Category: healing | Page 13 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

The Shattering II Giveaway

Sexual abuse is something which should never happen. To be assaulted or raped often devastates the person; they are violated in a most personal manner. When the perpetrator is a minister, it can have a profound effect spiritually. That also holds true when a church member assaults another member and the church tells the individual to keep quiet and allow leadership to handle it. The reputation of the church is more important than them. Many have watched as the priest/minister was allowed to retain their position as if nothing happened.

In all the years I have operated the spiritual abuse website, I have seen how difficult it is for people to open up and share. It is often the deepest, darkest secret they keep, buried under great pain, sorrow, hurt and tears. Some tried to share in the past and were disbelieved, even by parents and siblings. Others were threatened should they dare to speak. Some were falsely accused of doing something which caused their abuse.

While some try hard to bury what happened to them, it still lurks in the shadows. The past comes back to mind as things happen which trigger the memories and emotions. This happened with a dear friend of mine from my former United Pentecostal Church.

Julie liked it that way. After all, what would it benefit to go back to the past? Didn’t everyone just say forget about the past, get a life, or just plain get over it. Even Christians seemed to have the cliche of saying “That’s all under the blood.” It seemed that we were to just let it all go. But how do we do this? Julie wondered.

Julie tried hard and she had done a good job of it, too, of shoving it so far down within her, to a place where she thought it wouldn’t bother her anymore. If it would have just worked and stayed there it would have been fine. But it didn’t.

The past always resurfaced. And when it did, it would catch Julie so off-guard, that she could never be sure of how to handle it.

Julie began to ponder within her heart and search her Bible to try to understand more of how God would want her to deal with the past, a past that always seemed to rise up and haunt her- now even more so, with the recurring dreams that she continued to have.

…Julie continued to have the recurring dreams. Each dream that she had would only stir up all of the issues of her past and bring them soaring to the present. …The door part way open. …The villain in the house. She would awake full of terror, often unable to go back to sleep.

I’ve known Marty Barth for years, but never knew that her father had molested her as a child. That is until I heard about her first book, The Shattering, where she begins her story. I never knew the deep pain and hurt she held inside. She has chosen to openly share about her past in an effort to help others who have been harmed sexually. She now speaks at various functions across America and visits those in prison. Marty is a sweet, loving woman and though we have not seen each other since the year I made the decision to leave the United Pentecostal Church, I am glad to call her friend.

In the sequel to her first book, The Shattering II: Breaking the Silence shares some of the more recent events in Marty’s life, including finally opening up to her brothers and sharing what happened, her father becoming ill and her bold confrontation with him as he was dying. Her story shares how she fought to begin healing the deep wounds from her past. While her story has many sad and heartbreaking aspects, it is also one of hope and encouragement.

We have given away books for years as part of the spiritualabuse.org ministry. This is your chance to receive a new copy of The Shattering II: Breaking the Silence. You need not have read the first as this book stands by itself. We have two copies of this to give away. This is only open to those with a USA mailing address. (Unfortunately, it is cost prohibitive to mail books outside of the USA. Canadians with a USA mailing address are welcome to enter.)

This giveaway is a different from our large giveaways as it is a drawing and not a first come, first served event. To enter, just leave a comment on this post to show you wish to be included. The drawing will close on August 2 at 9pm (eastern time), after which I will draw two winners. You will then need to email me your mailing address if I do not already have it. There is absolutely no cost to enter.

Don’t be alarmed if your comment does not immediately show as comments require approval when you are commenting for the first time.

We always provide these at no charge to our readers. We want people to be helped and to heal. So far this year we have spent several hundred dollars on providing material free of charge to our readers.

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Fears after Leaving

After leaving, there may be a time period of trying to find some balance, a time when a person might go to opposite extremes with a sort of pendulum effect. Different people seek different kinds of balance. Some may go to extremes with their looks or actions. For me, I think the majority of my pendulum time has been spent learning to set boundaries and say no.

I learned a lot during this time from just being free to do these things. I was amazed when I discovered I wasn’t shunned for saying no, setting boundaries, or even leaving situations that made me uncomfortable, even if my friends stayed in those situations. I was even more amazed that these people remained friends. Yes, a few people ended their friendships with me, but many others were true friends and encouraged me and were there for me through this time. Just being able to set my own boundaries and make my own decisions was helpful and healing, but knowing that I was accepted as I did these, even when I was more extreme, was even more so.

