Tag: IFCA | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

What ‘The Walking Dead’ taught me about healthy forgiveness without obligation

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on May 10, 2025.

I wrote this in my journal on December 10, 2021. Learning what forgiveness looks like outside of fundamentalist Christianity, what forgiveness can be like when it’s healthy and not harmful for the person doing the forgiving, has been so important to me in my journey to leave behind and heal from high-control religion.

So I had an epiphany while I was processing what healthy forgiveness looks like.

There’s a part in season 9 of The Walking Dead where Father Gabriel is trying to convince the scavenger garbage lady Anne not to kill him with a walker and he finally says, “I forgive you, Anne, for whatever you have to do.”

He apologizes for pushing her away and it’s definitely kinda like a Jesus moment for him.

Photo: The Walking Dead, AMC

You can tell Father Gabriel is about to accept death, but he forgives her in the moment because he loves her so much that he knows she is going to regret what she’s doing to him later and grieve and hate herself. He loves her so much he doesn’t want her to do that.

This scene basically broke me inside for reasons. All the religious trauma and spiritual abuse recovery reasons.

Because I was taught for so long in fundamentalist Christianity that sacrificial love was obligatory and enduring mistreatment from other people was just part of becoming more holy.

I didn’t realize it was possible to radically accept something so horrible and still hold so much love for the person who is about to harm you without basically enabling yourself to be abused.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a regular thing that people with healthy boundaries should do, obviously, but it’s deeply moving.

It feels different.

Sitting through abuse without defending yourself normally feels cold and awful and like I’m worthless.

This scene feels like the love you hold and your own faith in yourself and the love you feel from your own connection to what feels divine protects you and enables you to still be you in the middle of something horrible happening to you instead of breaking you.

It feels warm and beautiful and so radically undeserved, not because “we are bad” but because it normally feels humanly impossible. I think it just clicked for me like this morning why church hymns call this “amazing” and “wonderful” and why one of my friends said last summer that “none of us deserve it.”

Not because “we are scum,” but because it is unexpected and healing and sometimes we don’t expect a grace like that.

Because we have crossed a boundary and caused harm, so we naturally expect to lose something as a result, which would only make sense.

But instead, we don’t. We are held. And we are loved.

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Deprogramming: documentaries and movies about cults and fundamentalist Christian subculture

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

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

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

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

1) you’re the only one questioning

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

This is how they maintain control, through isolation.

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

Sons of Perdition (2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus Camp (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God Loves Uganda (2013)

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

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

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

Basically, this film demonstrates missionary work gone bad.

Waiting for Armageddon (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

Saved! (2004)

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

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

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

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

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015)

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving is hard.

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

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

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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: Options, not ultimatums

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 11, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Cynthia Jeub’s story.

Several friends were part of our network that helped Ashley move out of her parents’ house. This is another person’s part of the story, in their own words.

It’s hard when someone you care about is stuck in an abusive environment. It’s worse when you feel like you could and should be helping them to get out of said abusive environment.

Unfortunately, that’s often not up to you.

Fundamentalist cults use brainwashing techniques to make people think there is no way out. Effectively, they remove their members’ autonomy and consent.

When you’re trying to get someone out of a cult, the temptation is to pressure them into it — after all, they’re stuck there, right? They need your help to get out!

Doing that will only make things worse. You’re emulating the same techniques as the cult, which means your “convincing” is only going to last as long as you’re around. It also destroys trust — how can someone who has been abused using brainwashing and consent-destroying abuse trust someone who uses the same techniques?

And before the cries of “But we’re doing it for their own good!” begin, the cult leaders say the exact same thing. They’re just trying to save the person’s soul, after all.

So what are we to do? It’s the hardest thing — you have to let the person make their own decision.

As people, we tend to think our decisions are just a little bit better than anyone else’s — after all, we don’t let our judgement get clouded, amirite? But for someone to successfully get out of a cult, and stay out, they have to know their support system isn’t just more of the same brainwashing, only from the other side.

We’re talking about informed consent here. So let your friend know you’re there for them. Let them know what options are available. The cult tells them no one outside the cult will help them; you need to show them that’s a lie. The cult tells them they’re all alone outside the cult — show them they’re not.

Notice it’s show them, not tell them. Cults love to change the meanings of words: It’s not abuse, it’s “discipline” because we “love” you. You aren’t a “captive,” we’re holding you here out of “love.” There has to be action with this, and it has to be action that is diametrically opposed to the actions of the cult.

It’s difficult — you’ll be stuck just waiting sometimes, feeling like you can’t do anything for your friend. And yes, sometimes people will choose the cult, and choose the abuse. But if those helping them are taking away their consent, how are we any different than the people currently oppressing them? We have to be different, as different as it is possible to be. Otherwise they’ll be exchanging one oppression for another.

There’s a caveat, though: If there is physical or sexual abuse happening, especially if the person in question is under 18, absolutely call the authorities (Child Protective Services or the police). That may cause them to lose trust in you for a time — but it’s better than them dying from the abuse.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that everything will work out, that everyone chooses to leave abusive and manipulative situations. It’s just not true. Sometimes, the person chooses the cult. And that sucks.

But sometimes people shake off the manipulation, the brainwashing, and the abuse. And that is the reward.

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