I have been trying to remember how old I had to be to start going to girls’ youth group, but then I realized, my friends and I were the first ones to have youth group, and then I realized, I couldn’t remember when it actually started, just that we started when I was around 11 or 12, and that was when more and more dramatic things started happening in our lives in the context of the cult. We didn’t mix boys and girls as “youth” until a lot later.

As I was digging through a box full of old memories looking for photos, I came across a notebook where I’d written an essay, that I am pretty sure I read aloud in youth group, titled “How I Would Like to See My Life Change as a Result of this Study,” dated, 6/2000. We were studying Proverbs. I can tell my writing was a little stilted, a little afraid, and saying a lot of “christian-ese.” I also remember I was earnest, but being led into a legalistic path of introspection and an attempt at a kind of self-sanctification. In particular, I noticed this sentence, “The only way I can be used of Him is if my priorities change to be more submissive to the authority in my life.” There it is. That’s the big, dangerous part.

I also wrote, “Up until now, my priorities have been violin, myself, and worldly things.” I really have no idea what worldly things I was talking about, but we used that term a lot to cover a whole spectrum of bases, like immodest dresses, doing drugs, too much drums in a worship song or glitter body lotion.

I know we also read the book, Beautiful Girlhood, and I devoured it and any book that claimed it was telling me how to be a godly young woman, including I Kissed Dating Goodbye. At that time, it was “bad” to like boys and at one point we weren’t even allowed to talk to boys at church.

Purity culture was alive and well. When I use these words, it is not with bitterness or a hatred for biblical purity, but these ideas were given to us girls in a way that primed us for unhealthy relationships and expectations later in life. Certainly, at 12 years old, I had no business dating, but I also did take on a lot of burdens that were not mine to carry at that age, and one of the worst ones that affected me deeply was a teaching we received on Bathsheba. We were told that it was Bathsheba’s fault that David sinned, and not to be like her, not put ourselves into a situation where we would cause a man to stumble. I internalized that idea deeply, and it did damage, and I was always a little scared that I could be unknowingly be a Bathsheba, even to the point that I would double check that I had really closed the blinds tightly enough in my room when I was changing.

We constantly learned about modesty. Boys and men’s lust was our fault and we had to always be thinking of ways we could be tempting them, which actually sexualized our young minds far too early. I remember my mom took me shopping and I got some new shirts from the juniors’ section at JCPenny (oh so cool!). I was so excited to wear them and I wore one to girls’ youth group. Because I was in a room of just girls, I was not careful with my looser fitting neckline, and I will never forget our youth leader angrily calling me out, “Sarabeth, if I see down your shirt one more time…” And then she told me I couldn’t wear that shirt any more. I was so ashamed, but I also felt the sting of injustice and stood up a little bit on the inside. My mom altered the shirts for me and then they looked weird. And I started sewing extra fabric into the neckline of shirts or wearing tank tops under everything.

Because we lived near the beach, each year, finding an acceptable bathing suit had its own special turmoil. At the beach, we had all kinds of rules like, “you are allowed to wear your bathing suit without shorts over it in the water, but once you get out, you must immediately put shorts back on.” I was always afraid of getting into trouble or tempting someone, so I wore shorts most of the time, even in the water. I remember the summer in the early 2000s when board shorts had become very popular and one of the moms wanted them banned because they were a slippery slope towards bikinis.

I’ve told this story many times because of the profound impact that it had on me, and so I think it should be told here, too. My mom and I were called to the back of the church, and met by my youth leaders and several pastor’s wives. They told me that someone (they never said who it was) told leadership that a few days before, at our homeschool “cooking club” I had been seen “dancing sensually” in the yard while all of us kids were outside playing. Mind you, I was still young enough to want to go run and play outside with my friends and play games like “red rover” and freeze tag. I didn’t know what it meant to dance in that way and had no real idea what they were talking about. I started crying because I didn’t know much about the topic, but I had been told so much to be modest and good, that this accusation felt like the worst thing I could have been accused of doing. I said I didn’t do it and defended myself, and one of the pastor’s wives said, “You can’t know the depths of the wickedness of your own heart.” No one, but my mom, would listen to me or believe me and I was just distraught and in tears. Even though my mom believed me, it didn’t matter. Leadership had spoken.

The next night, at girls’ youth group, I was forced to confess my sin to everyone. There was a moment I remember feeling a little fire inside, something that briefly considered, just for a moment, saying, “No, you can’t make me tell something I didn’t do.” But I did it anyway, and I can still remember the feeling so well, of just succumbing and giving up to the narrative of the cult and the leaders in it because I felt helpless and trapped. I confessed my “sin” and I lost even more of my ability to think and stand up for myself that night.

I remember once having to ask permission from the pastor’s wives if I could wear my new Easter outfit one year. It was when it was popular to have skirts at just below the knee, which was a departure from our usual ankle length dresses. I was allowed, but I spent the entire day wondering if I was going to get in trouble for dressing immodestly.

As I wrote this part out, it seems like a weird dream, and I kind of wonder, did this really happen? Was that really my life, and was that the level of scrutiny I was under from childhood? It was. It actually makes me really sad to see the level of anxiety I developed because of these rules, but what is even sadder is that as I grew up and my anxiety began to be more noticeable, the leaders would condemn me and tell me that I was sinning, and to, “be anxious for nothing…” Just stop being anxious. My anxiety was a sin, even though I now see that my pastor, John, with his PhD is psychology, knew exactly the effect this all was having on me.

I’ve run out of time for this installment, and will continue telling the story of the “youth” of the cult next time! Thanks for coming along as I attempt to write everything down. I already know I need to go back and write more about elementary school years, so this is definitely weaving in and out of time.

Introduction

My goal in talking about the roles of men and women is to offer hope and comfort by pointing struggling women to God’s word, so they can see God’s heart for them in the beautiful gospel of Jesus Christ. Since my goal is to be helpful and not sensational, I don’t want any “gotcha” moments. So in this first installment, I will start with sharing a few of my personal experiences, and then dismantle some of the unhelpful rhetoric present in much of the online survivor community, as I have experienced it. Rather than tiptoeing around these ideas, I want to immediately address them, opening up my ability to write and speak freely and clearly moving forward on this contentious topic. Much of what I will touch on briefly here I plan to unfold much more fully in subsequent installments.

My Past Experience

I experienced much abuse and harmful teaching since I was a little girl in various churches, and these experiences have shaped who I am today, and why I care so much about confronting a topic so controversial. To help get me started, here’s a non-exhaustive list, and not even the worst, of the things I experienced over the years:

• As a preteen, I was told in youth group not to be a Bathsheba because it was her fault that David sinned as he did. It’s hard to explain what this did in my young heart into my adulthood because of the weight of inappropriate responsibility this put on me to feel the blame for the of graphic sexual harassment I subsequently experienced multiple times over the years. I was also constantly scared that I could make a brother stumble without even knowing it.

• I was told I had the spirit of Jezebel and that I would never find a godly husband if I were to stay un-submissive.

• I was taught that I always needed a spiritual male “covering” over me (controlling me) and without it, I would be outside of God’s will for my life and in danger. (This is similar to the umbrellas of protection idea from Bill Gothard and the IBLP.)

• I dated a Bill Gothard influenced guy who told me my calling was to help him with his calling.

• In the group I joined after I left the cult, the pastor’s wife told me that I was a stumbling block to all women because I had been in law school.

• I was told by a pastor and his wife during a “counseling” session that the most important thing God delivered me from when I left the cult was not really the abuse, but a life of being an ungodly woman, and that he was delivering me to a life of biblical womanhood. So I became a “stay-at-home daughter” and was eventually crushed under the weight of it all.

• The pastor told me that he had been observing me interacting with the other girls in the church, and that I was different than them, and too expressive. My expressive personality was worldly and I had probably gotten that way from being in a classroom with other men in college and then law school and that I needed to change my personality and become more meek and quiet, like the other women at church.

• The pastor warned me about blogging because as a woman, I should not be writing and teaching in that manner, since I wasn’t following Titus 2. By God’s grace, I never stopped writing, but this same pastor met with Steve before we were even dating, and warned him that I had a blog, “You should know, she has a blog.”

• I was taught generally that all women are submitted to all men and are by nature inferior to them.

• I was taught that my identity was to be a homemaker and child bearer.

• I learned that my home’s cleanliness was a reflection of my godliness and spiritual state.

• My pastor told me that my interests in theology and (at the time) politics were masculine.

• I was not allowed to ask questions out loud during Sunday School, so if I wanted to ask questions, I had to write them down for a man to read.

• My pastor told me that he only spends about 2-3 minutes max talking to the women at church because any longer could be dangerous.

• I learned many unhealthy and abusive teachings on what biblical submission looks like in marriage that I will save specifics of for later.

• And so much more! ***Gesturing expressively*** (To spite the point above about my “masculine” influenced personality, of course!)

Past and Present Collide

Now that I have proven that I have enough lived experience to discuss this topic, I want to move on to my experience after this.

If you’ve listened to my podcast for a while, you might remember that there was a little series of episodes with this as a theme running through it for a while, and then came the October when I had gotten so triggered that I was reaching a breaking point, especially when I listened to Osbaldo Valdez’s commentary on how he and the late Todd Bordow became egalitarian.

For some context, Todd had become a trusted voice as I was trying to make sense of the things I had experienced in the church as a woman. I listened to his podcast, The Glory Cloud, as he exposited texts that had formerly been used to abuse and control me, and he painted a beautiful picture of men and women in the church, one I still hold to now. He became a friend, too, as I had him on my podcast a couple of times. In our last conversation, just a few weeks before his passing, he spoke kind words of encouragement to me. Just a short time later, his death impacted me greatly. Then finding out from Osbaldo that he had apparently become an egalitarian truly sent me spiraling.

I bring it all up by name because I think it’s important to name things like this, especially because there were quite a few others who were strongly influenced by Todd Bordow. I also do not wish to malign his name or the great impact of his ministry over the years, but to give an idea of the culture in the survivor movement at the time, and why I was so deeply troubled by the podcasts episodes after his death.

There was a kind of chemical reaction between my unprocessed trauma and the many voices in the internet, in books, and podcasts, telling me a formula for just how oppressed women are and how terrible men are to women in general. My algorithm on social media was giving me a lot of material on the way that men are generally emotionally neglectful and possibly abusive, and how they don’t carry the mental load. It is just a symptom of the patriarchal system we are stuck in. Once I had ingested enough of that topic, I was triggered into suspecting (not fully believing, of course) my husband didn’t care about me. Everything he did was a potential act of negligence and lack of love, maybe even abusive because he was simply participating in this culture that caters to and coddles men.

