Category: recovery | Page 3 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

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

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.

Continued from Self-care during activism

Here are Cynthia’s concluding thoughts.

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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The UnBoxing Project: Self-care during activism

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.

Continued from Homeschool, the perfect hiding place

Content Note: suicidal ideation, self-harm

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.

They had never met anyone who was black or disabled before.

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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The UnBoxing Project: Defecting from a cult

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.

Continued from Racquel’s story.

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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Why did you call it the UnBoxing Project?

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 6, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from The Trouble With Freeing People.

Editorial Note: I re-wrote this post in January 2024 to better reflect what I now know about social justice and systemic oppression in the last decade since I left fundamentalism.

When I moved out of my restrictive home environment and was kicked out of the cult my family was in, other friends in similar circumstances told me what they were dealing with.

I realized I wasn’t alone in my experience.

Unfortunately, there were many other young adults and college students in their early 20s from Christian fundamentalist or other religious backgrounds in Colorado Springs who lived with their families in high-control situations, just like I did.

I would alert the same network of friends who supported me, enlisting their aid. We offered them emotional support and resources or actually organized a plan to help them move out on their own.

My best friend in college, Cynthia Barram, who is black, said our network of friends helping friends to escape abusive situations was like an “underground railroad.”

However, we did not want to appropriate that name from the BlPOC community, although we shared a deep admiration for people from marginalized communities who risked everything to find their own freedom.

Our experiences were definitely not the same as those whose ancestors experienced enslavement and the generational trauma of racism.

Although ex-fundamentalist Christian homeschool alumni may experience the marginalization of disability, neurodivergence or chronic illness as the result of childhood toxic stress from living with long-term abuse and having a high score of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), we wouldn’t want to compare our experiences to other marginalized groups.

Homeschool kids often read a lot of history.

Unfortunately, we often were taught incorrect or biased history, but we also grow up resonating with historical figures like Harriet Tubman or Corrie Ten Boom or other people that we are told are heroes of our faith. People who made brave choices against all odds. My siblings and I often pretend re-enacted scenes from history that we read about. This experience I’ve found is common among those who grew up homeschooled.

Before bedtime, my mom used to read us Laura Ingalls Wilder books (yes, we now know these books have issues) and Christian historical fiction set during the Civil War like the Between Two Flags series. I read biographies about Corrie Ten Boom and the Hiding Place, did a research project on Underground Railroad in 6th grade, and devoured historical fiction like the deeply problematic and patriarchal Elsie Dinsmore series.

Two of my homeschooled friends at the Independent Fundamental Baptist church that my family attended in Dallas wrote their own Civil War historical fiction novel during our early teen years, distributing serialized chapters after church each Sunday.

I grew up wanting to lead people to freedom like Harriet Tubman or hide people in my own home like Corrie Ten Boom. None of us faced oppression like the enslavement or massacre of an entire people group.

But I had always connected with these narratives, and my friends did, too.

We weren’t immersed in popular culture, so we felt closer to people we read about from long ago more than our own time.

We liked the idea of people who couldn’t tolerate the injustices they observed and helped other regardless of the cost or risks involved.

In dealing with the abuses in our own community, we wanted to give shelter to those who needed it, until they found their own freedom.

My friend Kyle, who worked at a non-profit to prevent human trafficking called The Exodus Road, said that the number of young adults from this type of background being denied agency by overbearing parents is troubling.

We ended up calling our network The UnBoxing Project because my friends and I nicknamed the Christian fundamentalist homeschooling cult environment that we left behind “the box.”

Sometimes I’ll say things like, “back when we were in the box, they used to say that any music with a syncopated beat was demonic” or “People in the box think that Cabbage Patch dolls are evil,” and my friends know exactly what I’m talking about.

It’s a convenient way to refer to cult-speak and teachings of the cults that we escaped.

Helping others to leave abusive fundamentalist Christian environments is undoing what “the box” did to them.

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The UnBoxing Project: The trouble with freeing people

My friends and I often felt like Katniss in the Hunger Games as we left behind the high control churches we were raised in and rebelled against those systems. | Source: Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1.

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

Continued from Being an angel with a shotgun.

