Author: Eleanor Skelton

Eleanor Skelton is a freelance journalist and educator. They were homeschooled kindergarten through senior year of high school within the high-demand subculture of fundamentalist Christianity during the 90s and 00s before completing their bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Eleanor speaks about their experiences in leaving a cult to advocate for other survivors. They are currently enrolled in a journalism graduate program at the University of Alabama. They write about deconstruction and mental wellness at www.eleanorskelton.com.

Purity Rings: How I reclaimed a patriarchal evangelical tradition

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2013.

I was one of those pre-teens longingly looking through the True Love Waits catalog back in the early 2000s. Wondering. Waiting.

Somehow, I wanted to believe that wearing one of these rings and promising to keep my thoughts pure and my body untouched would magically cause the man God had prepared for me to appear, just like Prince Charming of the fairy tales. I composed letters in my head to my future husband. I dreamed of the day when he would remove my purity ring from my finger and replace it with our engagement ring. I would save myself for him, and we would live happily ever after in the enjoyment of each other’s company.

My parents didn’t buy me a True Love Waits ring. Instead, on the Christmas I was 13, my dad gave me a simple tanzanite ring. I wore it until last year, when the gold band finally snapped.

I didn’t put it back on. And I haven’t repaired it yet. Someday, I probably will. But I was already questioning the thinking behind the purity movement of my teen years. Now don’t get me wrong. I still want to remain a virgin until marriage, and I think there is something to be said for seeking to live well. But now I have a different definition of purity.

Many Christian girls of my generation – including some of my closest friends – committed themselves to the “pure girls” movement, yet ended up wounded by it.

A blogger who posts under the pseudonym gracefortheroad explains it in a post called, “I don’t wait anymore.” She says, “A lot of girls were sold on a deal and not on a Savior” and ends with this thought, “I just didn’t want to wait anymore – didn’t want to live like I was waiting on anyone to get here. I already have Him … and He is everything.”

The Recovering Grace website has an article regarding the pitfalls of the emotional purity teaching prevalent ten years ago, which argues that if you have a crush, you are sinning and giving a piece of your heart away to someone or losing your emotional virginity. Believing these ideas caused me to become paranoid of hugging a guy friend or allowing myself to become attracted to a man.

Last year, my friend Anna G. shared a story with me called “The girl and the glass heart.” It confronts the lie that if I freely love, I am left with less to love other people with in the future. The lies that tell me that if I love and I am left heartbroken, I am tarnished and used up, unfit for another relationship. The Heart-Healer in the tale tells the girl:

“Only in brokenness can [your heart] truly be whole. …. Wholeness does not come from perfection. Wholeness comes from purpose. There is no purpose in a perfect heart. There is purpose in a broken one.”

I had forgotten about my old purity ring until a few weeks ago.

Last December, over Christmas break, I finally told someone about my history of self-harm throughout my childhood and my youth. For the first time, the darkest lies I believed and deepest wounds I carried flowed out of my heart in a 3 am chat powered by Mountain Dew.

Later, I bought two rings engraved with the words “Forgiven” and “Jesus” to remind myself of why I never need to punish myself. But when my friend Cynthia B. first saw them, she said, “Congratulations on your first real purity rings.”

I drew back and paused, then smiled. “Yes. They are my purity rings.” The rings I wear now are not to symbolize something I do or don’t do. They don’t have much to do with me at all.

Instead, these rings point to what He did. For me.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 5: This is your life

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 6, 2014.

Continued from Part 4

I remember when
We used to drive
Anywhere but here
As long as we’d forget our lives
We were so young and confused
that we didn’t know
To laugh or cry
Those nights were ours
They will live and never die
Together we’d stand forever…
– Skillet, Those Nights

The first week of February 2014 at around 4:30 am, I was driving my little white Toyota sedan that I named Journey somewhere between east Houston and Beaumont, Texas, floating through bayou fog and the darkness before dawn.

