As promised, though at the last moment, I am posting the final three giveaways for 2025. More are planned for 2026, so you may want to subscribe for notifications of new posts. There will hopefully be one each month.
As with all of our giveaways, this is only open to those with a USA mailing address. There is absolutely no cost to enter.
“Cult victims and those who have experienced abusive relationships often suffer from fear, confusion, low self-esteem, and post-traumatic stress. Take Back Your Life explains the seductive draw that leads people into such situations, provides insightful information for assessing what happened, and hands-on tools for getting back on track.”
Jana Lalich is an international authority on cults and coercion and has a website, which is found here. (At the time of this post, it was not available, so a link is shared to an archived version.) She is the founder of the Lalich Center on Cults & Coercion. If you watch documentaries on unhealthy groups, you have probably seen her.
We have a playlist of many interviews and talks she has given here.
This giveaway is a drawing. To enter, just leave a comment to show you wish to be included. The drawing will close on January 3, 2026 at 6pm (eastern time), after which I will draw a winner.
Be sure to check back to see if you have won as in the past some people have not responded after winning and so a new winner had to be drawn. You will then need to email me your mailing address if I do not already have it, so be sure to watch your email and check the spam folder. If I know your Facebook profile, I will message you there.
Don’t be alarmed if your comment does not immediately show as it may require approval.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on May 10, 2025.
I wrote this in my journal on December 10, 2021. Learning what forgiveness looks like outside of fundamentalist Christianity, what forgiveness can be like when it’s healthy and not harmful for the person doing the forgiving, has been so important to me in my journey to leave behind and heal from high-control religion.
So I had an epiphany while I was processing what healthy forgiveness looks like.
There’s a part in season 9 of The Walking Dead where Father Gabriel is trying to convince the scavenger garbage lady Anne not to kill him with a walker and he finally says, “I forgive you, Anne, for whatever you have to do.”
He apologizes for pushing her away and it’s definitely kinda like a Jesus moment for him.
Photo: The Walking Dead, AMC
You can tell Father Gabriel is about to accept death, but he forgives her in the moment because he loves her so much that he knows she is going to regret what she’s doing to him later and grieve and hate herself. He loves her so much he doesn’t want her to do that.
This scene basically broke me inside for reasons. All the religious trauma and spiritual abuse recovery reasons.
Because I was taught for so long in fundamentalist Christianity that sacrificial love was obligatory and enduring mistreatment from other people was just part of becoming more holy.
I didn’t realize it was possible to radically accept something so horrible and still hold so much love for the person who is about to harm you without basically enabling yourself to be abused.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a regular thing that people with healthy boundaries should do, obviously, but it’s deeply moving.
It feels different.
Sitting through abuse without defending yourself normally feels cold and awful and like I’m worthless.
This scene feels like the love you hold and your own faith in yourself and the love you feel from your own connection to what feels divine protects you and enables you to still be you in the middle of something horrible happening to you instead of breaking you.
It feels warm and beautiful and so radically undeserved, not because “we are bad” but because it normally feels humanly impossible. I think it just clicked for me like this morning why church hymns call this “amazing” and “wonderful” and why one of my friends said last summer that “none of us deserve it.”
Not because “we are scum,” but because it is unexpected and healing and sometimes we don’t expect a grace like that.
Because we have crossed a boundary and caused harm, so we naturally expect to lose something as a result, which would only make sense.
But instead, we don’t. We are held. And we are loved.
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This is only open to those with a USA mailing address. There is absolutely no cost to enter.
I apologize for not starting our monthly giveaways in January. To make up for this, there will be three posted in March. The final will post on March 28.
Ronna had a childhood filled with fear of her father’s quick temper, being lost, and being left behind in the rapture. This book is more than just her experiences being brought up in the UPC. It is about how she struggled and overcame many years of loneliness and obstacles in her life.
Ronna, one of Donald Fisher’s three daughters, shares her painful and lonely upbringing in the United Pentecostal Church. She longed to belong and fit in somewhere and not feel suffocated by her father’s rules and control. Some people envy PKs, thinking they have life great, yet many do not and reading this memoir will cause you to reconsider such a thought.
The late Donald Fisher held license for many years in the United Pentecostal Church. His influence on the United Pentecostal Church cannot be denied, yet at the same time his influence on his children was something quite different, so much so that Ronna has never missed him since his passing in 1995.
This giveaway is a drawing. To enter, just leave a comment to show you wish to be included. The drawing will close on March 28, 2024 at 6pm (eastern time), after which I will draw a winner.
Be sure to check back to see if you have won as in the past some people have not responded after winning and so a new winner had to be drawn. You will then need to email me your mailing address if I do not already have it, so be sure to watch your email and check the spam folder. If I know your Facebook profile, I will message you there.