I’ve known people who didn’t seem to understand why I might need to do this. Maybe they didn’t share my experience of feeling I had to stay in an unhealthy church, had to support them or do things for them, keep participating in their activities, or had to remain silent and accept what I saw as harmful or frightening. It’s taken nearly eight years to regain some of the balance of being able to say “no,” to set boundaries, and even to leave a situation when I want… and it still takes a whole lot of self-talk sometimes to do them, especially without feeling guilty or embarrassed. But I’m learning.

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How to love LGBT people: a letter to the church {for the Huffington Post}

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on July 20, 2017.

This post is not intended for debate about LGBT issues, but just to tell my story.

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So I’ve been a Huffington Post contributor for a little over a year now, but today I’d like to share something I’m posting there with my regular blog readers.

This is a journey that I’ve been on for several months now. Here’s my heart, friends. I love you all.

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“But how should we respond?”

Someone asked this in my church’s home group, the week after the Pulse shooting in Orlando.

“My friends in that community are grieving right now, so how do I show support for them even if I don’t agree with their choices?”

The room was full of young families. They had known me for almost a year as the nerdy, awkward girl who moved back here from Colorado.

They didn’t know that I was hanging on their every word because I have dated girls.

In fact, I was currently on several dating apps asking out… girls.

I chose this church and this town, moving back to my childhood home, even though I knew they weren’t affirming, because I loved this place and these people and they didn’t seem like the sort to make a big deal about these things.

But now I looked down at my Bible, barely breathing.

This was the test.

Yesterday I was on the Huffington Post talking about one of the bravest things I’ve ever done. Won’t you join me there?

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Why does it take so long?

People may wonder–*I* wonder–why it’s taken me so long to get over some things. Part of it is that I was abused in more than one church, and had been taught to doubt myself and be dependent even before that, so there’s been a lot to dig through. Part of it is that… well, think of people who were hit with a hurricane or tornado. Some sustain more damage than others.

I visualize a person who had their roof blown off looking at me, sorting through the rubble where there was once a house, now completely unrecognizable, and asking why I don’t just get a new roof. I look at them and think, ‘after this happened, I didn’t even have walls anymore. Everything was gone. YOU had a roof missing. I have a house missing. Please don’t act life my life should be just fine because yours is.’ So part of it is the amount of damage that was done.

That’s not to say that the damage is too great. People rebuild, but they will also remember. All is not lost. As many have said who’ve weathered huge storms, we survived, and we still have each other (or we still have our lives). In other words, as long as we’re still breathing, there’s hope, there’s opportunity to start over, to rebuild, to restore. Sometimes we have to start by sifting through the rubble, then slowly rebuilding from the ground up. Other times we just need to throw a roof back on, or replace a few windows.

Either way, if we’ve lived through the storm we will not be the same. Storms, beautiful, powerful, frightening, and uncontrollable, come to all of us. Some may get a couple shingles knocked off. A few branches may fall from their trees. Others… others come out of their shelters after the storm and discover that they don’t even recognize the landscape anymore. But they rebuild. They continue. They don’t move on–years later they calculate time based on the year of the storm, but they do move forward. Sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly, all depending on how close they were to it’s center.

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A Time To Heal – A Time To Build Up

Part Two of Two Part Series

“To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:
‭‭…..“A time to kill, And a time to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up;”
‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3:1,3‬ ‭NKJV‬

This is my story of healing my heart and soul and rebuilding my mind and emotions….

For me recovering from spiritual abuse was very personal and private. I knew I needed healing and I needed to repair my relationship with God, which was my first priority. The problem was I didn’t know how to begin. So I started working on developing my relationship with God through conversations with God. To me this was more than just prayer like I had done in the past, this was actual conversation and telling Him about everything that I feared, my anxieties, my anger and I didn’t hold back anything. Then I would spend time in reflection, trying to hear his voice, sitting quietly outside on my deck looking at my gardens and letting his nature calm my soul and emotions, then I turned to scriptures and just began reading and meditating on his word. I felt like I was in that place where God was telling me to “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) .

I also read books: False Holiness Standards, Healing Spiritual Abuse, The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, and a few more but I can’t remember their titles. I surfed the internet reading all I could find on the subject and joining support groups. I was not going to a church and had not attended a service in over six months so the guilt was very high. Was it guilt from not attending service or was it the guilt and anxiety because I was enjoying not going?

