Category: sexual abuse | Page 19 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Traumatic Submission

Growing up, I was indoctrinated early to know that obedience and submission were godly, while rebellion or disobedience would end in eternal damnation. I probably could’ve told you this in simple terms by the time I was three or four years old.

I grew up playing church with my sister, and a huge part of that was beating our baby dolls into submission during our services. Those poor dolls were so naughty they got a “spanking” about every two minutes. Although, like most children, we probably over dramatized things a touch in our play, we were truly mirroring what we were being taught in our lives, through observation and personal experience.

Recently, I asked my therapist about why, in my childhood, I walked around in a fog all the time. I had no mental clarity about the passing of time, the structure of school, the location of anything outside of my home and my street, and many more things. I spent hours every day daydreaming and spinning wonderful stories in my mind, in which I was the recipient of many wonderfully ideal happenings. I read voraciously, and when I wasn’t reading, I was imagining stories in my own mind. My therapist noted that I grew up where I had very little control over my own life, and made virtually no decisions for myself. In addition, my life was boring; no extra-curricular activities of any kind, no television, no outside influences of any kind. In this sheltered environment, my mind created its own entertainment and ended up developing a very active imagination. Although there was nothing psychotic about this, it did make it difficult for me later in life, when reality imposed upon my dream world, causing extreme disappointment.

As a teen and young adult, I was at a place to fully understand that submission to my father, my mother, my pastor, and my future husband would be my lot in life. At that point, I didn’t fully grasp what it could mean to me. I did chafe at some of the rules in my own mind, but then I would quickly repent of my “questioning” and ask God to help me to submit without an attitude or doubt, because I was taught that it was only true submission if you didn’t’ question or doubt, but you submitted your will completely. Although that phrase I just typed now gives me chills at how unhealthy it was, it was all I knew at the time, and being highly contentious, I wanted to please God.

Off to Bible School right out of home school graduation, I was like an innocent child turned loose in a public park — although we were still somewhat sheltered in the Bible school environment. My unquestioning submission took me right to the top of the class from the very first. One professor commented that this was because I knew how to obey and I took him at his word when he told the class what he expected. He used my work as an example to the others. It was embarrassing, but it caused me to try even harder to please, because I felt I had reached the desired mark of submission in that moment and situation.

Another thing that happened at Bible school was that I was no longer under my father’s watchful eye, and boys were showing their interest for the first time in my life. Some of the young men at Bible School were very nice young men and went on to become preachers, pastors and missionaries. Others, however, were not respectful of women. My naivete was very marked, even in such a sheltered environment. I attracted the attention of a boy who I now feel was probably very experienced sexually and definitely had none of the naivete that I possessed. It is odd how one type of abuse conditions a person to attract other types of abuse. It is as if there was an invisible sign on me saying “I am open to abuse.” Even back then, I mostly attracted a dominant type. There was a lot of pressure from this boy to have sex with him, even though we were at Bible school. Finally, on one occasion I was terrified he was about to rape me. After that situation, I refused to go out with him again. I was tired of fighting him off and begging him to stop short of his goal. Strangely, out of all the teaching we were receiving in Bible school, the one thing he picked up that he liked to use on me was “We don’t have rights. We only have responsibilities.” Another thing that strikes me is that I still remember that statement all these years later, though we dated only very briefly.

Back home with my family and at my home church, I threw myself into service within the local church. I played music, sang, led groups, and used my car to carry people to church. I refused to take a job that would make me miss any church, and I worked hard to submit to everything my pastor/dad preached. I wanted to move out and get my own home, since I had a full time job, but it was frowned upon, so I never even voiced the desire. Instead, like a good Pentecostal girl, I dutifully went to every youth convention and worked hard to dress attractive and “holy” at the same time (a difficult feat sometimes). I was attracted to different young men, but I didn’t have very good social skills and was painfully shy, so I did not get noticed.

Finally, I met my soon to be husband. His family was even more strict than my own. They were in the same religion, but had a lot more rules. His social skills were even worse than mine, so we shyly began to communicate, then awkwardly date (always with a chaperone and never touching even so much as to hold hands–that was forbidden). Early in our formal dating, I told him that, as his girlfriend, I didn’t want to “bring shame on” his ministry, so I asked him to let me know if I was not following one of the “standards of holiness” that he preached, so that I could adjust my life to fit his. Part of the reason I did this was because I wanted to know his beliefs in full while we were dating, but I had also been taught that I should submit to the strictest of standards in such situations. A month or so later, after our engagement, his parents visited, and while they were there, he reminded me of my statement and told me my necklines were “too low.”

