When a Song Finds Your Story: “Hills and Valleys”
There are songs you enjoy and then there are songs that feel like they were stitched into your life long before you ever heard them. Hills and Valleys by Tauren Wells is one of those for me. I didn’t choose this song. This song chose me. It found me in a moment when I was trying to name what I had survived, trying to understand the depth of what I carried, and trying to accept that God had been holding me the entire time—even when I didn’t know it. When I listen to it now, I can trace the map of my marriage inside every lyric. The highs that looked beautiful from the outside.
The lows that felt too heavy to explain.
The quiet places where I cried alone but still believed God saw me.
The valleys where I begged Him for strength I didn’t have.
The hills where I thought, “Maybe this time things will change,” only to find myself slipping again.
For years, I didn’t understand that I was living in a cycle of emotional survival. Nothing looked extreme to other people. Nothing screamed danger. But there is a kind of pain that sinks in slowly—so quietly that you stop noticing how heavy it has become. And you don’t even realize how low you are until God reaches into that valley and lifts your chin.
That’s what this song reminds me of.
“You’re the God of the hills and valleys.” Not just one. Not just the other.
Both.
It helped me see that God was with me in moments when I felt invisible. In the arguments that made no sense. In the silence that stretched for months. In the times when promises were made and broken so softly I almost convinced myself they didn’t hurt. In the years when I tried to hold the peace by losing pieces of myself. In the confusion of thinking “maybe this is just normal marriage stuff,” even when my spirit felt buried underneath it.
Every valley I walked, God walked with me. Every hill I climbed, He strengthened me for it.
And in the places where I felt the most alone—those deep places where survival was my daily assignment—He never left. That’s why this song feels like it was written from my own journal. It captures the journey of being lifted, broken, carried, and rebuilt in ways I’m only now beginning to understand.
Writing my memoirs has forced me to revisit both the hills and the valleys of my marriage. To be honest about the parts I minimized. To acknowledge that some of what I lived through was not normal. To stop protecting other people’s feelings at the cost of my own healing. And to finally trust that God didn’t bring me through all of that so I could stay silent about it.
This song has been my reminder that my story matters—not because it was dramatic, or tragic, or public—but because God cared about every single part of it. He cared about the girl who kept hoping. He cared about the woman who kept trying. And He cares about the healed, honest version of me who is finally strong enough to speak her truth.
I survived valleys I didn’t even recognize as valleys.
I stood on hills I tried to pretend were mountains.
But through all of it, God stayed.
So today, I write my first blog post with gratitude, with honesty, and with peace… knowing that the God of the hills and valleys is the same God who is guiding me into this new season of truth, courage, and healing.
And I’m ready to walk it—with Him, and with a voice that finally belongs to me.
Emotional Abuse and the Body: A Conversation We Don’t Have Enough
I want to talk about something that doesn’t come up often enough when we talk about emotional abuse—what it does to the body. Not just the heart. Not just the mind. The body.
For a long time, I didn’t connect my physical exhaustion, my constant tension, or my emotional shutdown to what I was living through. I thought I was just tired. Just stressed. Just overwhelmed. I didn’t see it as harm. I didn’t see it as abuse. And I definitely didn’t see it as something that could affect my health.
But emotional abuse doesn’t stay emotional.
It settles into your nervous system.
It shows up in your sleep.
It lives in your shoulders, your stomach, your chest.
It trains your body to brace, to wait, to prepare for the next emotional shift.
And the hardest part? Most of us don’t recognize it while we’re in it.
When you’re living in an emotionally unsafe environment, your body adapts in order to survive. You become hyper-aware. You monitor tone. You read the room constantly. You learn when to speak and when to stay quiet. Over time, your body never fully rests—because rest requires safety.
What makes emotional abuse especially damaging is how invisible it is. There are no bruises to explain why you’re anxious. No clear moment you can point to and say, this is when it happened. Instead, it’s cumulative. It’s the constant questioning of yourself. The emotional unpredictability. The subtle messages that tell you your needs are too much or your feelings are wrong.
And when your pain is invisible, you learn to dismiss it.
I also want to say this clearly: while I’m telling this story from my experience as a woman, emotional abuse is not gender-exclusive. Men experience this too. They just carry it differently—and often more silently. Many men are taught that naming emotional pain is weakness, so they hide it behind work, control, detachment, or stoicism. The body still keeps the score, even when the pain goes unnamed.
What I’m learning now—through reflection, healing, and writing—is that my body was responding exactly as it should have to an emotionally unsafe environment. The anxiety. The exhaustion. The emotional numbness. None of it meant I was weak. It meant I was surviving.
And survival comes at a cost.
This is where faith and healing intersect again for me. Because for years, I spiritualized endurance without understanding what it was doing to me. I confused faith with staying. Strength with silence. Trust with tolerating harm. But God never intended faith to cost us our health, our identity, or our sense of safety.
Healing has required me to listen to my body with compassion instead of judgment. To stop asking, What’s wrong with me? and start asking, What happened to me? That shift alone has been life-giving.
So I want to open this conversation gently—for anyone reading who feels constantly tense, exhausted, anxious, disconnected, or emotionally shut down and doesn’t know why.
Your body may be responding to something your heart survived quietly.
And that doesn’t make you broken.
It makes you human.
Naming emotional abuse isn’t about rewriting the past with anger. It’s about understanding the present with clarity. And clarity is often the first step toward healing—not just emotionally, but physically too.
This is part of telling the truth.
This is part of reclaiming health.
And this is part of why silence can no longer be my refuge.