Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 7, 2015 as part of a series.
Continued from How You Can Help (Eleanor’s thoughts)
Although I had very little when I was kicked out of the cult and moved out of my family’s house, I came from an upper middle class, well-educated family. I grew up privileged.
I moved out as a college student with a couple of on-campus jobs after my parents emptied my savings account. Many of the people that we helped were in similar circumstances.
A week after I was kicked out, someone at the LGBT resource center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, known as the MOSAIC office, told me about resources for people with low income.
My upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian cult had taught me that accepting assistance from the government or non-profits like food pantries was morally wrong. If you didn’t earn your own food through your own hard work, you shouldn’t get to eat, they said.
Slowly, I learned to accept help when it’s offered and allow the help to stabilize me.
Resources like these helped me and my friends to stay independent from our parents and the cults we left while living on a tight budget.
- Food pantries and food stamps
When my paycheck barely covered rent and gas or three other girls were living out of our tiny apartment, we couldn’t afford food. Mercy’s Gate and other Care and Share pantries felt like small miracles. There’s even Colorado Pet Pantry for cats and dogs. And El Paso county provides SNAP benefits (food stamps).
- Cellphone plans like Straight Talk, Wal-Mart Family Mobile, and Tracfone
Our monthly bills were between $30-40, or we used pay-as-you-go plans, which helped us avoid higher costs from major cellphone network companies.
- Dollar stores
During the first year after I left, my roommate’s boyfriend issued me a challenge: go to a dollar store and notice everything they sold. It was so helpful that now I take other ex-fundies to show them what you can get with a few dollars in a pinch. Although some products are cheap or not good quality, it’s a good survival skill to see what supplies you can get at a discounted price.
- Thrift stores
In Colorado Springs, we have the Arc and Goodwill, and local thrift stores whose profits benefit human trafficking survivors or disadvantaged teens that sometimes resell the leftovers from bigger thrift stores at even cheaper prices.
- Temporary agencies
Our little band of cult survivors all needed jobs and often didn’t have much work experience to put on a job application. I didn’t know what temporary agencies did until one hard winter when I was down to only one of the three jobs I’d had the previous summer. Then I got a call from a temporary staffing agency that found my resume on Monster and wanted to hire me for a receptionist position at a pharmaceutical company, something related to my chemistry degree. They also gave me odd jobs like hotel housekeeping on the weekends for extra money. It wasn’t glamorous and sometimes the jobs I got were difficult, but it helped me survive short-term until I found something better.
- Housing / utilities assistance
Most cities have section 8 housing, although people often are on wait lists for several years and it’s difficult to qualify for. Colorado also has a Low-income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP), which provides heating assistance in the winter.
- Internet
Several major companies like Comcast and CenturyLink also offer low-income internet service. In Texas, Spectrum offers affordability connectivity programs.
- Mental health
We wrestled with anxiety, self-harm, PTSD, and survivor’s guilt. But we found counselors both on campus at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and within the Colorado Springs community who wanted to help us heal and worked on a sliding fee scale.
We also found several non-profit and government organizations in Colorado Springs with resources for survivors.
On the outside, we formed our own little family, a chosen family rather than by blood.
Dale Fincher, who talks about recovery from spiritual abuse at Soulation, writes in The Exodus From Family:
“When our biological family puts a brake on friendship, we must look for friendship elsewhere. This year, I am no longer defaulting to blood and legal relatives as my ‘ohana.’ They will not lock me into a family orphanage until I conform to their demands. No. My family has become my Chosen Family, for we cannot live as orphans (John 14:18).”
A theme that resurfaces in the dialogue about spiritual abuse is that of Christian fundamentalism’s idolization of family values over the well-being of the individuals within the family. The family unit’s survival at all cost becomes idolized, enabling denial of abuse.
We learned we could all find freedom together.
No, we couldn’t save each other or support each other—we all had to ultimately find our own way because all of us are broken and hurting.
But we knew we weren’t alone.
Sometimes a hug, a shoulder to cry on, enabled us to just keep walking, to not give up.
Even if we were outcast, we believed our experiences were valid, we grasped for something better.
And we wanted to share this new life, this freedom with others.
R. L. Stollar, one of the founders of Homeschoolers Anonymous, wrote:
“I learned that Jesus of Nazareth was not content with 99 sheep when 99 sheep means that one gets left behind to suffer in silence and solitude. [….] But Jesus dealt with human beings, not statistics. Human beings are what I want to deal with, too. […] Us “bitter apostates” will be out in the wilderness, searching for the one you abandoned.”
And that is what we did, too.
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