Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 4

The UnBoxing Project: How you can help (Cynthia’s thoughts)

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 16, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Self-care during activism

Here are Cynthia’s concluding thoughts.

Rescuing people from cults is not an item to check off of a to-do list. It’s a process.

While we worked together on the UnBoxing Project, we learned this through our own exhausted time and money.

We didn’t just need to free people from church attendance and their abusive, controlling homes. In little funny moments and frustrating conflicts, we watched them free their own minds and personalities.

Moments like when Racquel wore jeans for the first time. We’d told her that she had a lovely figure that didn’t need to be concealed under long, wide skirts, and she didn’t believe us until then.

Moments like when Eleanor first moved out, I recommended dry beans for cost-effective meals, and she didn’t know how to cook them.

Moments like the Socratic dialogue with Ash in a reclusive university meeting room, establishing that safety was possible.

After my friends and I got out, we struggled with various levels of c-PTSD, depression, and anxiety from the emotional, physical, and spiritual abuse we’d endured. It would be difficult enough to hold a job while dealing with shock and recovery, but many of the people we helped didn’t have any experience in the workforce.

I believed in self-sacrifice, and I didn’t care if I wasn’t well enough to help other people. Nobody else was going to do it if we didn’t. I told Cynthia Barram this, and she gave me a graphic image: She said to picture a woman in a place where food was scarce. The baby still sucked at his mother’s breast, but she had no nutrition left to give. At this point, the child was just eating blood.

We needed stability and resources ourselves, but with our parents gone, we only had each other. Like the undernourished mother nursing, we gave more than we had to give.

Many of us had to drop classes because taking care of extra people was so stressful. Eleanor ended up paying more than her portion of rent for the house she got with some of the people we’d rescued.

We realized that we weren’t heroes, and we didn’t have the strength to be heroes.

The question was, at what point do you let people learn for themselves?

Our own limitations answered for us: we didn’t have the means to support other adults who had so little experience with the outside world.

We all decided that if we needed to rescue people, we wouldn’t be able to share finances with them, like co-signing on a lease. Getting out of a cult left these adults without survival skills, and we were young and broke, too. For the first year after my parents kicked us out, my sister and I rented from a family whose children were grown.

If only we knew some people who were older than us, who had the financial stability to own a house and rent out a room. If only we knew people who could teach a young adult, between the ages of 18 and 25 or so, how to keep a job and pay the rent.

Unfortunately, most of the people in the networks we had were similar to our own parents. That’s what isolation does — it limits the people you know.

We’re still looking for people who can serve as safe houses in our UnBoxing Project, perhaps who have more stable living conditions than those of us who needed to escape, too.

We need them. People who are willing to take a young adult into a guest bedroom, and help them prepare for life outside. Help them find and keep a job.

Those of us who were abused aren’t very demanding. We generally don’t take up much space, and we shrink at the thought of imposing on anyone. Just let us know we’re welcome, and let us know that it’s okay to talk about what’s going on. We need therapy to deal with what we’ve lived through.

Can we ask you to do that? Because we can’t do it ourselves.

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The UnBoxing Project: Self-care during activism

Disability rights activist Cynthia Barram with her cat Dita in 2014. | Photo: James Sibert

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 14, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Homeschool, the perfect hiding place

Content Note: suicidal ideation, self-harm

Cynthia Barram was the first friend I met in college who helped me start my own moving out process before helping our other friends leave Christian fundamentalist, Quiverfull households.

Here’s her perspective on what happened, in her own words.

Lesson Number One: You can’t help anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself.

When several homeschool girls came to me, oppressed by churches and controlling parents, I helped them realize that sneezing would not condemn them to hell. They could kiss boys, get their ears pierced, and maybe even listen to some decent music without fear of the ground opening up beneath them.

But I didn’t realize I was trapped in my own cage, despite my involvement in disability activism. As the revelation hit me, I felt as though I’d been cut down from a whipping post.

My body sunk. My face went numb—unsure whether to react with joy or rage or some unholy spawn of the two. The revelation was the first of many from my support group. Long story short, the cage I had been living in due to the restrictions of my disability accommodations for the past ten years no longer existed, if it ever really existed in the first place.

The iron bars that burned when I touched them, the iron bars that held me fast to a life of poverty and escapism now crumbled and snapped in the hands of my mentors like dried reeds. One support group meeting did that, and afterwards I wandered the streets disoriented and moaning—drunk with the wine of freedom in all its bold bittersweet, soon to be very real possibilities.

