Tag: hurt | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

The UnBoxing Project: Being an angel with a shotgun

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 4, 2015 as part of a series.

Get out your guns, battle’s begun,
are you a saint, or a sinner?
If love’s a fight, then I shall die,
with my heart on a trigger. – The Cab, Angel with a Shotgun (Nightcore remix)

These are the stories they told me.

“Eleanor, my best friend’s parents told her she can’t drive the car unless she loses weight consistently every week.

I’m really worried about her. Yeah, she could lose some weight, but it’s not that bad, and I don’t think that’s healthy. What do you think I should do?”

My insides went cold, feeling the familiar rigidity and control descend, but this time for someone else.

They say before you start a war,
you better know what you’re fighting for…
if love is what you need, a soldier I will be.

“Eleanor, I’m 26 years old and my mom wants me to get married. She says she’ll send out the word among the [Indian] community to find a man for me. But I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

My friend already had a bachelor’s degree from an ivy league college, wasn’t enjoying her post-baccalaureate pre-med classes, and knew her parents wouldn’t understand her adoption of American culture.

She asked for help in moving her things out of her parents’ house. I rounded up a few friends and she got out.

I’m an angel with a shotgun,
fighting ’til the war’s won,
I don’t care if heaven won’t take me back.
I’ll throw away my faith … just to keep you safe…
and I wanna live not just survive tonight.

“Did you know Mike died?”

“No, I just talked to him last week. He was trying to start a chapter of the F.A.S.T. club at his graduate school.”

The coroner ruled Mike’s death a suicide. Mike grew up in the Colorado Springs homeschool community, although I didn’t meet him until college.

Questions about his death still linger with me and my friends.

Sometimes to win, you’ve got to sin,
don’t mean I’m not a believer...
Yeah, they still say I’m a dreamer.

Text messages from Cynthia Jeub, September 2, 2013:

“I need help. My dad is angry because he’s not making enough money. Can you help Lydia and me get out and find a place to sleep until our apartment paperwork goes through?”

“Dad was yelling at me when you tried to call. I never thought this would happen. We have a friend who will help, we might need help from you when we get back.”

“Dad says he might turn off my phone and Internet. Tell [a friend] to come if you don’t hear back again.”

I was five hours away up in the mountains and couldn’t come get her on the day that they were kicked out.

They say before you start a war,
you better know what you’re fighting for…
if love is what you need, a soldier I will be.

Google chat conversation, June 2013:

“I just want to go Home and be with Him. It’d be so easy… one bullet, one noose, two cuts, but I can’t bear to think of facing Him when I got there… For being a coward. For not trusting him enough… I really just want to escape. Wouldn’t you eventually get over it [grieving for me]. Death is a natural part of this life.”

A younger friend was suicidal again. She’d done this off and on since she was 13, and a couple of friends and I had talked her out of it, over and over.

“As long as I’m in class, getting A’s and studying all the time without a boyfriend or any other distractions, no one really pays me much mind. A fight’s brewing. So I’ll let you know after it happens if it does happen.”

Once again, her parents crushed her with unrealistic expectations.

I’m an angel with a shotgun,
fighting ’til the war’s won,
I don’t care if heaven won’t take me back
...and I wanna live not just survive tonight.

I didn’t become an activist because it was another hobby. Friends came to me with their wounds, their struggles. And I couldn’t just let them keep bleeding.

This is a series on helping isolated homeschoolers and religiously oppressed young adults escape cults and abusive households.

These are the ones I fight for.

…and I’m gonna hide, hide, hide my wings tonight.

********
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Are you sure you aren’t exaggerating? | How we respond to homeschool abuse victims

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

You just decided you had a terrible childhood after attending a liberal college, right? You got influenced by the Secular Humanism.

Actually…no.

I kept journals growing up.

Eleven of them, to be exact. Some were diaries, some were prayer journals.

Diary 1: August 1998 to December 2000
Diary 2: December 2000 to December 2010
Diary 3: June 2011 to September 2013
Prayer journal 1: December 2004 to November 2005
Prayer journal 2: November 2005 to April 2011
Prayer journal 3: April 2011 to August 2013

The other notebooks are a dream journal, a list of favorite Bible verses, a roster of people to pray for, and a journal filled with quotes and notes from family and friends.

Many times I was happy, or at least trying to be happy. I loved my family. Many times, I was not. And I wrote about it.

Here’s some excerpts.

