Growing From the Ashes

Aug 5

This week’s episode of Your Traitor Within began with what felt like a remarkable coincidence.

I met Sheila Lowe at an author reading. We spoke briefly, immediately connected, and then discovered that place cards had already assigned us seats beside each other. Neither of us had arranged it. We simply ended up in the same place, at the same table, at the right time.

After hearing Sheila’s story, I understood why that moment felt significant.

Sheila is a forensic handwriting examiner, an author, and a woman whose life has required her to rebuild herself more than once. She grew up in England and was raised in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, an environment she now describes as a cult. She followed its rules, went door-to-door, and eventually married an elder in the congregation.

To the outside world, her husband appeared deeply spiritual and trustworthy. Inside their home, Sheila experienced abuse.

One of the most striking moments in our conversation came from Sheila’s daughter, who was only three years old when she watched her father give a talk from the platform and asked, “Mommy, how come he’s not like that at home?”

Children often recognize the split long before adults are ready or able to name it.

Sheila eventually sought help from another elder after her husband choked her and left a visible mark. His response made clear that the system was more willing to protect an admired man than the woman he had harmed. When Sheila finally left the marriage, she did not only lose a husband. She lost her religion, her community, and nearly the entire support structure she had been instructed to rely upon.

We talked about what that kind of rupture does to a person, especially when it rests on top of patterns established much earlier.

At fourteen, after Sheila’s father left the family, her mother told her that she wanted to throw herself under a train. Sheila took responsibility for keeping her mother alive. She remained inside the religion partly because she was afraid that leaving would destroy her mother.

That is an enormous responsibility for a child.

It also became part of Sheila’s Traitor Within.

The child who learned to save her mother became the adult who rushed to rescue other people, tolerated more than she should have, and felt responsible for holding everyone together. These patterns were survival strategies developed by a child who believed another person’s stability depended upon her behavior.

The strategy followed her long after childhood ended.

During our conversation, I reminded Sheila that this protective part believed it was helping her. It had learned that caretaking, appeasing, and rescuing were how she stayed connected and safe. By adulthood, those same behaviors were keeping her inside relationships and responsibilities that were harming her.

Sheila responded with a sentence I have continued thinking about:

“If I give her that grace, I have to give myself the same grace.”

She was speaking about her mother. Sheila could recognize that her mother had her own painful history and did the best she was capable of doing, even though, as Sheila put it, “It was not a good best.”

That understanding did not erase what happened. It allowed Sheila to stop treating herself as though she should have known how to survive differently when no one had ever taught her another way.

Then our conversation moved into the loss at the center of Sheila’s memoir, Growing from the Ashes.

In 2000, Sheila’s daughter, Jennifer, was murdered by her partner. Sheila describes receiving the phone call no parent can prepare for, the disbelief that followed, and the terrible process of accepting that the news was real.

She also speaks with unusual honesty about complicated grief. Sheila had spent years worrying about Jennifer, trying to help her, and watching her enter dangerous situations that Sheila could not control. Some of her grieving had begun while Jennifer was still alive.

After Jennifer’s death, Sheila began noticing experiences she understood as signs that her daughter was still present. A phone rang late at night, but Sheila heard only static and a distant voice. The lights inside her car came on without explanation. Electronics behaved in ways they had never behaved before. At Jennifer’s funeral, a car alarm sounded as the procession reached the top of the hill, although no one was touching the keys.

Sheila interpreted these events as Jennifer finding ways to say, “I’m still here.”

Whether or not every listener shares Sheila’s spiritual beliefs, I found the role those beliefs played in her survival deeply moving. As a hospice social worker, I have heard many dying patients speak about travel, loved ones who had come to meet them, and places they believed they were preparing to go. I have also sat with bereaved families who described experiences they could not easily explain.

Sheila calls her understanding “life after earth.”

Her memoir follows the path from a restrictive religion that left no room for those beliefs to a spiritual life in which she could feel that Jennifer’s death was not the end of their relationship.

Sheila knew shortly after Jennifer’s murder that she would eventually write a book titled Growing from the Ashes. She could not write it then. The ending was too painful, and she could not yet see what the story had taught her.

More than twenty years later, she was ready.

She began writing on February 1 and finished the manuscript on February 27. The book became more than an account of tragedy. It became the story of what Sheila understood after living through it: the patterns she inherited, the relationships she survived, the daughter she continues to love, and the spiritual freedom she found after losing almost everything.

Hearing Sheila talk about waiting until she could understand the meaning of her own story reminded me of the long journey behind my novel, Traitor Within.

My book began nearly twenty years ago as an academic exploration of trauma, attachment, fear of abandonment, and self-abandonment. Eventually, I realized that fiction could allow readers to enter those ideas through the life of a character. Through Casandra’s choices and relationships, readers can see how an old protective pattern forms, how it repeats, and how fear of being left can lead someone to leave herself over and over again.

The subjects and forms of Sheila’s memoir and my novel are different, but they are connected by the same belief: stories interrupt isolation. We may recognize ourselves through another person’s experience before we are ready to name the pattern in our own lives.

Traitor Within is now available for preorder and will be released September 22. As a thank-you for preordering, you will receive a complimentary year of guided Your Traitor Within journaling prompts that can be used independently or alongside therapy or counseling.

You can learn more and preorder here:

https://www.jessicaannepressler.com/the-books

Our stories matter because they let another person know that they are not the only one.

Someone may hear Sheila speak about rescuing others and recognize their own parentified child. Someone may hear her describe institutional betrayal and finally understand why leaving felt impossible. Someone grieving a person they love may hear her speak about signs and feel less alone in something they have been afraid to tell anyone.

That is why Sheila tells this story.

It is also why I wanted to share it with you.

Listen to my full conversation with Sheila Lowe on Your Traitor Within wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the episode on YouTube.