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.
Photo: The Meta Picture.
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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.
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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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 16, 2015 as part of a series.
Rescuing people from cults is not an item to check off of a to-do list. It’s a process.
While we worked together on the UnBoxing Project, we learned this through our own exhausted time and money.
We didn’t just need to free people from church attendance and their abusive, controlling homes. In little funny moments and frustrating conflicts, we watched them free their own minds and personalities.
Moments like when Racquel wore jeans for the first time. We’d told her that she had a lovely figure that didn’t need to be concealed under long, wide skirts, and she didn’t believe us until then.
Moments like when Eleanor first moved out, I recommended dry beans for cost-effective meals, and she didn’t know how to cook them.
Moments like the Socratic dialogue with Ash in a reclusive university meeting room, establishing that safety was possible.
After my friends and I got out, we struggled with various levels of c-PTSD, depression, and anxiety from the emotional, physical, and spiritual abuse we’d endured. It would be difficult enough to hold a job while dealing with shock and recovery, but many of the people we helped didn’t have any experience in the workforce.
I believed in self-sacrifice, and I didn’t care if I wasn’t well enough to help other people. Nobody else was going to do it if we didn’t. I told Cynthia Barram this, and she gave me a graphic image: She said to picture a woman in a place where food was scarce. The baby still sucked at his mother’s breast, but she had no nutrition left to give. At this point, the child was just eating blood.
We needed stability and resources ourselves, but with our parents gone, we only had each other. Like the undernourished mother nursing, we gave more than we had to give.
Many of us had to drop classes because taking care of extra people was so stressful. Eleanor ended up paying more than her portion of rent for the house she got with some of the people we’d rescued.
We realized that we weren’t heroes, and we didn’t have the strength to be heroes.
The question was, at what point do you let people learn for themselves?
Our own limitations answered for us: we didn’t have the means to support other adults who had so little experience with the outside world.
We all decided that if we needed to rescue people, we wouldn’t be able to share finances with them, like co-signing on a lease. Getting out of a cult left these adults without survival skills, and we were young and broke, too. For the first year after my parents kicked us out, my sister and I rented from a family whose children were grown.
If only we knew some people who were older than us, who had the financial stability to own a house and rent out a room. If only we knew people who could teach a young adult, between the ages of 18 and 25 or so, how to keep a job and pay the rent.
Unfortunately, most of the people in the networks we had were similar to our own parents. That’s what isolation does — it limits the people you know.
We’re still looking for people who can serve as safe houses in our UnBoxing Project, perhaps who have more stable living conditions than those of us who needed to escape, too.
We need them. People who are willing to take a young adult into a guest bedroom, and help them prepare for life outside. Help them find and keep a job.
Those of us who were abused aren’t very demanding. We generally don’t take up much space, and we shrink at the thought of imposing on anyone. Just let us know we’re welcome, and let us know that it’s okay to talk about what’s going on. We need therapy to deal with what we’ve lived through.
Can we ask you to do that? Because we can’t do it ourselves.
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Disability rights activist Cynthia Barram with her cat Dita in 2014. | Photo: James Sibert
Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 14, 2015 as part of a series.
Cynthia Barram was the first friend I met in college who helped me start my own moving out process before helping our other friends leave Christian fundamentalist, Quiverfull households.
Here’s her perspective on what happened, in her own words.
Lesson Number One: You can’t help anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself.
When several homeschool girls came to me, oppressed by churches and controlling parents, I helped them realize that sneezing would not condemn them to hell. They could kiss boys, get their ears pierced, and maybe even listen to some decent music without fear of the ground opening up beneath them.
But I didn’t realize I was trapped in my own cage, despite my involvement in disability activism. As the revelation hit me, I felt as though I’d been cut down from a whipping post.
My body sunk. My face went numb—unsure whether to react with joy or rage or some unholy spawn of the two. The revelation was the first of many from my support group. Long story short, the cage I had been living in due to the restrictions of my disability accommodations for the past ten years no longer existed, if it ever really existed in the first place.
