Category: leaving | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

‘But for us, God is not that tiny’: Why I’m #withMalala

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 8, 2016.

Usually the documentaries I enjoy are about religious fundamentalism and cults or evangelical culture. I watch to learn and for research.

The other night I rented two movies from Redbox: the new live action Cinderella and He Named Me Malala.

I thought I’d learn something from Malala. More about the culture of Pakistan and the war on terror, more about equality for women in other parts of the world. I thought I would learn about someone vastly different than me.

Instead, I realized that Malala and I have more in common than I’d guessed.

1.) Isolation in a high control group and disagreeing with the conservative factions of your religion.

Malala’s father explains that when the Taliban first came to the Swat Valley, “We thought they were good people. They promised to follow the Quran.”

The Taliban took over media and had book burnings in the streets. The only information the villager could access was the radio broadcast every night, blaring throughout the whole village. People listened every night to hear their neighbors’ sins. Then the Taliban started killing the people named. They shot and slaughtered people in the square, saying that this could be you tomorrow.

They were anti-government, saying that any police or soldiers who attacked Muslims were infidels.

They said girls could not attend school. Three schools were bombed in one night. The Taliban singled out the women, telling them what they ought to do and be. “The women only have one window open and only one man is speaking.”

“if you don’t follow the real Islam that we are showing you, then you can be the next person like this man.”

And the destructive mentality of the Taliban leaders just fed the cycle. Malala’s father said, “When I am willing to kill myself, others are nothing to me.”

The Taliban is more like the subculture I grew up in than most are comfortable admitting. I’m not the first to notice this.

There’s some odd similarities.

Limiting educational access for women, telling them their place is only in the home and using religion to justify this.
Controlling information about the outside world. The Taliban radio broadcasts sounded eerily similar to tapes of Prophet Warren Jeff’s sermons that the FLDS people listened to regularly.
The government is wrong, not the group. Backlash is dismissed as persecution.

2.) Ideologies are more dangerous than individual people.

Malala’s father named her after a folktale about a woman killed in battle in the Swat Valley. The invading enemy seemed too great, but according to the story, the women told her people, “Live like a lion for one day or be a slave for a hundred years.”

She led them into battle. They were victorious, but she was fatally wounded.

Malala’s family watched the changes taking place in their village.

“I was feeling if I don’t speak, then I would be the most sinful and most guilty person in this world,” her father explained. “If you keep silent, you lose the right to exist, to live.”

Her father started calling out the Taliban publicly: “They have tarnished the beautiful face of Islam.”

Malala corresponded with a journalist on the outside and kept attending school.

“He didn’t push me. He let me do what I wanted.”

Malala’s mother doesn’t approve of all of her daughter’s boldness and activism. She is still too afraid that it’s not something a woman does.

“My father only gave me the name Malala. He didn’t make me Malala. I chose this life.”

Pakistanis and Taliban leaders try to discount her because they think that her father is behind this, that “Malala is just a character.” They can’t believe that a woman could actually do this.

“There is a moment when you have to choose whether to be silent or to stand up,” Malala said. “I’m not a lone voice, I am many. And our voices have grown louder and louder.”

Then Malala and two other girls were shot by the Taliban one afternoon on a school bus.

Her father feared that even if she survived her head injury, she would blame him: “I was a child, you should have stopped me, what has happened to me was because of you.”

But Malala says she would still make the same choice. “It does not matter that the left side of my face does not work.”

When the documentary makers asked her about the shooter, Malala said:

“It was not a person. It was an ideology.”

“The Taliban is a small group of people. They think that God is a small conservative being. But for us, God is not that tiny. We think that God has sent us to this world to see if we choose a good way or a bad way.”

This is why I stand #withMalala, why I can empathize with her story.

I also believe that it was fundamentalism that harmed me. My parents and conservative colleges like Bob Jones operate under a similar abusive system.

Often individual people have empathy, but they believe they must do destructive, terrible things to obey God. This is how they silence their own conscience.

They miss their country. Malala wants to go back and see their old house just once.

Sometimes, I miss my country, too. Some days I feel like I have no roots.

Malala is not that different than me. We actually have a lot in common.

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This is a story about the unexpected

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 4, 2017.

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve really blogged, but I’m doing so, so much better than I was.

I’ve been back in therapy for six months now.

I’ve been moved out for almost five years. I saw three different counselors in Colorado — a Christian psychologist and two counselors at my college off and on between 2011 and 2015.

My parents wanted me to see the Christian one because they thought he would convince me that moving out was a bad idea. He didn’t. He told me to be responsible and don’t go unless I could survive on my own, but he actually encouraged me to leave.

