JenniSue Jessen on Surviving Human Trafficking, Healing, and the Power of Using Your Voice

JenniSue Jessen Interview

Welcome to hard, beautiful journey, where we embrace vulnerability as our superpower and let courage light our path. I’m Tiff Carson here to share heartfelt stories of healing grief and resilience. Each week, I’ll talk with guests from experts to everyday heroes about their journeys through adversity.

Together, we’ll uncover the beauty that emerges from life’s challenges and how each experience can spark profound growth. Join us on this courageous journey of connection and transformation. 

Tiff: Some stories aren’t just meant to be heard. They demand to be felt. conversation will challenge you. It will inspire you maybe even change the way that you see the world. Human trafficking isn’t just something that happens in movies or distant countries. happening everywhere often in ways that we don’t recognize, and today’s guest knows this reality firsthand. 

At just four years old, JenniSue Jesson was trafficked by someone who should have protected her for years. She lived a reality that most of us cannot even imagine. But here’s what makes her story extraordinary. She didn’t just survive. She fought to heal, to rise, and to ensure that no one else has to endure what she did. JenniSue is the founder of Compass 31, a nonprofit that guides survivors out of exploitation and into freedom. Beyond her work she’s a living testament to the power of using your voice to break silence and reclaim your story. This isn’t just about human trafficking, it’s about healing hope, and the courage to rewrite your own ending. You’re going to want to hear this one. Hello, JenniSue. How are you?

JenniSue : I am so honored to spend this time with you, Tiff and your audience. It’s just such a powerful, space to sit and use our voices to raise awareness and facilitate freedom. So thank you for sharing your time and your platform.

Tiff: Absolutely. I am honored that you want to share your time and your story with us, especially with the topic that we are going to be talking about. Your story is one of survival and healing and fierce advocacy. But before we dive into your work, I want to take listeners back to that moment. Where you knew that your life purpose became clear and that defining experience, was that for you?

JenniSue : Oh gosh, like how my work began. I was living in Southeast Asia with my family, my husband and I were working there, and I couldn’t go on a date on Friday night without encountering men, middle age or older old men out on using quotes there with little kids, sexually exploited little kids. And I mean, we’d go to normal restaurants in touristy places and there would be men there buying and taking home children for the evening.  At that point it became really clear to me that I didn’t survive just to get by, my story was meant to facilitate freedom for other people. And several things happened. I started volunteering at a place that was working with sexually exploited youth. And about six weeks in that program was being closed down and my husband and I opened our home to three Mama baby sets. So three teenage girls had been trafficked, exploited, and conceived babies in exploitation.

We took the mama baby sets into our home, and that is how my organization Compass 31 was born. I often say we were born breach, like God just dropped this bloody squawking miracle, butt first into my life, I didn’t have a program, finances, facilities.  We just said yes to the need in front of us. And now here I am in my 14th year.

Tiff: Wow. Holy smokes. I think that many people. Just assume that trafficking happens in foreign countries or far off places, or it involves kidnappings. What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you’ve come across in your work? 

JenniSue : Those are great points, and that is what I hear most frequently. When people think of trafficking, they think far away in another place, and as I just explained, my work is we have an international counter trafficking organization with a presence in 44 countries. So it does happen in far off places, but we know from research and statistics that it actually happens in every country in the world, including the US and the US is one of the top five in the world destinations for individuals that are being trafficked. So people are brought into the US. It’s easy to look at Hollywood stereotypes. You know, we tend to think of the Jim K Souls or Liam Neeson’s busting down doors and killing bad guys and rescuing girls. But kidnapping involved such a small portion of what’s happening in the trafficking world and there’s reasons for that. Trafficking is most effective through coercion. And the vast majority of individuals who are trafficked are initially trafficked by somebody they know and trust. So well over 80% are trafficked initially by a family member or a romantic partner. Another more than 10 to 15% are a trusted, community member. And so it’s a very small percentage. They’re actually kidnapped and yeah, it’s happening right here in the us. I live in Colorado and it’s happening in my neighborhood.

Tiff: So from what you’ve seen, what is the grooming process look like or, what are the steps that they usually take in order to do that? If it’s somebody that you know and love, or is it something just like, it just happens and they just do it?

