Psalm 13, Erin Brockovich, and the Debris of Sexual Abuse

by on October 31, 2025

If you’ve ever wrestled with the long, uneven work of healing, we hope today’s conversation offers courage for the journey. 

Dan shares his recent reflections on the lament of waiting found in Psalm 13 and the persistent pursuit of justice embodied by Erin Brockovich as he rewatched the 2000 film. He and Rachael explore the tension between justice today and the full restoration that is “not yet,” bringing these insights into the lingering impact of past sexual abuse.

Healing after sexual abuse shapes not just your body but your whole affective and relational world. When harm happens in relationships, it distorts your sense of safety, trust, and even goodness. You may notice contempt toward your own body, frustration at emotional reactions, or fear around your own desires. Hypervigilance, self-protection, or numbing can become familiar companions, and trusting others—or even yourself—can feel risky. The work of healing in adult life is laborious, requiring vulnerability, patience, and courage to reclaim desire, goodness, and the capacity to be seen.

They consider Psalm 13 as both a cry of lament and a thread of hope. It doesn’t promise immediate relief. It simply says, “I trust in your unfailing love,” leaving open the possibility that this is not the end of the story.

Healing is not a linear path or a once-and-done process. It’s a lifelong journey of tending to what remains—the physiological, emotional, relational, and spiritual aftermath of trauma. And yet, even in the hard work, there is invitation: keep choosing life, goodness, and the beauty of your own desire.

Every small act of caring for your body, each moment of speaking truth, each return to beauty becomes a protest against despair—a glimpse of the wholeness that is coming. Healing itself is a form of justice.

* This episode engages the topic of abuse, particularly sexual abuse and child abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

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Episode Transcript 

Dan: Sometimes, Rachael, you ask me, what’s our focus or title? I think it’s more title. We usually know the focus. So let me give you a title for our time. Psalm 13, Erin Brockovich and The Reality of the Debris of Sexual Abuse. Do you like that title?

Rachael: It’s very particular. And so yes, but I’m also very intrigued.

Dan: Let me read Psalm 13. It’s pretty short. “How long, Lord will you forget me Forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?” I’ll stop there just for the moment. Erin Brockovich. I was starting to watch sections of that and it really brought back, damn, I don’t like the debris I know I still wrestle with. With regard to some of the effects of past sexual abuse, Erin Brockovich is exposing Pacific Gas and electricity and their simple pollution of a town called Hinckley, California with Chromium six waste. And I think most people have had some familiarity with the movie and the brilliance of this woman who she has no law degree, and yet she has the ability to help people tell their story and see how it synthesizes in exposure of this wicked company at that time bringing about such destruction to the bodies and lives. So as I began playing with Psalm 13 and Erin Brockovich, and then thinking about the reality of there are times my body is not working, at times my affective dysregulation has caused some significant complications in my marriage, I thought this is important to come and begin the process of saying how do you engage the issues of your own past playing out in the present and the reality that it’s not just harm you endured, but it’s harm you continue to endure in the context of your life. How do you deal with debris and injustice? Help us.

Rachael: Well, I first just want to say even your introduction, I’m just feeling a lot of tenderness. I can actually feel, I feel like I want to cry. I could feel tears. There’s just something so painful about, and we talk about this a lot in our work, and yes, in my own story and history of healing and contending, we’re not just dealing with the initial wound, though we are, but we’re also dealing with the debris and all that’s lost in the wake of it. And so in many ways, as much as we want healing to be a very linear, very, like you just pinpoint the symptom and then you just tend to it. I feel like any form of abuse, but particularly sexual abuse in the ways that it engages the body, it’s a very holistic and robust journey of healing that in many ways does leave us with some sense of we will not know the justice we are meant to know until all is made right? And that doesn’t mean we don’t lean in to honor to leaning into justice, to leaning into wanting things to be made and pursuing, whatever we can toward that. But when you’re reckoning with lifelong debris, again, that doesn’t always have the same impact. It doesn’t always have the same volume of impact, but if there’s an illusion that the healing journey, you just get healed and then you’re not ever having to tend to or have compassion for or wrestle with anger. This is why very simplified theological, spiritual bypassing around forgiveness just infuriates me. Because forgiveness will forever and always be an ongoing process because we’re never going to reach a point where we’re not dealing with something of the impact of someone’s harm in some way, shape, or form. And so anyhow, that’s probably more than you were asking for when you asked me that question. But.