This over-broad mischaracterization of dynamics between men and women can, and for me it did, create a kind of extremely activated thinking, filled with urgency and a frenzy of fear, and a felt need to change the “system.”1 I was in fight or flight mode most of the time, and it was difficult to feel safe anymore anywhere.

I had other trauma triggers during that season as well, and because I was “activated” I could not rationally handle or discuss difficult topics. Because I was so abused in the past and primed to be in self-protection mode, I couldn’t see that I was actually safe and loved. I couldn’t fully see my husband loved me. This all came to a head not long after listening to Osbaldo’s podcast episodes. I was also reading books from an egalitarian perspective on how poorly women have been mistreated in the church and in several Facebook groups that mostly focused on abuse stories and deconstructing from complementarianism.2

In the midst of this, God was so faithful to carry me through. I was praying about everything, and trying to trust that God would lead me to truth in His Word. But things had to come to a breaking point, and that is when my husband and I sought help from our pastor. I have mentioned this moment before in my writing.3 But I don’t know if anyone realizes how close I was to actually physically running out of the room, and out into the rain that January morning.

I was sitting in the room with two men, my husband and my pastor, and strangers on the internet had told me that they didn’t have my best interest at heart because they were men in a conservative church, a system supposedly designed to elevate them. (I did not fully embrace this teaching, but it still scared and impacted me greatly!) My past told me I would be abandoned, abused, and unloved for the rest of my life. My triggers were in my face.

I was terrified. It felt like my worst nightmare, two men against one woman, but I sat there, and said to myself, no, you know your pastor. You are safe. And I knew that my husband wasn’t against me. I willed myself to sit in that chair, mind over panic, a true act of trust, and listened to our pastor’s advice for us. It’s how I ended up in EMDR, which dramatically changed my life. 4

My story is an example of why we cannot coddle our trauma and our trauma stories, but need to safely and healthily face and deal with them head on. What we learned in the abuse and the way our bodies and minds keep the score means that sometimes our brain and emotions are lying to us. Internet experts in 30 second videos were telling me that what my traumatized brain was telling was actually true, and that I would not ever be safe, that it would not be safe for me to let my guard down, and trust. Social media and the online world are not good discipleship or therapy programs. 5

Here’s what I am able to see now in a more emotionally regulated state, after EMDR6: My husband is not neglectful. He is a human being who makes mistakes and sins, but he also cannot read my mind and he thinks differently than I do. So, for example, when I was able to calmly say to him, “I am feeling the weight in my mind because I am having to plan all the little details of the trip you want us to take, and I need help,” he sat down with a notebook and helped me write everything down, even taking on some planning himself. 7 (Turns out he didn’t need a lecture on mental load and how the patriarchy has primed him to not have a mental load.)

Clearing the Air

I am keenly aware that a lot of what I am going to say moving forward goes against much of what is being expressed in the anti-abuse movement. Nevertheless, I will be endeavoring to show women who they are in Christ, image bearers, and beloved children of God, and to do that, we will need to dismantle some error and ruffle some feathers along the way. I’ll with the underlying ideas that ended up hurting me in the story I just shared as I was earnestly and understandably trying to reconstruct my faith in the area of men, women, and the church.

Unresolved Trauma

As I mentioned in the previous section, something that makes it very difficult to handle talking about views on men and women is the pure trauma that some of us have experienced surrounding that whole topic. For me, the unresolved trauma made me so reactive any time anyone brought this up, I really was not able to access the rational parts of my brain and I was terrified most of the time. That is true for a lot of people, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of “therapy culture” on the internet that is simply not a substitute for the real, deep work that is needed to work through trauma.8

Unhelpful Rhetoric

There are people giving false choices on where we should land as we reconstruct our faith after abuse, essentially saying that any view other than a fully egalitarian view is harmful to women. I was under an incredible amount of pressure to end up with an egalitarian view because of this. As a survivor of abuse, this rhetoric affected me because I value being a safe person, and was scared of being called unsafe or even abusive because I didn’t affirm an egalitarian position.

That false choice narrative was part of what got me spiraling out because I was so terrified that potentially my husband, my church, my pastors, my entire denomination were all just blinded by the patriarchal misogynist system, and the only people who were calling out actual abuse that needed to be called out were telling me that also I should probably end up with this theological view because all of the other views, and scripture translations were born out of male oppression.

I now reject this. I don’t have to choose between being anti-abuse/misogyny and taking a position that recognizes what I believe are biblically delineated roles between men and women in the church, especially when it comes to ordination, in particular. (Which I will get to eventually!)

I also found polarizing oppressor/oppressed language in these online conversations, which I think is unhelpful and unbiblical. In my experience, this kind of language used to trigger my hypervigilant response to abuse, since I was always looking out for danger, and this language spelled out to my traumatized self that in no uncertain terms men were all suspicious, and that even church history was suspicious, since it was largely made up of male oppressors. This kind of language strips away any ability to calmly parse things out with nuance and even compassion for the “other.” Most significantly, it also ignores basics of what is taught in Scripture about sin and the nature of mankind and sets us up to be unable to locate objective truth as a result.

And finally, in our largely egalitarian9 culture, many are allergic to hierarchy and to real or imagined power differentials and unequal outcomes. I’ve heard and read many times that it’s unfair or oppressive for women to be kept from using their gifts freely in the church, and this also stems from a largely individualistic society and culture that the church has adopted. We’ve also got a lot of wrong ideas about what the office of pastor is even all about and often advocates reframe that entire conversation in terms of power and power imbalances, demanding that it now be women’s turn since men have unfairly held all the power. I will come back to this when I write more about ordination.

Moving Forward

There is a difference between being able to speak to and against the way that women have been mistreated in church environments and buying wholesale potentially unhealthy and unbiblical ways of thinking. Certainly there is a lot of wisdom to be found within the survivor and anti-abuse advocacy sphere, but I think we need to ground ourselves first in the truth and beauty of what God’s word says about us as redeemed image bearers, and that is what I am going to endeavor to do here, as I {cautiously} continue to write and talk about this.

Without further ado, I will now reveal where I landed in the end of all the spiraling, healing, and studying for years:

I still affirm qualified male ordination. I believe that marriage is not egalitarian in the sense that there are no “roles” or that there are no differences between a husband and a wife, and what Scripture says to each, but that the husband does have a role as “head” and that does not mean tyrannical ruler or king of his home. There is a lot more mutuality and interdependence in marriage than what I was taught to believe originally, and the main focus should not be on authority or who is in charge, but on outdoing the other in love, and deferring to one another, also known as mutual submission. I have found that there is much more variation and creativity to be found in the way God has made us, in His image, male and female, and that the complementarity of the sexes, not just in marriage, but in the way men and women generally interact and work together in all ways, is beautifully mysterious and profound, and many of the formulas, rules, and boxes (from both sides of the conversation) tend to squash that.

I realize that this sounds like a typical complementarian-lite outcome, which might be disappointing for some of you. But, I’ve got some real problems with some of the theology and use of Scripture in the complementarian and egalitarian camps and that is what I’d like to address gradually here with a careful unpacking of Scripture and historic reformed theology to try to point out where I think some things have gone off the rails on both “sides.” The modern patriarchal movement, as seen in particular right now with Doug Wilson and his cronies, is wildly unbiblical, of course, so I’ll address that as well. I’m also aware of the tension in the abuse advocacy world and the idea going around that affirming any kind of restriction based on gender is some kind of abuse or misogyny. I would also like to unpack that moving forward. Please give me time and patience to do all of this as I am able.

To untangle the complicated mess of the problems we see today will take time to address. In particular, if you’re a woman struggling with deconstructing or leaving the church and all this in general, I hope you will stick around for the conversation. This is for you.

I am glad to be back in this space writing again! Between the holiday season, sickness, and the entire month of February being downright rude, but also not altogether horrible, I was only able to get to my home, my in person people, and my studies.

I wanted to write about my anniversary of leaving the cult (February 19), and I did write about it in the midst of the anniversary season last month, but simply couldn’t get around to publishing until now.

Here are some of my thoughts on what it’s like to relive a trauma anniversary:

It came out of what seemed like nowhere.

I was sitting at my desk, filled with nervousness over nothing, yet it felt like I was about to do something scary, like speak in front of a large group of people. I was picking at my fingers, nearly shaking. Panic?

Then, the days started to feel like the whole world was too heavy. Ok get up out of bed. Ok, now, get dressed. Ok, now, do the next little step. What is this? Depression?

Why does it feel like I can’t breathe?

It lasted longer than a day, and it lasted longer than a few days, then it lasted a couple weeks.

I decided to get out my journal, and write down things that were upsetting me. Maybe these things are triggers I just haven’t worked through yet, and they’re surfacing now.

As I opened my journal, I found my last entry, and I am ashamed to say, it was from a year ago! I took a minute to look at it, and it was describing eerily exactly how I was feeling at that moment. I looked at the date. It was nearly to the day the same time of year last year. I sat there, asking myself, what is this time of year? What happened?

It feels a little unbelievable to say that I had forgotten, but I had. Around the last week or two of January 2013, I began the process of leaving. February 19th, I actually left. The long process itself was traumatizing.

When I realized that, my whole body relaxed into tears. The tension I had been holding, and the impatient and unhealthy way I’d been distracting and dragging myself around melted, and I realized. My ability to cry again confirmed. Yes, this is the thing. It’s the anniversary. 1

I think the emotions surrounding the anniversary were so jarring this year was because I’d spent my first year without PTSD in over a decade, so when those familiar symptoms came back all of a sudden they were even more jarring than when they were my constant, my normal. I tried my usual tools to help calm my heart, and nothing really worked, so I realized that I would have to get through this season holding onto to truth whether my feelings were in agreement.

I tried, like I have many other years, to change the perspective on the day, to make it a celebration of freedom. But that heaviness that I was feeling, I realized it was grief, grief asking to be heard and acknowledged.

I don’t know how many years this heavy grief will come back whether I invite her or not. I do know that she stands quietly by and raises her hand and I try to ignore her, until my body feels like I can’t drag it anywhere anymore, and I decide to listen. What is there to grieve? I naturally want to sidestep the sadness, and be glad that I have been free for thirteen years. And my whole family is out, and God is restoring our relationships. My divorced parents remarried each other two years ago. So much good and healing things have happened. So much praiseworthy, so much celebration.

But no matter what I try, grief shows up this time of year.

I think of Ecclesiastes 3 for this time, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…”

In the past when I was going through this kind of season, I tried to dissociate, a lot of times by scrolling social media mindlessly, which actually makes things even worse! I used to withdraw from activities and people, but this year, I decided to do everything, whether I liked it or not, and to tell people what I was going through, to connect instead of disconnect, to not be afraid of the emotions.

