Sharmen's Kimbrough's Story

A Christian Home Where the Bible Was Used as Leverage

I’m the second of six children, raised on a farm in eastern Washington, in a “Christian” home where my father used Scripture coercively for his own purposes.

He defined respect and submission as obedience. Then he justified his rages and his destructive behavior by saying we hadn’t respected him. Perfection meant compliance, conforming, and hiding. He did not see us as separate people with feelings of our own.

I know now there are words for that. Spiritual abuse. Coercive control. At the time there were no words at all — only the understanding that safety required becoming smaller.

At sixteen, a culmination of things happened, and I left. It certainly didn’t look like “honoring my father”. My brain wasn’t even fully developed yet; I had no plan and no foresight. Looking back, I understand it as God moving in a way that didn’t match anyone’s idea of what obedience should look like, to set my path according to Him rather than according to the rules I’d been handed.

The Life I Thought We Were Building

After high school I left Washington for Texas, finished a bachelor’s degree in psychology, got married, and built a life around my husband’s career.

That took us from Texas to Michigan to North Carolina, where I also began life as a stay-at-home mom. Life was good — or I believed it was. I thought the hard things we’d worked through were genuinely worked through, and the things we were ignoring were simply issues we’d get to eventually.

I believed God was the center of our lives, and that if everything else failed, we would both turn to Him and find the way through. That was how I had always experienced God, and I trusted it would always work.

I still do. I’ve just had to redefine what work means.

Six Years Between the First Sentence and the Last Signature

There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes when someone tells you they want out of a life you thought you were building together.

Six years passed between the day I learned he wanted out and the day I signed the divorce papers — granted five days after what would have been our nineteenth anniversary.

My heart physically, literally hurt every day of those six years.

I wrestled with fear and panic. With faith. With God’s goodness. With why it mattered to keep pressing forward when I wasn’t even sure what pressing forward meant anymore.

What Nobody Tells You About Trying to do Everything Right

I did everything I understood I was supposed to do to “fight for my marriage.”

I worked harder to meet his expectations and to change the things about me he didn’t like. I took a fierce inventory of my own character and set about eradicating anything that wasn’t true to who I believed God was calling me to be. I prayed harder. I sought counsel. I asked my church leadership to help redirect us. I read every book and listened to every podcast I could find about marriage, communication, and crisis. All the while, trying to hold it all together for my two little boys who had no understanding of anything other than their dad didn’t want to be at home with their mom anymore.

And most of that time I was profoundly alone, with no idea what tomorrow held.

Here is what I did not expect: some of the deepest damage came from people who meant well.

The secondary wounding that arrives through naive counsel — from trusted advisors, from friends, from leaders genuinely trying to help — can cut as deep as the original injury. Because when the people you trusted most hand you an explanation that doesn’t fit, you don’t conclude that the explanation is wrong. You conclude that you are.

I struggled through depression, panic attacks, hopelessness, worthlessness, and grief. I had to redefine what it meant to trust God, so that I could eventually put it into words for those with silenced hearts.

But God — And a Redemption Bigger Than the One I Asked For

But, God (love it when He ‘buts’ in!) saw fit to deeply shape my trust in Him through all this.  Having my feet knocked so completely out from under me compelled me to be on my face before Him, learning to spend every moment desperate for His hope and steadfastness.  He sent mentors to speak truth and hope to me, and awakened me to the daily reminders of His sovereignty.

I did want to give up! Sometimes it was hard to see why I shouldn’t take everything I could and run! I was incredibly close to a mental breakdown.  My feisty, rebellious side wasn’t tolerating any of this well.

But, God kept working to shape my character to be a better reflection of His, making me ask the hard questions about how I could still honor him in all this, and what it would look like to be a conduit of grace and mercy.  And I kept finding Him holding me even when I felt like I was falling into an abyss.

Walking out Redemption

For a long time, the redemption I was praying for had a very specific shape. A restored marriage. A story of overcoming the ugly underbelly of our selfishness to rise strong and beautiful together.

God’s idea of redemption turned out to be larger than mine — large enough to expose a love that covered every bit of my longing without my healing hinging on another person.

I had to learn that healing didn’t have to mean my husband came home.

It did mean leaning hard into what I knew to be good and right and true, and then taking the next right step. And it meant letting God be God, and trusting my times to His hands.

The walk of redemption also means none of us has arrived until we’re standing face to face with our Creator.

I finished my Master’s degree in professional counseling hoping that my scars could speak healing to someone else’s open wounds.

Ten Years Alongside Dr. David Hawkins at the Marriage Recovery Center

Then came a decade I did not see coming, and would not trade.

I spent more than ten years working closely alongside Dr. David Hawkins at the Marriage Recovery Center, where I developed and led the women’s programs, while coaching couples and individuals to emotional steadfastness.

It mattered to me for two reasons, and I want to name both.

The first is that it gave me somewhere to walk out what I had worked out. Everything I’d learned in the hardest years of my own story — about coercive control, about emotional and verbal abuse, about the difference between real change and performed change, about how faith gets used as leverage — stopped being private knowledge and became something usable. Wisdom that stays theoretical isn’t wisdom yet. It has to be tested against other people’s real lives.

The second is that it put me in the room with women who were living exactly where I had lived. Women who couldn’t name what was happening to them. Women who had been told to pray harder and submit more and wait longer. Women who had begun to believe they were the problem.

Getting to sit with them — to hand them language for what they were experiencing, and to watch hope and courage and faith come back into a face that had gone flat — is among the most meaningful work of my life. It is where I learned that naming something is the beginning of no longer being controlled by it.

I’m no longer contracted with the Marriage Recovery Center, and my work now lives at LiveFound. But that decade shaped everything I do, and I’m grateful for it.

Why LiveFound Exists

My work now is identity recovery.  I’m a firm believer that’s the whole point of the story!  To know who you are in light of God and His value, definition and calling of you.  

Not identity as a personality quiz or a set of affirmations, but the harder question underneath: who were you before you learned to survive someone else, and what would it take to find her again?

I help women recognize what has actually been happening — emotional abuse, coercive control, spiritual bypassing — and then do the long work of recovering a self and the agency to use it. Whether you are staying, leaving, or living in the limbo of a story you didn’t choose, my concern is not what you decide. It’s that you understand what you’re navigating clearly enough to decide it for yourself.

My mission is to be a minister of God’s grace to you, so you can find the strength to put one foot in front of the other and move purposefully through the life God has laid out in front of you.

My boys are grown and launched into their own lives. I’m a grandmother now, and married to a man who appreciates the adventure as much as I do.

I’m still walking it out. So are you. That’s rather the point.

.