My daughter and I had tried a couple other United Pentecostal churches but there was nothing there but dried up bones and that was six months ago. I knew I was not going back to the UPC. Been there, done that. But I was still trapped in their legalism of dress and hair, simply because that’s all I knew and the only clothes I had. It had been 32 years that I had been in the UPC. I no longer needed to dress this way but I didn’t know how to take that first step to change and that seemed to be the hardest step to take. Although my daughter wasn’t having any trouble giving up standards and she seemed genuinely happy as she searched for a church. She kept saying, Mom, all I want us to be are normal Christians.

Normal was good I thought, problem was I didn’t know what normal was. I did receive a few emails from my former church friends, asking why I left and I should come back and repent and not backslide and blah, blah, blah. I didn’t respond and I unfriended them because I didn’t need the distraction. It wasn’t like I was friendless; I had a lot of good friends at work, just nobody I could talk to about why I left my church and religion.

One of the first things I did was purchase a new Bible, a NKJV, and began to study it with an open heart and mind. I wanted my quest in God’s word pure and fresh so I could see His grace. It was like the word came alive to me and the first scripture I read was: “I am the LORD, that is My name; And My glory I will not give to another, Nor My praise to carved images. Behold, the former things have come to pass, And new things I declare; Before they spring forth I tell you of them.” (‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭42:8-9‬ ‭NKJV‬‬) This gave me a lot of hope that I was still in His will by leaving and searching for truth.

My daughter found a friend, Anita, from Youth Camp online and she explained that we were looking for a church that was “normal” and Anita invited us to visit Crosspoint Church, which was where she went after leaving the UPC. So on Palm Sunday we went and sat in the back row by the door, just in case things got hairy. But from the first beat of the music I could feel the strong spirit of God in a good and loving way; not in a frenzied emotional way. My daughter and I cried all through the service.

When we got in the car to leave, I remember my daughter saying. “Mom did you notice how happy and friendly everybody was?” I told her yes, but it could be a fluke because nobody I knew was that happy about their salvation. Although I saw how Anita was and she was very happy. So we decided to visit again the next Sunday on Easter and bring my granddaughters. The next Sunday was a repeat of the Sunday before and we decided to give it a try and see if this could be our church.

The Sunday following Easter, the church had a ministry fair and I signed up for a ministry called Thyme In A Garden and I registered for a summer ladies bible study to be held in a home close to me. Now I was really putting myself out there because I didn’t know anybody except the associate pastor and his wife and that was only because I grew up with them and my daughters friend Anita.

I’m very thankful for Dave and Ronda because of their wise council to me and the help and love they showed to me during this time. They also had made the same journey I was making. I remember one Wednesday night prayer meeting they both came and prayed for me. None of that grabbing my arms and spitting in my face or yelling in my ears type of praying. They simply put their hands on my shoulders and asked for God to lead and guide me down the right pathway.

After service I asked Ronda how did she overcome the dress code of the UPC? She just smiled and told me I would know when it was time to let go of the past and she assured me when I got rid of the trappings of dress and released the vestiges of legalism, then there would be nothing between God and me except for grace. She said his word would come alive to me like never before because I could no longer hide behind a facade of self righteousness.

A few weeks later I went to my first meeting to Thyme in the Garden and I was a nervous wreck about going into a place I didn’t know. But in I walked and said Hi, I’m Cindy. I was greeted so warmly and friendly by all the ladies and they accepted me right in and I’m still going 6 years later. I met the best group of Christian women that day and they prayed for me after I told them I just left the UPC.

Being a former pastors wife, you know a thing or two about people and of course the shunning and shaming you get when you leave a church. But my biggest shock came from one friend from UPC, we’d been friends for 30 years and I had visited many times since my divorce. She was emailing me at work and I was answering her and I told her that I was going to a new church. She asked me where and I told her and I guess she looked it up online and literally became a wild woman telling me I was backslid if I could go someplace that didn’t teach standards and now I was going to be a reprobate.

Then she finished by telling me we could no longer be friends because we have nothing in common anymore. I couldn’t believe it just five minutes prior to telling her where I was going to church we were chatting away. Now we had nothing in common? I knew I was going to lose friends but I never imagined her. We haven’t spoken since that day and she, along with her family, unfriended me on Facebook. The pain of it still hurts at times but God has given me more friends than I can count now. During this time, I continued to search scripture for reassurance and God never fails:

Do not remember the former things, Nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, Now it shall spring forth; Shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness And rivers in the desert. (Isaiah‬ ‭43:18-19‬ ‭NKJV)‬‬

I held on to his promises because I was in uncharted waters.