Dan: No, it’s so central, and again, I think it’s important before we actually name some of the debris to be able to say all forms of justice today are but a small taste of what will one day be true. And we can’t let what one day be true keep us from pursuing justice today. Yet if we think there is a resolve, something that finishes and provides full satisfaction for all that we have endured, it’s a set up to in some sense become even more the perpetrators in the pursuit of justice. We become the perpetrators of another level of injustice because we’re demanding the finality today. So holding that is a tension. It’s just a incredible tension between what we have underscored a number of times, the interplay of the already and the not yet there is meant to be something today and part of healing, and I think it’s important for me to hear this, part of healing was a form of justice. It’s a way of saying though I will never fully be who I might have been, I can become more and have something even more of a taste of the coming day. And that sense, healing, grace, mercy, growing tenderness can create and even greater commitment to, hell, no. I mean, I just love how the Psalm holds God in this tension of how long, how much longer do I have to wrestle with my thoughts and sorrow in my heart? Again, we’ll come back to the Psalm in a moment, but let’s just name what to be some of the physiological, affective and relational debris that from yourself and from others that you’ve worked with is part of the injustice that’s inevitable, particularly with regard to sexual abuse, but actually true with regard to any form of abuse and harm.

Rachael: Yeah, I mean I talked pretty extensively about this in a little series I did, I think last year on things I didn’t expect when healing from trauma in many ways was following some of this pattern. The what’s the physiological, what are the kind of relational, I also was talking even about the spiritual. And for me, I think it’s really important to start with the physiological debris because for so many people, because in many ways when we’re talking about sexual abuse or other forms of abuse, it’s rarely when we were talking about different types of trauma, like an acute trauma where it can be where it’s just like this one time event and it’s the only time you’ve had a violation like that. So there’s a beginning and an end and it’s event oriented in a specific time and space. Sometimes that is the case, but often the case is that it is an ongoing abuse and even if maybe it is contained, it’s still happening within other forms of abuse. So this often falls more into the category of complex trauma, something that’s ongoing, something where we have, especially if you’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse where there’s a profound sense of powerlessness to really be able to escape what’s happening. And we know that acute trauma has PTSD symptoms and we know that complex trauma can’t really call it like post-traumatic stress because in some ways it’s still going. So we have this term CPTSD, like complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is more a way of saying it’s kind of ongoing because you can’t really just one and done deal with this thing, and then you can kind of keep it contained. Again, it’s more pervasive, it’s more holistic. So when we’re thinking about the physiological realities, it’s really important that people get to make connections that some of the disorder they might experience, let’s say in your gut or some of the breakdown in the immune system, higher rates of inflammation. I will let you speak much more to that, but there’s just a sense of abuse has a profound impact on our bodies and our bodies’ systems to bring things in order. And so it disrupts those processes and it’s Bessel van der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps the Score. There’s a lot of other books out there now talking about this, but it has a profound impact on the body. The body is telling a story of the harm that’s experienced, and unfortunately, the more complex, the more chronic over time, the more profound those symptoms can be.

Dan: Well, and you put it so well. The reality is it’s sort of the indirect direct effect of past abuse in that we know that disease processes are deeply affected. Immune system, cancers, arthritis, colitis, all the itises are related to inflammation. Inflammation largely due to stress, biochemicals, adrenaline, cortisol, et cetera. That isn’t metabolized because you’re living in what’s called allostasis. Homeostasis is this lovely intersection between being able to have energy and then rest, energy and rest. The sympathetic parasympathetic system, literally every time you breathe in your body activates some degree of stress bio chemicals. Every time you breathe out, you are coming into a state of relaxation. But when you’re running from something that’s about to destroy you and it’s ongoing, allostasis is your body ramps up to such a degree that your body can’t distribute all the stress biochemicals in a way and allows you to come back to homeostasis. So I would say you, I know for me, we’re both somewhat allostatic in our bodies, which again, without going into all the details, leave us more susceptible to disease process. But if that’s enough, dammit, where are you Lord? But we also know that there are affective consequences, and the reality is there’s a certain degree of affective emotional dysregulation in your life, isn’t there?

