Church Abuse

I escaped from a cult.
Not the kind that kidnaps you, brainwashes you and demands a ransom from your family.  This one was far more sinister.

When my family moved back to Pennsylvania from Tennessee in 1999, we were broken.  Our marriage was in shambles, my husband was struggling at his job and our kids were young and needed a lot of attention.  We were living in his parent's house while we looked for our own, sampling churches along the way.

Once we knew the area we were going to live, we narrowed our church search to those close by.  In one church we went to, no one greeted us, or even acknowledged our presence.  In another, we just happened to be there the same day the pastor announced his resignation.  So, when we happened upon a small, overly-friendly congregation, it seemed like a great fit.  At least to my husband.  He went to the altar for prayer.  He cried and cried.  When we got home, he said being at that church made him "feel like he was home".

I didn't feel the same.
Something just seemed a little too good there.

I sat back and I watched.  That's what I do.  Size people up.  See if their walk matches their talk.  I hang back in the shadows, watching, trying to be unnoticeable.  I began to make friends on the fringe, but never quite considering it *my* church.

After we'd been there for about a year, I began to slowly let my guard down.  I became involved in things.  I attended women's bible studies and outings. I was assigned a mentor.  It seemed like the more I shared with her, the higher I rose in the church.  This brought jealous whispers behind my back and strange accusations.  It didn't make sense to me.  I was just being me, trying to improve myself.

I joined the prayer team.  I became the administrative assistant to the pastor.  I was in the inner circle. The whispers continued.  But I was confident in my position, knowing I was not doing anything wrong.  And as I felt more comfortable, I shared more and more of me.  My past, my hurts, my struggles.  The problem was, I was sharing those details with the wrong people.

The pastor was charismatic.  Fatherly.  Disarming. He seemed safe, maybe even trustworthy.  For me, that was a giant step.  The way he asked questions seemed caring, not probing.  I began to tell him more and more, thinking he was helping me deal with my past, sort out current issues, deal with people.  Instead he was grooming me.  Using my hurts, my quirks, my pasts to manipulate me, to further entrench me in their *system*.

Things were good there for a long time.
We established strong friendships.  Our house was often filled with people and laughter.
We experienced healing in our marriage, even having a ceremony there to renew our marriage vows.
I began to have healing in my life, starting to deal with scary, hurtful things from my past.
To let people *in*.

Then things got strange.  It began to fill uncomfortable.  We began to question things being said and done.  That was the beginning of the end.  I'd seen what happened to people who disagreed: how they were punished, ostracized, talked about, forced to leave.  Suddenly I was that person.  My worst nightmare was coming true.

The next 14 months were basically hell on earth for my family.  I watched my children's friends be torn away from them.  People quit talking to us.  I was forbidden to talk to the "pastor", and was assigned a handler who was supposed to be my liaison.  He took his job very seriously, using every opportunity to remind me of his place of power over me.

Fourteen months of pain and bewilderment.
Fourteen months of watching our friends drift away, choosing to sacrifice their relationships with us in order to maintain their position in the church.
Fourteen months of no one praying for us.
Fourteen months of crying every. single. day.

When we finally left there, I was totally broken.
My physical health deteriorated to the point that I had to stop working.  Some days I couldn't even get out of bed.  I was in constant physical pain.  The emotional pain was immeasurable.
I was diagnosed with complex PTSD.
I lived in constant fear of running into someone from that leadership team.  The few times i did see people at the grocery store, they made eye contact then turned and walked away.
I felt like a pariah.

We've been away from that for seven years now.
In some ways, I feel like I'm back to the broken woman I was when we first started attending there. The guard is so much stronger now, more impenetrable than it was before.
I'm more alert and cautious.
I'm slower to let people in, and quicker to let them out.
It's a lonely place to be.

I'm looking for the ways that I'm stronger now because of that experience.  Those are harder to find. I feel like the areas that I'm stronger in are negatives.
I'm more cynical.
I'm more guarded.
I'm even more untrusting.
But I'm alive.  I got out.
The cult, that man, did not break me.

Strength is not Immortality

My grandmother is a rock.

The things she has endured in her lifetime, and come out even stronger on the other side, are huge. Still she soldiers on.  She's a matriarch no one messes with.
She's also 83.

She my biological grandmother and she lives in California.  I try to see her every year but, I admit, it's been a couple years.  And with every visit, I see the frailty seeping in.  She needs a walker to get around.  She's on oxygen 24/7 and still can't get enough air.
She's my link to my past.

As I contemplate her mortality, I'm awash in emotion.  What will my life be like without her?
She is the one person who loves me unconditionally.
She doesn't place expectations on her affection. She doesn't try to manipulate me in any way.
She doesn't look at me with blame.  She doesn't see me as a symbol of all that went wrong in her life, her daughter's life, my life.
The thought of losing her overwhelms me.

She instilled in us the importance of being a strong, independent, self-reliant women.  My aunt, my cousin, my sister and I have all achieved this to varying degrees.  Sometimes it serves us well, sometimes it interferes in our relationships.
But we always muster through, using her strength.
We persevere.
We trudge through.
We survive, maybe even thrive.
I wonder how that will change when she is gone.

She's just always been there.
Taking us in after my mother's death.
Keeping us together as a pair when we entered the foster care system.  Visiting us in our new home.
Phone calls, card and gifts throughout the years of separation.
Always maintaining the relationship, the connection with her and my past.

As I've aged our relationship has changed. We talk about deeper things, and I feel the guilt she carries.  Guilt over things she's not responsible for.
I feel her sadness and her loss.
I feel her loneliness.
I feel her love.
And I feel her undeniable strength.