I adore roadtrips. Few other activities allow my brain that raw time stretching as far as the humming asphalt between my tires for pondering my life’s direction and my purpose.

No school, no work, just hours and hours of listening to music and calling friends or chatting with anyone in the car I’ve managed to kidnap. I can just be and enjoy existence. Roadtrips make me feel alive.

Two of my housemates traveling with me had fallen asleep in the backseat a few hours before. Our little escapade is still nicknamed “that one time we drove an extra 15 hours to have a 20 minute conversation with Mullet Jesus.”

We’d left Colorado Springs around 11pm Friday night, arrived in Dallas around 1pm, napped and visited friends, and now I was in the 4th hour of the 6 hour drive that Saturday night stretching into Sunday. The remaining itinerary involved church, a 9 hour drive to Lubbock to see Skillet at the Rock and Worship Roadshow, then 7 hours back home.

Despite the Monster drinks and beef jerky, I knew I was nearing my limits. I turned up the speakers and scrolled for Switchfoot’s Beautiful Letdown on my iPod.

Don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes / This is your life and today is all you’ve got now / Yeah, and today is all you’ll ever have…

The rhythmic, deep buzz of the opening notes blended with my thoughts. Don’t stop feeling this semester. Don’t forget how you learned to be alive, I reminded myself.

This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be? / When the world was younger and you had everything to lose…

I imagined my 5-year-old self. What would she think of adult me? She’d be slightly ecstatic, I decided. I was finally going on adventures my heart longed for, and at last I had friends.

– – – – – – – –

Since recovering from repression, emotional honesty has been crucial.

My counselor told me summer 2013 that other people, including my parents, wouldn’t understand me unless I told them how I felt.

And I’ve found abundant, vibrant life in community and artistic expression.

Late nights driving around town with my friend MangyCat and the Midnight Muse writers and making miniatures in my friend Kim’s cozy basement were staples of my first year living outside the box.

But last spring, I took an entire semester of courses for pure enjoyment: Acting, 2D Art, Koine Greek, Poetry Workshop, and Choir.

My heart is in theater, both inside the church and beyond it, which I admitted to my friend Cynthia Barram last month when I volunteered to act for Haunted Mines, a local haunted house.

“Honey, everybody uses theater to work out their emotional problems,” she replied.

Slam poetry, which I discovered 6 months before moving out, became my catharsis, a safe place for open and honest expression. Almost like a new form of church.

My two favorite slam poems are Confession: For the Christian part of me (Joel McKerrow) and Letter to my 10 year old self (Susan Peiffer, of Hear Here, the Colorado Springs local slam team).

I heard Joel perform his poem live at an open mic in the campus pub one Friday night in October 2012. He said he felt privileged to perform it in Colorado Springs, among all the religious tension. He begins:

For the Christian part of me,
not for the Christ, but for the Christian,
I am sorry.
For when I look at the book and look at my life,
when I look at the Christ and look at the church,
the two are as black and white.
So for the way I have silenced you,
with words that I thought were the only truth,
for every preacher that has yelled at you
every Bible that has been quoted at you,
every megaphone that has damned you,
every friend that has judged you,
every parent that has guilted you,
I am sorry.

And Susan’s poem sparks new beginnings for me through my old scars. I love how she ends:

And Susan, one day, occupy your body again.
Realize and understand the gentleness of touch.
And let this realization convince you
that you are much, much more than a product of your past.
You are the manifestation of some dream whom destiny means to last
and you will always have words.
Words will never leave you.
I don’t have much else to tell you, Sue,
because it gets better, yeah, but it gets worse, too.
Remember, beloved, you are made of poetry.
Stardust, wanderlust.
[….]
You will fall in love, and you will be partially fixed.
And if you miss your youth one day,
You are secure enough to say
You feel twelve again
All over like it should have been
Even if it takes ’til 36.

One day, I want to shout out my story as they have, unashamed and no longer silenced. But for now, I am learning how to feel every day until it’s like breathing.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 4: October

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 6, 2014.