Rachael: And I think we’re going to talk more about this next week in our conversation, so we can get into that a little more deeply, but…

Dan: But you can just go Oh, as if it’s not in yours, Dr. Allender.

Rachael: Yeah, yeah. It takes one to know one.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we love each other, honor each other, but we’ve had our moments of intense interactions, fortunately or unfortunately, so have our spouses with each of us. So the reality is that for those with a history of abuse, sometimes the intensity and over reaction or in other words being triggered, plays out. I mean, it’s one of the major things that I wanted people to wrestle with in the Deep Rooted Marriage. Yes, a lot of fights have a substance to them, but a lot have an energy that has almost nothing to do with the surface issue other than things are being triggered. And then add to that, that there’s relational emotional volatility, but also I’m really good at dissociation. I mean, I can read books for hours if not a day, in a kind of disconnected internal reality. So when you begin to talk about the gaps in our memory, it lack of integration due to our thalamus not working, you begin to go, oh, it’s not just our body, but our whole affective system is playing out. And then to think about the relational consequences,

Rachael: Yeah, I mean, if the harm is happening in a relationship and in ways that we, I mean, one of the core aspects of sexual abuse especially is this reality of grooming that sets the stage for which we’ve talked about in other conversations, but it sets us up over time to feel very complicit in our harm. So just this experience of profound contempt towards our bodies, towards our, how do you not have contempt when you have emotional dysregulation? I feel like being a parent of a young child and having my emotional dysregulation kind of in my face all the time, the amount of labor to really stay grounded, I just constantly am up against contempt in this season. It fills in my face more like, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just be like these people I perceive who just don’t get, they’re just not as intense. They just don’t get bothered. I said that to, I just want to be someone who just doesn’t get bothered. This feeling of my desire, my arousal is, my sensuality is dangerous. It’s set me up for harm, my desire for care, my desire for to be seen and delighted in just really good beautiful things about us that we don’t trust, that feel dangerous, that again, we feel set us up for harm or made us foolish and naive and we should have known better. And just that sense of hypervigilance that plays out in trusting others to be good or to not be exploitative or sometimes relationally, we can move the other end of the spectrum where it’s like, I don’t ever want to feel powerless, so I will kind of opt into violence. I’ll opt into my own degradation. I’ll opt into a kind of relational, again, not necessarily consciously, but I just think in some ways as a very subconscious way, I’m not afraid of these things because I’m choosing them, so therefore I don’t have to feel powerless. Or if you’ve had a history that feels very thematic, these kind of reenactments of harm that feel like I’m never going to escape this. Wanting to convince yourself that it’s better to choose it than to be at the mercy of it. So I just think there’s a wide spectrum of some of the relational debris, just whether it’s, yeah, we are more shut off and have this sense of high protective walls that keep us isolated, whether it’s we have weaponized our coping mechanisms like contempt and shame to make sure we’re not harmed again or we don’t harm other people, or whether there’s a kind of recklessness that just says, I don’t care if harm’s what I’m going to know, then I don’t care. I don’t care. It would be better to be dead really than to have to just know when’s the next time going to come. And I just think sometimes we fall in many different places along that spectrum. And it’s incredibly heartbreaking. Because once you start to do healing work and you start to make sense of your story, and not just the story of harm, but the context within which the harm played out, the ways in which your story has shaped how you would relate to the world around you, how you would be vulnerable even to perpetrators, you start to understand how contempt would make you feel safe, how shame at times would feel more familiar than goodness how desire has been exploited for a long time. And so for me, this is some of the most painful work because it’s not work you can necessarily do in isolation, whereas in some ways physiological work, you certainly need care providers, but it just is different, right? Even affective work, you can do body work. And of course that still sometimes depends on other people, but relational healing work requires a kind of vulnerability that can just feel really threatening.