I put on the dresses he had criticized (or his family had criticized to him–it all amounted to the same thing) and got in front of a mirror in all kinds of contortions to see why he thought they were too low. Seeing nothing immodest, I went to my parents and did the same in front of them to see if they could see anything. They couldn’t either. I was bothered. I felt shamed and degraded. It didn’t make any logical sense. But, I wanted to be submissive to my husband in my upcoming marriage, so I prayed about it and raised the necklines.

After we were married, submission became even more of an excuse to abuse power. I soon received the message, delivered personally and in my face, that the Bible said that a wife could not deny her husband sex because it was a sin to do so. My parents had never taught me that–but they had laid a foundation of submission that created fertile soil for this teaching. It was my job to work hard to please my husband by running the home, keeping it clean, and providing good meals for him while keeping his sexual appetite filled. At the time, I was working a full time secular job and he was working part time at the church for “peanuts” as a salary. We were mostly living off of my income, and driving my car which was paid for. He was deeply in debt and not working outside of church. I would come home to filth and he’d been home all day. I was expected to clean everything up, do all the laundry, cook us supper, and still feel excited about having sex with him every night….because that was what submission was.

This set the tone for the rest of our marriage. If he said to spank one of our children for something that was developmentally appropriate, I had to do it in order to be submissive. If I didn’t obey in everything, I had a “spirit of rebellion” and I was a “nagging, unsubmissive wife.” If he told me not to yell out in fear while he was driving and I instinctively did it some time later, I was “not being obedient.”

He had told me, and it was my responsibility to obey.

When I had endometriosis that made it very painful to have intimate relations, he became angry that I didn’t want to go through that pain. I had a “spirit of rebellion” and was not willingly giving him his “just due.” So, I learned to grit my teeth through the pain and made a doctor’s appointment to get checked out as soon as possible. Soon I was feeling better, and things went back to the way they were. When he was ready to have a second child, it was really not for me to disagree. I wasn’t ready yet, but he was the “boss” so I felt I had to give in.

This was my life….. and so much more… for many years. I stayed pregnant and had a house full of kids–all of whom I love very much.

Yet things got even worse. Part of his abuse to me was emotional/verbal abuse. He would tell me I was “stupid” and “you don’t know anything.” There were a myriad of other negative messages. Many of them were outright lies. He blamed me for moving things he misplaced, for somehow causing him to overdraw the checking account, for having my fingers in the wrong place when he slammed a door on my hand, and on…and on…and on. Many times, immediately following an episode of extreme disrespect or hatefulness, without any kind of apology, he wanted to have sex. I hated those moments. I wanted it to be about love, mutual respect, kindness, and tenderness. Instead, it felt like prostitution. I felt like his property. He could yell at me, call me names, humiliate and put me down, and then have sex with me all in the same breath, and I had no say in any of it.

When I would complain and tell him how I felt, I would be accused of having a problem with discontentment, being “impossible to please,” or again, “the nagging wife,” the “unsubmissive wife” that was a “blight on her husband’s ministry.”

There were many times I laid in bed with silent tears running down my cheeks while he used my body. Sometimes he would waken me in the middle of the night out of a deep sleep and demand sex. Once I pretended to be deeply asleep so he would leave me alone. He sighed, then began to pray loudly for God to intervene in my soul. I felt like his prostitute; not his wife, to be loved and protected. I remember crying silent tears in the night because I wanted to be loved, I wanted to be cherished as a person and appreciated for who I was.

Going back and looking through my private journals during that time is very triggering for me. Between the heart breaking episodes I recorded, there would be “devotionals” about submission; about how to better respect my husband; about being a better wife and praying for him appropriately. The prayers I wrote down to God, asking him to help me to submit my will and not long for things that I didn’t have are right beside the art I drew to show how my heart had been shredded by the abusive treatment. I so wanted to be saved! Yet, I believed that anything less than total submission to the will of my husband would be displeasing to God, and ultimately cause me to be lost.