JenniSue : Grooming is often a part of the paradigm. A lot of trafficking is an outflow of what begins as sexual abuse. Not to minimize in any way, sexual violence is an act of violence. That is a process of building a trusting relationship and showering this individual with affection and with treats and trust and special adventures and, bonding with them, that escalates into a physical. I almost said relationship. It is in no way a relationship. It is exploitation, but it escalates into physical or sexual contact. After that point, the perpetrator often will then, a, a soft entry into trafficking would be introducing the person they’re victimizing to their friends. To their coworkers, before they start exploiting them on a broader scale. But one of the things that your audience might be surprised by, one of the fastest growing trends in the US is high school kids. Sexually exploiting younger kids. And so, and these are the, the popular girls, primarily those juniors and seniors, popular, affluent, upper middle class girls who identify middle school girls or underclassmen who are not really popular, who want to be in the in crowd. They invite them to a party. At the party, they give them drugs or alcohol to get them under the influence of substances. While they’re under the influence, they take sexually explicit photos. Then they use those photos to control. They’re the individuals who force them to have sex with other people for money. And so that, that’s the fastest growing trend right now in the US is high school kids, primarily girls exploiting younger kids.

Tiff: What? Oh, my, my mind is just blown right now. What the heck? So, okay. I don’t even, oh my goodness. So you have said, in a lot of your work that victims don’t identify victims. Why is that and how can we shift that perspective so that they get help?

JenniSue : What a fabulous question. I am so glad you asked that. Not only do victims not identify themselves as victims, but those of us that serve them don’t identify them as victims. There’s two reasons for that from the perspective of the individual being exploited. Because they have had a relationship with the person exploiting them, they feel responsible for what’s happening to them. As an example, referring to this fastest growing trend, I consulted on a case of a 14-year-old girl who had been invited by the popular girls to a party, had been through the experience we talked about, but she had snuck out from her home. She wasn’t allowed to go to the party. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be there.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : So when she got into trouble, when she was violated, when these pictures were taken and these girls threatened, I’m gonna send them to your dad. I’m gonna send them to the youth pastor. I’m gonna send ’em all over to school. She was afraid to tell her parents.

Tiff: Mm.

JenniSue : She was ashamed of these sexually explicit photos taken without her consent.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : , And so for a period of nine months, she submitted, she did what they told her to do. She was being extorted and exploited. She continued to do what they told her to do because she was terrified of being found out and she felt responsible. Had she not snuck out, had she not gone to the party. She felt like she wouldn’t be in that situation.

I just wanna be really, really clear. It is never, ever, ever her fault.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : Every kid does things that are regrettable at some point, sneaking out of your house what you wear. The, things have no impact on victimization. So I wanna clarify, it was not her fault, but she felt responsible.

Tiff: Yeah.

JenniSue : That is true for the vast majority of individuals that are victimized. They love this person, and if only I did things differently, then I wouldn’t be in this situation. If only I performed better, maybe it would stop. If only I could make them happy in another way, then it would stop. So because we need to control our world, as humans, we wanna be in control. And children particularly believe they’re magical. Like I cry and somebody comes, I want dinner, and it magically appears I don’t make dinner when I’m four. Right. It’s just here

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : I want it and so because we have that magical thinking, especially young people. We think it’s our fault, so we don’t identify as victims. The reason service providers don’t identify individuals that are exploited as victims is because it infers an identity on them based on the worst thing that’s ever happened,

Tiff: Mm. Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : And that isn’t who they are. It is what they’ve experienced. And so from day one, we’re building into them their true identity, which remains unmarred by what has happened to them. Their experiences equip them to go out and change the world. They do not define them. So that’s why service providers also don’t call them victims. We call them men, women, children, individuals who have experienced this thing.

Tiff: I love that you distinct it that way. It is so much more empowering. 

Tiff: When someone has experienced something like that, someone has escaped trafficking, people assume that the hard part is over. They got out of the trafficking situation, but survival of that and healing are two completely different things. What was one of the most unexpected challenges that you faced after your experience?

JenniSue : The most unexpected challenge. You know, that’s a really interesting question, Tiff. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that and, and so my answer may seem a little disconnected, but I’m gonna answer you authentically.