Dan: Well, I had a client say it this way. She said, I feel like I flip flop back and forth between in one sense, one extreme and then another. And then I find the only thing that seems to work is to numb myself to normalcy. And I thought, oh, I’ve just never heard that phrase, numb myself to be normal. Trying to think through, okay, what does a normal person do when they get triggered? What does a normal person do given that they don’t seem to get triggered? And in that sense of, I’ve lost me in the process because now all I’m trying to do is to make sure I don’t offend my spouse, my children, my neighbors, my church, et cetera. So you come back to this core question of I would fear at the worst, and I just will put it in extremes at the worst, someone can hear so far and just kind of go, well, that’s a damn life and I feel justified to do what I want to do. That kind of indulgence in the heartache and in the harm or more likely a kind of hopelessness, a kind of, I’ve known it all along, this is too big with too many consequences. There’s really nothing that I can do if you’re just naming it quickly, the physiological, the affective, the relational, and then your point earlier, the spiritual. And that’s why we come back to Psalm 13, and let me just take us to verse three. “Look on me and answer, Lord my God, give light to my eyes or I will sleep in death and my enemy will say, I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall.” To me, as I read that Psalm prompted by Erin Brockovich, I’m like, oh, you’re so angry at God. So blaming God and in and of itself, let me just remind people what I’ve said a million times. This is worship, it’s Psalm of praise or lament or thanksgiving, and in this case obviously lament and complaint, but it’s considered worship. So in that the reality, we get to bring our deepest and most jagged questions about God’s goodness to God directly. I don’t know how many times I’ve just felt like I’m not alone. The questions I still have after being a follower of Jesus for over 45 years and still going, I echo, I echo this. And yet the Psalmist turns, even rage to the invitation of, look, if I don’t find some light, I’m dead and your enemies win. Is that how you want this? I mean, it’s almost a negotiation tactic with God. Hey, it’s your reputation, my life, but is this what you want? Desire opens up a realm of engagement. All these issues, the physiological, will you care that your body can grow and heal? Will you allow yourself to long not to resolve the affective complications, but actually to find something of the goodness of God in the midst of the extremity you may feel? And then hardest of all, could I actually be in a community that doesn’t write me off for being weird, but also doesn’t indulge it in a way where people are afraid of my extremity? And so all this comes back for me at least to that powerful third verse, will you let desire come to be rooted and grow something of how you begin to engage not only your own self, but God’s self?

Rachael: I was actually just thinking back to in some ways, I would just say, at least in my own story, I think I would’ve listened to a podcast like this and still been thinking about all the other people I was serving in ministry that this was for, and I would not have been able to hear, that it was for me. I just was not in the place. And in some ways, the profound mercy of God in my life at the time and my youthfulness to kind of uproot me and plant me in a place that’s like you’re going to be invited into understanding your story, understanding yourself, and not like I wouldn’t call the Seattle School or Mars Hill Graduate School time a gentle way, but at least for me, because it was housed in my pursuit of more theological education and vocational kind of faithful stewardship and still at least initially to grow skills to help other people and to be in a context where so many of the things that we’ve named here were playing out in my life, were bringing tremendous heartache to me and to others. Were bringing tremendous shame and contempt for myself. I did find myself in the context of just, I don’t know, people who were like, welcome. You’re not as volatile as you think you are. You’re not as unlovable as you feel. You’re not crazy. There are many reasons why your body suffers when it suffers, why your nervous system is so dysregulated and why you, at least for me, I’ll speak for myself why codependency feels safer than true intimacy. How it’s kept you alive. And we can bless that. So I just think that sense of desire, sometimes we don’t have to have the clear-eyed sobered sense of my desire is for this particular thing. Sometimes it might be our desire is just yes for goodness, for more goodness to sometimes we find ourselves in a context that healing is for us that we didn’t even know we needed it. And then sometimes we know, and maybe we’ve even tried different things. Maybe we’ve gone to therapy. Maybe we tried to be honest with friends at church. Maybe we took that yoga class or tried all these things that people are saying this can help, and it just made us feel more hopeless. And I just think, yes, I think about the mustard seed of, is there any part of you, any part of your heart that says, I want more. There has to be more for me that can relate to this Psalmist basically saying, and if there’s not, I don’t know. And so yeah, I just want to say I have tasted profound healing. My life is radically different today than I ever had imagination for. Does that mean we were talking about when we started that I have arrived at someplace where I don’t deal with physiological debris or affective dysregulation or relational struggles at times, or familiar reactive moments in relationship? Of course I do. But I have tasted so much goodness, so much freedom, so much clarity of mind, so much healing in my body, so much more grounding and peace and a solid ground to stand on. And even to the point that I get to do this work with other people. And so I wouldn’t be here having this conversation with you if I didn’t feel like, oh, there’s so much life worth fighting for.

