Thistle Farms Is Helping Women Reclaim Their Lives

Hello, Guideposts readers. My name is Becca Stevens, and I’m the founder and president of Thistle Farms. And we are happy to partner with Guideposts to share with you our story. So Thistle Farms opened 21 years ago. We opened with one house. We invited five women in who were survivors of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution. We just said, “Come. Find your home. It’s not a halfway house. It’s not a treatment center. It’s not a shelter. And tell us what you need from healing.” So what they needed was space and time to figure out what healing looked like for them. Four years later, we realized that poverty was one of the biggest issues that were still driving women back into dangerous relationships and on the streets. So we started a justice enterprise, making healing products for the body. After my father was killed by a drunk driver when I was five years old, I was sexually abused beginning in the church by one of the church elders. It took years to figure out how it affected me and what I was going to do with all of that maybe fear and anguish that goes along with it. So when I started Thistle Farms, I knew I needed to be about my own healing as well as healing others. You know, the idea of, like, if I can find peace, a thousand people can find peace. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what people need to be doing to find their own healing. You know, after 20 years of doing this work, I wrote a book called Love Heals, to say there’s practical, daily, and really relevant steps we can take so that we can be about the healing work after trauma. There’s a whole life after Me Too. I think there’s three things that really help people heal from abuse. I think the first one is to have a real purpose in life, that if I feel like I have a purpose, then that makes me want to be healthy. And it makes me want to reach it back out into the world, so to have meaningful work that drives you to get up in the morning and to do the things that you need to do, so that you’re a healthy, healing person. You know, I mean, that is important–so to have purpose as a person. Second thing I think people need is a supportive community. One of the reasons that women do so well and thrive here at Thistle Farms who are survivors is they have a powerful community behind them. That means you’re not going through this alone. Community is the entity that is the sum that’s greater than its parts. You know, that there’s something beautiful and healing and magical about having a community around you to help. And the third thing I think people really need is a lot of mercy and forgiveness. You know, we’re so hard on ourselves. And the aftershocks of abuse can leave a pretty devastating path of destruction. And so we need a lot of forgiveness and mercy for others, but also for ourselves. I believe with all my heart that God is love, and that God wants loving things in our lives and wants us to be whole and well. And I believe that if it weren’t for God, the devastation of the abuse I went through would be much worse. So that’s all that we’re about at Thistle Farms is just saying, you know, love heals. God is a healing presence. And whatever else you went through, you can trust that.