Memories Are a Tricky Thing

Bits of a life in Ethnos360/New Tribes Mission

When childhood trauma strikes, the brain takes over. Shielding, distorting, burying—whatever it takes to help that child survive. Years of therapy have taught me not to fear the hidden memories clawing their way to the surface. I’m strong now. I’m no longer that powerless child, molded by the whims of a toxic doctrine instituted by Ethnos360, formerly New Tribes Mission.

My parents returned to the States when I was 18. I had graduated at 17 and stayed behind to teach first through third grade at the missionary boarding school while the regular teacher was on sick leave. Yes, you read that right. A freshly graduated teenager, handed a classroom of small children—another stark reminder of how little missionary kids mattered to Ethnos.

While my parents spent their furlough in their home state, I packed up and left for New Tribes Bible Institute in Michigan. So young. So naïve. So perfect—the ideal blank slate for the mission to shape into a future missionary’s wife.

That ignorance, that lack of basic life skills, left me vulnerable. I was abused again—and told it was my fault. With my parents back overseas, I had no one to turn to. For nearly four years, I was homeless, drifting between relatives’ couches and friends’ spare rooms, never stable, never secure. But after a childhood of instability, this felt… normal. Right?

The deepest wounds stay buried—if you’re lucky. Mine began to surface when I held my first child. That was the start of my awakening. A slow, painful unraveling of the past, learning to face what happened to me from a place of strength, not powerlessness. I’m not that little girl anymore, hiding in corners, lost in a book, praying invisibility would keep her safe.

This reckoning isn’t easy. It isn’t simple. It’s exhausting, agonizing work. But there is healing in confronting abuse from a place of power—in rewriting the ending they never meant for you to have.

~ThreeWillows