As I sat earlier this week in my counseling session and finally shared these events with the counselor I’ve been seeing for years, his response startled me. I had told him there was no sexual trauma in my past. My childhood was highly controlled and strict, but I’d not had any sexual abuse. He pointed out to me that, although it is great that my childhood didn’t contain sexual abuse, there is a history of sexual trauma in my life as an adult.

I responded that I’ve always told counselors “no” when they’ve asked if I was ever raped by my ex-husband. told him “I wasn’t really raped, because I’d been taught I had to consent no matter what. It was said that rape in a marriage was not possible. Maybe I am minimizing what happened to me, but I’m not sure it was rape. I didn’t say ‘no.’ I submitted because I thought I had to do so to be saved.”

The therapist really emphasized to me that, no matter if you call it “rape” or “coercion,” or “dominance,” it all has the same effect in the end…it is sexual trauma. “Dominance was enacted upon you against your will, and that is traumatic.”

It was deeply thought provoking for me. The submission teaching was extremely dangerous and damaging. No human being should EVER have to submit their will entirely to another human being–but that is what submission was to me at the time.

A few days ago I read a chapter in Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog. He shares how his team was called to work with the children who were released from the Branch Davidian group in Waco. These children had been raised in a terribly damaging cult. Although that cult was much more controlling than my early life, there were some key elements that I could identify with. The author commented that these children had been “marinated in fear,” and he goes on to explain how continued fear tactics cause our brains to create too much cortisol (Perry, 2017). He describes how these children had great talent at artwork and other skills, such as reading. Many of them were extremely familiar with Bible passages, but had no idea how to make basic decisions, like what they wanted for dinner. They had not been allowed to figure out what they liked or didn’t like or even who they were individually (Perry, 2017).

In this way, I could identify with these children. In many aspects of life, we never had the option to decide things for ourselves. It was unheard of to even entertain the thought or possibility of being different from who we had been told we were. Our purpose was laid out before us by others, and we were told what to think, who to befriend, what to love, what to hate, how to dress, how to comb our hair, who to talk to, and who to avoid. Like the children Perry described, we viewed all outsiders as “unbelievers,” and therefore, anything they said was automatically suspect (Perry, 2017). Like those children were able to draw detailed drawings to represent their indoctrination and their collectivist society, yet unable to draw a self portrait; my life was also consumed with submission to norms of the group. I could recite chapters from the Bible and explain complex doctrines, yet had no idea who I was as an individual.

This is the trauma of submission.

It is not biblical. In fact, a careful study of submission in the Bible will show that a mutual submission was taught. It never meant literally checking your brain at the door, like I was taught to do. Instead, it was submission in the sense of accepting others as they are and not trying to conform them to your will. It begs the question, how can so many concepts become so twisted in such environments, so that they end up teaching the exact opposite of their originally intended message?

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Child abuse prevention in the church is not big government

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 3, 2016.

Back in high school, I used to love Andrée Seu Peterson’s column. I read her pieces first when our copy of World magazine arrived in the mail every week. She always made me think because she was less conservative than my homeschool textbooks, and I admired her writing style.

I haven’t read World magazine since I moved out–the subscription is expensive and I’ve had too much reading for college. Last year, though, I read about her problematic column on bisexuality in posts from Libby Anne and Samantha Field.

But in her article “Houses Taken Over” in the Nov. 14, 2015 issue, Peterson argues government oversight like food safety guidelines and background checks for child care are intrusive. She even suggests following such protocol is equivalent to Nazi Germany’s laws against Jewish people. Here we go again with Godwin’s law.

It was not long ago that the state cracked down on church homemade desserts here in Pennsylvania. The year was 2009, and as an elderly parishioner of St. Cecilia’s began unwrapping wares baked by fellow church members, a state inspector on the premises noticed that they were not store-bought and forbade their sale. It was the end of Mary Pratte’s coconut cream pie, Louise Humbert’s raisin pie, and Marge Murtha’s “farm apple” pie, as well as a tradition as old as church socials.

We Christians are a good lot, by and large. We know Romans 13 and desire to be model citizens. Would we have been sad but obedient when the 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” barred people of Jewish descent from employment in government? Would we have had searchings of heart but complied with the 1935 “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” that interdicted marriage between Jew and German? Would we have sighed but acquiesced in 1938, when government contracts could no longer be awarded to Jewish businesses, and in October of that year when Jews were required to have a “J” stamped on their passports?