But what was I to do without my chains? Like Jacob Marley on parole, I was now confronted with the equally real problem of how to get on without them.

So I understand the ones I’ve helped move out, the ones who have looked to me. Because I, too, don’t know how to handle so much sudden freedom.

Cut to support group a few weeks later.

“I love my friends,” I told them, “But rescuing two of them called me out of a final exam. I took an incomplete in a class last semester because we had a suicide attempt and dealing with it messed with my head, and now this.”

“No wonder you haven’t been yourself,” they said. “That’s way too much for anyone to carry, but we’ll help you.”

They then proceeded to divvy up my business as if it was their own.

I made a promise to the rest of the group members to keep our meeting days clear from other appointments, free from stress, and when I figure out who I am without my chains and graduate from college, I promised to let everyone know.

That’s the trouble with “witch work” as I often call it.

If you were born a witch (and I mean the green nasty one from the 1943 Wizard of Oz film, not Wiccans) like I was, you get used to that icky-sticky-kind-of-cool-but-on-your-own feeling.

On the one hand, you swear you must have three breasts, and are understandably and almost perpetually embarrassed.

On the other hand, you get used to hearing things like “Ever try to put a jet engine on that power wheelchair?” and “I’ve never been friends with a black person before,” and “You never wear feminine clothes.”

(Never mind of course that dresses get caught in my wheelchair!)

I heard many of these statements repeated again in college from formerly homeschooled people I met at college, like my friend Eleanor and the people she was helping.

When I first met Eleanor, she told me her homeschool textbooks taught her to sit or kneel when talking to people in wheelchairs, but I found the action too intimate for a casual conversation.

The only people who had done that to me without it being offensive were my first boyfriend and my childhood hero.

In other words, what the hell?

You laugh as if the jokes are funny, and offer up starters to the almost obligatory culturally informative conversations that follow.

You get so good at doing this on a small level that eventually you take on bigger game like formerly Christian homeschooled LGBT folks trying to move out when their parents have guns and women self-harming and ending up in the ER.

I didn’t seek out these people who asked for my help.

No, these homeschooled girls with braids and glasses, dressed like they were going to the Little House on the Prairie fan convention from hell, found me out on campus, at Bible studies, after church services. And I couldn’t scare them away, either.

They had never met anyone who was black or disabled before.

You become so brilliant at this in fact that you tie yourself with chains to the greater good and wait for this or that friend with this or that crisis to—effectively becoming more worn out than any of your mentees are.

That is, until the cross disability support group at the Independence Center on Fridays, until the smashing of chains and the breaking of cages, until a group of people who swear on their lives to keep your secrets, and who feed you as you feed others.

Sometimes you need to crash on somebody else’s couch, figuratively, after you’ve hosted several refugees, or you lose yourself.

And that support group has got to be there before during and after anyone is even considering doing this work.

It has to be there, or the psychological slavery that you work so hard to liberate everybody else from will find a much better mark in you than it ever did in your charges, and this slavery comes customized complete with your own set of flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and mood swings, trust me.

The support group has to be there or you will contemplate crazy shit—drinking bleach, stepping in front of a car, shooting yourself in the head, and when a woman in trouble holds your hand and begs you to tell her why you are alive, you will not be able to answer her.

I cannot stress this enough. The support group in some shape or form has to, has to, has to be there.

And no matter the strength of the freedom fighter, no matter the clarity of his or her vision or the strength and purity of the intentions behind it—anybody, anybody, anybody can find themselves worn out by the difficult and delicate process of freeing people to follow their dreams.

Cynthia Barram graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and she is the former president of the Disabled Student Union on campus. She petitioned for the Colorado Springs City Council to not cut funding for bus routes in 2008, which was covered by The Gazette and the Colorado Springs Independent. Cynthia is involved with the community at the Independence Center, which sponsors disability access and justice in the city.

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The UnBoxing Project: Homeschool, the perfect hiding place

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Gissel’s story

I met our friend Shelby Shively while working for the campus newspaper, The Scribe. Shelby was earning a master’s degree in sociology, and she mentioned that the homeschooling population seemed to be understudied in academic literature.

Here is her perspective on Christian fundamentalist, Quiverfull children we were helping to leave their abusive households, in her own words.

I, personally, have come into contact with a handful of homeschooling experiences in my lifetime.