The anxiety and sadness come on like powerful waves, almost like a labor contraction I have to breathe through. All the memories resurface, and I am that terrified young woman in 2013 again, unsure of so much, yet strangely, deeply sure that I was following God to leave that place. Yet, so broken and trembling and desperate, I was afraid to be alone. It all washes over me, and I relive it in my whole body, but I’m stronger now, and I have tools to handle it. 2

I would like to acknowledge the trauma and grief of leaving. It was different than the trauma of life in the cult. It was monumental and life changing and it was freedom, but it was also terrible and the most difficult thing I have ever done.

In the middle of January 2013, I hugged John3 goodbye.

We were standing in the kitchen while he got a drink from the fridge. A side hug because he wouldn’t be up early enough the next day to see me leave to go back to school.

I’d said goodnight and goodbye to him many times over the years.4 After all, he’d positioned himself as my rescuer from my broken family, the family he broke. He assumed a role of father and the broken and confused person I was accepted that. He’d methodically stolen me from my parents. He’d methodically stolen them from each other, too.

Something was different that night. I think he knew I knew the game, and I was no longer prey that piqued his interest. I think we both knew that I wouldn’t be coming back.

Some time earlier, I’d heard his daughter downstairs talking to him one night “telling on” me, how I’d become too independent since I went to law school. How I wouldn’t listen to her correction and justified myself too much. She’d confronted me, as though it was a deeply spiritual matter, on how careless I was to let my cell phone die one evening when we were out at a concert together. I didn’t care. She had corrected me on the cut of my jeans and told me that they were immodest. They weren’t. But I didn’t care what she thought anymore. I thought she was being ridiculous. I could hear them talking about me and instead of being extremely scared of getting in trouble, like usual, I was mostly furious.

Things were fracturing for me. They had been for a while.

By the time I got back to Virginia for what was supposed to be my final semester of law school, I was not focusing on school. I was thinking about leaving everything.

Early in the mornings before class, a dear friend and I met to pray about my life’s big decisions. God answered us, and we had no idea what we were really asking for!

I sent an email to a trusted older woman, “I have a lot of things weighing pretty heavily on my mind and heart,” and we met that weekend at a coffee shop called The Good Cherry in Forest, VA. As we sat down with a French press full of coffee, I said, my first treasonous words against my abuser,“I think I need to leave my church.”

And I did.

A while ago, I wrote down each of the people I lost as a result of being in the cult. By the time I left, I had already lost 71 people in a traumatic way due to the requirement that we shun those who left. Somewhere in there, I lost my first childhood best friend, and it destroyed me. I missed her for many years, praying for her to come back, telling God that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was that her family would come back. One time, her mom stopped at our house, van full of children, and we had a secret reunion with their family. We knew we could get in trouble for seeing them, but I will always treasure this memory of genuine love and friendship not caring what John said about anyone. My mom told me we could not tell anyone they’d come to our house. My friend and I promised each other, in the dramatic way that little girls do, that we would be friends forever, no matter what.

When I left, I lost 43 people all at once, including my immediate family.

The total (which is probably actually higher) number of individuals that I lost over my time in the cult, against my will, 114 people.

When I left, I left extreme abuse, yes, but I also lost my family and my friends, and the only life I’d ever known in the span of just a few hours. I’ve often wondered how I could even begin to process that? I loved each of those people, and I’d known most of them for my entire life. I can’t begin to describe that, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to wrap my own mind around it myself. Each time I reconnect with another person from the cult, once they leave, I am incredibly grateful.

I also left something I knew and walked into the unknown, and it was scary. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have anyone supporting me anymore. I had to be strong in a new way, and it was absolutely a matter of survival and God always provided for me.

I wondered many times in those early days whether I really was the evil jezebel John said I was and if all the turmoil and struggle that happened after leaving was God’s judgment for my rebellion. Since then, I’ve grieved the years lost that I didn’t really understand or know that I could call on God in my distress, or understand His vast love for me. Those early days, though, I did begin to understand because I recognized His sustaining and encouraging presence in my life as I started walking down this unfamiliar path alone, without anyone else who’d survived a cult or anything like my story, at least for a time.

Of course, everything was not hopeless, and in writing all of this, I can’t help but also notice all the many beautiful things God has done in these last 13 years. I always mark them down as years survived because the days have been hard and long sometimes, and I am looking forward to marking more days in than out, but for now, I mark the time like this, acknowledging and grieving, but also commemorating and remembering God’s faithfulness through it all. He is my deliverer, my healer, my redeemer of everything even all those years that seem wasted and lost.

Now, I am writing this on the other side of the anniversary season as the intense anxiety and grief have passed:

When I read my journal a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see what I had written a year ago because I had forgotten that it happened. That gave me hope that the resurgence of anxiety and grief probably wouldn’t last long, and it didn’t. I made it to February 19, my husband and I toasted to 13 years out, and gradually after that date, the symptoms started to fade, and now I no longer feel the same overwhelmed way about my past.

I’ve said that each February 19, I mark the time as surviving surviving.

If you’ve left something like I did, then you know this all too well. The aftermath is almost worst than the years of abuse and false teaching because it feels like the pain will never end, and you’ve got to somehow be a whole entire person and show up and act normal, but never really feel like you will ever be normal.

I am looking forward to when I hit year 26 out, because then, I will have had more years out than in. I think maybe then I will have a big party, Lord willing!

I want to emphasize, in all this pondering and remembering, is encouragement that if you are going through a similar season of aftermath or your body keeping the score of a traumatic anniversary, two things:

1. Seek extra help if you need it. (Trusted friends, a counselor, your church community) Don’t do this alone. Your emotions and feelings may try to trick you that it’s better to withdraw. It is not. It might be good to do less, take more time to refresh and rest, but, isolation is not the answer. I also checked in with my therapist during this time.

2. Don’t let your waves of emotion lie to you. This is the point I wish to unfold the most:

Something I surprising I experienced as the waves felt like they would overwhelm me, was that I found myself crying over the pain of it all, and questioning the sovereignty of God in my story. I had been solidly settled on the truth of God’s sovereignty in suffering and trials for several years now. In fact, it was a biblical truth that was integral in my EMDR therapy and healing from PTSD. In that anniversary season, though, one night, it got foggy, and my past pain overshadowed this once bright and hopeful truth, and I didn’t feel like it was true anymore. I knew the answers, the Scripture references, the doctrine back and forth, but I my emotions were telling me another story. And that’s the thing about trauma: it’s what we learn as a result of the event, and often, while what we are feeling should be honored as valid, it must not be accepted as the final word on the matter. Trauma taught me many untrue things, and those familiar pathways in my brain reopened as all the memories came roaring back.

In those choppy and strong waves, I had to remind myself of truth, truth when it was almost too dark to see and my feelings were not feeling in alignment with objective truth. I love the example of how to speak to ourselves Psalm 42:5-6 gives, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”

Learning to speak the truth of God’s word to myself is a never ending process, but these are the dark moments, we can speak to ourselves like this, with the hope that we “will again praise him.” I told my friend what I was experiencing that night on MarcoPolo, and I knew this feeling would pass, that I would need to weather this moment, and treat the feeling with truth. She still responded with encouragement, and there’s really no such thing as too much encouragement!

It’s a tricky thing, in this “trauma informed” culture5, to navigate learning to notice and be curious about emotions surrounding our past traumas, but not trust them, or let them define us or guide us. Many of us spiritual abuse survivors were taught that our emotions were bad, our bodies were bad and didn’t matter, and we must only be concerned with deeply spiritual matters, even at the expense of our physical and mental health, and we must not ever feel anxious or sad. There’s an equally dangerous reaction to this that tells us in the worse sense possible, to follow our hearts, and to embrace how we’re feeling. There is also way that social media sound bite psychology has discipled us that tends to lead us away from Bible truth.

Even though many of us experienced an unhelpful spiritual bypassing kind of answer when we needed someone to simply sit with us and acknowledge our struggle and grief, we must not let a poor application of Scripture, bad timing, or “miserable comforters”6 steal away the profound truth of Scripture and the need we have for it to heal from our past.

Let me be your internet friend offering you this encouragement that you not withdraw from truth when the pain hits you, because God’s word does not bypass the reality of the brokenness of this world and all of our difficult emotions. Please don’t forget what Romans 8 says:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose…What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Or what Psalm 61 says,

Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy.

Or Psalm 139:

Where shall I go from your spirit? Or Where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If make my bed in Sheol, you are there… If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.

Here’s a lovely song by Ellie Holcomb, “Where Can I go?” (Psalm 139) Because music is a great way to get these truths into your heart, too.

I tried so many of my tools to help me those weeks from January- February, nothing really took away the sadness or anxiety I felt as I remembered my past, and think that’s important to note, and only after the anniversary came and went did I begin to feel relief again, and return to normal. Total healing or feeling impervious to the things that happened in the past is not really the goal, and it may not happen completely on this earth. But we can be healed enough to take one more step, to call out one more time to God, to speak His truth to our souls, and to remember His faithfulness.

I remember when things were more normal. I was three and my dad was taking me to the hospital to meet my brand-new baby sister. Excited and nervous, I walked down the hallway, and someone from the hospital gave me a tiny hospital gown with a “Nurse Koala” on it so I could hold my sister. My dad put a pillow on my lap and laid her in my arms. A new love awakened in my heart. I had a sister! I immediately loved her and was thrilled to have her with us. I remember the day my mom came home with her, and the excitement surrounding that time. I don’t remember sibling rivalry; I just remember loving her with my whole heart.

There were many good things in my childhood. My mom made me beautiful dresses. (Sometimes we even matched!) She even gave me a brand-new bedroom for my four-year-old birthday. My parents planned a huge birthday party for me, with games and a big, exciting reveal of my new room—new bedspread, pillows, curtains, everything, all pink, and all handmade by my mom. They hired a person in a bunny suit to bring me balloons, a birthday tiara, and to lead us all to the surprise room. I was overwhelmed and shy, fully terrified of the bunny. They also got me a new swing set, which was one of my favorite things of all. My dad would let me help him in the big garden, and growing gardens with my dad is still a precious memory to me, and I think, part of why I love gardening to this very day. My parents even built me and my sister each our own beautiful dollhouse that they painted and decorated inside, like a Victorian mansion. And in those early days, there were these more normal memories, but The Wolf’s shadow was falling over our family, looming darker and darker.

I was a willful and disobedient child, and The Wolf told my parents how to discipline me. It was harsh and it was unrelenting, and it was not what they wanted to do and it was not what I needed. I have struggled with how to write about this portion of my childhood, and I don’t think it needs detailed accounts, but just a general understanding that the methods of parenting and discipline were handed down from “on high” and my parents were under a huge amount of pressure to keep me in line and performing well. I know I was a difficult child. I liked to argue and push back and ask questions, even at a very young age. I usually had a strong sense of justice and wanted to know why all the time. (I have a similar child now and know how challenging that can be when all you are trying to do is get the child dressed for the day!)