The iron bars that burned when I touched them, the iron bars that held me fast to a life of poverty and escapism now crumbled and snapped in the hands of my mentors like dried reeds. One support group meeting did that, and afterwards I wandered the streets disoriented and moaning—drunk with the wine of freedom in all its bold bittersweet, soon to be very real possibilities.
But what was I to do without my chains? Like Jacob Marley on parole, I was now confronted with the equally real problem of how to get on without them.
So I understand the ones I’ve helped move out, the ones who have looked to me. Because I, too, don’t know how to handle so much sudden freedom.
Cut to support group a few weeks later.
“I love my friends,” I told them, “But rescuing two of them called me out of a final exam. I took an incomplete in a class last semester because we had a suicide attempt and dealing with it messed with my head, and now this.”
“No wonder you haven’t been yourself,” they said. “That’s way too much for anyone to carry, but we’ll help you.”
They then proceeded to divvy up my business as if it was their own.
I made a promise to the rest of the group members to keep our meeting days clear from other appointments, free from stress, and when I figure out who I am without my chains and graduate from college, I promised to let everyone know.
That’s the trouble with “witch work” as I often call it.
If you were born a witch (and I mean the green nasty one from the 1943 Wizard of Oz film, not Wiccans) like I was, you get used to that icky-sticky-kind-of-cool-but-on-your-own feeling.
On the one hand, you swear you must have three breasts, and are understandably and almost perpetually embarrassed.
On the other hand, you get used to hearing things like “Ever try to put a jet engine on that power wheelchair?” and “I’ve never been friends with a black person before,” and “You never wear feminine clothes.”
(Never mind of course that dresses get caught in my wheelchair!)
I heard many of these statements repeated again in college from formerly homeschooled people I met at college, like my friend Eleanor and the people she was helping.
When I first met Eleanor, she told me her homeschool textbooks taught her to sit or kneel when talking to people in wheelchairs, but I found the action too intimate for a casual conversation.
The only people who had done that to me without it being offensive were my first boyfriend and my childhood hero.
In other words, what the hell?
You laugh as if the jokes are funny, and offer up starters to the almost obligatory culturally informative conversations that follow.
You get so good at doing this on a small level that eventually you take on bigger game like formerly Christian homeschooled LGBT folks trying to move out when their parents have guns and women self-harming and ending up in the ER.
I didn’t seek out these people who asked for my help.
No, these homeschooled girls with braids and glasses, dressed like they were going to the Little House on the Prairie fan convention from hell, found me out on campus, at Bible studies, after church services. And I couldn’t scare them away, either.
You become so brilliant at this in fact that you tie yourself with chains to the greater good and wait for this or that friend with this or that crisis to—effectively becoming more worn out than any of your mentees are.
That is, until the cross disability support group at the Independence Center on Fridays, until the smashing of chains and the breaking of cages, until a group of people who swear on their lives to keep your secrets, and who feed you as you feed others.
Sometimes you need to crash on somebody else’s couch, figuratively, after you’ve hosted several refugees, or you lose yourself.
And that support group has got to be there before during and after anyone is even considering doing this work.
It has to be there, or the psychological slavery that you work so hard to liberate everybody else from will find a much better mark in you than it ever did in your charges, and this slavery comes customized complete with your own set of flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and mood swings, trust me.
The support group has to be there or you will contemplate crazy shit—drinking bleach, stepping in front of a car, shooting yourself in the head, and when a woman in trouble holds your hand and begs you to tell her why you are alive, you will not be able to answer her.
I cannot stress this enough. The support group in some shape or form has to, has to, has to be there.
And no matter the strength of the freedom fighter, no matter the clarity of his or her vision or the strength and purity of the intentions behind it—anybody, anybody, anybody can find themselves worn out by the difficult and delicate process of freeing people to follow their dreams.
Cynthia Barram graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and she is the former president of the Disabled Student Union on campus. She petitioned for the Colorado Springs City Council to not cut funding for bus routes in 2008, which was covered by The Gazette and the Colorado Springs Independent. Cynthia is involved with the community at the Independence Center, which sponsors disability access and justice in the city.
