Category: healing | Page 3 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Healing

In the last few months I’ve been very triggered. I watched as someone I cared about was ostracized, gossiped and lied about. I watched as others participated in the gossip. I warned people, knowing doing so would likely not end well for me. I lost friends, felt judged… and relived a lot of past church trauma.

I made some different choices this time than I would have in the past. I did what I thought was right, and some of that may not have been what was best and some that I thought in the past would have been better to have done didn’t work, after all. There are just some situations that no matter what we do will not end well. I learned one thing: no matter what we do, we can’t usually stop some large entity intent on hurtling toward a bad end. At least that relieves me of some guilt or self-doubt from the past. And I’ve learned sometimes the only thing we can do is what we think will be best for ourselves – and that that’s not selfish, it’s just life.

Healing is an ongoing journey. It’s not linear. We take a step forward, sometimes three steps back. We move forward, then end up triggered by something and end up cycling back through everything all over again. Or – ugh – we end up in a situation that’s eerily similar to what hurt us to begin with, parallel on parallel, and we have to somehow navigate that AND all the memories and past hurts at the same time.

It’s OK to do that. And the fact that we can demonstrates that we really ARE healing, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.

A year ago I had an experience that brought major healing to an old hurt. It was sudden and unexpected. In the process I learned I could play the piano again. I didn’t think I ever would. After the triggers though, my playing gradually stopped. I haven’t played for close to three months, and haven’t played joyfully or for long for maybe twice that time.

Today brought some closure. Several surprises, several opportunities to remember good things that have happened, past healing moments. And somehow through today, I know the music is back again. I haven’t played yet, but the sadness that blocked the music isn’t blocking anymore. Nothing major happened today. Just memories, just acceptance, just love. And it was enough. And that’s healing, too.

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Outside the Box: Recovering from obsessive guilt

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 7, 2016 as part of a series.

Continued from What Is Joy?

“i am still learning that i am allowed to be human out here
inside it was not allowed
those things made a bad thing happen
so i still feel that. any tiny mistake… ” ~ anonymous friend

Obsessive guilt is no longer my religion.

But for many years, it was, and the scars left by it still linger for many of us. This post is for my friends whose wounds are still bleeding. This is for everyone who can’t find the words yet.

I’ve written before about my history of self-harm, prompted by years of being told when I was a small child that I murdered Jesus simply by being born, because of original sin.

Every breath I took, every time I threw a tantrum as a toddler, every time I didn’t obey my parents immediately without question, all these things drove nails into Jesus’ hands. Or so I was told.

This story on Homeschoolers Anonymous is very, very much like how I was raised. It’s like my mom is talking to me all over again.

“You are such a disappointment to God. He is sitting in heaven crying because of your sinfulness. Even if you were the only person who ever lived, Jesus would have had to die because of your sin! Your sin caused Jesus to be tortured and killed. It is just like you were there hammering the nails into him.”

Over and over, I was told that Jesus and the angels were always watching me, that they were disappointed in me when I talked back to my parents. That I made Jesus sad, that I hurt him.

Guilt for Jesus’ pain is why I self-harmed, starting at age 5. And none of the adults in my life then understood why.

We grew up with this mindset, believing that only guilt could dictate ethics. If you didn’t feel bad about yourself, you were prideful. If you weren’t thinking about Jesus’ suffering, you were ungrateful for his sacrifice.

And it’s not just those of us who were homeschooled in Christian fundamentalist households.

One of my Mormon friends told me she obsessively washed her hands when she felt sinful, because it made her feel less dirty. Later she found out it was part of her OCD diagnosis.

I’m also not the only one who thought I had to hurt myself because I caused Jesus pain. I have several friends who also did the same thing, for the same reason. The idea actually goes back to the middle ages and flagellantism, radicals in the Catholic church who beat themselves to mortify the flesh and identify with Christ in his suffering.

I used to dig my fingernails into my hands every time I referred to the divine without capital letters, because I believed I had disrespected the Almighty. Now I no longer believe my God is concerned with misspellings.

Those in the church probably don’t realize that the language they use often gives a very different idea than they are intending to, especially with children who take things literally.