Continued from Part 3

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness
Like resignation to the end, always the end…
– Gotye, Somebody I Used To Know

October, it’s not your fault. But I really don’t like you anymore.

Depression hits me hardest in October and January. Summer’s buzz fades, and my dreams seem to die with it.

The past three autumns had a pretty dismal track record.

October 2011: My favorite high school English A Beka video teacher, Mrs. Sandy Schmuck, dies from a rare form of cancer.

September / October 2012: I call the campus police for a friend resuscitated from one suicide attempt who plummeted again.

A coroner’s report rules my musician friend Michael Thigpen‘s death a suicide.

September / October 2013: Fellow classmate of five years, chemistry major, dies alone in his apartment.

A guy friend and I talk my friend Ashley out of a suicide attempt when her manipulative parents and cult Pentecostal church crushed her spirit.

September / October 2014: I’m in the ER with a friend whose self-harm went wrong.

American Evangelical Christianity has issues reconciling with mental illness. We took the “rejoice always” thing to mean “never, ever, ever let anyone know if you are depressed.” We forgot that we were also told to “bear one another’s burdens” and to “weep with those who weep.” That even Jesus wept.

“I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time, I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time, since Jesus Christ came in, and cleansed my heart from sin, I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time!”

One of the songs I grew up singing in A Beka elementary Bible video classes. My mom sometimes quoted it at me when I was grumpy.

So according to the song, if I’m truly a Christian, I can only be happy?

My friend MightiMidget described this so well in her post “Joy and Theology“:

“Then if joy is a command, and struggling with hopelessness is a sin, where am I allowed to feel? At all? Is struggling in itself a sin? Then apparently I am doomed to never get out of that cycle, and to ‘live in sin,’ and if I am ‘living in sin,’ does that mean I am not a believer and will never be able to truly achieve eternal life? Is it not meant for me? Am I not elect? God is Love, but is that Love then not for me, because I’m too emotional? Do I have to learn to not be emotional?”

I was always guilty if I wasn’t happy enough. As a teenager, my dad called me Eeyore when I was moody and told me to be more like Tigger. So I tucked my griefs deeper inside.

No wonder so many of my friends and I had a goth phase. At least there the darkness inside us gets recognized, as my friend Cynthia Jeub wrote about Christians and their attraction to goth culture.

I crashed last October. The waves of panic pulled me under, and the uncried sadness of more than a decade erupted.

I couldn’t stop crying. I cried between every class, couldn’t focus on assignments and exams, took naps on the couch in our campus newspaper office and let the tears roll down.

I got the flu, I dropped all my classes but one, and I slept for 15 to 18 hour periods for two weeks recovering from a sinus infection.

I’d hit a wall where I felt even I wasn’t worth fighting for anymore. My sleep-deprived mind and body demanded rest, and I finally gave in.

My Shakespeare professor and one of my Chemistry professors understood. Most of my professors and classmates didn’t.

My study buddy Racquel took me to the campus pub and bought me curly French fries, which we ate while I cried in her lap. Cynthia Jeub skipped out on part of our weekly student newspaper staff meeting with me and wiped my tears, coaxing me to eat. Josh took me out to Panda Express the day I got afraid of my own head again and debated theology with me at the coffee shop next door all evening.

My friend Aaron and his wife brought Starbucks to my apartment and told me it was okay to feel sad, it was even normal given my family background.

One afternoon while snuggled under my quilt feeling particularly crazy, I called my ever-traveling friend MOTS. She calmed my panic and told me not to stop the grief, to let it out. She said, “As my dad always tells me, ‘You can’t control emotions, all you can do is ride the waves.'”

This October I’m back at it again. Taking the same classes, facing the professors whose classes I dropped last year. I’m still fighting, and because I learned to endure even the sadness, I am stronger.

Maybe I won’t always hate October. Maybe I won’t always keep needing to grieve.