I had a very strong will and could be defiant. I was sinful, but the response and discipline only made it worse for me, isolated me, and shut me down. I never learned how to handle my strong emotions or to feel safe talking about them. I know what being trapped in fight or flight feels like now, and I remember the same feeling in my tiny body back then, of being trapped in my emotions and being frozen, unable to stop crying, but I was not supposed to cry. My parents were told to spank me until I stopped crying, and I would cry so hard that I would throw up. I was unable to “obey” and I was just alone and scared, needing comfort.

Around age 2 and 3, I remember being very affectionate and not afraid to share my affection. I was not afraid to show love and to say “I love you” to my mom and would give a spontaneous hug and “I love you” without reservation. I also remember at some point along those early years, shutting down, and beginning to guard my affection. It was too vulnerable to show feelings is what I had learned, so I began to hold my feelings inside most of the time. I was still happy as a child in many ways but changed. I would cry when I was alone, as I got older, and eventually developed a reputation for being tough, not crying. But I was anything but tough. The goal of the parenting advice was to break my will, so The Wolf said, but instead, it broke my heart.

I know my parents meant well, and that they even didn’t want to follow the counsel of The Wolf, but they were young and scared, and The Wolf was telling them frightening things about how I would turn out if they didn’t follow his advice. He was also teaching them a false understanding of obeying “spiritual authority” and the repercussions of their own disobedience to his counsel before God. I don’t like writing this part of my story because I love my parents and we have reconciled, cried, and processed these things together and I have forgiven them. I know, too, that they loved me, and the way the actually wanted to parent me also came through all along the way despite The Wolf’s influence. In many ways, they shielded me from the greater intensity of The Wolf’s influence the best way they knew how, and they were also being abused by The Wolf.

There is a part of me that wishes I could skip this part, but I think it’s important to tell because it was these interactions and discipline that primed me to blindly obey and follow The Wolf. I think he knew that, and eventually realized it would not be the parents, but the children born in the church that would be his most easy to control population, particularly since he began a very blatant campaign to turn us against our parents during our very influential and formative teen years.

I have been thinking of this part of my story, and how it is a very painful part, not just for me, but for my parents. I also know that that there are those of you reading this that have been the parents in a scenario much like my own, and this has been on my mind for a very long time, so I’ll take a little departure from my story to write to parents who raised their children in this kind of environment and have deep regrets. It’s possible your kids still hold it against you, have walked away from the faith, or perhaps they’ve forgiven and understand the difficult situation it was and you have reconciled. Whatever the case, I want you to know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is for you in this, too. This is not the unforgivable sin. You are still a loved and cherished child of The King. We share the same Heavenly Father, who sent His son to die for this, yes, even this thing that you deeply regret.

The most comforting thing to me in my story was understanding that God is sovereign in these stories, even if you think somehow your regrettable actions are outside the reach of God’s forgiveness or His love, or even His plan for you. Perhaps you feel you are just on the outskirts of Christianity, and all the promises of God aren’t really for you. Romans 8:28 is quoted so much and often given as a sort of platitude that comes across in a most unhelpful way, that seems to bypass the real emotions of the trials and things that we go through. “Well, it doesn’t matter how you feel! This is all going to be worked out for good.” That is such a mishandling of this teaching. What happened is bad. Parents, you were robbed of your parenthood, as your children were robbed of their parents and childhood. This is a grievous thing. This is not pleasing to God, and it is a tragedy. It is important that you grieve and acknowledge the difficulty, and even repent and repair where necessary, and know that God is with you in this. As you do this, it is also vitally important that you hold fast to truth, and run these regrets right to the cross, and understand that God does work all things, including raising your family in a cult or other unhealthy church environment, even disciplining your children to the point of abuse, when trying to follow “counsel” of “spiritual authority,” for good. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” This is actually the best news for us all as we process our stories. This is the most hopeful answer I have for any of these stories, no matter how terrible, is that we can be one hundred percent sure that God is working every single thing together for good.

Just a few verses later, we have this assurance without caveat: “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (I’m just blatantly writing from my sermon notes notebook from last year for this next bit.)

Romans 8:32: He who did not spare his own Son. Spare here has the meaning of leniency, so it could be read as “He who did not deal leniently with his own son.” And we know that Jesus cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) so you don’t have to cry out like this. You will never be forsaken because He has said “I will never leave you for forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)

In not sparing his own son, but giving him up, “how will he also not with him graciously give us all things?” Is saying that if God has accomplished this greater purpose, eternal redemption, and the fulfillment of his promise from Genesis to redeem us, then how can all these other lesser things not be accomplished? I also love the word graciously here. It does not just say “How will he not also with him give” it says, “graciously give” and I love that because it is not begrudging or bitter giving. It is certainly gracious because we don’t deserve it, but it is also a Fatherly giving, abundantly and without sparing. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” Romans 15:13 “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think…” Ephesians 3:20

There is hope and beauty, even in the darkest story and memory. That’s what I hope parents regretting these choices will know is true for you. God is sovereignly working in all things, and He is for you in abundantly gracious ways. I was listening to R.C. Sproul lecture on the providence of God in Romans 8 just yesterday, and it was so beautifully hopeful to me. Far too often, we think of God in an austere way, with His providence being callous and unfeeling, but what we have seen here is that the doctrine of providence of working all things together, is “all about God being for His people.” God is for you. I don’t think we will ever grasp the wonder of that. Sproul highlighted the comprehensive nature of this. If God is for us, who can be against us and who can separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing! List anything you want. List it forever. No matter how intense the pain. “They do not have the power to break or sever the relationship we have to a loving, kindly, sovereign providence.”1

So even for our regrets for actions done within these cults or toxic churches (because I have them too!), we can confidently say with Paul a few verses later, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The biggest reason for this is that I am collaborating with another podcaster on a rather large project with a tentative release date of the end of January. This is a full (10+ episode) podcast season in which we will be exploring the topics of Complementarianism, Egalitarianism, Patriarchy, among other related things. I’m going to be letting you all know exactly where I stand and how I got there, and as you might imagine, it’s a very big project. Because we want to be as clear and as biblically focused and accurate as possible, this is taking quite some time to put together, and we have been working on this in the planning, research and general ideas for many months. We’ve already put hours and hours into this. (Not to mention our own harrowing life experiences!) Now, we are actively writing, and with everything else I have going on in my life, I am having to shift priorities to make this happen, so we can release as close to our original deadline as possible.

I am also finishing up one seminary class, with a final and paper due in the next few weeks, then not long after Christmas, starting another one. I am being stretched in the best possible way. (I’m seriously loving all of these things, but they are a lot all at once, and I’m not even telling you all the other things I am busy with!)

My daughter will also be on break from school in a few weeks, and we will have many fun activities and lots left to do to get ready for Christmas at our house. And since I am a limited human being, and since I can’t stop sleeping to make everything happen, I need to stop writing here as consistently for a time. (And possibly delay the final two episodes of the True Affirmations series on the podcast. Most likely, I will release those in the first couple weeks of January. They’re outlined, but not quite ready.)

I’ve got several written pieces in the works, always simmering in the background of my mind, and I am excited to get back to the weekly sharing more parts of my story with you, and my Friday posts that dive deeper into topics surrounding engaging our stories after abuse.

Thank you for subscribing and for your patience as I am figuring out the balance between being a mom, student, and trying to work here at Reconstructing Your Faith!

Hi Everyone! This is just a little update.

First, next week, my daughter has Thanksgiving break, so I will be taking the week off from writing here and releasing podcasts. I *might* get to the Wednesday post, but I’m making no promises!

I have two episodes left in the True Affirmations series on my podcast, and those will release December 4th and 18th. After that, I am not sure of the next release date because I am in the midst of a project that I am excited to share with you eventually. I can’t say much more than that at the moment, but it’s an entire season/series, and the goal is to begin releasing episodes weekly in January at some point. Due to the amount of work involved in that project, I may end up needing to pull back from my usual twice per week posting here, but not for too long.

Finally, the article I am working on about Jesus and trauma is deeply important to me, and taking more of my time reading, reflecting, and praying about because I think it’s not something to just write quickly without being very careful, so I won’t have that ready today. I will probably week after Thanksgiving break, and I imagine it may be longer than one post.

As we take time to be particularly thankful this next week, I am thankful for each of you that have subscribed here and support this work. Thanks for taking the time to read, listen, and be here with me.

Counseling- it was not voluntary, but a kind of punishment for whatever behavior or struggle The Wolf decided was a problem. There was a time when The Wolf himself would do actual counseling for married couples and individuals, but I never participated in that, so I have little I can speak to on that front. (Until I interview some more people!) For now, I can describe what I experienced. I was confronted for a perceived severe conglomeration of problems (I stood up to The Wolf’s daughter. She often was a bully.) and was ordered into counseling with The Wolf’s son who had a masters degree in counseling, but never got licensed. (To the best of my knowledge.) I will save the details of that story until we get to that point later, but at that time in the church’s history, The Wolf’s son came back from getting his Masters at a major Christian university, and began to “counsel” church members.

There was no confidentiality, even though the son said there would be. He told everything to his dad, and it was common knowledge who was in counseling at The Wolf’s house. (I lived there; that’s how I know… more on that later). People’s issues were openly discussed without any confidentiality. While I was in counseling, my best friend was in the room too, since she married The Wolf’s son, and I was not allowed in a counseling room alone with him, and that added to the separation in our former best friendship, and further sense of shame for me. Counseling was, simply put, humiliating, and I later started calling it “extra special brain washing just for me.” Not only were people forced to do it as a kind of discipline, but also they had to pay for it.

For the next several terms and cultural elements, I’ll just take some time to describe a typical worship service where these things would occur:

Pre Service-We had to be early to be on time. We were not allowed to be late. For a time, the men (presumably because they were head of household) were forced to do pushups if they/their families were late for church. (And if you remember, my roommates and I were forced to dress like clowns because we were late one time.) However, The Wolf and his wife were routinely late (this changed from time to time), coming into the service a good 15 minutes into it because The Wolf did not want to get bogged down with our sin and issues. He wanted to be free from our grossness dragging him down as he was anointed to give God’s word. He actually said this.

Praise and Worship- Fairly long portion of the service of singing. We were influenced by various elements of the charismatic movement, so at times there could be emphasis on the moving of the Holy Spirit, but mostly there were fast songs at the beginning and slow songs at the end. During praise and worship, we were expected to be very expressive and while sometimes that was a genuine expression of love for God, often we were criticized and told to “lift up your countenance” or asked, “Why is your countenance fallen?” if we didn’t seem happy enough for some reason, so there was a lot of pressure to perform during worship.