JenniSue : And that is I grew up believing. I learned in really brutal ways that my survival depended on my silence and my submission, and I learned it well. So using my voice and telling what happened was a huge, huge challenge. The other piece that I wanna add to that is I grew up believing that every man was dangerous. All men just wanted one thing, and so in recovery the world changes, and now I have autonomy. Now I can ask for what I want. Now I can get my needs met in a safe way. Now I’m interacting with men that aren’t perpetrators, and it’s entirely world shattering in the best possible way. Challenge to interact with individuals who you have only known or expected to be perpetrators in. In my case, I thought all men were bad, right?

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : And to begin interacting with men that could be noble, could be safe, could be respectful, was wildly challenging in the most profound and healing way.

Tiff: Mm-hmm. How long was that healing journey for you? Or are you still on that healing journey of trusting?

JenniSue : How long? I came to Freedom when I was 18.  I’m now 53, so 35 years of healing. Sometimes I still sleep with the lights on. I sometimes still have nightmares. I have been married to my husband for 30 years and there’s still times that I’m a, ugh, touch me not because the terminology I use with him is I’m haunted.  It’s not him I’m rejecting. It’s that be touched right now for whatever emotional, spiritual, physical reason that being said. What healing looks like for me is I am living a, a life of purpose and joy. Joy to the, point that I often wake up in the morning and I wake up and my face is tired, sore from smiling so much in my sleep.

Tiff: That happens to you too? I’ve had that a few times lately where I’m like What is going on here? Like, was I laughing all night or what?

JenniSue : Laughing all night and, and my day-to-day life is immersed in the depths of counter trafficking work. I’m personally mentoring 18 survivors. We have work, I said going on in 44 countries.  I am immersed in the darkness. And still, I wake up with joy and I’m living this amazing life of purpose. So healing is incremental. And yes, sometimes I’m still haunted and it’s just part of the journey.

Tiff: What’s one piece of advice that you would give someone at the beginning of their healing journey from this experience?

JenniSue : You know, I would say they don’t need any advice at all from me. They have survived the unthinkable. I would say the fact that they have come out is proof of their resilience, is proof of how fierce and powerful they are. They have again and again and again suffered violence and again and again and again, gotten up and put on their makeup and gone to do the next thing. So they don’t need advice from me. They need somebody to say, Hey baby, it gets better from here. We’re gonna take all those skills, all those coping strategies that kept you alive, and we’re gonna figure out how to translate them into you living this powerful dynamic, world changing life. Don’t give up.

Tiff: Those people that you’re working with you are so, so, so blessed to work with somebody like you to guide them through this because that is so powerful, what you just said. Like it, it just gives them their life back.

JenniSue : Yeah, they’ve been stripped of their autonomy for how long? Days, weeks, years, and years. I don’t have any desire to control or direct or advise. I just wanna, I’m a big sister. I’m gonna walk alongside of you.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : Scars. Yep. Things that you wanna get rid of. Let’s do that. You set the priority, the individuals I have the privilege of working with, they set the priorities. And I help them navigate the systems to get their needs met in a healthy way move towards purpose and joy. But it’s all them. They have it in them.

JenniSue : I would say they’re created in the image of God and they have this resilient, unstoppable spirit.  The fact that they’re here talking to me is proof.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : So I affirm that and listen to what they need and we walk towards it together.

Tiff: That is so beautiful. But something that is so much more beautiful is this post that I read on your account about somebody named LB. 

JenniSue : Yes! LB.

Tiff: Would you like to speak about LB on my podcast because I was in the ugly tears.

JenniSue : I love that. LB is, you know, this amazing human that in a lot of ways kept me alive and kept me whole through my childhood. And surprise, surprise, coincidentally, in four days she will be here in my home and she’ll be here with me for several days.

Tiff: Oh my gosh!

JenniSue : But your listeners don’t know why that’s important.  So let me tell you.

Tiff: Okay.