When I told my new counselor this, while reciting my entire History of Therapy (TM) to him, he laughed and said, “backfire!”

My first counselor taught me that I wasn’t responsible for other people’s emotions, like my dad’s outbursts.

He told me that leaving would involve a risk that I wasn’t ready to take yet. I asked him what that was and he said I needed to ask myself that question.

And he showed me that I wasn’t obligated to believe religious dogma that hurt me.

One day he told me that he wanted me to “stop thinking in terms of shoulds and musts and start thinking about wants and your reasonable heart’s desires.”

I asked him if that was wrong.

I recited that Bible verse that says, “But the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?”

But my counselor said, “The former is living under the law and the latter is where freedom is and where Christ wants you to be.”

I didn’t have the faith to believe him yet, but I wanted to. I was still so scared.

My second counselor was secular. I saw him through my college’s mental health services program. He didn’t really understand the pain of trying so hard not to stop believing when everything you were raised with seems like a lie, but he definitely tried.

But he told me to try new things and he asked me what would happen if I carried less in my backpack going to campus every day.

He asked me to put my backpack beside my chair, instead of between me and him. I’d barricaded myself off without realizing it. Not having something between me and him while talking about deep emotions was unexpectedly vulnerable.

My third counselor was through my college again. She happened to be Christian and had been to seminary, so she could feel my faith wounds.

She told me that my flashbacks and nightmares were part of c-PTSD. We started a type of therapy to help my brain process old memories and not freeze up.

I found her after my first breakup, in the lurch of unexpected heartbreak. When I wanted to stop breathing and not exist.

Last summer, I knew I needed to go back.

I knew I wasn’t done yet. But I didn’t know how to begin again, to recount my whole life story all over again for a stranger who I would come to know but who knew nothing about me.

But then unexpectedly — and aren’t the best things so often like this — one of my pastors was starting graduate school for counseling last fall.

He started meeting with me. He knew parts of my story already, so vulnerability was both harder and easier. But there was really no one else I’d rather tell these things to.

It means so much when someone listens with their heart. They are more than just a counselor, then, they become an anchor.

In December, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore.

I have wanted to hurt myself for as long as I can remember. Even as a tiny human, I believed that I deserved punishment and would invent penalties for myself when “getting in trouble” didn’t seem like enough.

I am learning to trust other people. I am trying not to withdraw so sharply when I am anxious.

I am healing.

And I want to start sharing some of what I’ve learned.

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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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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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Deprogramming: documentaries and movies about cults and fundamentalist Christian subculture

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 16, 2015.

Some people asked us what life was like after we left when I posted the UnBoxing Project series, how we handled leaving the sects of fundamentalist Christianity we were raised in.

My friends and I went through a period of deprogramming, which is still ongoing. We’d been told what to think our whole lives, what is good and what is evil, and then we found we’d been lied to.

Cults teach the people who want to leave the group that:

1) you’re the only one questioning

2) this is somehow your fault, because everyone else is compliant and does what they’re told.

This is how they maintain control, through isolation.

My best friend in college, Cynthia Barram, found some documentaries about cults and Christian fundamentalism that demonstrated nationwide trends and helped our little group of ex-fundamentalist homeschoolers realize that we weren’t alone in deconstructing from toxic religion.

Sons of Perdition (2010)

This documentary is about the teenage boys who get kicked out and the girls and women who leave Warren Jeff’s FLDS cult on the southern Utah / Arizona border.

Although our experiences in the Independent Fundamental Baptist or United Pentecostal Churches were different than the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints since our churches didn’t practice polygamy and didn’t have a prophet, we shared many similarities with their deconstruction process. Like the ex-FLDS young adults, we grieved the loss of family members who shunned us, struggled to find a sense of purpose when we no longer felt like we had been “chosen” to fulfill a divine mission like the cult taught us, and worked through unhealthy ways of coping with these losses and found a better way to live.

The “Sons of Perdition” struggled to support themselves and enroll in school. The daughters cut their hair for the first time and put on pants. We could identify with their stories because of our own experiences in fundamentalist cults.

Daddy, I Do (2010) and Cutting Edge: The Virgin Daughters (2008 TV Show)

These documentaries are about purity culture and the father-daughter virginity ball hosted at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs every year.

Daddy, I Do features a variety of perspectives: fraternity boys, churchgoing parents raising kids, abstinence-only program leaders, and progressive Christians like blogger Matthew Paul Turner. It addresses the problematic nature of a daughter promising her virginity to her father until marriage.