October 31, 2002: “I feel like I’m always in trouble. I can’t seem to do anything right. I try my best. [….] I cry a lot at night because I have bottled up feelings all day and I need to let it out.”

November 1, 2002: “I feel like everyone’s pasttime is to make fun of me. [….] I can’t do anything right.”

January 4, 2003: “Will Mom ever understand how much her words hurt me? [….] Mom wasn’t any comfort. I wanted her to be, but she was harsh and unfeeling.”

After a spanking with the belt. I was 13.

January 20, 2003: “I am in trouble every day, or so it seems. My mom and dad are pleased every time I show them a good test grade […] but the pleasure doesn’t seem to last long. I am crying and I don’t know exactly why.”

September 30, 2004: “I wish Dad wanted to visit with people more. Oh, well. He does provide for us very well. I hope God will change Dad’s heart.”

A few years later, the entries get more detailed.

April 22, 2010: “I don’t understand why my family has so much emotional pain in it. I don’t feel like I can please Mom and Dad, [sister] doesn’t feel like she can please Mom and Dad, etc. Mom and Dad are so busy and so stressed that they are often not very loving towards us either. [Sister] feels like there is a lot of hurt in our family and hides up in her room all the time. I don’t understand why we all aren’t nicer to each other and more understanding. There’s a lot of pain beneath the surface. Everyone suffers their own pain and can’t see everyone else’s. And no one helps anyone else. And Mom just gets angry and takes it the wrong way if I try to point out how she has hurt me or [sister]. No one is willing to help things change. I don’t understand. I have prayed about it for so long now. It never seems to get any better permanently. We just go through cycles of more and more pain. I am beginning to think God must be letting things go on like this for a reason. But then I wish it was just me who always had hidden hurt. [Sister] and [brother] are so young and malleable and hurt can affect the rest of their lives. Sometimes I feel like running away not coming back. But I feel like [sister] and [brother] need me, especially [sister]. I know she has a lot of pain inside, and I don’t know how to help her.”

May 20, 2010: “Still having a lot of the same issues. I realize that in some ways, I create my own problems, but there are other things beyond my control. I feel like Mom and Dad take me for granted. Since I did well my first semester, they sort of assume I will do well and don’t appreciate the work that goes into it. I am having very dark thoughts tonight. I often wish for death to end all the pain I have inside, but I know [sister] really needs me and that really keeps me going. I have vowed to Jesus that I will never commit suicide, and I mean by His grace to keep that vow. Life just hurts so much sometimes. I can’t stop crying right now. […] All my emotions get all bottled up in me these days.”

August 8, 2010: “I feel like I push myself really hard about school and all, but I never seem to do enough to meet Mom and Dad’s expectations. I don’t have very much time at all to do something fun, or just relax, which I think is kind of unhealthy. [….] It’s not wrong to rest – Jesus even called the disciples aside to rest. I sort of think maybe my family doesn’t know how to rest.”

My prayer journals are less honest, but I was always praying to be less prideful and depressed and more submissive, better able to accept unfairness in life, because Jesus suffered more than I ever could.

It’s painful to revisit, like a giant headache.

And this is another reason why I left fundamentalism.

I was always writing and scrapbooking, trying to capture my life. I don’t know why. Maybe I knew I’d need it later.

But as Shaney Lee argued this past week on Ryan Stollar’s blog, please believe us when we tell you our past still hurts. Not everyone documents their pain. But that doesn’t make it less real.

Floating on a rebel tide

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on December 14, 2014.

I’m shooting for the stars to hit the moon
Mapping out a course for both my shoes,
I’ve already practiced acting like there’s nothing to it.
– Jellyrox, Rebel Tide

Some days I’m still lost.

Some days independence still knocks the breath out of me, and I’m reeling.

I’m split.

Over two years ago, I cracked, couldn’t live under the burdens anymore. And I left.

But I didn’t know how lonely I’d be, how long and cold winters could last outside in exile.

Try to hold the world together in my mind,
Try to make it snow in mid-July,
Try to prove my heart is worth the blood that’s pumping through it.

Some days I’m so cold. I warm my hands against favorite memories, hoping one day the frost will be over.

Looking for the light in the dark, the sunshine behind the shadow.

I try to keep my hopes above my doubts
Try to keep my thoughts above my mouth
I feel like a satellite just dying to leave my orbit…

I’m homesick. My friends noticed it reached unprecedented levels.