JenniSue : We might get more into it, but my history, my childhood is one of trafficking and exploitation. I was sold into the sex trade when I was four. God provided for my rescue and escape after a failed suicide attempt when I was 17. But a lot of my exploitation happened because my dad was an alcoholic and my mom was addicted to my dad and when things were particularly chaotic at home, they sent me to my grandparents’ house three hours away.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : And that’s where my grandfather was my primary perpetrator. When I was at home and not at my grandfather’s house, I had a nanny and her name was LB and she came from this huge Catholic family and she loved me fiercely.  She did not know what was happening.  Had she known I’m quite confident she probably would’ve hunted down my grandfather and put an end to him because she just, loved me with this genuine, tender ferocity. She was aware of the alcoholism. She was only young when she started taking care of me, I was three, four and she was 15. So she was kind of a baby herself and she lived with us, part of that time again, taking care of me. Driving me to school, taking me to T-ball practice, taking me to the dentist, planning the birthday parties. She did all the things. Cooked dinner, took me to her house for Sunday dinner. After mass, she did all the things. But when I was nine years old, my dad quit drinking. We moved to a new place. Initially, LB moved with us, but then my mom decided she needed to be a mom and that I was far too bonded with LB. And so I went to school one day and I came back and LB was gone and my mom had fired her and sent her away. There was no opportunity for goodbye, for her or for myself. And, I was nine years old and we didn’t see each other again until a year ago.  Last May, her daughter, worked in an investigative job and LB had looked for me all of these years and they, they found me on Facebook she pops up with a message, “I don’t know if you’ll remember me. I took care of you.”

And I’m like, you know, I’m ugly crying. At that point, of course, I went directly to my hope chest and after years of exploitation, I have very little of my childhood, but in my hope chest, I have a picture. That LB and I colored together of Pink Panther when I was four years old. I have had this colored picture that we did together for 48 years at that point and she found me and we reconnected and it was, both of our hearts that had longed for and looked for each other. All these years and she found me. And now next week she’s gonna be here in my home. We’ve continued to stay connected. Reminisce, you know, I remember things about my childhood, things that she did, songs we sang together. Adventures we went on in her little navy blue pinto. It was a death trap that didn’t kill either one of us. You know, all the things but she was an individual in my life that was a point of stability. A point that love was safe and protective and nurturing and really the only experience I had until adulthood that that’s what love could be.

Tiff: So what has that taught you about the long lasting impact of love? Like even when it’s lost, what has that taught you about it?

JenniSue : Yeah. Even when it was lost, you know, when I came home from school and she was gone, I cried for days and days and my mom was furious that I kept crying that she was gone. She was very, in a very real sense, a mother figure to me. The only mother figure I really had.

JenniSue : I think love doesn’t expire. Once it takes root, it is always there. I think some individuals come in our life in a very short season, some in a much longer, some even in a lifetime, you know, over the course of a lifetime. But the way that she loved me in selfless ways. Planted a seed that perhaps I was worthy of love. Maybe I was worthy of care. It could be possible that there was safety somewhere, because I knew safety when I was with LB.

JenniSue : And I think those are really key pieces for anybody who experiences violence. We can remember these acts of violence and we have nightmares and triggers and all of that. But also at any point I can shift my focus to a birthday party that she was making the cake or her taking me to the park and seeing how high she could swing me or her taking me to high school because I couldn’t go to school that day.  And everything in my demeanor shifts because in that season, despite the violence, I also knew moments of a pure unadulterated kind of love, that that lasts a lifetime.

Tiff: Do you think that that reunion with LB has helped you even more with your work through Compass 31?

JenniSue : Oh, absolutely. It brings a different level of healing to my heart. My work was happening before but I would say the love that she poured into me as a child contributed to my work long before we reunited.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : I always carried forward what she gave to me in the people I was serving. That no baby, you are worthy of protection.  You are worthy of love.  I see you.  Let me make your birthday cake. I carried forward what I learned from her, even though she was absent after I was nine until this last year.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : So has she impacted my work? Absolutely. Has reconnecting expanded that? I don’t know, but I know it’s certainly expanded my healing and my heart to find some fulfillment to a relationship that I only knew as a child.

Now I get to interact with her as an adult and, and it’s a whole new level of being loved.

Tiff: I’m so, so excited for you to reconnect with her. In the next coming days, I hope to see it on your social media, at least a picture. And the reason why is because we had a nanny for our kids for about two and a half years when they were little. And that relationship is so beautiful. It’s so important, to have those loving relationships for your children, especially in my case, I was going back to work, but knowing that they were being taken care of by someone that loving was just a relief for us. And I still have a relationship with our nanny too, it’s a beautiful thing.

So when I was reading it, like I was ugly crying story, it was just beautiful. 