Strength I can only hope to live up to.

Live with Purpose

Four weeks ago, I almost died.

I went to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack.  It turned out that I had a perforated ulcer on my intestine the size of a quarter.  It was leaking air into my abdominal cavity.  The doctor kept asking how long I'd been having symptoms, amazed that I'd felt nothing until that day. He said most of this type of perforation are the size of a dime, and patients are in excruciating pain.  Why didn't I feel it?   I was in emergency surgery within 2 hours of leaving work that day.  Had I waited one more day, the results would have been very different.

I have a freakishly high pain tolerance.
I've trained my body to not feel any thing.  Emotionally or physically.
Call it a coping mechanism.

I have complex PTSD.  To deal with all that "stuff", I learned how to just shut down.  That means blocking pain and emotion, good and bad.  As a kid, I actually forced myself to not be ticklish in order to avoid attention. I learned to deadpan, to not allow my face to show emotion.
Just absorb it.  Just get through.
Just don't feel pain until it almost kills you.

I spent a week in the hospital.
I have an incision from my sternum to belly button that needed 25 staples to close.
I've been home, recuperating, for 3 weeks and I still feel like a bus ran me over.
Sleep is my only escape, but that's becoming harder to do.
I'm malnourished and dehydrated.  All my plumbing has been re-routed and it's not happy about it.

Up til now I've been too busy trying to heal to even begin to deal with how close I came to dying. This week, feeling a little better, has given me more time for reflection.  I've come to believe that the excruciating pain I felt that night, the pain I could not ignore, was the finger of God.  Stay with me.  I know not everyone believes this way, but I do.  He could have let me just continue to ignore whatever was going on inside and die.  Or, as he did, put me in so much pain that I had to pay attention.

There has been many tearful moments this week, realizing how close I came to not being here.  I guess I've been kept here for a purpose.  Strangely, that brings a lot of pressure.  It also brings clarity.
No more just coasting through life, hiding from the hard things, believing the lies people told me just to hurt me, neglecting the gifts I have been given.  It's time to live with purpose.

It's time to feel again.

Silent No More

Shame.
That's a word I don't have a lot of experience with.  I can say that I haven't really done many things that I'm ashamed of doing.
I don't shame myself.
But I'm finding out recently how heavy is the weight of the shame others put on me.
I don't like it.

"If you hadn't been born, none of this would have happened."
Shame on you.
"You were illegitimate?"
Shame on you.
"You were molested... abused... thrown away?"
Shame. Shame. Shame.
"Why aren't you like everyone else?"
Shame on you.
"Can't you just make it look like everything is alright?"
Shame on you.
"Why do you have to talk about those things?"
Shame on you.

Well, I refuse to carry that anymore.  That shame is yours, not mine.
My story has a voice and it refuses to be silenced.
I don't want your hand-me-downs, and I don't need your pity.
I'm an adult.
None of this was my fault.
I refuse to continue to kowtow to the powers that be, allowing them to define me as they see fit, rather than BE strong, to be me.

From now on, I'm making my own way.  I'm following my own rules.
I'm going to continue to not fit in or be like you expect me to be.
I've been through things, and that has changed me.
It makes me different.  That's good.
I wouldn't wish it on anybody to be like me.

So you have a choice to make.
Choose wisely, not like in the past.
Don't label me.
Don't misjudge me.

And if you do, shame on you.

Make a choice already

I've spent the majority of my life deciding what I didn't want to be.

I didn't want to be a victim.
A victim like my mother, brutalized by someone she loved.  A victim like my grandmother who fought the demons but lost.  A victim like that lost little girl that men touched and kissed and based her worth on her looks.

I didn't want to be dependent on a man for... anything.
I didn't want a man to tell me if I could spend money or not.  Not like my mom.
I didn't want to need a man to fix things, open things, protect me from things.

I didn't want to be different.
Not the shy girl who couldn't meet your gaze.  Not the adopted girl who didn't look like the rest of the family..  Not the girl who scratched rashes or had non-stop cold sores. Not the girl with the past so scary that she couldn't talk about it.

I didn't want to be used.
Not by any one.  Least of all by a father who treated me like a possession. Or an uncle with disgusting motives. Or any one of the boys who tried to lure me away into dark rooms and wooded trails.

I didn't want to be afraid.
Afraid of an abusive father with a quick temper.  Afraid of turning out like my mother.  Afraid of being less than.  Afraid of not being able to protect myself and the ones I loved. Afraid of the dark.  Afraid of the silence.  Afraid of closed doors and unknown places.  Afraid of people and afraid of myself.  Afraid of making the wrong choice.  Afraid of losing everything... again.

I didn't want to be alone.

The problem is that while I was so focused on not being something, I didn't choose what I did want to be.  I just let my life morph me into someone hard, jaded, solitary, non-trusting, fierce, abrasive and wildly independent.    I built walls greater than the ones Trump has planned.  I learned to disconnect from my body, to not respond to touch.  I learned to free myself from external emotion, to pace my breathing and maintain control.  I learned to hide all emotion and project a blank canvas that didn't belie the turmoil just below the surface.

They say if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.  I'm not sure that's the case.  I think it makes you harder.  People stop trying to get in, stop trying to penetrate the fortress that's been reinforced with fat and sarcasm on the outside, hurt and loneliness on the inside.  People pull away-- or are driven away-- and every fear about people is realized.

People suck.  People leave.  People hurt.  People disappoint.  People are... people.  And supposedly I need them.  Well, that's what I'm told.  I don't totally buy into that.  I'm skeptical.  But maybe I don't want to be.