Category: healing | Page 3 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

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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Outside the Box: Butterfly support group

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on February 29, 2016 as part of a series.

Laura blogs over at Laura’s Light. This post was originally posted on her blog on January 22, 2016.

I feel so lonely. And… I don’t know what to do.

Does a butterfly feel lonely in the cocoon? Or does it have butterfly conversion support group meetings?

I don’t know. But I wish I had them.

I wish I had someone at my beck and call, people who would come whenever I needed them: to say hello or to just sit next to me and be. But it doesn’t work like that. People have their own lives, their own things going on. And they can’t always come. It feels like they can’t more often than not these days.

Or maybe I just don’t know how to ask.

I don’t. I know that. I don’t want to let myself need people, to not be ok.

But if we’re honest, this butterfly has gone through a hell of a lot of shit this year.

And she doesn’t know what to do. And she needs people. She just doesn’t know how to ask.

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

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

Continued from How You Can Help (Cynthia’s Thoughts)

When we started helping people move out, we learned that getting out and finding freedom is messy, and everyone’s situation is different.

When someone contacted us for help, we said that they went “active.” It’s like being on call for an emergency move 24/7.

They’ll tell us the situation is deteriorating, but we don’t know it’s going to happen until they call us, because we leave the choice up to them.

In summer 2013, when Homeschoolers Anonymous posted Eve Ettinger’s Call For Help: A Quiverfull / Patriarchy Rescue, I wrote in an email to our network: “I think she is the first of many.”

The backlash is one of the most difficult things we all faced in leaving our cult-like churches and controlling families.

One morning in my apartment, right after Racquel and Ashley left their church, the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs, Racquel’s phone rang. She stepped into the next room for a private discussion.

She came back out looking troubled.

Ashley asked what was wrong, and Racquel said Sister H. from Louisiana just called.

Racquel started crying.

“Sister H. told me that the pastor may be wrong, our parents may be wrong, but not to give up on the Pentecostal church. But I just can’t do it. I can’t.”

“Did anything like this happen to you when you left, Eleanor?” she asked.

Yes. Yes, it did.

One of the pastors and his wife at our old church in the Dallas Metroplex, Rockwall Bible Church, called me and tried to convince me to attend Bob Jones University.

They agreed with my pastor at Grace Bible Church in Colorado Springs and they said the only way to honor my parents was to do this one thing, to obey them.

My friend Anna G. called me a few weeks after I moved out. She said she’d gone back to the church. The assistant pastor and his wife asked her to step into their office after an evening church service and asked her about two of my Facebook posts that she’d liked and commented on.

One of my Facebook posts that she had liked was lyrics from a song called “Keep Your Eyes Open” by the contemporary Christian band NeedtoBreathe (and the assistant pastor and his wife believed all syncopated music was of Satan).

The other Facebook post was a link to a Tumblr blog called Hey Christian Girl, a collection of memes with cheesy, silly pick-up lines with Biblical allusions. They said didn’t see the humor, and they thought it was sacrilegious.

Anna also said the pastor and his wife asked her if she agreed with me moving out, if she’d aided me in leaving the cult. They told her that they didn’t want her to influence their children to move out without their approval.

I caught my breath. I could see it now.

They can’t stand to lose one of their own, because that’s losing a soldier to the culture wars. You take one step back from fundamentalist Christianity and now you’re one of the outsiders, one of the “lost” that they evangelize. And they need your soul.

So when I hugged Racquel while she sobbed, I could say, “Yes, this happened to me, too.”

This is why leaving these churches and these homes is leaving a cult. And this is what it’s like to walk beside abuse survivors in seeking freedom.

I’ve waited through months of watching and making preparations before helping someone leave. I keep an emergency cellphone with an unlisted number in case a controlling parent blocks someone from calling my regular cellphone. I’ve carried pepper spray, a stun gun and a small knife, all legal to carry on my college campus, so I can protect myself and those who ask for our help if a situation turns confrontational and violent.

Our network of friends discusses alternate scenarios, backup plans with people who are wanting to leave. We plan for the worst while hoping that one day this won’t be necessary.

Here’s we learned about helping people move out:

Take the essentials, but stay safe.

TESSA, a non-profit in Colorado Springs that offers advice and support to spousal domestic abuse survivors, has a checklist of what to take with you when you leave that we found helpful.

Identifying documents
Clothes to last a week
Cash and bank information
Keys to car and work
Medications
Important paperwork and records
Personal items like photographs and jewelry

When Ashley moved out, five of us showed up because we knew her father was armed, he’d destroyed the inside of the car and the apartment, and we didn’t know when he’d return.

Later, I learned anyone who feels threatened can request police protection while moving their possessions.

Sometimes we left something behind we valued.

I couldn’t take my heirloom violin from the 1890s or one of our family dogs I’d bonded with. Ashley left her dog Sasha and her bed because we couldn’t fit it in the van, and Racquel sold her horse when later she couldn’t pay board and her own living expenses.

We lost diaries, mementos, and valuables.

We decided our freedom was worth losing those things or that lifestyle.

We realized the important thing was keeping ourselves safe and learning how to heal.

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