I do want to say from the outset, though, I did love to worship God from a young age, and I do have memories of true adoration of God, and I think many other fellow members attest to this, as well. I ended up playing violin for church every Sunday for a long time, and I did take it seriously as an act of worship, although I knew I was under extreme scrutiny. It’s a mix. And it’s very difficult to unpack clearly.

The offering Just what you’d expect, except, at one point, we shifted to bringing the offerings forward ourselves, so everyone could see us bringing our money to the offering basket. Then someone, and I can’t remember who it was, I think The Wolf’s son would hold the basket up while we all sang the Doxology. I love singing the Doxology now, but I can still hear The Wolf’s voice in my head saying, “You may be seated,” as a part of the ending after amen because he would walk up to preach while we sang it. I hear it less and less now, but that was drilled into my memories every single Sunday for 25 years.

The Sermon I don’t even know how to discuss this, but for now, to be brief, The Wolf would preach unless he was sick or out of town. And he would preach for a very long time, well over an hour. We knew that we had better respond correctly during the sermon, but what I remember is most of the time not really understanding what he was talking about, but knowing that I had better be serious because he was angry and that meant God was angry. His exegesis was nearly non existent, but he would make every passage of the Bible specifically about us to suit his purposes. We had certain phrases we had to respond to during the sermon. Of course, “amen?” had to be met with a boisterous “AMEN!”Or He would say “Glory!” and we all had to say “Hallelujah! Jesus is Lord.” We had to be emotional at the right times and in the right ways. And we knew where that was. He used God’s word to captivate us for an emotional roller coaster that we rode until we reached the end agreeing with whatever purpose he had for us that week, usually giving, doing, being more.

Going to the Altar- immediately following the sermon, musicians would go play while nearly everyone would usually flood to the front to kneel down at the altar and cry. It was just the floor at the front of whatever building we happened to have a the time. It was an emotional time of response to the “conviction” of the message. If I didn’t feel convicted about something, you can bet I would find something to go forward about because no one wanted to be the only one standing up. By the end of my time there, I remember somewhat defiantly standing and not going to the front.

Altar Call- This was when the gospel was given ( a muddy law/gospel combination), and the altar was open for people to come forward to “get saved.” I also remember by the end of my time thinking that this was not in the Bible and if the Apostle Paul himself came into the church, they would tell him he wasn’t saved because their criteria for saying just the right words and doing everything just right was so over the top. I quickly chided myself for being disrespectful back then for having those thoughts against the leaders.

Closing Song- If no one came forward, we sang a song that was the sad “no one got saved” song, and if someone did, we had a different song that was happier.

That’s all for now. If you can’t tell, I just write a little here and there on this as I am able. For next time, I want to discuss more of what it meant to “get saved” and also what assurance was like in The Church.

For now, I want to close with praising God for the real beauty of the real church. As I wrote this, I thought of the order of worship at my own church and how extremely opposite everything is each Sunday. I am so grateful for what God has done in healing me to be able to see that, and for the true church that God established!

I want to continue to unfold and develop the ideas I brought up in the last installment in this series on Engaging Our Stories. In part three, I summarized Westminster Confession of Faith 1.1, 1.2, and Westminster Larger Catechism in this way: The Scriptures are necessary, given by inspiration of God for faith and life, and teach principally what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. (Scripture proof texts are in the footnotes of the last post.) I want us to continually keep in mind the purpose of Scripture as we continue in this process of letting Scripture inform us as we engage our stories of spiritual abuse. If you didn’t know, I also have a podcast, and the last two weeks, I have featured my friend, MaKayla Ross and she tells her story of abuse and finding healing in God’s Word. Part 1 she tells the story of abuse and Part 2 she talks about how returning to God’s Word and church has helped her heal. I think it’s a beautiful example of the way God works in His Word, and will perhaps offer you hope as you are on your own journey after abuse.

Last Friday, I talked about how trauma does not make a good hermeneutic, and I want to unfold that a little more to discuss how we should not let the lens of trauma and trauma responses allow us to stray away from the truth of Scripture about our healing and our sin in the process of healing.

Scrolling through my various social media feeds, I am inundated with a lot of posts about trauma, and many of them are secular in perspective. That is not necessarily to say that they are not of any help at all, but that I’ve learned that I need to let Scripture help me discern what to take and what to leave. One of the big issues that is controversial or sticky when it comes to talking about our trauma, particularly in our newer trauma informed landscape is the topic of sin. There are a few reasons for why this is difficult:

1. We may have learned that we need to bear the burden of our sin, and fix ourselves. We didn’t understand grace or sanctification, and so we don’t know what to do with our sin, and it truly is reason to feel overwhelm and despair, so we just try to avoid the topic or stop the behavior on our own.

2. When we tried to point out our abuser’s behavior, the abuser (or others) may have said something along the lines of, “You have sin, so you have no business pointing out my/their sin.”

3. Teachings on sin sound similar to things we may have been abused with, bringing up shame that was used to control and manipulate us in the past, causing us to feel the triggers of the past.

4. Trauma informed therapists and online sources teach about trauma responses, and in many ways, skip the idea of sin completely, and it becomes difficult to tell the difference between fight or flight and sin as we wrestle through the aftermath of spiritual abuse.

5. Unhelpful/unbiblical Christian counseling set us up to believe that negative emotions or mental illness like depression and anxiety are a sign of lack of faith, and if we would just repent and live right, those sinful problems would go away, and now it’s difficult to address the issue without it seeming like this kind of advice, when we really need to heal from wrongs done to us, things that are the result of another’s sin.

The trauma informed posts and books that are available have helped us to feel understood and affirmed. We are not crazy. Our bodies have been keeping score, and we finally have words for these strong reactions to triggers, memories, or even anniversaries of troubling events. I think this is good and helpful, but I think where we go wrong is allowing this to absolve us of seeing where we may be sinning in our process of healing if everything can be called a trauma response. In a different way than a spiritually abusive environment that lorded sin over us and used shame to control us, hiding the good news of the gospel from us, this trauma informed way of thinking also can cut us off from the finished work of Christ and viewing ourselves in light of His work because in some ways it takes away the problem of our sin by explaining away behaviors and excusing them, but still leaves us with the effects of our sin and no idea what to do with it. There are also people leading the deconstruction movement who blatantly minimize sin and deny our need for the substitutionary atonement of Christ.

To illustrate, I want to use something I wrestled through in my own life, that I brought to my pastor last year while he was preaching through the book of Romans. One Sunday, he preached on Romans 8:5-8:

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

The gist of the sermon was that once we become a Christian, sin doesn’t disappear, but there will be things that distinguish believers from unbelievers. Paul is saying that there are things that because we are believers that God is working in us, so there will become an observable difference in our mindset (what is my thinking consumed with most of the time?), disposition (more peace, rest, stillness, contentment, satisfaction, and our purpose changing to please God.

At the time of this sermon, I was in EMDR therapy and had opened the proverbial can of worms of my trauma. My PTSD symptoms were front and center for me, so that meant, I was acutely aware of my extreme amount of anxiety and hyper vigilance, always seeking and thinking about safety, and aware of many trauma responses. In fact, for many years before EMDR therapy, I would pray and ask God to help take away my “idol of safety” and I was finally understanding that once my body was entering into fight or flight, it had no idea that it was safe, and that prayer was perhaps not the most accurate way of viewing what was happening with me. PTSD was a real thing happening in my brain, causing me to respond to my past, and feeling as though the past event was currently happening, and not necessarily a lack of trust in God. That was comforting to understand. Yet, at the same time, I knew that within that PTSD diagnosis, amid my hypervigilant frantic search for safety, I would sometimes react with sin. The example that I was the most aware of was snapping at my husband because I was often misperceiving things in our relationship as unsafe, then I would respond in a sinful way to him. I was actively working to uncover and process through the past events in my life that contributed to my panic, and encountering (mostly on the internet, not in my real-life sessions) a vein of trauma recovery that was just sweeping everything under the rug of trauma response. We are victims, so our responses are just to be expected and we are not responsible.

I was in conflict and even felt a painful sting within listening to the sermon. On the one hand, I was getting excellent help in EMDR therapy with my counselor and finding healing in the process. At the same time, I was aware of secular advice on social media saying that everything is a trauma response, and essentially absolving the survivor of behavior, doing away with sin. I had also been under the influence in the past of unhealthy and unbiblical nouthetic counseling which told me that everything was sin, so PTSD was sinful because I was so fearful and depressed.

All of these things were clashing into one another as I listen to my pastor describe with Scripture the hallmarks of a believer, and at that particular time, I was so aware of my lack of peace and stillness (one of the examples of a trait of a believer), as a result of trauma. I even bounced back and forth in my mind about quitting EMDR therapy, wondering if it was actually biblical or helpful. Suffice it to say that I was experiencing turmoil over this topic. So, I reached out and asked, in the form of a pretty long email, my many questions about this that boiled down to: Where do the need for healing and the need for repentance and sanctification intersect? Were my responses sinful or were they not?

I have returned to his response quite a few times over the last year or so and even used it to help as I walked alongside of others struggling with the same thing in the aftermath of trauma, so I will now summarize it to help get us to a place of understanding multiple things can be true at the same time.

He responded by using an analogy he’d used before in the sermon series. That idea of what makes a dog a dog? It’s its DNA, and that makes it an internal objective reality that a dog is a dog. Just listing external markers is not really accurate because dogs can look all kinds of ways, especially if they’ve been neglected or abused. They might even be unrecognizable, but as time goes on, and they receive care and healing, they start looking more like the dog they are. He related this to my situation. (And this was when I told my husband that our pastor called me a dog. I’m KIDDING!)

So now I’ll relate it to all of us recovering and navigating these tricky and difficult issues. That we are in Christ is an issue of changed DNA. It is an internal, objective reality that God’s Spirit dwells within us and it is just simply true. We may struggle and have some traits that don’t look exactly like a Christ follower because of abuse and hurt. As time goes by and we experience healing and goodness, we will start to look more and more like Christ.

So, there are things that are the result of living in a broken world, like our abuse stories and the aftermath. (This is where the idea of sinners, saints, and sufferers comes in handy!) So, all of these post abuse PTSD and other kinds of struggles are likely also mixed with sin. I’d like to directly quote the email, “Our prayer ought to be for Christ to reveal where sin is, either the cause or maybe a secondary result of our hurts and help us to repent. At the same time, it’s ok to admit the damage that has been caused and the effect it has had on your mind, heart, and life… I think it’s perfectly acceptable and the only sufficient explanation to say BOTH, that you have been abused and have a fight or flight response AND that you can/are sinning against your husband {or whomever}. You can admit it openly to him. You can pray to God for help, healing, and forgiveness for all the same things.”