If the local church cannot be trusted to know its people well enough to decide who is fit for nursery duty, there is nothing much to say, except that we had better get back to a New Testament model where pastors knew their flock. If bakers of coconut cream pies are notoriously dangerous people, then we have brought these statist regulations on ourselves, and more’s the pity.

The woman sitting to my right at the ESL meeting said (not disapprovingly) that from now on if a junior high event takes place at someone’s house, a person must be present who has state clearance. I hazarded at that point that it looked like government intrusion, and no one said a word, as if I had passed gas and everyone pretended I had not. As if I were the kind of person who did not care about the children.

Peterson’s article fails to differentiate between Hitler’s laws, which discriminated against Jews based off propaganda, and laws to prevent child abuse, which only restrict people convicted of a heinous crime. She also sounds defensive, as if she finds regulations burdensome and cannot understand why no one else at her church agrees with her.

American Christianity protests the removal of religious symbols from public parks, but pleads for separation of church and state when any government regulation affects church functioning. This is hypocritical. This attitude also ignores the very real problem of child abuse in both Catholic and Protestant circles.

When I know that a church is following state and national guidelines, I feel safer being with that group of people. The church I recently joined requires a background check and a child protection training course for any volunteers, and I did not protest.

I actually told the nursery workers, “I’m really glad you do this.” childprotectiontraining1

The 12 page booklet provides extensive definitions and examples of sex offender patterns and contrasts it with cultural stereotypes, as well as defining what is and is not appropriate protocol when working with children. childprotectiontraining3

Peterson says in her column that background checks would mean less available childcare at her church.

The far-seeing ESL director realized the implications and judged that it would be prudent to scrap the baby-sitting: Fewer people would be willing to take the extra step of filling out the necessary forms. The resulting smaller pool of workers would mean that our ESL cadre would be in competition with the Women’s Bible Study ministry and the Sunday nursery ministry for manpower.

But the quiz at the end of my church’s child protection course is clear that the intent is not to prevent people from volunteering. Protecting children is the first priority.
childprotectiontraining2

Christians believe that Jesus said “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6) If the church wants to follow this teaching, we need to be preventing child abuse through the best methods currently known.

Homeschool parents often argue that government involvement is a bad thing, and HSLDA actively encourages this. Slate magazine, the New York Times, and the Daily Beast have all reported on the lack of regulation. No accountability enables child abuse and educational neglect. This past Thanksgiving, KGOU’s article about homeschool regulation in Oklahoma was met with so much backlash from the homeschool lobby that an entire interview was withdrawn.

Societies have rules, at least in theory, so that their people can live in peace and be treated justly. Every community needs to protect the children and disadvantaged.

Shame on You!

As stated before, I was a sensitive child. I grew into a sensitive teen, who became a sensitive adult. The age-old question arises, was it nature or nurture? Was it biology, or environment? Obviously, it is impossible to decipher. Regardless of the cause, I was sensitive. That meant that I was quicker to respond to the slightest pressure, as well as being deeply affected by everything that was said to me. I was highly conscientious, and hyper-aware of disapproval. At an early age, I learned to read expressions. A raised eyebrow or dirty look was as potent to me as if words had been spoken over me. Many people raised in abusive environments have this trait as adults. It comes from a shame-based upbringing, where fear is palpable.

I’ve written past articles about how I was trained to sit on the front row in church by myself at nine months old. In the moments where I had trouble managing that, I was taken out and spanked…thus, instilling in me from an early age a sense of shame. To be sure, the entire environment of the cult is drenched in shame. It functions on shaming the subservient population so that they will give more power to the ruling class. In this case, the congregants are the subservient ones, while the pastors are the elite.

Shame was also prominent at home. Because of the nature of being a preacher’s daughter, we didn’t just go to church a couple times of week and then go about our normal lives. Church was our normal life, and every day revolved around our ‘relationship with God,’ and our ‘service to God.’ As a result, anything you did at home that was remotely ‘sinful’ received a message of shame. For example, normal developmental stages of childhood include such behaviors as lying to get out of trouble, sometimes lying because you don’t even realize it is a lie, taking things that don’t belong to you, etc. These are behaviors related to learning the boundaries of one’s environment. Yet, reacting with anger when you were told no, or when people invaded your instinctive boundaries was also ‘sinful.’ All of these things were not only punished with a spanking, but also involved a sermon about what God thought about it.