JenniSue : It’s a beautiful redemptive story. And you know, back to the context of this conversation and trafficking is we all have the opportunity to see and express love to the people in front of us. And there’s people hurting all around.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : One out of three women will be sexually assaulted by the time they’re 18, and one in five boys will be sexually assaulted by the time they’re 18, and maybe they’re just at your house for dinner one night. And in one two-hour conversation you can express that they’re worthy, that they’re seen, that they are known, that they’re loved, that might be the seed that keeps them alive and drives them towards freedom.

Tiff: Mm-hmm. So what point in your journey did you feel or say to yourself that I can’t just heal myself, I need to help other people too?

JenniSue : I think it probably goes back to the season that we were living in Southeast Asia and what’s significant about that? I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the trafficking over there, because that’s the stereotype that everybody thinks of, right? The difference with trafficking over there is it’s culturally accepted people sell their children.

That’s just a cultural norm where I was living and working. Nobody really frowns on it. It’s just the cultural norm, whereas it happens with the same frequency in the US but in the US we frown on it. We all, you know, culturally say you don’t have sex with children, period. You don’t buy and sell other people. This is not acceptable. So culturally, it’s secret right? It happens in the shadows, it happens in the dark.

Tiff: Yep.

JenniSue : Where I was living, this particular place where I was living in Southeast Asia, it was out in the open I couldn’t sit back and watch it unfold and not intervene there. That wasn’t a possibility. I had to be involved initially. I didn’t know how I would be involved or to what extent. At that point, I was a homeschooling mom in Asia. I thought maybe I’ll volunteer, you know, two hours a week with an organization that’s providing services.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : And then the joke was on me four to six weeks after starting volunteering. I was in it full time. And now June will be our 14th birthday. And we expanded from, initially we said yes to that three mama baby sets who moved into our home, then we expanded from there. Now we have restoration work in five countries and prevention work in 44.

Tiff: What does Compass 31 do differently than other anti-trafficking organizations?

JenniSue : One of the things that makes us distinct is we believe in empowered ambition. And so from the time a participant comes into our program, day one, they go with their caseworker and they open a bank account in their own name and they start earning a salary or a stipend every month based on their participation and performance in school. The more they show up and the better they perform, the more money they earn. Volunteers who are financial advisors who help them one third of their money every month automatically goes into that long term savings account. One third if they want to, they can invest in their families. And we’ve seen really cool things like a girl buy a motorcycle for her dad to go back and forth to work.

Another girl learned how to build aquaponics systems and doing that in her village, for her family. All these different things. And then one third is just to be kids with, to go to the mall to buy the shoes to. To go to the movies. But because of that, our participants when they graduate, our program generally have between $1,500 and $2,000 saved in their own name.

Tiff: Wow.

JenniSue : It’s all theirs. Their education has been paid for. We have one participant who graduated law school and passed a bar exam. We now have four who have achieved master’s degrees in social work and are working as social workers. We have a couple of business degrees. We have a couple of small business owners. We have some that went to beauty school, some that went to sewing school. A girl whose dream it was to make custom wedding dresses. She was one of our first three girls that we said yes to. And she would fall asleep in the family room with bridal magazines across her face. And now she works in a shop, and she custom designs and makes beautiful wedding gown.

JenniSue : And so that makes us distinct because there’s a lot of programs that, you know, they employ the girls or boys and everybody makes jewelry. Everybody makes purses, which is fine. And I’m not faulting those. I’m glad that it works for them. But I’m a mama at heart and I want these girls or boys, these participants to be everything that they were intended to be before the trauma happened.

JenniSue : I don’t want them to follow in my footsteps. If they wanna make jewelry, absolutely, let’s go to design school and figure out how to make the most exquisite pieces that you can make. But I want them to be what they were meant to be before the trauma happened. So empowered ambition, we walk alongside them to the highest level of education they desire. And then watch them launch and be world changers.

Tiff: Honestly, that is so incredibly inspiring. I’m just so happy that they have you and your company as their guides, back to a place of where they can be so incredibly proud of themselves

JenniSue : Yeah. It goes back to that one of the first questions you asked. I don’t see them as victims.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : I see them as these fierce, resilient warriors. They’re capable of anything. Let’s give them the tools to do the thing.  There is nothing these individuals can’t accomplish. I don’t pity them. I don’t look down on them. I don’t, you know, placate pat them on the head. I’m like, come on. They will rise to the highest levels, I mean, beyond what we could ask or imagine, and that’s why I wake up with my face, you know, aching with joy is because yeah, I see the dark, dark, but I have a front row seat to watching redemption unfold again and again. And watch these individuals who have experienced the worst of the worst rise to their highest capacity and change the world.