I know that it’s not popular to go ahead and tell survivors that they also need to repent of sin as they struggle through the pain and trial of recovering from abuse, but unless we can acknowledge that part, I don’t think we can effectively reconstruct our faith, appreciate the gospel as good news for us, or view Christ’s life of obedience correctly in the midst of His experienced trials and his own kinds of trauma. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, and it is a great relief to be able to call upon Him in the middle of our distress. We can freely confess our sins to Him and have a great calm assurance that we are forgiven, and we can also bring the tangled up mess of our post abuse lives without understanding it all, and just lay it down before Him.

For more discussion on confession and assurance, please also listen to my latest podcast episode which talks about the true affirmation, “He has paid fully for my sin.” I am releasing it today instead of waiting for Thursday because I realize that it could be a helpful companion to this post.

Next Friday, I want to take a look at Jesus and the New Testament and see what we can learn about His perfect life of obedience in the face of trial and what some would call trauma.

In two week, I will pick back up with the True Affirmations series with our next section of the Heidelberg Catechism Question 1.

Thanks for listening!

*Trigger warning, especially for those who grew up with me* (It took it out of me to write this!)

Authority Structure

Our church was independent but called itself an independent, fundamental, spirit-filled Baptist church. We were one hundred percent pastor led, and gradually, we ended up with three pastors, with The Wolf as the lead and main teaching pastor, and two others filling specific “offices” of evangelist and prophet. He never really said it explictly while I was in the cult, but I believe The Wolf believed himself to be akin to an apostle, and we believed in continuation of apostolic power today. (More on that later!) Although we had three pastors, we all knew who called the shots. The congregation had no say in anything whatsoever, and had to accept any pastor who was brought in an ordained because we were told God called them and they were anointed. Voting and congregational input was mocked, and churches who had that kind of structure were criticized because the congregation was just against submitting to biblical authority. The congregation was often likened to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and The Wolf was like Moses, having to deal with all our mess. He was the mouthpiece of God in our lives, and everything he said was to be taken as such. Even if he was wrong. God would deal with an anointed man, and our job was just to listen, and stay under his “covering.”

The other two pastors had authority, but not really. Everything really went back up to The Wolf. Eventually, we added some other pastors, but we called them elders. They were lower down in authority. I truly can’t explain any clearer than that because it was weird and unclear. The one thing that always remained clear was that The Wolf was the God-ordained leader, and he was the one calling the shots. The pastors and elders families were also elevated in status. They were treated better and deserved more honor and respect than everyone else. This changed over the years, but eventually resulted in us having to always use their proper titles.

Even pastors’ and elders’ wives were in an upper tier and we were not permitted to just call them by their first name, but must call them “miss so-and-so”) This was especially jarring when my best friend’s husband became a pastor and suddenly, she was not my best friend anymore and I had to call her “Miss so-and-so.”

When I was little I remember my mom called the pastors’ wives the “ladies” and each woman had her lady that she was accountable to. I was only a child witnessing this, and I think initially it was meant as a kind of discipleship, at least on the surface, but like everything else in The Church, it was a way of keeping tabs and reporting back to The Wolf.

This was a divide that God does not make in the church in His Word. This was the upper class and the lower class, and we were the lower class, meant to serve the upper-class. In fact, The Wolf preached against servant leadership explicitly.

This structure shifted over the years, even with The Wolf deciding to demote various pastors and elders over the years because of their behavior that was not loyal enough to him, or for whatever controlling purpose he had. For the most part, though, what I have described here was the way things were structured. Additionally, as the years went on and children grew, the children of pastors were ordained into pastor/elder/deacon offices. They kept it all in the family. The Wolf’s son eventually became a pastor and now is the public facing leader of The Church, however, behind the scenes, The Wolf is still controlling.

Ordination did not include much other than the whim of The Wolf, and a service where the selected men were appointed and prayed over as pastor. Theological education was not viewed as important, and in fact, I grew up hearing that it was what killed good preaching.

Terms

We had our own vocabulary in The Church, and our words might have sounded normal to the outside, but they had meanings that only we understood. I believe the psychological term for this (or for a form of this) is dog whistling. (I’ll leave the deep dive on that tactic to the reader.) In sermons, there were phrases we were taught to always respond to with an emotional amen, or even a particular call and response that only our group knew, or perhaps as a quick way to shame and threaten one of the members of The Church.

I decided to just list the terms and phrases out in no particular order and do my best to define them. They will come up again and again as I write this narrative of my memories in The Church.

• Communication a way of talking about how we were supposed to always be “in communication” which at various times could mean a daily email to the pastor or a pastor’s wife detailing your thoughts and day, or just an arbitrary frequency that no one knew what it was supposed to be until you “hadn’t been in communication” and got in trouble. If we were out of communication it meant we were thinking too much on our own, and that was not allowed. We had to communicate everything. Sometimes, I had to communicate every single thing I would do in a day to The Wolf’s wife, including if I was just going to stop on the way home at the grocery store.

• counsel - asking The Wolf what to do. AKA “getting wisdom” but it eventually stopped being voluntary, and started being mandatory. It used to be for bigger decisions, but then it turned into needing counsel for nearly every decision. Once, I got in trouble because I opened a savings account without asking for counsel.

• submit - shut up and do whatever The Wolf says and don’t ask questions. We must submit to biblical authority if we don’t want bad things to happen to us. God will deal with the authority, but it’s our job to just follow without thinking about it. “We don’t need to understand, but we need to stand under.”

• The Vision - (this is wild WILD I tell you!) The Wolf had a vision. I don’t know if he claims to have had an actual supernatural vision, BUT that is what he called this plan: To have a city within a city and have The Church there, our own hospital, our own grocery store, doctors, lawyer (yours truly), everything a city has, and entire neighborhood of all of us living there. This was really a vision for an isolated community, more of a commune than anything else, and I AM SO THANKFUL this did not work out. From the depths of my soul, I praise God for this.

• The Land- A big piece of land on Johns Island, South Carolina that was purchased for The Vision by a group of men called investors. The first and only thing built on the land was an extravagant home for The Wolf, which he complained about for years as not being good enough. (A house I lived in for years when I was told to move in with The Wolf and his family.)

• Leaving the church - when someone left the church, they were leaving God because they were refusing to be submitted to The Wolf. Since we had to submit completely to him, there was never a good reason to leave the church, so leaving the church was often synonymous with not being saved, and we had to shun anyone who left. We were not permitted to communicate with them at all, unless we had permission, and that was just to tell them to repent and come back.

• spirit of Jezebel - Any woman who questioned things, or even made decisions on her own had the spirit of jezebel. Once, I was told I “had the Spirit of Jezebel deeply intwined in my soul” because I missed an exit on the interstate. It was a control tactic to silence women, especially when a wife would question why her husband was never home, and why The Wolf was requiring so much out of him because he was working on The Vision.

• the need - Words cannot describe the weight of this, but essentially, The Wolf demanded a certain lifestyle that The Church had to supply regardless of how the individual families lived or what the realistic budget of The Church was. The way this was addressed changed over the years, but I remember that there was a shakedown after the offering was counted on Sunday mornings, and the men were called into a meeting until they all coughed up enough money to cover the need. Sometimes, we didn’t have grocery money because of this. We had to cover “the need.”

• heady - anyone who thought too much was heady. It was a sin, and I was always being reproved for my headiness. It was a catch all word that also meant that someone was thinking too much and needed to just “trust” and blindly follow everything.

• covering - this is a lot like the umbrellas of protection concept. We all needed to be covered by our spiritual authority or we were in danger of bad things happening to us. Everyone needed spiritual covering, but women especially needed it. When I first left, I actually didn’t know what to do without this, and thought as a single woman that I was in a particularly bad place and had no place in the church without a man in authority over me.

• the men - It was literally just the men of the church, but the term carried more weight than that. They were the ones that the weight of the burden of “The Need” “The Vision” and everything in between fell on them as providers. This was a way of seeing them as a unit, and they were often addressed in this way. They were heavily abused and used, often working their full time jobs during the day, and then forced to work in the evenings (and sometimes all night) on projects to fund whatever scheme The Wolf had thought up. My dad was gone most of the time during a certain span of my childhood, and my mom was always worried that he would fall asleep while he was out late driving home.

• men’s meetings - The men’s meetings also carry a weight that is hard to describe. My most vivid memories of them were that they were after Wednesday night prayer service and that they would last into the wee hours of the morning, and the men were berated and discouraged into conformity and giving more money.

• restriction - A kind of punishment, like being grounded.

• restitution - another weighty word that carried a depth of shame with it. Any time anyone was inconvenienced or there was a wrong, whether real or perceived, the offending party had to make it up to the other person (usually The Wolf) by doing restitution above and beyond whatever the wrong was. For example, my roommates and I were late for church one Wednesday night and owed restitution to the pastors and their wives for being late. The Wolf made us dress up like clowns and attend church to pay back our lateness and shame us.

• Probation - this was a kind of church discipline. It could be instituted for anything The Wolf determined was a sin worthy of this kind of punishment. A woman gets her hair cut too short? She got put on probation, which meant she was not a full member of the church and was not permitted to attend church fellowships and gatherings outside of the regular church meetings. They would be restored when they met the terms of restoration (or restitution) determined by The Wolf, or just whenever he felt like it. The person on probation was treated as an outsider and shamed.

There are more, but I have to stop for now, and will share more terms and phrases next time. And as a better parting note than all this darkness I just described, I am so grateful for God’s deliverance out of this mess, and for the actual beauty of the real church and real pastors! I’m breathing a sigh of relief that this part of my story is over, but I can’t handle writing about it anymore.

…Until next installment of more terms and phrases!

I want to plainly state what I see happening in the aftermath of so much of our collective trauma awareness as a culture to explain why I feel so strongly that a warning is needed about how we engage with our stories.

The Good

• There is a growing awareness of the issues of abusive pastors and leaders within the church, and knowing the warning signs of abusive leadership.

• The church is also being cleaned up because of the exposure of many false shepherds.

• Survivors can understand and name what happened to them and seek healing.

• We can care for one another in wiser and more trauma informed ways within the church.

• We understand the importance of churches being safe, both in preventing abuse and taking it seriously, and in receiving survivors and caring well for them.

The Bad

• There are wolves in this survivor movement, that want to prey on the vulnerability of the traumatized.

• There is an overuse of words like abuse, trauma, toxic, narcissist, and other terms, and when everything is abuse and trauma, then nothing is.

• We are too preoccupied with safety as the end goal of our faith and life.

• Survivors can tend to find their identity wrapped in a trauma diagnosis, which can lead to other damaging beliefs about themselves and God.