Don’t be alarmed if your comment does not immediately show as it may require approval.
You may want to subscribe to the email notifications of new blog posts in order to not miss these. While we try to share about our giveaways on social media, those platforms often do not show the posts to many people.
********
Shop at our Amazon store! As an Amazon Influencer, this website earns from qualifying purchases.
This is only open to those with a USA mailing address. There is absolutely no cost to enter.
I apologize for not starting our monthly giveaways in January. To make up for this, there will be three posted in March. The next will post on March 26.
This giveaway is a drawing. To enter, just leave a comment to show you wish to be included. The drawing will close on March 26, 2024 at 6pm (eastern time), after which I will draw a winner.
Be sure to check back to see if you have won as in the past some people have not responded after winning and so a new winner had to be drawn. You will then need to email me your mailing address if I do not already have it, so be sure to watch your email and check the spam folder. If I know your Facebook profile, I will message you there.
Don’t be alarmed if your comment does not immediately show as it may require approval.
You may want to subscribe to the email notifications of new blog posts in order to not miss these. While we try to share about our giveaways on social media, those platforms often do not show the posts to many people.
********
Shop at our Amazon store! As an Amazon Influencer, this website earns from qualifying purchases.
Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 15, 2019.
It’s just not worth it to live with secrets.
My social media feeds have been flooded with National Coming Out Day posts over the last week, and I realized while reading through them that it’s such a relief to able to tell people the truth, to not have to hide anything.
I keep thinking about October three years ago when I started telling people at my church that I dated women, that I was in a relationship with someone in college who broke my heart, that I’m attracted to someone’s soul more than their gender.
I took a big risk. Someone who hasn’t been in that kind of situation might not understand that risk.
I really didn’t know what my church people would do.
I had only moved back to my childhood home, back to the first church I could remember about a year before, and of course, I hoped they wouldn’t cast me out like the fundamentalist cult I’d been in as a teenager did, for so much less. But I had no guarantees.
You learn who loves you unconditionally when you start telling people who you really are and seeing what they do next.
A friend once told me that sin could be defined as “treating people like objects” — essentially not valuing other human beings. It resonated with me because it puts most of Christian theology and doctrine into one idea.
After I started telling people about who I had dated, Christian friends I’d known for years had told me I was no longer welcome in their homes to hang out with other friends, that they could no longer speak to me, as if being gay was contagious and they might catch it.
I already knew how some people in my family felt about LGBT people.
Growing up, I was told not to eat my cousin’s cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving because “he lives with his boyfriend and we don’t know how clean their house is.”
They didn’t exactly say it, but their words hinted at fears of catching AIDS from dirty kitchen utensils.
But still my secret kept burning on the inside.
I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t feel this way, even though it was costing me so much to be honest and open.
Reading this, you might think my church is affirming. They aren’t, but that’s okay and here’s why. They showed me that they accept me just as I am, even if they didn’t agree with my choices.
Two of my pastors gently guided me and went out of their way to show me that they didn’t see me any differently than before they knew. They told me they believe that we all have different issues and no one’s secrets are any worse than anyone else’s.
And this meant the world to me.
Through their love, I grew more confident. I learned to hold my own in the world. I stopped cycling through romantic relationships with people who were using me.
Because they valued me, I started to value myself.
I realized if sin was objectifying human beings and not recognizing their value, how I had been living was a sin, because I was letting people treat me as an object. I started believing I was worth more.
If I said I wasn’t gay anymore, that would be a lie. I am still attracted to women. Getting baptized again didn’t change that either — even if some of my relatives thought it did.
Now, I ended up choosing side B, the celibacy option, but that’s wasn’t really about “trying to not be gay” — it was about making healthier, wiser choices. You can read more about that part of my story over here.
And if I find someone one day that I want to marry, great. If not, that’s ok, too. I also don’t believe anymore that you have to find a partner to be complete.
Now I believe everyone is made whole as they are and they don’t need other people to make them whole, and if you’re not feeling that just yet, that’s ok, and you might not be quite done healing.
I’m not going to get into the semantics of whether or not people should say they’re gay or that they’re someone with same-sex attraction because I don’t think that’s ultimately helpful. (I’ve heard the “you shouldn’t be identifying with something that’s a sin” argument — I’m using the term to describe how I am, it’s just a label that helps explain how I feel.)
And I’m not here to argue about LGBT issues — whichever side you’re on doesn’t really matter to me for the purpose of what I’m saying.
I’m just asking you to treat other people as humans equally deserving of respect. And just listen to their stories. Let them tell you their secrets, and don’t recoil when it’s something you’re not expecting.
This is how they’ll feel safe around you. And this is how they will heal.
If you’re reading this and you’re still part of my story, thank you for sticking around through the rough patches and loving me so well.
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