Shame, shame, shame on you! So, not only would you get a spanking for stomping your foot and screaming, when you were two years old, but you would also be told that God was not pleased with your anger, and you would have prayer. You would be led through a prayer of repentance to help you start to understand that God was displeased with your actions as well. When I received a spanking for anything, even fighting with my sister, there was prayer afterward, to “get right with God.”

As an adult educated about child development and human nature, as well as boundaries, I realize that many of those things were not even remotely sinful, but were my instinctive reactions to being manipulated and controlled. While on the surface this might seem to be a good way to raise kids, every little mistake became a spiritual issue. You were lost eternally if you told a lie or showed anger toward your parents. This created in me a sense that every moment I could be ‘falling into sin.’ As a human being, there seldom was a day that went by, in certain stages of childhood, where I didn’t do something that could be deemed a ‘sin’

Clinical observations: Imagine the shame and the guilt of a child who really wants to please God, but finds herself continually failing. The anxiety and panic of somehow failing to be perfect can be overwhelming. Gradually, in such an environment, you become ashamed of your own feelings, so you try to numb them. Stuffing those feelings inside creates a low level of depression clinically termed “dysthymia.” At the root of most anxiety is this deep sense of shame. In the case of this example, you are constantly anxious that you are displeasing to God, that you are not measuring up to your own expectations, and that you are somehow continually missing the mark. Shame is different than guilt. We all feel guilty when we do something wrong. This is a natural feeling that leads us to repentance, change, or reflection. Shame is different. Shame is there because we are a general failure in our own minds. Shame is there because we do not measure up, either to our own standards or to those of others. Shame is not just felt in a moment, concerning one action, but permeates our lives.

As I grew into a teenager, I learned to feel shame about other things in my life. (For example, as humans grow into the teen years, it is normal to have hormones and to begin to feel sexual attraction. The bodies begin to change, and secondary sexual attributes become apparent.) For a girl raised in this cult environment, there’s a lot of shame attached to these developments. Of course, every human being knows about sexual development, and hormones. However, in the cult environment, by its very nature of listing rules and regulations, the female body becomes a shameful thing. I am not trying to be crude, but girls with natural curves may especially feel a sense of shame attached to their bodies, because the cult ‘rules’ teach females to hide their bodies ‘to avoid others lusting.’ This teaches girls that they are responsible for the thoughts, and even sins of others. What a shame!

Over-sexualizing the human body causes a lot of shame, and even some twisted thinking. I remember a young man who was always correcting a couple of young ladies in the church. He kept coming up to them and telling them that their skirts were too tight, or that their tops were too tight. Finally, my dad addressed this with him, and told him “If they’re not dressed right I will correct it, as the pastor.” He said “It’s not your place to go around correcting women in the church.” He then found out that the young man was feeling sexually attracted to these girls, and that’s why he was finding fault with them. The problem really was not with the young ladies, but with his own natural attraction to the opposite sex. (From the viewpoint of mental health, looking at nature and hormonal influences, even he was not at fault…he was made to feel guilty for something that was quite natural.)

I remember once, around the age of fifteen, feeling ‘convicted’ because of a beautiful dress that I had bought, and loved dearly. It looked so pretty, and it was my favorite dress. However, I became aware of a teenage boy looking at my breasts when I was wearing the dress, I felt that I was being ‘sinful’ to wear a dress that was ‘fitted.’ Granted, I was a little more ‘blessed’ than some of the other girls, just by genetics. Because of this, pretty much anything I wore was not going to hide my body, unless I wore a feed sack.

Yet, in retrospect, I was not the only girl so affected. A friend of mine in the cult, who was extremely sensitive as well, wore loose jackets all of the time, and would never wear a dress with a bodice. Everything was always very baggy, and she looked pretty tacky on purpose. She also walked stoop shouldered to hide her figure. Her body shame was caused by not wanting to be the ’cause’ for a man to sin with lustful thoughts. She also told me, at one point, that she would never wear anything but plain cotton underwear, because anything else made her ‘have bad thoughts.’ She was a teen girl with hormones and body development given by God. What a shame that she carried around such needless shame!

The shame in the cult never ends. You are shameful because you fail, you are shameful because you are a sexual creature, and you are a shame because the opposite sex is attracted to you. Shame on them as well! How dare they notice that you are female with curves!