I had three friends who had been homeschooled, two of whom entered semi-public high schools for reasons I do not know.

My friend Mary took a GED test and attempted to take a few online college courses, essentially continuing the homeschool experience as a college student, before realizing she would be better off on an actual college campus. I also had six cousins from my aunt on my father’s side, most of whom she homeschooled.

Mary’s parents were incredibly controlling.

Her older sister used her body for her rebellion: she got her belly button pierced, got haircuts her parents considered strange, and dyed her hair unnatural colors. Mary rebelled in other ways, and she eventually moved out, although she is currently living with her parents again.

My aunt had four boys and adopted a young boy and girl from Russia. She homeschooled her four birth children and the girl she had adopted, but the boy was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. My aunt did not bother to try to understand his learning needs, and rather than alter her own teaching, she sent him to public school.

She was very abusive. She eventually kicked him out, and he tells stories of eating rats at the park when he was homeless. He is now in a transitional program.

I got my bachelor’s degree in sociology and women’s and ethnic studies, and I spent a lot of time learning about domestic violence because I had experienced it from a boyfriend in high school.

It was not until recently that I realized how common my cousin’s story is.

While the details of the situation vary, abuse seems to be common in families that homeschool.

When researching domestic violence and volunteering at a local shelter, I have found very little about children, even adult children, escaping abusive homes and even less about children of homeschool families. One of the only things I have heard is that the majority of homeless teens are escaping abusive homes, though this tells us little about the circumstances surrounding these escapes.

Little academic research has been conducted about abuse in homeschool environments, and the research that has occurred is necessarily incomplete.

Even surveys like the annual survey (part 1 and part 2 and part 3) conducted by the Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) group rely on a volunteer sample from the Internet, although it gathers much data that other organizations have not yet attempted to collect and analyzed. Informal surveys are not accessible to people without Internet access, and rely on snowballing (people take it and share it with others from the same population), which tends to yield a more homogenous sample.

Further academic research is needed to determine risk factors for homeschool environments.

Part of the reason so little research has been conducted is because it is simply difficult to properly conduct. Homeschool policies differ based on the state and sometimes even the school district, and record-keeping may also look very different on a state-by-state basis.

It is impossible for a researcher to gather demographics of the homeschool population with inconsistent records or use these records to gather a good, random sample.

Without resources like time and money, a researcher will have difficulty conducting research with homeschool families, especially if these families are reluctant to allow a person to question their motives, tactics, and overall situations.

There are increased difficulties in trying to conduct research with minors; for example, parents who homeschool their children are under no obligation to provide consent for their children to participate in a research project, even if said children would like to participate.

Many, though certainly not all, homeschool families are connected to a church, and the church may be involved in hiding abuse occurring within these families. Many families feel deep paranoia and are not willing to participate in research if they do not perceive the researcher as an ally in some way, such as a member of their church or at least the larger denomination.

The homeschool population is not easy for researchers to access, which is likely one of the primary reasons there is so little research about this population.

It is also possible that researchers lack awareness of the problem. They must be made aware that there is abuse in the homeschool population before they can consider researching it.

My recent awareness of the abuse in the homeschool population has sparked my interest in researching it, but I know there are many struggles to overcome in attempting to reach this population. I also know there are only so many resources available to a person with my current education level, and I may have to set aside this potential research project until I am further educated and perhaps even employed in a university or other research institution.

I can only hope by the time I am fully equipped to conduct this research, others have already done so.

Shelby Shively is a sociology graduate student at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and former columnist for the student newspaper, The Scribe.

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The UnBoxing Project: Gissel’s story

Gissel dyed her hair red for the first time during the first week after she left home.

Continued from Options, not ultimatums

In July 2014, Ashley came over to my apartment to visit one Saturday morning.

While we were talking, Ashley got a text message from Gissel, one of her friends from the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs (now known as Heritage Pentecostal Church), that she’d left six months before.

“Hey, can you come pick me up? My dad kinda went crazy and kicked me out. I don’t have anywhere to go… can I stay with you?”

Gissel was on her lunch break at work, so Ashley and I drove over to meet her and help her get her belongings out of her father’s house.

On the way to her dad’s house, Gissel explained she already planned on going to live with her grandmother in Texas.

The night before, she’d stayed out with her boyfriend and a group of other friends until past midnight. She discovered her dad had locked her out when she tried to come home, even though he’d never enforced the curfew he set for her older brother and his girlfriend.

