Chris O’Leary started to sweat in church as he and his family moved up the line of parents and kids waiting for a turn at the confessional. When they got to the head of the line, O’Leary was crying and trying not to pass out.

O’Leary’s panic attack hit as his son made his first confession, in 2002.

He wasn’t sure why, but he wondered if it had something to do with hazy memories from his childhood confessions. Three years later, in 2005, his daughter made her first confession. He had another panic attack.

O’Leary had talked to church officials in 2002, after the New York Times broke a story involving sexual abuse allegations against Father Leroy Valentine. Valentine had been a priest at O’Leary’s childhood parish until the Archdiocese of St. Louis began moving the priest around. The story revealed that in the late 1990s, the archdiocese had settled with three brothers who had accused Valentine of sexual abuse, paying them $20,000 each.

The Times story unsettled O’Leary; he wasn’t sure if his vague, uncomfortable memories of confession with Valentine meant something inappropriate had also happened to him. When he spoke to then-Bishop Timothy Dolan, the bishop reassured him that he was misreading the situations from decades ago.

O’Leary also sought clarity outside the church. “Are you sure this wasn’t a thing?” he asked a psychologist. She also told him he was misinterpreting his memories.

So O’Leary buried them.

Then, his life started falling apart.

His panic attacks got worse. He couldn’t concentrate at work, and lost his job as a process improvement analyst where he made $90,000 a year. He got diagnosed with ADHD and then Asperger’s. He withdrew from his marriage of 16 years, which ended in divorce.

“By 2011, I had lost everything,” O’Leary said. He had also begun to accept that something bad had happened to him during his years at Immacolata Catholic Church in Richmond Heights, Missouri. Something happened during face-to-face confession with Valentine when he was in grade school.

“My head would end up in his crotch,” O’Leary said.

He went back to the archdiocese in 2011, met with an investigatory review team and told them what he had remembered. Two months later, he says, Deacon Phil Hengen told him Valentine denied the allegations.

Then in 2013, the church permanently removed Valentine from the ministry, saying in a statement that a recent allegation of an incident in the 1970s was credible. When O’Leary read the reports about Valentine’s removal in the local paper, he had a mental breakdown.

“That absolutely destroyed me,” he said. For so long, he had questioned his own reality and sanity. He didn’t trust psychologists anymore. He didn’t have any faith left in the church. He had already lost his job and family. And he had finally remembered the worst thing of all: That day in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, where he had always had a blank spot in his memory, had come back to him.

“I’m at the door of the rectory. The west door. Trying to get out. My hand is on the handle of the storm door. On the left side of the door. It’s all I can see as I fumble with it, desperate to get outside,” he recently wrote, in a blog post describing being raped that day.

In October of 2015, he filed a lawsuit against the archdiocese. It was settled two years later, and he received $9,000 of a $15,000 settlement after lawyers’ fees. When asked to comment on O’Leary’s account, archdiocese spokesman Gabe Jones said in an email, “The archdiocese’s record of Mr. O’Leary’s allegations are significantly different; however, due to a court order as well as our own ethical obligation, we are not at liberty to discuss Mr. O’Leary’s case.” Jones also said the information O’Leary shared initially changed multiple times by the time he broke off communication with the archdiocese’s Office of Child and Youth Protection.

The settlement, which O’Leary says he accepted under pressure of a statute of limitations that would have negatively affected his case, has not healed any of O’Leary’s wounds. The money mostly went to medical bills and other debts.

O’Leary, now 50 and living in Webster Groves, Missouri, struggles to leave his house and makes a living selling e-books and DVDs about baseball pitching and hitting techniques. In addition to ADHD and Asperger’s, he has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, OCD and complex PTSD, but he hasn’t been to a therapist in years because he says the church destroyed his trust in them.

He decided to talk publicly about his case because he doesn’t believe the church is sincere about helping sexual abuse survivors. He wants to warn other parents. He’s published a detailed account and timeline on his website.

“Eventually, I realized the archdiocese didn’t care about me or what happened to me,” he said.

