud, “You weren’t raised to be a porn-watching, materialistic, two-timing slut.”
The word slut slithered out of my mouth like a hiss. I was disgusted with myself for saying it, but at the same time, I also had an epiphany. Wait. The “real me” never would have said the word slut. Why did I say it?
I closed my eyes. I saw the word slut painted in a million different colors and fonts. It was like I was looking at a computer screen through the lens of my mind’s eye.
In that moment I realized the connection: my porn habit was somehow part of the demise of my relationship. Pornography—the words, the messages, and even the actions—had infiltrated my mind and my life.
That was the night I walked over to my computer, a purple and beige Compaq Presario, unplugged the tower, marched it down the concrete stairs of my apartment building and across the parking lot, and placed it next to an overflowing dumpster. That was the night, disgusted and frustrated by my lack of control and online pornography bingeing, I threw away my computer. I’d hit rock bottom.
Two years later, at the age of twenty-one, I finally opened up to a friend, only because she confessed her struggle with pornography use to me first. We began a path toward healing and for the last fifteen years, though it’s not been a perfect journey, I can say with great confidence that God has set me free from the desire to look at pornography and from the shame I carried for so long.
Speaking Up about Freedom
Over the last decade, I’ve had the opportunity to share my story in a variety of venues with hundreds of thousands of teens, college students, men, and women. Sharing my story is always a little awkward, but it’s a gift I’ve embraced over time.* It honestly doesn’t even feel like it’s my story anymore.
*I call it the spiritual gift of awkwardness.
Instead, it’s a story God has redeemed for good. I am no longer the woman at the well, ashamed of her past. Instead, I am the woman at the well after Jesus meets her—the woman who, despite the shame and embarrassment and awkwardness and fear, can’t wait to tell others what he did for me.
After Jesus met this Samaritan woman, she couldn’t contain her joy.
The woman left her water jar beside the well and ran back to the village, telling everyone, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he possibly be the Messiah?” So the people came streaming from the village to see him.
John 4:28–30 NLT
Like the Samaritan woman at the well, I can’t wait to share that there’s hope and freedom down the road. And beyond that, there’s joy!
I was twenty-seven years old when I left my full-time job at a church to become a full-time author and speaker. I worried people wouldn’t listen to me because I was so young. Many of the audiences I spoke to were comprised of parents and people in their midforties. Although I always felt a little timid speaking to these listeners, I drew strength from the truth that I was called by God to share my story of redemption with them. Over time I came to understand that many men and women, no matter their age, related to my experiences. We shared a common history: sexual abuse, struggles with pornography, codependency, feelings of worthlessness, and issues with body image. Although hearing people’s stories was painful, seeing God heal and transform others—and continue to heal me—was rewarding.
In my early thirties, I returned to school to study the science behind addiction and the sociology behind family dynamics. My goal was to bring a technical understanding of sexuality into the realm of religion and faith, where I saw it was deeply lacking. During this time, more student ministries and universities began to ask me to speak. Now my fear was that I was too old. What twelve-year-old boy wants to hear someone his mom’s age talk about sex? Awkward! Yet I sensed a calling to share with students how God has freed me from the shame and actions of my past. I yearned to assure them that they aren’t alone (because everyone always truly thinks they are alone). One college dean referred to me as “the grenade we’re tossing into our student body to get the conversation of sex started.” He and other administrators had realized that sweeping these topics under the rug caused their students to feel trapped, obsessed, and ashamed. I will continue to share my testimony in this capacity as long as there is a student in front of me who needs to hear it. When I finish speaking at these events, I’m always surprised to see how many students line up to talk with me afterward. They want and need to share their stories, their desire to be free from their struggles with pornography, their battles with shame, and their pain from abuse—struggles, battles, and pain no one knew about.2
An Unexpected Shift
The core of my ministry completely changed in the summer of 2013 when I entered a world few souls in my profession dare to venture into: junior high church summer camps. From Canada to Illinois, my husband Tim and I spent weeks with junior high students, equal parts terrified of their emerging hormones and enamored with their not-quite-teenagers-yet innocence.
The last night of the last camp was pivotal for me. In fact, it prompted the idea for this book.
The camp directors (who were youth pastors at the church sponsoring the camp) asked me to share my story with the junior high girls, most of whom were ten to thirteen years old. I had shared a little each day, but the last night culminated in hours of open one-on-one confession and counseling in the back of the auditorium. As the girls tearfully shared their stories with me, I was forced to mask my shock and horror regarding what they confessed. At the same time, I noticed three things in common with almost all the stories and confessions I heard that night:
When I mentioned what I’d learned to the youth pastor at the night’s end, I’ll never forget what he said: “The thing is that most parents think their kid is the exception.”
At the end of the evening, I collapsed onto the bed in our camp room. Tim comforted me as I wrestled with what to do with all the information I’d heard over the summer. The next day I penned a blog post titled “Three Things Parents Don’t Know about Their Kids and Sex.” Within seventy-two hours, the post went viral, with more than 1.5 million people reading and sharing it across social media channels. What I’d learned at church camp clearly connected with many parents who wanted to protect their children but didn’t know where to begin.
Now more than ever I am aware of just how little parents know about what’s happening with their children and sex. Please don’t hear this as an insult to you, your heart, your intention, or your love for your kids. It’s not. And because I haven’t experienced years of parenting (yet), I feel terribly inadequate telling you this.
But I can’t not tell you. A mentor and close friend recently reminded me that the two people who talked about marriage the most in the Bible were Jesus and Paul, neither of whom was married. God’s call is God’s call, and I am confident in my call to speak out on this topic. Those closest to me affirm this.
After seeing the innocence in the eyes of ten-year-old girls who’ve carried secrets nobody, let alone children, should carry, and after hearing some of the most horrific accounts from students I’ve heard in recent years, I cannot go one more day without pleading with you to talk with your children.
Would you prefer your son learn what a fetish is from you or from searching Google Images? How would you feel if your daughter came home from a slumber party singing the lyrics to an inappropriate song? That happened to a friend of mine. She overheard her eight-year-old daughter singing the lyrics to “All about That Bass,” a song that refers to a young woman’s curvy hips as something guys like “to hold at night.” When my friend asked her daughter where she heard it, her daughter replied, “We watched the video on Taylor’s iPad.” Of course, in conducting proper research for this book, I also watched the video, which includes a model wrapped in plastic wrap, sexy poses and dancing, along with a couple of ten-year-old girls dancing to the song in the video. Another friend of mine learned her daughter first saw porn in the church bathroom via an image on a fifth-grader’s phone.
Do the right thing, the hard thing, and talk to your children about sex for their sake and the sake of your family. If we don’t have these conversations now, I am terrified the enemy will continue to steal hope and joy from our youngest generation, paralyzing their ability to advance the kingdom of God as they mature. We can’t let this happen anymore. It’s going to be hard, but you don’t have to do it alone. This book (along with your church, your community, your doctors, your counselors, and your friends) can guide you through the process.