Dan: Well, that to me is that the echo of desire that I hear you speaking just awakens something in me to say, hell no. I will not let systems, I will not let past abusers, I’m not going to let myself kill the fundamental desire for goodness. And I may continue to have all sorts of disease processes that need ongoing healing until I depart this earth. But there is something about the choice. It happened just a few nights ago where Becky was gone for significant conference that she was attending, and I just, I’m alone. I’ve eaten. I think I’m going to go do more work. And I think I heard something of the spirit whisper and say, it’s a beautiful sunset. And I’m like, literally, my response was, it’s kind of cold. And I heard at least something say you own a coat. Like, well, that’s funny. Yeah, I do. The invitation go sit in the presence of beauty. Let your heart receive something really good, slow down, tend to, let yourself, in some sense, attempt to move from your allostatic norm of being ramped up, somewhat intense, always doing something to sitting on the porch rocking and watching the sunset. So I think in that process, I am actually living out justice. I’m letting my body receive something what the new heavens and earth will be the fullness of. So I think in that process I’m discouraged, but in some sense I’m enlivened. And I think that’s a complexity that a lot of abused people with histories were ambivalence between the arousal felt in the midst of the abuse and the horror of the harm. We’re just not good at holding complexity with honor, with a acknowledgement of we’re angry and yet we desire God. We question his goodness. But there is no one else who provides me with life. No one else who has the words of life like Jesus. So holding that I think is where in some sense, the already not yet sliver of justice now, anticipation of full justice to come allows the Psalmist to be able to say in the last several verses, but I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices into your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise for He has been good to me. At one level, I want to go, are you psychotic? Wait a minute. It is only five verses away. You’re questioning the integrity, goodness, kindness of the redemptive plan of God. Are you bipolar? What’s happening? Help me. What’s happening?

Rachael: I’m hearing this in my work with spiritual abuse. So I’m like, how would I talk with someone who’s asking what the hell is happening here? And how is this not spiritual bypassing? And I think it’s important to, number one, it’s a liturgical. There’s something of what the Psalms do that when you talk about being in worship, it’s a practice of expression and honor and truth telling. So spiritual bypassing would not leave place for questioning God. Would not leave place for the expression of anguish and despair and actually death to name. In some ways. If you are good, and this is the extent of your goodness, I think it would actually be better to just find a different way. So that’s part of what I think is happening here. And I also think there’s something of a, it’s both a expression of faith and an expression of hope, I think. Because in some ways it’s saying, I have tasted your goodness, and I’m not going to let suffering sever that attachment and that thread of being and that thread of belonging. And I am also angry in myself to a sense of your loving kindness, not your power and might not your, and there are some Psalms that I think turn more toward this kind of victorious, kind of triumphant God. But there’s something about this Psalm that I think feels really powerful to me, that the rooting and anchoring is not a resolve. It’s not, then, well, let’s just forget about everything we’ve just journeyed through. It’s simply saying, in the midst of this agony, I am putting my hope in your loving kindness, in your goodness, in your faithfulness, in some ways, leaving possibility that this doesn’t to be the end of the story. And I think in some ways, as followers of Jesus, that if it is the end of the story for us in the already, that it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the end of the story. And that feels tricky to say, because I would not want someone who’s maybe feeling near death feeling despair to hear. It’s better to give up. That’s not what I’m saying. Reach out to people, lean into resourcing, lean into medical support. I think just thinking theologically, I think it’s really important that we ground ourselves in what it is to have a God who is love and what it means for us to be those who are beloved. So that doesn’t feel like necessarily like a satisfying answer. It’s just a place that I find myself really clinging to these days.

