Through His Eyes: My Journey From Sexual Abuse Victim To Victory In Jesus Christ, by Deborah Mayers
[Note: This book was provided free of charge by BooksGoSocial. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]
This book has a pretty easy to recognize target audience, namely those who have or are in the process of overcoming sexual abuse as believers. There are a great many books that are aimed at similar audiences [1], and this book avoids going into great detail about the author’s own experiences while providing a discussion of the context and repercussions of child abuse in language that will be familiar with many charismatic Christians and with content that will be all too painfully familiar to those who have survived child abuse. Books like this one are not read because of the pleasure they give to the reader, but rather because, as the author thoughtfully comments, one needs frequent encouragement and also needs to break the silence by repeating one’s stories and over and over again to those who can help or who are willing to listen. Since finding people who are willing and able to listen can be a challenge, it is little surprise that so many survivors write about their experiences as is the case here.
This short book of a bit under 80 pages is organized into 21 short chapters, likely designed to be read a day at a time, since it can be a bit overwhelming to take a book like this and the memories and feelings it triggers at one time. Each of these chapters includes the author’s discussion of some aspect of her abuse as well as a prayer to God, often directed on the behalf of the reader. The author’s discussion includes the unpleasant matter of how predators groom their victims, the ways that parents can often miss red flags about abuse, and the way that abuse tends to find its way especially connected with dysfunctional and broken families like that experienced by the author herself and many, many others. The author also spends a great deal of time talking about problems of sexuality, dissociation, and self-worth that often result from abuse, blending an approach that is part psychological counseling and forensic profiling and part Pentecostal and charismatic in nature. This mix likely matches well with the interests of the author’s target audience to a great extent.
A great deal of this book appears to be directed to female Pentecostal survivors of child sexual abuse. This can be determined largely because the author’s reference to soul ties and her immense interest in demonology–a fairly natural interest, it must be admitted, in those all too familiar with such spiritual warfare–clearly have that sort of flavor to them. Thankfully, the author focuses on God’s love for people and on the need to overcome the lies of Satan and not a particular agenda on the part of the author herself. The book itself gives the reader a great deal of curiosity in the author and her life, and was written with a large degree of detachment and emotional distance, which must have been more than a bit difficult. One wonders what sort of long-term struggles the author has faced with regards to intimacy and being a wife and mother herself, matters which are not discussed in any particular detail in the pages. As an encouraging book about a subject that is deeply unpleasant and distressingly common, this book provides encouragement to people who are seeking to walk with Christ who have tied their painful experiences with abuse to an interest in spiritual warfare.
[1] See, for example:
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