Gissel kept asking why it was different for her as a girl, why she was being punished.

One of Gissel’s younger sisters let her in the house so she could get her suitcases already packed for her move. We put them in the trunk and drove to where Racquel and Ashley were living so Gissel could stay with them temporarily.

The rest of her siblings watched us from the window, huddled together.

Ashley told Racquel what had happened and that Gissel would be staying over for the rest of the week until she flew out of town. Gissel went back to work for the day, and we picked her up that evening.

She was quiet. Reality set in.

Silent tears slipped down her cheeks. There was no home to go back to now.

We hugged her, asked her if she was ok or needed to talk. Told her it was ok to be sad, ok to cry.

Later that night, she sat next to Ashley on the couch while we watched anime and the first Pirates of the Carribean movie. Watching television isn’t allowed in most United Pentecostal churches like the one she grew up in.

Ashley helped her dye her hair that week, another thing that the church deemed sinful.

Gissel started wearing a crucifix that her dad gave her. Her dad told her if she was going to leave the church and wear jewelry now, she might as well wear that. It was a religious guilt trip, since their church doctrine forbade wearing jewelry, and typically Pentecostal churches do not agree with Catholic doctrine.

After Gissel left for Texas, we kept in touch.

I asked her last fall how she was doing and if she would like to share her story.

Now she is free to live outside the cage of Christian fundamentalism and legalism.

I thought once Racquel and Ashley and the others that we’d moved out were free, that everything would start to go back to normal. That our little network wouldn’t need to keep helping people.

But Gissell reminded me that so many more are out there, waiting.

Gissel studied social work at community college and works in a healthcare center in Texas. She also cohosts a YouTube channel called Gen and Gigi.

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The UnBoxing Project: Options, not ultimatums

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 11, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Cynthia Jeub’s story.

Several friends were part of our network that helped Ashley move out of her parents’ house. This is another person’s part of the story, in their own words.

It’s hard when someone you care about is stuck in an abusive environment. It’s worse when you feel like you could and should be helping them to get out of said abusive environment.

Unfortunately, that’s often not up to you.

Fundamentalist cults use brainwashing techniques to make people think there is no way out. Effectively, they remove their members’ autonomy and consent.

When you’re trying to get someone out of a cult, the temptation is to pressure them into it — after all, they’re stuck there, right? They need your help to get out!

Doing that will only make things worse. You’re emulating the same techniques as the cult, which means your “convincing” is only going to last as long as you’re around. It also destroys trust — how can someone who has been abused using brainwashing and consent-destroying abuse trust someone who uses the same techniques?

And before the cries of “But we’re doing it for their own good!” begin, the cult leaders say the exact same thing. They’re just trying to save the person’s soul, after all.

So what are we to do? It’s the hardest thing — you have to let the person make their own decision.

As people, we tend to think our decisions are just a little bit better than anyone else’s — after all, we don’t let our judgement get clouded, amirite? But for someone to successfully get out of a cult, and stay out, they have to know their support system isn’t just more of the same brainwashing, only from the other side.

We’re talking about informed consent here. So let your friend know you’re there for them. Let them know what options are available. The cult tells them no one outside the cult will help them; you need to show them that’s a lie. The cult tells them they’re all alone outside the cult — show them they’re not.

Notice it’s show them, not tell them. Cults love to change the meanings of words: It’s not abuse, it’s “discipline” because we “love” you. You aren’t a “captive,” we’re holding you here out of “love.” There has to be action with this, and it has to be action that is diametrically opposed to the actions of the cult.

It’s difficult — you’ll be stuck just waiting sometimes, feeling like you can’t do anything for your friend. And yes, sometimes people will choose the cult, and choose the abuse. But if those helping them are taking away their consent, how are we any different than the people currently oppressing them? We have to be different, as different as it is possible to be. Otherwise they’ll be exchanging one oppression for another.

There’s a caveat, though: If there is physical or sexual abuse happening, especially if the person in question is under 18, absolutely call the authorities (Child Protective Services or the police). That may cause them to lose trust in you for a time — but it’s better than them dying from the abuse.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that everything will work out, that everyone chooses to leave abusive and manipulative situations. It’s just not true. Sometimes, the person chooses the cult. And that sucks.

But sometimes people shake off the manipulation, the brainwashing, and the abuse. And that is the reward.

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