The Virgin Daughters focuses specifically on Colorado Springs and the father-daughter ball, interviewing the various families who attend and showing the pledge the fathers sign to protect their daughters’ chastity.

Both of these documentaries feature fundamentalist Christian parents who admit they actually were not virgins at marriage, but they want their children to be.

Jesus Camp (2006)

This documentary is mostly about an evangelical Pentecostal-style church camp gone wrong.

The charismatic camp director says in the opening scenes that America’s only hope for spiritual revival is through the hearts of malleable children. So she and the other leaders proceed to brainwash them and manipulate their emotions, telling the children that they are engaged in warfare for the good of the nation.

The film also shows the group of campers visiting New Life Church in Colorado Springs and meeting the pastor at the time, Ted Haggard.

Ted Haggard, who founded New Life Church in the mid 80s, was known for “waging spiritual war” in Colorado Springs and encouraging his church members to “anoint” streets and intersections with cooking oil, according to a Harpers’ Magazine article called “Soldiers of Christ” by Jeff Sharlet published in May 2005.

The neighbor family who lived across the street from my parents in Colorado Springs had attended New Life Church for years when we moved there. The husband and wife both worked at Focus on the Family while we were neighbors, and the wife often took a spray bottle of cooking oil on her walks around the neighborhood that she would use to “anoint” neighbor’s driveways if she felt that she sensed a demonic presence, in accordance with Haggard’s teachings.

Haggard resigned as senior pastor of New Life Church in the fall of 2006 after allegations surfaced that he used methamphetamine and had sex with a male escort in Denver. He and his wife left the city for several years, but he moved back to start another church in Colorado Springs in 2010, where he has been accused again of illegal drug use and inappropriate behavior with young men, according to a July 2022 article by the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Jesus Camp was a harrowing portrayal of spiritual abuse, but I needed this film to process what happened to me and my high school youth group in one of my fundamentalist churches, to realize how we had been radicalized for the culture wars.

God Loves Uganda (2013)

This documentary is about non-denominational evangelical churches like the International House of Prayer (IHOP) group (which has also been called a cult) that has emerged over the last 20 years increasing missionary efforts, reacting against established denominations leaning away from traditional theology and missions.

They look at what happens on the other side, at the financial impact of this church planting and aid on the countries receiving these missionaries.

The documentary makers point out that people end up depending on the monetary support from the missionaries and churches in Western countries, and the evangelical churches sending missionaries use their influence to pass laws, like the one in Uganda that advocated the death penalty for LGBTQ people.

Basically, this film demonstrates missionary work gone bad.

Waiting for Armageddon (2009)

I’ve given up on rapture theology. The whole philosophy is based on a handful of verses and wasn’t widely accepted until television preachers in the 1960s started it during the Cold War era. If Jesus actually comes back like that, great, but if not, I’m okay with that, too.

In the film, a group of somewhat clueless Texans tromp around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and their pastor threatens to cause an international incident by yelling that this is where Jesus will come back until security asks them to stop, reminding them that at least three different religions consider the Temple Mount to be sacred and each religion believes very different things about it.

Then they play the Star Spangled Banner while riding in a boat over the Sea of Galilee. Gotta love that American Christian exceptionalism. Lovely.

Jewish leaders who better understand the intricacies of the religious history of the area are also interviewed in the film, and it also covers the annual Tribulation Conference in Dallas, Texas.

On the lighter side, we also watched comedy movies and TV shows critiquing how we grew up.

Saved! (2004)

In this movie, a high school girl decides to “save” her boyfriend from being gay by giving him her virginity. Then she gets pregnant.

And did I mention she’s in a Christian high school?

Cue goth punk chick and dude in a wheelchair (the other “outcasts”) coming to her rescue.

We laughed so much watching this film, because many of the ridiculous plot lines would actually happen in evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015)

In this Netflix-only series, Kimmy escapes an apocalyptic cult’s bunker after 15 years of captivity and reinvents herself and her identity in New York City.

The episode titles are hilarious from the obvious “Kimmy Goes Outside!” or “Kimmy Gets a Job!” and “Kimmy Goes on a Date!” to the more mundane, like “Kimmy Makes Waffles!”

The show received a positive review from an actual survivor of an apocalyptic cult.

I watched the first season during spring break of my last year of college and loved it, but I couldn’t watch too many episodes in one sitting because some of the comedy was too real.

When I first moved out, I was so very, very much like Kimmy, right down to her bottomless optimism. Laughing at her is like laughing at myself, which is both healing and painful.

Leaving is hard.

But for those of us who seek freedom, it’s worth it.

And we’re not alone, in this mess of deprogramming and making sense of what our lives were like and what our futures will be.

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