A recent Relevant magazine article explains it like this (link removed as the article is no longer available):

“If you tell a 10-year-old that he should be washed in blood, he’s probably going to imagine something closer to the opening scene of Blade than a loving Jesus who wants him to be happy forever. I pictured Jesus standing next to a giant bathtub that He was bleeding into while trying to make me dive into it like a Steven Curtis Chapman song in ’99.”

When we talk about the crucifixion as penal substitution and say that we also have to take up our cross, when we tell young children to prepare for martydom or teenagers to stand up for Jesus like Cassie Bernall at Columbine, some of us take these ideas far more seriously than we probably intended.

We hate ourselves, we struggle with feeling unworthy, and we believe that we are undeserving of love. I have friends who can’t convince themselves to take medicine until their pain becomes unbearable because they believe they deserve suffering.

My friend Ash shared this song with me last year, and I cried because it is me. For so long, I couldn’t accept love because I thought I wasn’t worthy.

Before you came the days just passed
But now I so cannot reach seconds
Within me thousand suns rise
And I’m praying for them to never disappear
Tell me what have I done to deserve something this beautiful.

Tell me why I deserve you
Tell me why I deserve you
Tell me why I deserve you
Why is it me you love? – Lafee, Tell Me Why / Wer Bin Ich, Nightcore remix

It’s a process, we can’t just instantly rewire our brains. We don’t magically become healthier.

I’m still wrestling with my own theology, struggling to imagine that my God is pure light and love, a radical idea from a Graham Cooke video I watched years ago:

“You are the beloved. It is your job to be loved outrageously. It is why I chose you. That is why I set My love upon you; that you would live as one who is outrageously loved; that you would receive a radical love, so radical it will blow all your paradigms of what you think love is. I know I will love you outrageously all the days of your life because I don’t know how to be any different. This is who I am, and this is who I will always be. This is the “I am” that I promised you. I am He that loves you outrageously. And you may love Me back with the love that I give you.

“You may love Me back outrageously with the outrageous love that I bestow upon you. And know this, you can only love Me as much as you love yourself. So My love comes this evening to set you free from yourself. To set you free from how you see yourself. To set you free from the smallness of your own thinking about yourself. My love comes to set you free from rejection and from shame and from low self-esteem and from despair and from abuse because when I look at you, I see something that I love. I see someone that I can love outrageously.

[….]

“There is no fear where I am present because My love casts out fear.

“Beloved, you are My beloved. You are My beloved. And in my love, I want you to feel good about yourself.”

Unraveling all the gnarly threads woven through our souls takes months, years.

It’s like recovering from addiction or learning to drive a car. We’re learning how to love and be loved. Remembering that we are all made of stardust.

So when you meet a former box-dweller, please be gentle and patient with us. We’re still recovering. It takes time.

I hope you guys enjoyed this series and a glimpse into the souls of these lovely guest writers.

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Outside the Box: What is Joy?

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2016 as part of a series.

Continued from We Are Less Fragile

Another anonymous post from a creative soul friend.

Dear ****,

I’m not writing this for you, cause I know you’ll never read it.

I’m not writing this for you either, or you or you or you. I’m writing this for You, and I’m writing this for me.

Did you know I was at a point in high school, yellow light and kneeled prayers on my bed, please help me to be well I can’t handle this the rest of my life I’ve only been living this for four months!, and how did I still get the kind of grades I got that semester?

My freshman roommate from the start was a foreign creature but do you know the kind of embarrassment I felt when she asked me why it is I wash my hands so often!, she doesn’t know how it feels to hate yourself in the black and green of the mirror and wash your hands at midnight because of all the things you did wrong that day, hate your face in the morning fluorescent because of the way the lighting picks out the red on your cheeks when everyone else’s face is clear, stare quaking at your feet pointed toes in the library and unable to raise your head to the sky lit and clouded sky because your mind is turning turning please please help me can I know this is right which choice do I take cause something like a class schedule can obviously completely make or ruin your entire life!

Do you know about the times that I sat huddled in the corner of my room by the closet door at night all alone, knowing I was worthless and horrifically flawed because he talked to the blond one and not to me, cause from the moment I first heard his voice and saw his eyebrows he has held sway on a piece of my heart and you know that he holds it still.

(and yeah you know I still love him but there’s something different about you, something different, don’t worry).