Some autumn nights I still recite one of the poems we memorized in Mrs. Schmuck’s ninth grade English class:

A Vagabond Song
Bliss Carman

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

My final post will be about the importance of emotional honesty.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 3: The Angry Monster

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 3, 2014.

Continued from Part 2

Content note: self-harm

In a group session summer before last with my counselor and my parents, my mom mentioned the time my sister asked her why I was so logical and scientific when one of our dogs was being euthanized in his old age.

“How could Eleanor be so cold?” she’d asked. My mom said, “But I saw Eleanor sobbing in her car afterwards. She wouldn’t cry in front of us.” I had always felt I had to be strong in front of my siblings.

My counselor turned to me and said, “That’s a great skill if you want to be a surgeon. But even those guys end up crying in my office years later.”

– – – – – – – –

Fast forward to March 2014.

I was talking to my counselor again about feeling. But this time, I was afraid of my own anger.

“Clench your fist,” he said. “I want you to hold it tight, feel the anger. How does that feel to you?”

I was so out of practice. “It feels…red.”

The secret side of me
I never let you see
I keep it caged
But I can’t control it
So stay away from me
The beast is ugly
I feel the rage
And I just can’t hold it…
– Skillet, Monster

– – – – – – – –

That same month, I had tried out for my first acting role. I was on the red team (ironic, right?) in the crowd in New Life Church’s Easter production, The Thorn. But the first time we did mob scene, someone on the director team pulled me out during rehearsal because I didn’t match the group.

I wasn’t projecting enough anger.

The passion play in Texas my family went to every year made a big impression on me as a sheltered child, and I had always wanted to be in it. Call it fulfilling a childhood dream. And my worst nightmare.

Unrestrained mob violence like the French Revolution or the crowd at Jesus’ crucifixion always terrified me, partially I think because anger unleashed in my family released chaos. We were always playing duck and cover between explosions, like living in a psychological war zone.

Small wonder I couldn’t stand seeing the monster in myself.

It’s scratching on the walls / In the closet, in the halls / It comes awake / And I can’t control it…

– – – – – – – –

It was dark and maybe raining. I was riding in my Fisher-Price car seat. My parents were driving home.

I hardly ever got to see other children because I was homeschooled, and leaving a birthday party for a coworker’s daughter had left four-year-old me in a perfect rage.

My tantrum reached a pitch and snapped. What was the worst thing I could scream at my parents to get them to stop ignoring me? I didn’t know any swear words.

CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM!

– – – – – – – –

It worked. They were disturbed. But we never talked about it. Or any of my other outbursts. All I knew was deep, deep shame.

Why should anyone love the horrifying small child who had screamed for blood?

So I turned the anger within. Inflicting pain on others hurt too much afterwards, so it was easier to hurt myself, bruising, cutting. It was better if I bled. If I paid for my own crimes.

Of course the guilt posed serious problems for my debut in acting. My counselor suggested I step out of the mob scene entirely when my recurring graphic dreams about the crucifixion and finding Jesus’ mutilated dead body resurfaced, but I told him I believed it was time to face down the nightmare.

It’s hiding in the dark / Its teeth are razor sharp / There’s no escape for me / It wants my soul, / It wants my heart / No one can hear me scream / Maybe it’s just a dream / Or maybe it’s inside of me / Stop this monster!

– – – – – – – –

So just before show week in April, I talked to my pastor who used to play Jesus at my first church in Texas.

After spilling everything, I said, “But…Jesus did say ‘Father, forgive them.’ So…I guess that means…me too?”

He looked half-amused and incredulous. “Of course you too, what do you mean you too? Christ sees you as a jewel. How does that make you feel?”

I was dumbfounded. My childhood hero knew my darkness. He didn’t shame me or ignore it. He knew it. And it didn’t frighten him. I could finally believe that the real Jesus did, too.

I cried. For hours. I was forgiven.