Clinical observation: Now that I have studied human development, I realize that all of these things are very normal and not sinful at all. It is very normal for a young male to be attracted to a young female, even noticing her body traits. It is very normal and natural for all young people to occasionally have ‘dirty’ thoughts. These things are not shameful, but are part of the human existence that God created to drive procreation and families. Obviously, people have to learn to curb impulses, but as far as being ashamed of one’s thoughts or hormonal reactions, it is ridiculous to heap this kind of shame on people.

When I was engaged to my first husband, I was still part of this cult. He was very conservative, an ordained minister in the same cult. I remember telling him as we became engaged to “just let me know” if he had any “holiness standards” that we didn’t have, and I would change my dress or behavior to what he preached. He declared that there was nothing like that at all. A month or so later, his parents came to visit, his mother with her scarf around her neck like a turtle neck…and all of a sudden I got a phone call from him, commenting that my necklines were too low. I was frustrated, because I worked very hard to follow all of the modesty ‘rules.’

We spoke at length about this, and he described to me different dresses that I wore where he had noticed that my necklines were too low. I tried on those dresses, bending down in front of the mirror and even bending down in front of my parents to see if they could see anything. They couldn’t. I called him back, trying to figure out what in the world he was talking about. He told me that he saw too much of my neck and it made his mind wander to other areas. We were engaged to be married in two months! He was sexually attracted to me, as hopefully most engaged young men are to their fiances. There is nothing wrong with this, but he felt shame, which he then tried to project onto me, as causing him to have ‘sinful thoughts.’

After we were married, he would criticize practically everything I put on. Finally, frustrated at the guessing game, I asked him one day to just give me a place on my body where he wanted my necklines to be, and I would make sure that they were always there. He told me that my collarbones needed to be covered up, because the base of the neck was very sexual, and caused men to think about other parts that were covered.

As you can imagine, the entire marriage was drenched in shame. (In retrospect, I realize that he had also been soaked in shame growing up, and that ‘shame’ had basically become his middle name.) However, at the time, I only knew that I received constant messages of shame. If I did not want to have sexual relations with him some night, and he wanted it, then I needed to “submit to him as the Bible said.” If I asked him more than a couple of times to change a light bulb, I was a “nagging wife,” and the Bible talked about those! I was not to disagree with him about anything, because the Bible said to submit to your husband. If he wanted one of the children spanked, even for age-appropriate behaviors, I had to spank them, regardless of my personal feelings about the matter. This not only invaded my boundaries, but caused me to go against my very own conscience. However, it was a shame to have my own thoughts, it was a shame to defy my husband, and it was especially a shame, since he was my pastor, to disagree with him.

Of course, we began raising our children in a constant shower of shame. Early on, he had the three-year-old and five-year-old in their room, giving them a message about hell fire….describing in very explicit sermon terms what hell is like, and telling them over and over “You’re going there. You’re going there. I can’t save you.” All of this happened because they lied. (Now if you know anything about child development, you know that it is very normal for three-year-old and a five-year-old to lie. A three-year-old and a five-year-old may not even be aware that they’re telling a lie, they’re just responding instinctively.) Even though I was horrified at his terrorizing the children, I could not intervene at that time, because of my own deep sense of shame. He was their pastor, he was their father, while I was merely his wife, and was supposed to be submitted to him. Even though I stood in the other room horrified, and crying for the terror my children must be feeling, I did nothing. Shame on me!

During this time, I remember specifically working on my own attitude, because of the resentment and disagreement I felt at the continual abuse and shame that was occurring in our home. I engaged in a daily Bible study about all the verses concerning ‘submission’ and daily repentance for my inner thoughts that were anything but submissive. I prayed for him to change, to be a good father, to be a kind husband, but I really felt so much shame regarding my lack of agreement with his behavior, and that was the main focus of my devotionals during that time. Some very difficult things happened in our lives right after that, and we ended up abruptly moving.

He had admitted viewing pornography, years earlier, and he felt deep shame, but eventually shifted to shaming me for “not forgiving” him when I had difficulty trusting him alone with the computer. He would be gone at weird hours of the morning and night, often leaving as I was putting the children to bed and not returning until three or four am. He would tell me that he was at the church “studying” or “preparing his radio broadcast.” I only knew that there was no computer in our home, but in his church office instead. I had difficulty trusting that his spirituality was so thick during those hours, because his abuse of the family daily grew worse, and his behavior with me was deeply hurtful.

