Could She Change Her Family’s Story?

At a young age, Kelley Frenchko-Gordon had already met the dark side of life. Domestic violence. Addiction. Prostitution. Molestation. Trafficking. Could she change her family’s story? 

Read on and find out but be forewarned. 

Kelley’s story is ugly and almost hard to believe. We all face adversity—the general topic of this blog—but in my many orbits around the sun, I’d never met anyone who’d experienced so much trauma starting at a very young age. 

The examples are mind numbing.

“The place I called home was different . . . there was violence within the walls,” she said. Drugs and alcohol flowed freely. Overdose deaths happened as did sexual and physical assault. 

By the age of nine, Kelley started thinking, “My biggest hero is my mom. But if she doesn’t have any hope, how can I? That’s basically where I was.” 

Though she didn’t follow through on her suicidal thoughts, she lived the next fourteen years falling deeper into the self-destructive patterns that had shackled her family, including her two brothers.

A Divine Appointment

Kelley and I met at a Christian writers’ conference in the mountains of North Carolina. We first ran into each other at the elevator, she very much pregnant with her third child.

She spoke of her husband of nine years and their two little girls at home in Tennessee. Joyful, friendly. I noticed her dimples, her All-American girl good looks. She had the type of personality that drew me in. 

By our third or fourth encounter at random places during a conference attended by hundreds, I started thinking, why did God put her in my path?

And then, I discovered the answer. 

One morning, the dining room full, I spotted an open seat at Kelley’s table. Her table mates and I then listened in stunned disbelief as Kelley recounted her experiences, our jaws agape.

I had set this blog aside for nearly a year and kept thinking I needed to return to it. A post about Kelley’s journey seemed like the perfect story to share after a year’s absence. 

Defining Generational Strongholds

A stronghold is a fortress. In a spiritual context, it refers to patterns of behavior, beliefs, and emotions passed down through families. These patterns can be rooted in sin, trauma, or unhealthy coping strategies. Evangelist and author Beth Moore writes about it this way: 

“Oftentimes we’ve grown up with these chains and they feel completely natural. We consider them part of our personality rather than a strangling yoke.”

The strangling yoke experienced by her mother, who’d been sex-trafficked herself, ensnared Kelley. By sixteen, Kelley had already been drugged, raped, and then videotaped. “The story wasn’t that I was a trafficking victim,” Kelley wrote in a blog. “I was dubbed the ‘whore.’”

Within a couple of years, the strangling yoke cinched tighter when she became involved with a deeply troubled man, a narcissist who used threats and physical violence to keep her under control. 

He was a familiar spirit. 

“Oh, there were signs . . . oh, there were signs,” she said, but she married him anyway. “It was like I was under a spell.” But it didn’t last. Weary of his verbal and physical abuse, Kelley got a divorce and moved back to her native Florida.

There, she completely unraveled.

A Girl Gone Wild in Florida 

Could she change her family’s story? A laughable notion then. She went full Jezebel. Fueled by ecstasy, alcohol and other mind-altering substances at social clubs in Miami, she preyed on men and enjoyed manipulating them—the seductress alluded to in Proverbs 7. 

“I was sleeping with men, and I thought that I may as well get something for it,” she told me. Cruises, gifts, and yes cold-hard cash. She quit her job and relied on prostitution to meet her financial needs. “It got bad, demonically bad.”

But a reckoning awaited her.

One night, like so many before, Kelley was headed for yet another club, inebriated, when she noticed two men following her. “I was in the middle of crazy and I could see the darkness . . . I saw demons. They were trying to kill me.” 

Terror filled her heart as she called a friend to pick her up.

But something else imbued her spirit. She felt the tangible presence of God, she said, and a certainty that He had protected her from two men, potential traffickers, who meant her harm. For the next six hours, she wept and repented. She felt a love never experienced. 

“Okay, God, where do I go from here?”

Could She Change Her Family’s Story?

It took thirteen years of hard work to first see herself for what she’d become after twenty years of abuse, and then to understand who she really was in Christ. “I had to come against so many strongholds so that I wouldn’t pass them down to my daughters.”

A surrender and a victory. 

Her mission these days is to shed light on hard things, sensitive topics surrounding sex, drugs, rape, abuse, and suicide. Through her example, a healing work of God manifested. Both brothers are clean and sober. As are her mom and dad. 

Could she change her family’s story.

She did. 

“The generational strongholds ended with me.”