I told my sixth roommate that my thoughts are a pressure cooker, that they spin and spin and spin the pressure clamps down harder, I can’t get out because I don’t know how I got in and she asked me how it doesn’t drive me crazy. This one was a nice boy but I couldn’t get out because all of a sudden he couldn’t compare to A— L—! Too many times I’ve loved a broken human being cause this wasn’t the first time but not the last either.

(and answer—it does.)

I don’t want to tell you about the times that I laid in my bed and I laid on the couch and there was sun behind the window but my ceiling was blue shadow, hearing a daybird sing in the first-summer twilight and listening to A Comet Appears and Pink Floyd’s The Wall way too many times until I couldn’t be anything but a tortured artist, cause the myth of the tortured artist is a persuasive one, you know.

I don’t wanna talk about that last dark semester, too many lonely nights with the light of my iPod at 2am in that strange dusty back room, my roommate was a perfect child with a secret and I never knew her in the six months that she slept five feet from me, ducking her head in the hallway and cripplingly polite as she was, she went to bed at 10pm and stood up at the first chime of her alarm in the morning and I sat and wrote in the dark and listened to her sleep. There was a quiet storm raging in the rest of my apartment and I knew from the first day and especially at the last that I could see the lights on the mountains and that everyone else couldn’t.

That was a semester of black and gold, under fire from heaven, on my knees by my bed but unable to think about anything but my next assignments. I was doing everything right but the formula for me wasn’t working, I was losing everything that’s so important to me and I tried to read thy words but instead I would bite my knuckles and my hands and wish I could cut myself open like a fish—!

My brother let me cry on his chest for three awful hours in between the trees and the streetlights. I could see the yellow light from the doors opening and shutting like matchbooks in the parking lot and I wished someone would hear me out there because my entire being was crying out and I just couldn’t believe that nobody could see it!

I was trapped by two boys that were like anchors on my feet. But when I went with you to the salt flats like I had dreamed every day for half a year, looked to the sky and asked what a terrible world what a beautiful world, walked in the pink and spun poetry from the air, and then when I came back those kind of anchors ceased to have any kind of relevance to my being—!

I’ve been writing like a fiend since the eleventh day of last December. I’m sounding the river of my being, in time and place like a rapid bioassessment and searchable by a magnifying glass. I’ve said a thousand times that my existence is not sustainable, that I am burning inside like a swamp gas, and I only write stories that are true.

I don’t wanna say this but there is something about you that fills me up with gold.

I don’t need all that anger and those blessed twenty-one pilots expressing my broken relationship with my God. You’re such a help to me above and below, you’re so kind and special and so quiet but your soul is so so good, you showed me that you don’t have to be boring to be good, you let me soften my heart and fill my being back up with light. I’ve laughed to the sky a hundred times since the start of September, I tell myself that no one who gets this little sleep should be allowed to be this happy.

Some days I have the bones of a bird but I can’t tell you about all the mornings that I wake up with a sandbag in my chest. I can’t explain why but I’m doing better than I have been in years and years and years, I would never take away anything that has ever happened to me because everything in the world is beautiful.

And you know I had a moment in the green and the blue while I was walking under that bridge in Iceland, an insane trust in God that has been more solid and enduring than any trust I’ve had in Him before, despite the sunlight on the walls in that window-filled room and despite naps in the park and a firestorm in my brain just last weekend, there have been hands on my head and a peace in my heart as I’m kneeling on my deep blue sheets every single night, but now I think I get that You love me as I am, because for the longest time it’s been I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, but you know that right now it’s just thank you thank you thank you.

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Outside the Box: We are less fragile

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 2, 2016 as part of a series.

Continued from I Wish I Didn’t Know

My friend Mary Nikkel, who I once knew by the online nickname Elraen, was the first blogger I started regularly reading while I was still trapped in the cult my family was in, the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement. She blogs at Threads of Stars. Here is what she wrote about recovering from spiritual abuse.

I grew up believing that I could break other people, break myself, break the world, with the smallest of missteps.

There was a list of movies I couldn’t watch and music I couldn’t hear because they would break my mind.

There was a list of things I couldn’t wear because they would break the minds of others.

There was a list of words and opinions I couldn’t say because they would break someone else’s perception of the Christian faith.