My friends have my back, my mentors believe in me. Somehow I’ll find the courage to keep walking, even if my steps are slow.

I take another shot at faking love
Miss it by a mile and then some
My insides are thirsty for whatever drink you’re pouring…

I’m tired all the time. The end of the year comes in like a tsunami, the semester drenches me. Maybe it’s senioritis, maybe the panic put a constant drain on my spirit.

I thought this biting wind would have moved on by now. Didn’t think the season would be so quiet a third time.

But they told me my freedom would have a price. Someday I’ll write about why.

And it takes you by surprise, like a rebel tide
Like lightning from the sky has been searching for you
And it splits you like a knife, the moment that it strikes
When you realize that death was looking for you.

I count the times I nearly died.

When the ether of death filled my nostrils, when I believed the only option was to slaughter my dreams, to bury them. Then reborn desires crowd around me, remind me of all the times I’d left them for dead.

Telling me my longings are real, blowing on my numb hands so I don’t freeze over.

Praying like a child Christmas Eve
Father, won’t you raise the son early?
I ask an awful lot of both my knees just waiting for you.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 4: October

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 6, 2014.

Continued from Part 3

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness
Like resignation to the end, always the end…
– Gotye, Somebody I Used To Know

October, it’s not your fault. But I really don’t like you anymore.

Depression hits me hardest in October and January. Summer’s buzz fades, and my dreams seem to die with it.

The past three autumns had a pretty dismal track record.

October 2011: My favorite high school English A Beka video teacher, Mrs. Sandy Schmuck, dies from a rare form of cancer.

September / October 2012: I call the campus police for a friend resuscitated from one suicide attempt who plummeted again.

A coroner’s report rules my musician friend Michael Thigpen‘s death a suicide.

September / October 2013: Fellow classmate of five years, chemistry major, dies alone in his apartment.

A guy friend and I talk my friend Ashley out of a suicide attempt when her manipulative parents and cult Pentecostal church crushed her spirit.

September / October 2014: I’m in the ER with a friend whose self-harm went wrong.

American Evangelical Christianity has issues reconciling with mental illness. We took the “rejoice always” thing to mean “never, ever, ever let anyone know if you are depressed.” We forgot that we were also told to “bear one another’s burdens” and to “weep with those who weep.” That even Jesus wept.

“I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time, I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time, since Jesus Christ came in, and cleansed my heart from sin, I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time!”

One of the songs I grew up singing in A Beka elementary Bible video classes. My mom sometimes quoted it at me when I was grumpy.

So according to the song, if I’m truly a Christian, I can only be happy?

My friend MightiMidget described this so well in her post “Joy and Theology“:

“Then if joy is a command, and struggling with hopelessness is a sin, where am I allowed to feel? At all? Is struggling in itself a sin? Then apparently I am doomed to never get out of that cycle, and to ‘live in sin,’ and if I am ‘living in sin,’ does that mean I am not a believer and will never be able to truly achieve eternal life? Is it not meant for me? Am I not elect? God is Love, but is that Love then not for me, because I’m too emotional? Do I have to learn to not be emotional?”

I was always guilty if I wasn’t happy enough. As a teenager, my dad called me Eeyore when I was moody and told me to be more like Tigger. So I tucked my griefs deeper inside.

No wonder so many of my friends and I had a goth phase. At least there the darkness inside us gets recognized, as my friend Cynthia Jeub wrote about Christians and their attraction to goth culture.

I crashed last October. The waves of panic pulled me under, and the uncried sadness of more than a decade erupted.

I couldn’t stop crying. I cried between every class, couldn’t focus on assignments and exams, took naps on the couch in our campus newspaper office and let the tears roll down.

I got the flu, I dropped all my classes but one, and I slept for 15 to 18 hour periods for two weeks recovering from a sinus infection.

I’d hit a wall where I felt even I wasn’t worth fighting for anymore. My sleep-deprived mind and body demanded rest, and I finally gave in.

My Shakespeare professor and one of my Chemistry professors understood. Most of my professors and classmates didn’t.

My study buddy Racquel took me to the campus pub and bought me curly French fries, which we ate while I cried in her lap. Cynthia Jeub skipped out on part of our weekly student newspaper staff meeting with me and wiped my tears, coaxing me to eat. Josh took me out to Panda Express the day I got afraid of my own head again and debated theology with me at the coffee shop next door all evening.

My friend Aaron and his wife brought Starbucks to my apartment and told me it was okay to feel sad, it was even normal given my family background.

