How to Be Overcomers and Survivors of Rape... Not Victims

By Connie L Harris

There was a closet in that rented house, and it had a small window.

She was twelve years old. On the nights her stepfather came into her room, she would crawl into that closet afterward, climb into the window and cry - telling herself that if nobody could see her, then nobody could see how broken she was.

Connie Harris kept that secret for years. She was warned she would be blamed if she told. She was warned her mother would go to prison and the children would be scattered to an orphanage. So she said nothing, and buried the pain so deep that she came to hate her own life.

This is the story of what happened next.

Connie tells all of it - the violence in the house, the police at the door every single weekend, the marriage that collapsed at seventeen, the two small children who kept her alive on the nights she wanted to die, and the evening she finally knelt at the edge of her bed and let Jesus take the weight she had carried alone since she was a girl.

And then the part almost nobody writes about. She forgave him. She wrote to the man who had raped her and asked for his forgiveness, for the years she had spent hating him. He tore the letter up and mailed the pieces back. She forgave him anyway, and walked out of a prison she had been locked in for forty years.

Read this ifYou were hurt as a child and have never said it out loudYou are carrying shame that was never yours to carryYou want to forgive someone and have no idea how to beginYou love someone who is suffering and you don't know what to say to herYou have quietly wondered whether God could still want you

Connie Harris is not a therapist. She is a grandmother from Ward, Arkansas, married to her Butch for more than fifty years, who has stood up in front of women's groups for over forty years and told them the worst thing that ever happened to her - because every time she does, someone in the room finally speaks too.

Short enough to finish in one sitting. Honest enough to change how you see yourself.

If you or someone you love has been made to feel worthless and unlovable, don't put this down. The abuse does not get the last word. The shame does not get the last word.

You are not a victim. You are an overcomer.

Scroll up and start reading her story.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKHFDQQL
• ISBN13: 9798175926386
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.2" x 5.0"