I went home and had a blast during show week. I let loose my anger during mob scene. A woman in the front row jumped when I raged. I had made my peace with the angry monster.

In my next post, I’m going to talk about dealing with another negative emotion, depression, outside of fundamentalist Christianity.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 2: Dare You To Feel

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on September 23, 2014.

“We’re talking about anger here, Fraser, a human emotion.
Are you human? Because if you are, human beings feel things, okay?
They feel anger, they feel love, they feel lust and fear, and sometimes,
and I know you don’t want to hear this, sometimes they even cry.”
– Ray, Due South (2.17), “Red, White, or Blue”

My wall shattered one morning.

I was merging onto I-25 early on a gray Monday in January 2012 to head to campus.

The weekend before, my family had been out of town and I’d watched some brand-new Faith Lessons by Ray VanderLaan, a Biblical archaeological DVD series, and sobbed for the first time in months at the idea of radical love, acceptance even when I failed to measure up. That I was worth love simply because I was alive.

And then Switchfoot’s song “Dare You to Move” came on 103.1 WAY-FM. I lost it.

I’d made a pact against crying around the age of 8 or 9. Crying showed vulnerability and weakness, neither of which I felt safe exposing around my family or church members. I prided myself on my refusal to cry at Passion Plays or sad movies. My mom would recount the entire Easter story with A Beka Bible flashcards, depicting the scourging in graphic detail. She cried. Not me.

I could hold it in when no one else could. I told myself over and over: “I am ice. Ice does not melt.”

I did Elsa’s whole “Conceal, don’t feel” thing before it was cool.

Well. Then I couldn’t cry at all. Even in private.

Most of my teen years were spent reversing the choke hold I’d imposed on my tears. And halfway through college, the rest was crumbling. “All the walls you built up / Are just glass on the outside / So let ’em fall down / There’s freedom waiting in the sound.” (Tenth Avenue North)

I described the experience to my friend Elraen later that cold wintry week on chat during one of our all-nighters.

I said, “I wasn’t really expecting it. It was one of those times when Jesus really gets your attention, and you realize just how much He really loves you, and you cry your eyes out. Somehow…I’d had two experiences like this in high school…but nothing quite like that since late 2005.”

“I guess I thought maybe experiences like that were over in my life.”

Elraen knew what I meant. She responded, “I hope that more and more God can bring moments like that into your life, breaking through the walls that have been put up to shield yourself from hurt […] I hope that healing comes and drives deeper and deeper into your life. Because He DOES love you. So, so much, no matter what [people] say about you or accuse you of — His love does not ever change.”

My soul was reawakening, but I’d have to fight my tendency to lock up. Numbness felt like being a ghost in my own existence, but at least it kept pain at bay.

The next few months, I felt like this little bubble of hope protected me, which I needed for the “coming of age” phase of my life story.

I still questioned the wisdom of feeling over the next two years. Doesn’t it take more energy than necessary? In late high school, when I read through all four Gospels twice, one detail stuck with me.

Jesus is about to be crucified. He is offered a drugged wine to dull the pain. He refuses.

“And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he had tasted it, he would not drink it.” (Matthew 27:33-34, ESV)

My Nelson study bible explained that “Jesus refused it; He wanted to drink His cup of suffering fully aware of all that was happening.”

From a logical perspective, this seems incredibly stupid, like refusing anesthesia before surgery. But often love isn’t logical.

If you wanted to identify with someone else completely, to live in their skin, you’d choose the full emotional and physical repercussions. Not out of cold obligation. With fire in your chest.

I know. Because I chose this once. I wanted to know the everyday struggles of my friend in a wheelchair. So I didn’t take the gloves she handed me or the foam seat cushion. I wanted noodly arms and a sore butt at the end of the day, because it would be a more honest reflection of her experience.

And this is how I realized that really choosing to live, embracing love and peace, grief and pain without censorship, requires a bravery I was still discovering.

Part three of this series will be about how I learned to be honest about my anger.