Eventually, when I realized the children were in serious danger, I left. I had been deeply concerned about one of our children, who had suddenly begun to hoard things, as well as obsessively washing his hands every few minutes. Both of our older children had recently regressed to urinating and defecating in their clothing, after being fully potty trained years earlier. I felt that my children were not going to survive the abuse unscathed, and my first responsibility was to save my children. While debating and praying about what to do, I found another twist. I discovered this ‘godly man’ involved in sexual abuse of our children. I caught him having one of them touch him sexually. They were innocent, and I was their guardian. I made my plans to leave, and carried them out. It was a logical decision, because I realized even then that I was going to lose everything to shame. My life as I knew it ended the moment I chose the children over a “man of god“.

It was worse than I had imagined, though, because he then contacted other conservative preachers, and asked them to contact my father. They proposed to have a meeting, where they would command me as ministers of God to go back to my husband and submit to him. My dad refused to have me endure that treatment, since he had personally witnessed results of beatings my husband had given our children, including one time when he whipped our toddler with a belt while he was naked, (causing him 30 minutes of screaming due to the belt hitting sensitive male parts).

Though I’m thankful for my dad’s protection in that matter, shame was heaped upon me. My ex continued to preach and be promoted even more with the endorsement of ‘big-name’ preachers within the cult, even when he ended up divorced, with only supervised visitation. Meanwhile, I was reported to have been “crazy,” “ungodly,” and a “liar,” an “instrument of Satan used to try to destroy a man of God.” I was shamed again, and it was almost more than I could bear. There was no room in the cult for a ‘divorcee’ (which was a term said in a whisper, as if it was a bad word). An ex-wife to a preacher was even more unheard of! What a shame! I was left in disgrace, trying to find my way alone, slogging through the marsh of shame. Still, I stayed in the cult.

Note: This post is one of the most difficult I have ever written. There will be sequels in time. Writing about this is deeply cathartic, but also extremely intimate. Shame has affected my life permanently and there is so much more to tell about the scars it has left. Yet today I am aware of its existence. Due to the Grace I have found in Jesus Christ, I am no longer a slave to shame. I am a child of God. He bears my shame, and he knows me by name. Every day is a little brighter since I realized he is not, and never was the author of shame!

Bloody Hands, Wounded Souls

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

As I spent the rest of my growing up years as the pastor’s daughter of this church, many different things happened. A lot of them were things that I did not understand at the time but later came to understand, and now feel very shocked over.

One of these situations was when a 14-year-old girl in the church was seduced by a thirty something-year-old man with a 12-year-old daughter. This family had moved in from somewhere else, and my Dad was not aware that he had been a pedophile with teenage girls previously.

In those days it was not looked at in the same way it is now. Still, he seduced this young girl in the church and began having an ongoing sexual relationship with her. He would pick her up from school without her parents knowledge, and take her to his home where they would have sex, or to her home, when her family was not at home.

When my father found out about this, it was called “an affair” and both of the parties were punished equally with church discipline, meaning that neither one of them could participate in any kind of leadership in the church services for an extended period of time. The girl was young, and had not been participating in the services other than to play a rhythm instrument in the congregation. She was not allowed to do this anymore at that point. The man was involved in church leadership and he was also placed “in discipline.”

It was not until many years later as a grown woman that I realized how horrible it was for that young girl to be punished, as if she had done equally wrong as this thirty-something-year-old man. She was just a child, just having come into puberty. She was taken advantage of by a grown man. Not only was this horrible child abuse, and not only was it not reported, but the girl was disciplined, punished and shamed just as much as the man. She was the victim, and yet on top of being victimized, she was also made to feel that she was somehow at fault.

Sadly, she developed a pattern in her life of being with abusive, controlling men. To this day she is in a marriage where she is treated as a second class citizen. I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened had she received compassion and been pointed to counseling instead of being condemned.

In another case, a child I grew up with was obviously troubled, had anger issues, and very bad social issues. It was known that her dad had been in trouble with the law various times for exposing himself in public, masturbating in public, and wearing women’s underwear in public.