It’s a ghost that has haunted him the past 16 years, ever since he first spoke to a church official. Perhaps he holds out hope that someone in the church might acknowledge how much he continues to suffer -- not just from four years of intermittent abuse, but also from 16 years of not being believed.

He still considers himself a Catholic.

But he doesn’t believe he will ever be able to step foot in a church again.

Mark Zuckerberg’s apologies are not enough.

Imagine a friend of a friend stalked your Facebook page. He saw that you had liked posts about cute puppies and that you’d joined a rescue group on the site. So, he started putting stories on your newsfeed about the puppy mill practices of the store where you normally buy dog food.

The images of abused dogs and heartbreaking stories convinced you to stop shopping there and switch to a different store.

But the store you left never did any of those terrible things. It was your stalker’s competitor, and he wanted to hurt their business. If I found out I had been targeted, lied to and manipulated like this, I would not settle for a contrite apology. And I wouldn’t expect the stalker to change his ways simply because he had been caught.

Now, what if that business had been a political candidate? And it was your vote that was influenced by lies?

That is the question Congress should be asking on behalf of 87 million Facebook users whose data was “scraped” by research firm Cambridge Analytica and used to help the Trump campaign. The burning question is no longer whether Facebook is turning us all into narcissists. As a country, we should be outraged that Facebook let “bad actors” feed us lies, weaken trust in our institutions and tear our civil discourse apart. To what extent has Facebook been complicit in subverting our democracy through fake news, Russian trolls and privacy breaches, and just as importantly, how do we prevent it from happening again?

More than questioning, we need Congress to propose legislation that protects us like the laws that European countries have enacted. American social media users should be able to decide to opt in if they want their data shared. The tech giant should be prohibited from tracking our online activity once we are logged out of the site. We should have disclosure about how our data is monetized and who buys access to it. It’s clearly not just advertisers who use this data to market to us. We should not have to wonder if our news feeds are filled with fake news or propaganda.

I received a Facebook notice that my information had been compromised -- by a friend logging into the “My Digital Life” quiz -- and shared with Cambridge Analytica. Now, I would like to believe that I am media-savvy enough to avoid falling for fake news planted in my feed. Likely, the vast majority of my “friends” are. But we are consumers being misled by a product. We all suffer the consequences in a democracy when people fall for misinformation.

You may be smart enough to spot propaganda -- this time. But what about when the tools of bad actors are sophisticated enough to exploit your values and interests? Broadcast television is regulated and has federal oversight. News organizations are liable for slander. A social networking behemoth with nearly 2 billion users, many of whom use it as a primary news source, holds outsize power to influence elections, public policies and consumer behavior. And yet it is subject to no similar oversight or regulation. Facebook is a publishing platform and should be treated as such.

My concerns about social media used to focus on the personal: the toll it takes on our mental health, productivity and social relationships. I also thought and wrote quite a bit about the political: the erosion of privacy and what it meant for our society and children. But that seemed like a battle lost in the court of public opinion. Millions of Americans willingly made the trade-off of giving up personal information for the habit-forming convenience of these platforms.

I was one of them.

Several years ago, I realized how we had lost control of our personal data and knew little of how it was being used to influence or impact our lives. So, I made a few changes in how I used social media. Mostly, I became a lot more cautious about sharing pictures or stories about my children, but I continued to log into Facebook and Twitter daily.

More recently, when a whistleblower revealed the enormity of the privacy scandal at Facebook, I decided to take a complete break. I also wanted to show my children, who use Instagram and Snapchat like most of their peers, that a social media detox is doable and can be beneficial.

I quickly realized how habit-forming these sites are, because I instinctively went to click on them anytime I was waiting -- in a line, in traffic, at a restaurant. I had to stop myself whenever I felt an inkling of boredom or when everyone around me was looking at their phones. The external validation through engagement on these platforms is brilliantly designed to make our brains crave it. It’s become a part of the culture of how we share our opinions and personal news.

A few days into my detox, Facebook started emailing me multiple times a day. The company tracks users’ time on its site carefully, and will aggressively try to lure you back once it notes a decline in use. Up to four times a day, Facebook sent emails about what I was missing. A friend just shared this, so-and-so just tagged you, you have so many unread messages. It felt like the manipulations of a desperate ex trying to win me back.