• When survivors are too focused on trauma and the need for safety, they miss out on learning to be resilient and obtain skills and tools to press through difficult or scary things (why seeing a personalized care and qualified counseling and not relying on social media therapy culture is very important!)

• Survivors are tempted to view everything through the lens or worldview as trauma survivor, and this becomes especially dangerous when we approach the text of Scripture.

I realize that I just opened up a big can of worms, and I also plan to take the time to unfold each of the above “bad” points, as I continue these Friday posts, but to start, I want focus on the last point on the list. Trauma is not a good hermeneutic and we need to be very careful that we don’t let our traumatic stories distract us from the greater narrative that is being told in Scripture.

A hermeneutic is simply a method of interpretation. Our trauma does not make a good hermeneutic because the effects of trauma and the unbiblical teachings within “trauma culture” (I don’t know what else to call this for now) pose the risk of making us biased as we approach the text, potentially causing us to miss what the text is saying. The Bible tells us what it is about, and there are a several guiding principles we must use as we read the text if we are to understand it properly, including understanding the original intent of the author, letting scripture interpret scripture, and seeing the overarching story of the grand redemptive narrative of the text. The Bible is telling us one unified story and the Bible is about God.

I would like to invite you to look at Scripture from the perspective God has given us within His Word. Full disclosure, I am coming at this from a confessionally reformed perspective, and so I will be quoting from the Westminster Standards when applicable as we work our way through these ideas in the coming posts. I will quote and leave the scripture proofs in the footnotes and encourage you to pause and spend time studying each one. Additionally, If you are new to the idea of confessions and catechisms, a simple explanation is that the confessions summarize the core doctrine of Scripture can be found here.

Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) 1.1:

I. Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable;^a yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation;^b therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church;^c and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing;^d which maketh the holy Scripture to be most necessary;^e those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased1.^f

I wanted to quote this entire section because it tells us why Scripture is necessary. Essentially, this is saying that what we observe around us that gives us information about certain aspects of God, but is not sufficient for us to have the specific information we need for the knowledge of salvation, so God spoke in the past through many ways (think OT prophets and NT apostles), to reveal Himself and declare His will, that time of God speaking through prophets and apostles is finished and we have all the ways God spoke through them written as The Bible.

WCF 1.2 lists the sixty-six books of the Bible and tell us that they all “are given by inspiration of God, to the rule of faith and life2.”

And finally, The Westminster Larger Catechism Question 5 asks, “What do the Scriptures principally teach? And answers, “The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man3.”

To summarize everything up to this point:

The Scriptures are necessary, given by inspiration of God for faith and life, and teach principally what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.

This is the starting point for us as I take us down this path of what Scripture has to say to us and our trauma stories. The Bible is not meant to be a text that we can take and make it our own to make statements for our particular issues of interest, but a place for us to lay down what we have experienced, and let the truth of Scripture illuminate our hearts and stories by the power of the Holy Spirit. God, the Maker of all, who knows us completely, and knows far better than any finite trauma informed person the effects of trauma on His creation, and nothing can separate us from His love.

I only have one memory that predates my family being a part of The Church. I remember it snowing quite a bit where we lived in Rutherford County, North Carolina. It’s one very short memory, like a clip of a movie, of my dad telling me to be careful not to go into the road because the snow was piled up too high for me. You may or may not believe me because I would have been under 2 years old at the time, wearing a red coat and Tweety Bird mittens. (I still love snow, so maybe that’s why that memory stuck with me!)

After that, all my memories are of living in the Charleston area of South Carolina, and most had to do with or were influenced by The Wolf and The Church. We first moved to Goose Creek, South Carolina from our rural home in North Carolina. I don’t remember anything of that time very specifically until I was about 3 years old and my sister was born. Six weeks after she was born, Hurricane Hugo ripped up the coastline, and we stayed through the storm. I remember that night in bits and pieces, too, because it was so scary! About this time is when I my more consistent memories were beginning to form. I felt the influence of The Wolf in the way my parents disciplined me, and in the way I was required to do certain things well in school because of how The Wolf told my mom that I was “slow” and that if I did not do well he would force her to send me to public school. From a young age performing well in school became a huge part of my beliefs of what it meant to be good and obedient.

The Church was nomadic most of the time. We bounced back and forth between renting office buildings that we used as our own, or borrowing spaces in the National Guard Armory, meeting in other church buildings between their services, setting up in schools, or renting other spaces in shopping centers. We were used to setting up and taking down often for church. We never really had our own space for more than a year or two at a time. And, we were always in a financial crisis, but The Wolf was always well taken care of. (Much more on that later!)

Gradually, every family transitioned to home schooling their children. I can’t say for sure if it was a required, but I think it was for a time. (I’ll have to ask my parents!) The rules were always changing, but for the purposes of my schooling years, everyone was homeschooled, and we considered it to be the only way, so I was homeschooled K-12.

Being homeschooled, being different than everyone else in “the world”, and being a part of our church’s homeschool group, was a big part of my identity as a child. I was taught to fear the outside world and its influence on me. In earlier years, I had some neighborhood friends that I played with during the week, but even that changed and for the most part, I only socialized with my friends from The Church.

I think that many can remember the 90s was a big time for homeschooling and pushing a lot of problematic ideals. When you picture long skirts and big collared shirts, and “Shiny Happy People” you would be correct about us, but only for a time. In The Church our rules were constantly changing. What never changed, though, was that we had to follow whatever rules The Wolf decided to give us, or we would be in danger of discipline.

We took field trips together, did craft days, children’s choir, even had PE class on Friday afternoons. Eventually, once those of us first born children got into the more difficult days of high school, our moms pooled their resources and formed our “Classes” as we called it, and it was like homeschool co-ops you see today, except for they were only for our church people. I loved classes, and excitedly learned Latin, Spanish, and Biology with my friends.

In The Church we did not celebrate holidays with our own families, but we always had to attend the church potlucks. Although at one point, we were not allowed to call them potlucks anymore because luck was a worldly concept, so we pivoted to calling them fellowships. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July, etc… we were always together. Each family had to bring food, and some point, even the menu was dictated to us, with each lady being told even which recipe she could make. As a child, I had fun being with my friends, and I didn’t know any better, but looking back, I realize that we didn’t get the chance to choose what we wanted to do as a family, and there was incredible pressure on our mom especially to cook and perform well for these big fellowships.

Although in my earliest memories, things in The Church were more “normal” compared to how they eventually changed, we were always under The Wolf’s scrutiny and increasingly everything we did had to be run by him. Rules developed with criteria for why we were allowed to miss church, and it was only that we had a fever or were vomiting. We attended Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday nights, plus whatever extra events we had going on, like PE, fellowships, home school classes, “Cooking Club” (aka home economics), literary days, and then just spending time together for dinner, or birthday parties, and everything in between. We lived our lives almost exclusively with this group.

I think that there’s something beautiful about spending time with fellow believers, and having strong community with your own church, but what we had was not natural and free. It was forced, and over time, The Church was exclusive and closed to outsiders. As a child, though, I formed strong bonds with the other children, and we were like siblings, and I am still quite close with some of them to this day. (Once we all got out and were allowed to see each other again!) While our parents were navigating the ever-changing turbulent waters of being members of The Church, we were busy in our childhoods growing up together, and along with traumatizing memories, I also have very sweet memories with friends.

To be continued…

It was middle of October of 2013 and I can remember how I was feeling. My mind was spinning with rapid thoughts, eyes moving quickly, short breaths, and I felt like bursting out of my own skin from head to toe. I was terrified, convinced even, that I was alone and that no one could understand me well enough to help, and nothing was safe. I was triggered. I was in anguish and pain. I felt like I was losing my mind, and I was trying to process my entire life, but I didn’t know how. I was desperate to know the truth of what happened in the cult I just left, and in my own family, but no one could explain it. And, I felt like not only was I voiceless, and no one was listening to me, but that I was also being drowned.

When I first left the cult, I sought refuge in another church that turned out to be spiritually abusive in different ways than how I grew up. I had been trying to get the pastor and his wife to listen to me, and to try to understand the despair I was experiencing. They had me come to their home every other Tuesday, and have sort of counseling sessions in their basement after dinner. I have mixed feelings about those days. They welcomed me into their home when I had no family, and they even helped me leave the cult I grew up in. However, the pastor was ill-equipped to help me, but that didn’t stop him from giving me a book by Jay Adams, and telling me that my depression (the only word I had for it at the time) was sinful and the result of self-focus.

I remember trying to advocate for myself, trying to research and understand that something different was happening than simply sinful self-focus. I brought a list of books about spiritual abuse to the pastor and begged him to read them so he could know what was happening with me, but he didn’t read them. He actually made me promise to stop researching spiritual abuse, and told me instead to read the Jay Adams book about how Scripture was all I needed to heal.1

That is an example of how sometimes, oftentimes, particular types of biblical counseling can go extremely wrong, and be very dangerous.

I’m sharing this because I want you, dear fellow survivors, to know that I understand the kinds of pain that people with good or bad intentions have done by stressing the sufficiency of Scripture and faith in healing from trauma, without having an actual biblical view of suffering, an understanding of the serious effects of trauma, or even what the Bible actually does say to someone after trauma. I want you to know that there is a difference between what they may have said, and what I want to say about the sufficiency of Scripture to speak to and inform your trauma of truth (in addition to whatever professional mental health work you need).

So, back to the bad counseling story, I listened to the pastor, and I did seek comfort in the Word of God, and God did meet me there. However, I did not see nearly complete healing in my symptoms for more than 10 years after finally seeking qualified mental health therapy. I want to stress that although the counsel I received was terrible and dangerous, I did cry out to God in that season, and He met me where I was in His Word, in the book of Job. There, I saw Job’s friends, saying things very similar to what I’d heard recently about my own suffering. I began to wonder if my pastor and his wife were also “miserable comforters” like Job called his friends. I saw hope in those pages, and I believed that “my Redeemer lives,” and God gave me the strength to go on. I saw that what those unwise counselors were telling me was different than what God was saying in Scripture, and eventually it was Scripture that led me to leave that group as well.

That week in October 2013 when I was spiraling in fear and despair, and researching spiritual abuse, I found a helpful quote from a book called, Recovering from Churches that Abuse, by Dr. Ron Enroth. It says,“Spiritual abuse is a kind of abuse that damages the central core of who we are. It leaves us spiritually discouraged and emotionally cut off from the healing love of God.”