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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 8, 2015 as part of a series.
Liz was part of our network that helped Racquel and Ashley as they left the cult environment of the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs. Here is her perspective.
Photo: Wil C. Fry, creative commons license.
Nearly two years ago, I received text messages from Eleanor about a friendship between two girls that had been recently forbidden by their religious leader.
I was asked to attempt to sneak a cheap TracFone to one of the girls at her school because I would not be recognizable to her parents, who had confiscated all her means of communication. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in class that day.
Eventually, they acquired their freedom by leaving their church behind and living with friends.
Most people assume their own community has only good intentions in mind for members. Why would we believe otherwise if an overwhelming majority of us were taught that strangers are the ones who seek to hurt us?
In reality, data suggests that most cases of violent crime and sexual assault occur between people who are at least acquainted with each other or in regular physical proximity.
In spite of statistical and factual realities, we teach our children to fear strangers. We teach them to avoid the rare anomalies but fail to teach them to look for warning signs in the mundane. This contributes to the denial in identifying abusive communities when people are a part of one.
Instead, people taught to fear the outside world might think that to leave would be worse.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt says that evil is banal. It is predictable, common, and is generally perpetuated by unremarkable people motivated by their own, typically material needs.
An intense, outward adherence to a particular ideology or manifestation of a psychological condition might be present in the situation, but neither are enough to explain why communities as a whole behave a certain way.
In other words, abusers are regular people and not the monstrous caricatures we see on TV or evil stepmothers in children’s fairy tales. There might be a few narcissists and sociopaths at the upper echelons dictating the orders, but several people who are afraid of seeking out other dissenters within the group.
With hierarchy and scale, diffusion of guilt and responsibility is inevitable. Diffusion of guilt is generally paired with resistance to collective guilt that should logically follow the diffusion.
The lower end claim to be following orders, the higher ups claim they didn’t personally do it.
It’s the same garbage that makes none guilty for abuse that many participated in. It is as if people hope that with sufficient diffusion, the amount of culpability per person is rendered insignificant. Dilution of active ingredients in homeopathic “remedies” operates this way.
Abuse as a phenomena doesn’t become significant simply because the perception of responsibility among abusers is thinly spread out because there is always someone else to blame in the eyes of the guilty such that their victims somehow become responsible for their own abuse.
What I’ve gleaned from my studies in history and politics is that there is a tendency to conceal or otherwise diminish the significance of abuses as a means of trying to protect the legitimacy and reputation of an organization such as the Catholic church, many American universities, collegiate and professional sports teams, the entertainment industry, among many other examples.
When an organization cares more about protecting its own reputation than removing abusers or helping victims, there is a reason to question the validity and value of such an institution and the complicity of people within afflicted organizations.
Even if an individual abuser recognizes the harm they cause, to reject the cultural norms is to risk being socially ostracized and possibly, their standard of living. Obedience experiments by Milgram and replicated by others show that people are generally submissive to figures of authority up to a certain point.
It is likely that people from more isolated communities would escalate punishments further when commanded by members of their community than people from the general population being instructed by a stranger because of a greater sense of obligation and desire to belong in the former.
Defection is complicated. It comes with a high price tag in both an absolute and perceived sense.
People in deliberately isolated communities are generally taught that outsiders are evil, that its their own fault for being mistreated or that victims deserve it, and that the victims aren’t being treated badly in the first place. If maltreatment is believed to be normative and benevolent it tends to make victims attempt to justify what is going on as a means of internalizing conflicting messages.
The more isolated people are, the harder it is for them to recognize their own condition and the more complex the logistics of leaving becomes.
Liz received training at a local college in her hometown so that she could teach freshmen at her high school about how to avoid and recognize dating violence, local resources for victims, and statistics regarding the frequency of rape and lack of conviction. She was also a student teacher who assisted with evening adult education courses in sexual assault escape and self-defense offered by her school to the community.
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On the one hand, you swear you must have three breasts, and are understandably and almost perpetually embarrassed.