I stayed away from Facebook for eight days, and by the end was nervous about getting back on. Facebook tested my self-control and reinforced that it’s impossible to expect the company to act in the interest of its users. It’s a corporation that acts in the best interest of its investors. It’s too big, too invasive, too secretive, too profit-driven to care about what we lose in all this connection.

We’ve already sold our data to the devil.

We didn’t realize how steep the cost.

When the recording on the shuttle bus warned about deadly flash floods, I smiled at my children decked in their waterproof Gore-Tex bodysuits and repeated the message.

“Flash floods can kill. Don’t let it happen to you!”

We laughed, in that nervous way when you wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into.

I had convinced my husband and our two young teenagers to hike The Narrows, renowned as one of the most scenic slot canyon hikes in the world. Hikers must wade through the Virgin River, which runs from wall to wall, as it cuts through the canyon in Utah’s Zion National Park. We were visiting in the early spring, when the snow melt can frequently cause the water level to rise too high, shutting it down for hikers. The temperature was in the 30s the morning we headed out. We had rented canyoneering shoes, neoprene socks and walking sticks in addition to our wetsuits to keep us relatively dry and warm.

I had deliberately chosen a family activity in which I knew neither child would be able to look at their phone for eight solid hours. The river demands your full attention. As a parent of teens, you relish the phone-free hours on a vacation.

Before we left, there was a heated debate about whose phone would be carried as tribute in the waterproof bag, along with our snacks and water bottles. The youngest child, with the oldest phone, finally agreed to let us stow his after we promised to replace it with an upgraded version if his phone became an unintended casualty of the adventure.

I also wanted to take us out of our comfort zones. I knew the hike would become physically uncomfortable at times and would require some persistence to reach the point we wanted before turning back around. We would have to slog through the river together.

A paved path ends at the bank of the river where we entered the water. Around 9 a.m., the cold water was flowing fast -- around 126 cubic feet per second (cfs) -- which meant it would be a challenging hike upstream. When the water flow is above 150 cfs, the river becomes impassable. In the summer, the flow is around 50 to 60 cfs. Today, the water was cloudy with silt. It had been closed to hikers due to flash flooding the day before, and the chocolate-brown water churned around our legs. Water seeped into our shoes and squished between the layers of socks.

The river bottom is uneven and covered in large rocks. I had read some descriptions beforehand that said it’s like walking on wet bowling balls. Not all the rocks are that smooth, however. It took us a while to get our footing, especially since we were laboring against a strong current.

The river’s depth is also unpredictable. The water can shift from mid-calf to chest-high within a few feet. We relied on our five-foot tall walking sticks to keep our balance, and even then, our youngest fell a few times. The entire way we were surrounded by vermilion sandstone mountains, their summits towering more than a thousand feet high. We passed waterfalls and patches of vegetation on either side. It takes about an hour to hike one mile.

We had 2.5 miles to go before we got to the part where the 2,000-foot-high walls narrow to a passage about 20 feet across. Along the way, we crossed the rushing river several times. At one point, I realized what an apt metaphor this struggle through the water was to the journey of raising teens. We were trying to keep a watchful eye on our kids to bail them out if they fell, but we had to let them find their own footing. It was hard to stay balanced. It felt a bit dangerous, and we were all unsteady and fighting against a stronger force at times. Yet when we stopped to look around, it was glorious. The heights and depths, the colors and the light interplayed to create an intensity and serenity.

And we were in it together.

Now, of course, we did not last the entire time without a flare-up between mother and teenage daughter. It’s not a river of miracles, after all. I know there was a period of cross words and angry sloshing, although for the life of me, I cannot remember what triggered it.

That’s an advantage of being in a space of otherworldly splendor. Families get distracted and tend to lose track their personal grievances with one another.

The disagreement sorted itself out as we moved downstream.

On the shuttle ride back, we were all exhausted. There was a quiet closeness, that bond that develops when you’ve struggled alongside someone to experience something special together.

The flash floods didn’t get us.

But the river did.