Content Note: suicidal ideation, pastoral authority doctrine

“Eleanor, does your church teach the doctrine of pastoral authority?” my friend Racquel asked.

She was waiting with me in our college’s main auditorium and we were talking before the review session for my Organic Chemistry class started.

“What is that exactly?”

Racquel attended an apostolic Pentecostal church in Colorado Springs that told her that a person wasn’t “saved” unless they had been baptized and spoken in tongues at that particular church, not any other Pentecostal churches in the area.

A long list of offenses that are part of everyday life for most people, like watching movies and television or wearing short skirts and jewelry, could grieve the Holy Spirit, she said, and then you’d lose your salvation and have to “pray through at the altar” again.

Although I also grew up fundamentalist in the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, we believed in “once saved, always saved,” meaning that if you messed up bad enough, you must never have been a real Christian to begin with and your salvation was fake somehow.

We’d been taught two different theology systems, but both churches taught us to be constantly afraid of hell.

“Pastoral authority means that our pastor, Brother Burgess, prays and decides if it’s God’s will for us to talk to a guy in the church, date him, get engaged, or marry,” she said. “And whether or not we can move out of town and attend another apostolic church.”

“Other apostolic churches allow social media and let their young people listen to CCM [contemporary Christian music], but our pastor has decided it’s not spiritually good for our congregation.”

Racquel didn’t see the harm in what her church banned, and she believed her pastor had good intentions.

“I can tell my pastor cares about the people in the church, the way he walks around and prays for us during the service.”

I hadn’t moved out of my parents’ house or begun dealing with the unhealthy cycles in my own life, but I knew something wasn’t right. A church community should support my friend, not make her miserable.

Over the next few months, Racquel and I had many theological discussions, and I argued that Jesus was about freedom and grace, not rules.

I said her church had the tendencies of a cult. But she couldn’t see it yet.

// // //

I’d started texting Racquel’s best friend Ashley. She’d just gotten permission from her parents to own a cellphone and drive the car again, even though she was nearly 20 years old and attending massage therapy school full-time as well as a part-time job.

I had moved out in August 2012, and felt even more strongly that Ashley’s family situation was toxic since my escape from fundamentalism.

In January 2013, I lost contact with Ashley when her parents and Brother and Sister Burgess (the pastor of their church and his wife) discovered she and Racquel had watched movies again and listened to rock music, including Skillet. Brother Burgess declared Skillet was demonic after listening to their song “Monster.”

Ashley was finally allowed to buy her own iPhone with parental and pastoral permission eight months later. (Yes, this is a real thing in Pentecostal churches. I realize how wild it sounds to people who didn’t grow up this way.)

Now it was late October. Ashley and I were meeting for coffee that evening. She showed me Search for Truth Pentecostal Bible study lessons, intended to recruit potential converts to the UPC church, as an excuse so her parents would allow us to hang out.

I was driving down towards the Starbucks where we would meet on the south end of town when I got a text message from her.

“I’m sorry, Eleanor. I can’t come meet u. My parents are now not letting me use their car for anything.”

“Stay calm, see if I can pick you up in a bit,” I replied.

“I’ll try. Don’t know if I can last that long. Cya.”

“You can make it. I believe in you. You still ok?”

“No I’m not. I’m done Eleanor, I’m sick and tired of this. I can’t do it anymore. I’m too tired and can’t keep this facade up. I’ve fought for 13 years against this and am too tired to continue fighting this. I have no control and no choice. I’m fed up and there’s no way out. I realize that now. I just don’t know what to do now.”

“Do you want out? Do you want to make the jump?”

“Yes I do. But I can’t.”

// // //

The church and Brother and Sister Burgess trapped both girls in an awful double bind, using manipulation and lies. I knew they needed out.

I organized a network of friends to be prepared when they asked for help.

But when would they be ready?

One of our friends at the time, Cynthia Jeub, wrote an article called The Trouble with Freeing People for the Huffington Post describing Ashley’s situation and how we couldn’t force them to leave.

“Helping her feel ready to take freedom for herself is the only way to make her free,” Cynthia wrote.

Only they could decide.

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