Tiff: Like you said, it is a dark topic, um, experience. What other tools do you use to keep yourself okay? 

JenniSue : To keep myself Okay….I learned several years ago, gosh, I don’t even know how long ago, many years ago, that our emotional state follows our thoughts. If I, you know, if I’m telling you about the day I got married, this happy, beautiful, barefoot on the beach wedding, I’m gonna be glowing, I’m gonna be smiling, and my brain is gonna release all these happy chemicals.

In response to me thinking of this story and telling you this story, if I’m thinking about a traumatic event, then my brain doesn’t have a timeline. It believes that event is happening right now, just like with a happy story, it’s going to release all of the chemicals to cause my body to go into fight or flight.

Tiff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : My emotional state follows my thoughts. If I’m sitting with an individual and I’m listening to their story, I can listen with deep compassion and empathy. I can sit with them in their grief. I can be stomping mad, table, flipping mad. I can cry with them. Also I can see the potential, the resilience, the possibility, and when I start calling that out, then their emotional state changes and we’re equipped with what’s called mirror neurons because we’re made for relationship. I will become calm. They will become calm together. We rise all, all boats rise with the tide.

And so when I get in a dark space. It’s because my mind is caught in a loop of these dark thoughts, I can honor it. Yeah, that’s worth being mad about. That is worth grieving. And I can ask myself, self, what do you need? Do you need a hot bath? Do you need a walk? Do you need to just be stomping mad? Do you need to cry for an hour? I can honor what my body needs. Whatever that is. A bowl of chocolate ice cream, is a favorite coping strategy for me. 

And then once I honor that emotion and that need, I can shift to, you know what, I’m still here and I am watching that.  I have a front row seat to the best show on Earth.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : What, you know, I personally credit God with, you know, that, that God created these individuals majestically, fearfully, and wonderfully made and watch them become everything they’re meant to become. And that is a joyful thing. So that’s how I keep myself. Well, I feel all the feelings. I don’t deny it. Like, yeah, today was a sucky hard day and also, here’s where I saw joy, and here’s where I saw hope, and here’s what I have to be grateful for.

Tiff: Hmm.

JenniSue : My body responds to my thoughts, and I have power over that. And for somebody who’s been stripped of your autonomy, it’s a wildly beautiful power to wield.

Tiff:. So one of the pillars, in the Healing Heart journey that I created is Find your Tribe.

JenniSue : Mm-hmm.

Tiff: What role has community and belonging played in your recovery and advocacy?

JenniSue : That’s a great question. A super challenging question. To be honest, I think many of us who have endured compound complex trauma. For me it was 14 years of rape for profit. We tend to be a lone wolf, right?

Tiff: Yep.

JenniSue : What happened, happened in isolation. It didn’t seem like there was any help. And as somebody who’s come out of that, it is really, really challenging to develop trusting relationships,

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : Intimate friendships, people who are trustworthy, people who aren’t going to pity me, people who aren’t gonna look down on me, people who aren’t gonna want me to fix them. It’s a relationally. There’s a lot of overcoming to do but the reality is, well, maybe that’s too strong. What I have come to believe and understand is that trauma doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is relational. It happens between one person and another.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : Healing is relational.  The antidote is relationship, and so finding those key people. I have been blessed with some tremendous friends. My board of directors, the women on my board for my ministry are, I mean, they know me, warts and all. They know when I’ve had a hard night. They know me when they need to yank my chain.  Hey, Jenny, Sue. You know, like come back. 

JenniSue : They’ll do it with love and yeah, a fierce kind of love. I would say maybe it’s not unique to those that have experienced sexual violence. That’s just the, the demographic I live and work in.

JenniSue : It’s true for all people, but when we find a tribe of people that we speak the same language, and by that I mean a language of common experience, you know, not just English, but experience.

Tiff: That’s a great way of putting it, a common experience. Find your tribe that has had that same experience as you, is so important.