There was a corresponding list of words and opinions I had to say because I would be sending someone to hell if I were to omit them.

The lists of the way I could break things seemed endless, and I lived by the letter of their law with an awful holy terror. But there are terrible consequences to believing you live in a world so breakable, with a soul so fragile. I began to feel like I was, at best, a weak excuse of a human for being so unable to meet the list of requirements, and at worst, a weapon designed only to damage the world. Better if I be removed for the sake of safety, my mind whispered on the dark nights. Better if I erase myself before I break anything or anyone else.

When grace opened the door to a wider world and I learned to walk in it (certainly with my fair share of bruises and skinned knees along the way), I would quickly be startled by a few truths. First was that the world was more elastic than I had imagined, that sometimes when I fell, rather than shattering beneath me like brittle glass, this wild life embraced me and bent around me and became a new kind of beautiful. Second was that sometimes even when something did break—my heart, a friendship, some corner of my innocence—my spirit had the ability to mend, like grace had planted this resilient life in me that outlasted even the death of dreams, the death of my strength, the death of all the porcelain pictures I once thought defined “good enough.” And really, perhaps these truths are no surprise in the end, for I believe in the truth of a Christ whose Spirit overcame death—who gifts that same Spirit to me.

On the other side of laws and fear-based protective prisons, I have certainly loved the freedom to enjoy things. I have the freedom to immerse myself in rock and roll, the freedom to dye my hair blue, the freedom to wear shorts and tank tops in the summer, the freedom to watch (and even laugh with) movies that currently matter in pop culture. But perhaps the freedom I have loved even more is the freedom to make mistakes along the way, knowing each small choice will not save or condemn me.

I have certainly found consequences and heartache out here. But I have outlasted them. And the steady hands of friends who have stayed with me, even when I say the wrong thing or say nothing at all, even when I’m feeling too small and dim inside to spark any kind of response to their lavish light, has taught me that maybe I can’t break others as easily as I once believed either. Maybe there is a staying power in our souls beyond anything we could possibly imagine. There is more grace out here than I ever knew.

I believed I was an ember, struggling to stay alive from my place embedded in the ash and dirt. Imagine my surprise to find a spirit like a star burning in me, relentless, impossibly bright, alive though it wander through the coldest walks of the night.

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Poem: Outside

The sun is shining over the flowers my grandfather planted. They’re still growing, long after he died in 1995.

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on February 28, 2016.

One of my goals for 2016 was to write a new spoken word poem every month. Here’s February’s poem.

We can breathe again, out here in the open.
Drink in lemonade sunlight
because each one of us has faced so much dark.
Right now my journey can be described by a Taylor Swift song,
and I’m okay with that.
The world I once lived in
was clearly defined by words like
good and bad,
light and darkness,
believers and unbelievers.
If you were not for us, you were against us,
and criticism of the church meant betrayal.
One of my roommates who grew up like I did
couldn’t even wear gray clothing,
gray was not in our vocabulary
because gray was not supposed to exist.
Anyone who lived in the gray was shunned
because they were really black and just didn’t know it yet.
But life, this life has so much color.
I lost my greyscale sunglasses somewhere behind me,
and now I can see the full spectrum.
Sometimes I’m still finding my coordinates,
and this road is nothing like what they told me it would be.
So some days, I will still ask you:
“Are we out of the woods yet?”
because I’m afraid to believe your answer is true.

They told me my emotions were evil,
that the numbness in my soul was the sacrifice my God required,
they took away my oxygen.
It’s a daily renewal,
this learning to inhale again
when you were nearly dead inside.
You don’t understand what safety is
until that first time your heart knows it,
and there will still be days when we shiver at shadows,
because the darkness can only fade, not be forgotten.
I cracked open
and shattered into hundreds of shards, scattered,
and yet I am finding my pieces.
I no longer have words to describe my doctrine,
my theology is like waves down at the gulf shore
tumultuous, yet cyclical
murky, but shimmering
and when the tide catches me,
I can’t tell you how far down I am.
My religion is complicated,
a living fire always melting the ice
until I can feel my heartbeat in my fingertips.
I embrace your newborn freedom
while I exult in my own.
One day I know that they will see all of us
as a kaleidoscope of stained glass windows
because we could not be broken.

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