Dan: Well, and it’s been said a trillion times, but I always come back to this, do I believe have I bet my life on the resurrection? And if so, then indeed the capacity of God to enter into the humanity of human suffering through the presence of what Jesus has endured. Again, without knowing Friday and humiliation Saturday and despair, there is a sense in which it is bypassed to merely get to the resurrection. But in that, I’m telling you I need, and I use this word with great respect for you. I need wildly crazy, beautiful human beings like you to remind me. Oh my gosh, I actually know an Erin Brockovich, I know she exists. I don’t know her. I’ve only seen her through Julia Roberts. But when I watch her and go, oh, you go, she’s interacting with a very staid professional, well educated female attorney, and the interplay between kind of the radical humanity of that woman and then the interplay of the austere proper attorney, it’s just again, it’s like, wait a minute, the prodigal really is the one who parties. And there’s something about, I’m not saying that we need to rebel in order to be redeemed, but in that wild invitation, there is something about your heart needs to scream about what your gut has suffered and likely, largely related to what you’ve endured in terms of past harm. And there are things that can be done and they may not fully resolve, but just any goodness brings you back to that taste of, yeah, you are Erin Brockovich, Rachael.

Rachael: What a compliment. What a compliment. I think part of what I’m thinking, even as you name that, and I just feel like for so many of us, our spiritual formation has been, we have such an individual imagination. And I think part of what I would hope is that we get to lean into each other. We get to borrow hope from each other. We get to rest in the hope of the beloved community. When we can’t, when we can’t say what the Psalm, when we can’t join the psalmist in the ending, we still feel stuck in the middle that we actually get to link arms and we’re in this together. And even if that doesn’t feel true, I think part of my prayer for all of us is that we would get a glimpse and a taste of those who remind us we’re not alone. Even if it’s like a movie where we’re seeing a story that gives us hope, that there are people who have the courage and the grit to say, hell no. And not just hell, no. But also there is goodness that people are, there is honor, there is dignity. There is some movement toward restoration, toward repair, toward accountability, and toward bringing about, again, the shalom-oriented kingdom of God that is not just about escaping the here and now, but about bringing it closer, bringing it into more fullness. So.

Dan: But the reality of being in a community where we can sing Psalm 13 together to not deny our core war and struggle, and yet that desire, that adamancy of, I will not let evil have, if it has blighted significant parts of my life, I will not let it take my heart. I will not let it take desire, and it will not take, as you put it, the thread at times that feels pretty thin. But if in fact it’s acknowledged, it’s a steel level thick wrap around my heart of I’ve tasted goodness and I need that 2000 movie, but I need the presence of others that are reminding me that even healing personally cannot help but then be a corporate story. And that there are, we’ve met them. We’ve had the privilege of meeting many of our listeners who have appreciated us, which I appreciate, but far more, they’re living in a way that basically says, hell no, heaven yes. I will participate in what redemption brings, but I will not let it cause me to lose something of that sweet hope of there’s going to be a day, and I’ll live for that day in today, not waiting for the then, bringing the then into the now to be able to hold all this with some sense of, it was good to watch the sunset.

Rachael: Yeah, I love that. Thank you, Dan, for, I actually feel very ministered to today, so thank you. Thank you for saying yes to the sunset and for saying yes to watching Erin Brockovich, whatever brought that about.

Dan: Well, you’re welcome. But again, I think for us, we say it often. This is for you all, no less for us.

Rachael: Amen.