He had supposedly repented, and regularly played an instrument in church, as well as singing with his wife. As this girl grew into her young teenage years, her rebellion and anger grew. At times I was the only person near her age that would even talk to her. I always felt sorry for her, feeling like something was wrong.

Often she would sit and talk to me in detail about her feelings of anger toward her family. Eventually she shared that her dad had molested her sexually. As a young girl her age, I did not know what to do. I told my parents about it, and they called her in privately to talk to her about it.

She shared with them that she had been molested, but as they pressured her to make sure it was true, she changed her story and lied, saying it never had happened. As they continue to talk with her again she began to cry and say that it had happened, but eventually under pressure said that it had not happened. In their inexperience with such situations, they never did anything about it.

Eventually, she had a one night stand with a man who was sleeping around with different women in the church. Finally, she left the church and married some guy she had met. The last time I saw her she looked like she was about 80 years old. She’s been using drugs for years and cannot seem to break free from it. She’s been homeless living under a bridge, she’s been beaten by previous spouses, she’s terribly addicted to drugs, and only a shell of who she once was.

She gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, and signed custody of those children over to her mother. While those children were growing up, her dad repeatedly got in trouble with the law, for flashing people in parking lots while wearing women’s underwear and a woman’s wig.

Because my dad publicly exposed his deeds to the congregation, and eventually ask him to leave, they haven’t attended my dad’s church for many years. They attend another UPC (United Pentecostal Church) church in the area. Those children grew up, and recently the girl turned 18, left home and the UPC church, and publicly came out and said that both her grandfather and her brother had molested her sexually.

I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if her mother’s reports of sexual abuse had been taken seriously. What would’ve happened if she had gotten counseling and help, as a young teenage girl? Would any of this further pain have occurred at all?

During the time that she was still at home, her parents welcomed a close relationship with a young adult woman who was in her early 20s. This woman eventually began to show sexual attention to their young son, who was about 14 at the time.

Again, my father, as pastor of both the woman and the boy, dealt with both of them equally. He strongly rebuked the woman, and called the boy in for a “counseling session.” He described to our family how he talked to this boy about the fact that this woman had kissed him, what feelings it must’ve stirred up in him, and how he would’ve felt her female curves pressing against him while she was kissing him. Neither of them ever said that there was an actual sexual act that occurred. Still, she was seducing a 14-year-old boy, and should have been reported. Nothing was ever done about it. That boy grew up into a man and left the church.

Although there are countless other stories that I could share, I will skip forward to my adult years. At a time when my own children had suffered child abuse at the hands of their father, I had them in counseling with a professional children’s counselor.

Another woman in my dad’s church asked me for the name of the clinic where my children were being seen. She had just separated from her drug addict husband, who had been very abusive to her son. She wanted her 15-year-old son to receive counseling, to help him recover from the situation. I gave her the name and number of the clinic where my children were being seen.

As a “good saint”, she told my dad that she planned to take her son there. He told her not to take her son to a professional. He told her he would do any counseling that her son needed, and then he privately rebuked me for giving her this information. (I won’t go into my reaction to his rebuke in this post.)

His “counseling” of that teenage boy was to have him come out and mow his lawn repeatedly, and gruffly try to give him some advice. He also had the boy hang around while he worked on different projects, helping with physical labor. That was all the “help” the child ever received.

This young boy was being homeschooled by his mother, but she now had to go work a full-time job. He was left at home bored, and began to wander the streets. My dad publicly rebuked him about this from the pulpit, in front of the entire congregation. This was a very shaming and humiliating scenario, with a lot of loud amens from the congregation.

The child was now branded, and as one might expect, he simply ran the streets more than he had before. He never graduated from high school, but soon got a job. He then proceeded to impregnate different girls, eventually receiving drugs from his dad.

The last I heard about him, he was regularly shoplifting, robbing different places to support his drug habit, and sometimes selling drugs. He had children by different women that he was not taking care of, and couldn’t hold down a job. His mother’s only child, she is left with this heartache and a distant relationship with her son. She tries to do what she can to indoctrinate these little children he’s procreated, whenever she gets a chance to bring them to church. She often has to clean them up and show them nurturing that they’re not getting at home.

My heart breaks every time I think of this story. Could he have been saved, if only he had received the professional help he needed? Why does ego get so involved in these spiritually abusive cultures? Why does a pastor think he can be everything in all ways to the people he pastors? When did pastoring become ruling instead of just preaching?

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