Sheltered but Not Protected: Learning to Love, Forgive, and Heal After Emotional and Sexual Abuse

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In this moving yet disturbing memoir about finding healing after suffering unthinkable trauma, Justin Woodbury recounts his time growing up in an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church and how its cultlike organization allowed for child abuse. Justin was taught from a young age that if he followed a strict set of morals-such as no TV or worldly music-he would be protected from all the evil in the world. But one spring day in 1998 when he was followed into a barn by sexual predator and faithful church attender Carol Lynn Mathia, he learned this wasn’t true. He didn’t know this family friend had been grooming him for years, and he certainly didn’t know that forty minutes after walking into the barn, he would leave feeling confused, dirty, and guilty.

After the incident, Justin became trapped in a twisted sexual relationship that lasted months, and ended with a conspiracy to commit murder. When the church found out, the abuse was covered up and life went on as normal-except it didn’t, not for Justin. For the next twenty years, he experienced PTSD and nightmares, and he carried heavy baggage that almost ended his marriage. Sheltered but Not Protected is the true story of a young boy growing up in the IFB church; the sexual, mental, and emotional abuse he experienced; how he escaped; and his journey to find healing and forgiveness.