I again showed up at the home where the summer woman’s Bible study was being done and again God put me in touch with Steve and Helen, former UPC Pastor and wife, who left the organization years ago. God knew exactly who to put me in touch with. I don’t know how many times I’ve called upon them to calm my fears and doubts.

“Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity? Unless the LORD had been my help, My soul would soon have settled in silence. If I say, “My foot slips,” Your mercy, O LORD, will hold me up. In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comforts delight my soul.” ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭94:16-19‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

Steve and Helen prayed for me and with me, gave me scriptures to read and taught me about healing and forgiveness. I told them I wanted to start over as a brand new Christian and they even signed up to take a new Christian Bible study with me.

I started feeling more at peace every time I went to church and finally I felt the freedom to get rid of the old clothes and buy new. My daughter and I had fun shopping and there wasn’t a dress or skirt purchased. My daughter was getting ready to graduate from Beauty School, so I was her model to demonstrate a hair cut. I donated 24 inches of hair to Locks of Love and felt so light and free. I was her model for color demo and she made me a beautiful blonde. I hadn’t felt pretty since my wedding day until that day. I sat and looked in the mirror and cried.

I took the church’s Welcome to the Family class, which is a four week course that explained the history of the church, their beliefs, their staff and what was expected from a new member. Again I had to brace myself against the anxiety, but my daughter took it with me so I wasn’t totally alone. During the first class we found out the church came out of the United Pentecostal Church about 30 years ago and my pastor was also former UPC and that explained a lot of the teaching. It wasn’t legalism at all, it was grace and mercy. It was Christ and him crucified. It was no big “I”s and little “U”s. But it was salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. It was humility and servitude and living within your means. There are no thrones on the platform, the ministers sit with the congregation. They teach commitment, connection and contribution. Everybody dresses casual so all that come feels comfortable. They were answering all my questions one by one. It was amazing and wonderful all at once. I finally felt at home, that I was in a safe place and I had a place where people cared and prayed and loved each other.

My final confirmation that I was in the right place for me came in September at our ladies retreat. My pastors wife wanted all of us to go outside and enjoy nature alone with God and our Bibles. I remember sitting at a small table looking over the lake and asking God one more time, is this the place you want me to be? He replied with his word: “You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, And called from its farthest regions, And said to you, ‘You are My servant, I have chosen you and have not cast you away: Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’ “Behold, all those who were incensed against you Shall be ashamed and disgraced; They shall be as nothing, And those who strive with you shall perish. You shall seek them and not find them— Those who contended with you. Those who war against you Shall be as nothing, As a nonexistent thing. For I, the LORD your God, will hold your right hand, Saying to you, ‘Fear not, I will help you.’” (‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭41:9-13‬ ‭NKJV‬‬) With tears streaming down, I lifted up my hands and praised him for always being with me and leading me out of darkness into his marvelous light.

That was six years ago and do I still have anxiety from the past? Yes I do and I still have fear from time to time. And yes I suffered with nightmares for several months, but I put my trust in God and he never failed me.

Last year I was reconnected to a dear friend from the church we had pastored and we’d been apart 18 years, but our friendship is closer now than ever before. She has been delivered from legalism and spiritual abuse.

A few months ago I was able to call my ex-husband and forgive him for everything and he started crying and saying he was sorry for what he did. We talked for over an hour about our children and grandchildren.

My daughter met a really nice man and they were married two years ago. She has 3 girls and he has 2 girls, so now I’ve been blessed with 5 beautiful granddaughters.

Has it all been a bed of roses? No it’s not, life is still life. I lost my father and step mother within two days of each other through cancer and pneumonia in October 2011. My mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and is in stage 5-6 of the 7 stages. I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011 and had to retire in 2016. And I lost a dear uncle to cancer last year (2016). But through all the trouble and tribulations, God has always been there with a comforting word and prayers, visits and ministering from my church friends helped us get through those tough times. There’s been good news, too. My aunt and cousin have accepted the Lord into their hearts and attend church with me. I helped a dear friend escape from my previous church and she is healing and attending Crosspoint, along with her grown children, who were also spiritually abused and hurt. My dear mama has also accepted the Lord.

Yes, when you’ve been in an abusive church for any length of time, things are killed in your heart and soul and things are broken down in your mind and emotions. Eventually you become spiritually crippled and emotionally damaged.

But the Lord gives us a time to heal and a time to build back up. It does take time and patience and a renewed walk with Jesus and the right church and people. And a whole lot of trust in God. It wasn’t easy and it has taken me six years to get this far, but with God all things are possible.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. ‭‭II Corinthians‬ ‭5:17-19‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

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