JenniSue : And when you’re in a tribe, inherently there will be people that are further along and people that are not so far along and that in and of itself is a healing equilibrium.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : It, it provides hope for the newcomers. It provides hope for the ones that have been at it for 30 years who need to know, yeah, look how far I’ve come. And in empowering this person, it empowers me. These empowering relationships that happen within the context of people who not just have empathy for where you’ve been, have themselves been. There is a really strategic part of healing. It doesn’t happen easily. It is a challenging thing to find people you can trust, in those spaces when you’ve been violated by people you trust. But yeah, I think the antidote is healing. The antidote to the trauma that happens in relationship is the healing that happens in relationship.

Tiff: So we hear a lot about raising awareness. What are some real tangible ways that people can help?  

JenniSue : You know, the thing is I used to teach like, here’s the red flags and here’s the steps you can do, and there is a national hotline, human trafficking hotline. The reality is, here’s what I’ve come to believe. Is that every individual has the capacity to have an impact when we will slow down and see the people in front of us. Like maybe she’s experiencing domestic violence. Maybe his dad just got diagnosed with stage four cancer. It’s not necessarily trafficking related, people all around us are hurting,

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : And so we in our culture right now, we are so busy. Scurrying and scrolling. You know, we’re scurrying from point A to point B, gotta get the kids to school, pick the kids up, go to soccer practice, get dinner, get kids ready for bed, get to work, do the same thing again and again. And if we have a moment’s reprieve, we get sucked in to scrolling through our phone. 

And when that happens, people are crossing our path all the time. And I would argue many of them have experienced sexual violence and or sexual exploitation. And we’re so busy scurrying and scrolling that we don’t ever see them. So when you’re asking how do we get involved, how do we raise awareness? It is put down your phone and cut half the things out of your calendar.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue :  Go for a walk without looking at your phone. Talk to the kids at your table about, you know, where did you feel empowered today.

Tiff: Mm-hmm.

JenniSue : What made you feel happy today? Who did you help today? How did you fail today? Have real conversations with the people in your life and you will encounter. People who are hurting are also people who are healing. You’ll have the privilege to have a front row seat to watch them heal and rise. So like I said, I used to have this whole list of red flags and steps, A, B, C, D, what you do. And now I make it much simpler, slow down to the speed of love.

Tiff: Oh my gosh. I love that. That’s gonna be on the quote sheet, just so you know. Slow down to the speed of love. 

Tiff: Okay. So I could talk to you for a long, long time, but I’m going to put this up here. If people want to learn more about you and work with you. You can check out JenniSue’s website www.compass31.org or Instagram @Compass_31.

Tiff:  I end every episode, JenniSue, asking my guest what they are grateful for, because there is always something to be grateful for. Always. What are you grateful for today?

JenniSue : What I am grateful for. You know, I alluded to it earlier, one of the things I learned as a child was my survival depended on silence and submission. And I am super grateful to be able to have conversations like this, to use my voice you know, I was stripped of that as a child and now I get to own it.

And not only do I get to own it, but I get to share it with other people and, empower them to use their voice. I had a great, incredible empowering conversation with one of my girls just right before I got on the call with you.  She had been through some really hard things today. And we got to celebrate how she navigated it in a healthy way. So there’s so many things about my life to be grateful for the fact that I’m still alive. I have three beautiful kids. I have grand babies. Three and four are on the way.

Tiff: Yay.

JenniSue : I get to spend next week with LB. 

JenniSue : I have an amazing husband that taught me that not all men are dangerous. So many, so many things to be grateful for.

Tiff: Oh my goodness. Your story seriously has been amazing to hear and I’m really grateful for you being here and sharing it. It’s one of heartbreak and healing. Survival, all of it. And I just wanna be, really clear how grateful I am that you know how important the work that you are doing is so important in this world

JenniSue : Hmm. Thank you for that. I’m grateful for you as well.

Tiff: As for anyone else that is listening, I wanna leave my listeners with this. And I am gonna try not to cry ’cause this has really been an emotional episode for me. Healing it isn’t just about surviving what broke you. Because a lot of us think that we might not come back from that thing that broke us, but it’s about reclaiming our story finding those people using our voice to create something bigger than ourselves. And if this episode moved you let that feeling turn into action. Follow Compass 31 and educate yourself. And most importantly, never underestimate the power of even the smallest act of kindness and love. Because as JenniSue has pointed out, sometimes the love that we give without realizing it becomes the very thing that saves somebody else’s life. So until next time, take care of your heart, hold space for somebody else, and remember that your journey, no matter how hard or how beautiful, or both….it matters.