One afternoon while snuggled under my quilt feeling particularly crazy, I called my ever-traveling friend MOTS. She calmed my panic and told me not to stop the grief, to let it out. She said, “As my dad always tells me, ‘You can’t control emotions, all you can do is ride the waves.'”

This October I’m back at it again. Taking the same classes, facing the professors whose classes I dropped last year. I’m still fighting, and because I learned to endure even the sadness, I am stronger.

Maybe I won’t always hate October. Maybe I won’t always keep needing to grieve.

Some autumn nights I still recite one of the poems we memorized in Mrs. Schmuck’s ninth grade English class:

A Vagabond Song
Bliss Carman

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

My final post will be about the importance of emotional honesty.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 2: Dare You To Feel

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on September 23, 2014.

“We’re talking about anger here, Fraser, a human emotion.
Are you human? Because if you are, human beings feel things, okay?
They feel anger, they feel love, they feel lust and fear, and sometimes,
and I know you don’t want to hear this, sometimes they even cry.”
– Ray, Due South (2.17), “Red, White, or Blue”

My wall shattered one morning.

I was merging onto I-25 early on a gray Monday in January 2012 to head to campus.

The weekend before, my family had been out of town and I’d watched some brand-new Faith Lessons by Ray VanderLaan, a Biblical archaeological DVD series, and sobbed for the first time in months at the idea of radical love, acceptance even when I failed to measure up. That I was worth love simply because I was alive.

And then Switchfoot’s song “Dare You to Move” came on 103.1 WAY-FM. I lost it.

I’d made a pact against crying around the age of 8 or 9. Crying showed vulnerability and weakness, neither of which I felt safe exposing around my family or church members. I prided myself on my refusal to cry at Passion Plays or sad movies. My mom would recount the entire Easter story with A Beka Bible flashcards, depicting the scourging in graphic detail. She cried. Not me.

I could hold it in when no one else could. I told myself over and over: “I am ice. Ice does not melt.”

I did Elsa’s whole “Conceal, don’t feel” thing before it was cool.

Well. Then I couldn’t cry at all. Even in private.

Most of my teen years were spent reversing the choke hold I’d imposed on my tears. And halfway through college, the rest was crumbling. “All the walls you built up / Are just glass on the outside / So let ’em fall down / There’s freedom waiting in the sound.” (Tenth Avenue North)

I described the experience to my friend Elraen later that cold wintry week on chat during one of our all-nighters.

I said, “I wasn’t really expecting it. It was one of those times when Jesus really gets your attention, and you realize just how much He really loves you, and you cry your eyes out. Somehow…I’d had two experiences like this in high school…but nothing quite like that since late 2005.”

“I guess I thought maybe experiences like that were over in my life.”

Elraen knew what I meant. She responded, “I hope that more and more God can bring moments like that into your life, breaking through the walls that have been put up to shield yourself from hurt […] I hope that healing comes and drives deeper and deeper into your life. Because He DOES love you. So, so much, no matter what [people] say about you or accuse you of — His love does not ever change.”

My soul was reawakening, but I’d have to fight my tendency to lock up. Numbness felt like being a ghost in my own existence, but at least it kept pain at bay.

The next few months, I felt like this little bubble of hope protected me, which I needed for the “coming of age” phase of my life story.

I still questioned the wisdom of feeling over the next two years. Doesn’t it take more energy than necessary? In late high school, when I read through all four Gospels twice, one detail stuck with me.

Jesus is about to be crucified. He is offered a drugged wine to dull the pain. He refuses.

“And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he had tasted it, he would not drink it.” (Matthew 27:33-34, ESV)

My Nelson study bible explained that “Jesus refused it; He wanted to drink His cup of suffering fully aware of all that was happening.”

From a logical perspective, this seems incredibly stupid, like refusing anesthesia before surgery. But often love isn’t logical.

If you wanted to identify with someone else completely, to live in their skin, you’d choose the full emotional and physical repercussions. Not out of cold obligation. With fire in your chest.

I know. Because I chose this once. I wanted to know the everyday struggles of my friend in a wheelchair. So I didn’t take the gloves she handed me or the foam seat cushion. I wanted noodly arms and a sore butt at the end of the day, because it would be a more honest reflection of her experience.

And this is how I realized that really choosing to live, embracing love and peace, grief and pain without censorship, requires a bravery I was still discovering.

Part three of this series will be about how I learned to be honest about my anger.