"It was someone I was supposed to be able to trust. Someone who was supposed to protect me. . . . There never was a time I felt safe at home," Latter-day Saint Erin says in the new "His Grace" video "Living with the Pain of Childhood Abuse."
During her childhood, Erin says she endured physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse until one day, she told her mother. Erin says that after that, she and her mother moved away, ending the abuse.
But as Erin moved into her teenage years, reverberations of the abuse continued to echo, creating an inner battle that continued to build until one day, when she was 17, Erin stopped going to church.
"I just started doing things that I thought would make me happy," Erin shares in the video. "Being with people who I thought accepted me. And it was very quickly that I realized that wasn't what I wanted. That wasn't what made me happy, made me feel fulfilled."
But that began to change as Erin met with the missionaries, a decision that started her on the path toward healing her life from the outside and the inside.
Watch Erin's full story of living through and healing from childhood abuse.