That quote helped me put words to what I was experiencing. Spiritual abuse (trauma) distorts our sense of self and our sense of God and who he is. And this is precisely why we need inform our trauma of truth because there, we will learn to take courage and to understand that we are not cut off from God in our times of grief and lament. There’s a danger in our stories of reacting to this kind of so called “biblical” counsel I described earlier by thinking that perhaps Scripture is not sufficient, or that it is too triggering to read, that can cut off the answer to finding a source of true and lasting healing in the depths of God’s Word, which actually is a very safe place for survivors to go.

II Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” All Scriptures are from God. He did not just breathe on or give a little help as men were writing. Scripture is filled with the very words of God he breathed out to them as they wrote. These words are sufficient for everything you need, particularly, learning who God is, and who you are in light of that.

This II Timothy passage was used more like a weapon in the fundamentalist circles I was in, less confidence and comfort in the power of the Word, and more of a threat to be quiet and not ask questions. We had to accept whatever our leader said that it said, and any mental health struggle was demonic or spiritual and a lack of faith. But when we look at the whole Bible, we can find expressions of lament, grief, depression, despair, deep betrayal. We find Jesus, the one alone “who has the words of eternal life” 2. We can see that He experienced deep sufferings and temptations on Earth as a human, so that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” and who endured without sin, so that we can now, “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” 3God’s word is full of beautifully good news for you as a sinner, saint, and sufferer.

This is all I have time for this week, but next Friday, I want to spend some more time looking at how Scripture speaks specifically to us in our trials and suffering, and how we should not let trauma be our hermeneutic for reading Scripture.

Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash

The Wolf knew my parents in his college psychology class as their professor, he officiated their wedding, and became a powerful influence in their lives in the years before my birth. Ultimately, he convinced them to move from our home in North Carolina to the South Carolina Lowcountry to help establish his new church when I was just 18 months old.

I didn’t stand a chance. As an infant, toddler, little girl, teenager, and young woman, I was trusting and naive, and he was conniving and calculated, speaking into my life through his control of my parents in my earliest memories, and then taking a much more direct place in my life as I grew. As I look back, I can see his methodical alienation of children from their parents, so he could have a direct access to us. He knew that we were the most malleable and susceptible. We had no outside experience, and the only life we ever knew was our life there in the cult. We could not understand that what was happening to us and each of our families was not normal, and was, in fact, abuse.

Leaving the church was a phrase that meant much more to us than just not attending on Sundays. To leave the church meant we were turning our back on God because we had turned our back on The Wolf. He always said he wanted us to follow God, but the line between following God and allegiance to The Wolf was blurry. I wanted nothing more than to please God, so I would do my best to follow everything The Wolf said, and I didn’t ever want to leave the church. I did everything I could to keep that from happening.

Although there was someone who meant my harm and meant to exploit and use me since I was born, God was the One writing my story and holding me in His hand for as long as I can remember. As a 4-year-old I understood that I was a sinner, and that I was incapable of stopping sinning because I would try with all my might to stop sinning every day, but I just kept on sinning. I wanted so badly to be able to tell my dad, when he got home from work, that I had perfectly obeyed all day, but I never could. I knew, even at 4, that I wanted, as we used to say, “ask Jesus into my heart,” and one night, after a particularly sinful day, I prayed with my dad to be saved.1

Just a few years after that, somewhere around 7 years old, I remember sitting cross-legged on a carpet in our Children’s Church class, looking up at a flannel graph and hearing my teacher explain what Jesus did on the cross for me. It was enormously weighty and breathtaking, and I remember grasping (to a degree) and internalizing the gravity of what Jesus went through. It went deeper than I had words for then, and even now, I still struggle to articulate it except to say that the Holy Spirit was working and that day deepened my childish understanding of who Jesus was and what He did. I sat quietly and speechless, obviously lost in serious thought, so later my Children’s Church teacher singled me out from the others to be sure I was ok. I didn’t know how to explain to her that I was in awe of what Jesus did, and I knew it was my salvation, so I think I just told her that I was thinking about Jesus dying on the cross.

As precious and clear as the Gospel was at first, it was nearly immediately muddied by a focus on self and accomplishments. I was not discipled to look to Christ, or to apply the Gospel daily, but definitely felt that I had to do the hard work of being a Christian. I don’t remember learning to ask God for help when I struggled, but to just try harder. I remember a lot of fear and shame. These kinds of teachings only became worse and worse as The Wolf continued exercise more and more control and practiced how to devour the flock while seeming to be a caring and selfless person.

Even in my earliest memories of him, before things changed and morphed into the hellish nightmare they eventually became, I remember being afraid around him, almost a reverential awe. He demanded respect and attention, and was the kind of person people wanted, even needed approval from. One time when I was very young, perhaps around 3, he prayed over me in a church service. He had a glass vial of anointing oil, that he kept up at a small, round table at the front of the church. He touched the oil to my head. I remember feeling my head burn where he had touched me. I remember the tone of his voice praying, and that I was frightened. I don’t remember the words, but I remember the power he seemed to have and that he had a very direct access to God that no one else did. I think what was so scary to me, too, was that things were happening to me outside of my control, and he must see things about me that I could never see, and he only continued to capitalize on that idea over the years until I fully relied on him to tell me everything. Over time, I thought he could look at me and know what I was thinking because over the years, he would stand and “prophesy” about people, and regardless of if it was true, people would have to take it and admit it because he was anointed, and you cannot touch God’s anointed, and no one could call him a liar.

The Wolf holds a PhD in professional counseling from Purdue University, specializing in Marriage and Family Counseling. He has an MA in Psychology from Western Kentucky University, Concentrating in Learning Theory and Psychobiology. His BS in Chemistry was from Clemson University, with a focus in biochemistry. He is smart. And I think he knew what he was doing to us all along. He used his high level of education on how people work, and how to help them, and rather than using that knowledge for helping the hurting, he preyed upon his own flock. He utilized tactics of mind control, and what now seems to me, particular kinds of therapeutic techniques without our knowledge or consent. He used us, alternatively exploiting and condemning us for our strengths, depending on what he needed. And for good measure, he shamed us for what he perceived as our weaknesses and sins. He continues to use all these tactics to cruelly abuse the flock, and has only become more and more open about it with time.

To be continued…

In keeping with my last post, I have been wanting to write on some of the ways that I was able to heal from my PTSD/C-PTSD diagnosis after trauma. I am writing from my own observations and experiences, and this is not meant to be specific advice, but more like “big sister energy.” I think that it matters the way we view our stories and the resulting struggles after trauma, and I have learned over the last couple of years that I need to be careful with how I engage with both my and others’ stories.

The next several posts in this particular series will be unfolding that topic, by telling my story, and relating the lessons I learned through my time in trauma therapy. I also realize that not everyone is in a safe place yet where abuse has stopped, or yet in a place to face and begin to heal their trauma, which is why I am trying to leave a little breadcrumb trail for when you’re ready and able. If you are not ready, please do not feel any shame. Healing takes as long as it takes, it is not linear, and God is with you where you are. Trauma and the resulting struggles are not your fault, so please read this as one speaking from a place of gentleness and compassion.

Last spring, I broke my right elbow and tore my MCL and PCL in my left knee, interrupting and redirecting most of our year. I spent around 9 months in difficult and painful physical therapy for my elbow and knee, and God used this experience to help me understand what He was also healing within me regarding my own story of trauma.

One afternoon, I cried driving home from physical therapy, and it wasn’t because it had been that painful! It was because my physical therapist said something that went way past my broken elbow and right into the difficulty of working through all the internal healing I was simultaneously doing in EMDR therapy. He explained the swelling and stiffening of my muscles and ligaments around my elbow kept further damage from being done to the bones. It helped my elbow survive the traumatic event. However, it no longer served me to have my elbow stuck in nearly a 45 degree angle, even though it felt safe, and was what I had grown accustomed to, not using my arm, and protecting it. It hurt to try to extend it, and that felt scary, similar to the pain that caused the damage in the first place. But, my arm was literally stuck and weak, and it was time to remove the (obnoxious) brace, to engage in the productive discomfort of stretching and strengthening, and to bring my elbow out of survival mode. Just like me. I cried because I realized that the ways I had been engaging with my story and my trauma felt safe, but survival mode no longer was serving me.

Author and licensed therapist, Aundi Kolber, talks about different types of strengths in her book, Strong Like Water, and describes the survival kind of strength it takes to make it through traumatic events and times as situational strength. It keeps us alive. It makes us survivors, and that is something to celebrate! It has an important role to play in our lives and stories, but we were never meant to stay in that kind of strength. It’s easy and almost inevitable that without outside help and a lot of hard work, that we survivors will just live in that kind of survival mode, but that mode, like my stuck elbow, is not where you or I were mean to stay after our abuse and trauma. Aundi conceptualizes strength as a flow, like water changing from gas, to solid, to a rushing river or a gently flowing stream. So, we too, can move from situational strength, the essential kind of strength God equipped our bodies with to survive our circumstances without completely losing our minds, to transitional strength, as we begin the healing process, to integrated strength, the place we were meant to live and flourish.

One of the ways that I think we can unhelpfully engage our stories is by activating our trauma responses in an unnecessary way and creating a cycle that keeps us in fight or flight mode, keeping us in the kind of situational strength we must move out of so we are able to heal. I see this happening in multiple ways, and it’s mostly what I’ve observed in the online world, in spaces where we are all recounting our stories to one another over and over. We survivors are craving someone to validate and understand what happened to us, so we find people who understand, and I think that validation and being believed is very important, even crucial, to finding healing, and at the very least, establishing safe and healthy relationships with people as we are working through healing. But, I do think we can overdo even a good thing. Let me explain. (As the youths say, “Let her cook!”)

Early on, my therapist pointed out to me that I kept wanting to tell her my story, and she challenged me on that, and she explained why. I honestly was pretty angry at her and thought she was wrong at first, but I do credit her now with teaching me how to get myself into a calm enough place long enough that I could get out of fight or flight. For me recounting my story re-traumatized me because I still had PTSD and was reliving the experience in real time, so my body was feeling like the past events were still happening in the present. This means that I had many symptoms that would manifest themselves in things like hypervigilance, panic, and even lashing out at times. I hated it, but it was a cycle I didn’t know I was in until it was too late.

I also was immersing myself in listening to other people’s stories of abuse, and that was also re-traumatizing me. I was in survivor groups online and the venting and sharing was also triggering me. All of this had me in a constant state of fight or flight, and I was not functioning well. I was hypervigilant in safe {enough} places with safe and loving people. If I am being totally honest, feeling panic was sort of a comfort to me because if I let my guard down, something bad could happen again, and all the survivor groups I was in and all the news I was consuming were confirming that. Abuse was happening everywhere, and nowhere was safe, and if I were to just live the normal life that I longed for, then maybe all the bad things would sneak back in.

It was scary for me to step away from constantly ingesting information about abuse, current and past news, and to let my body calm down. It was also scary to stop trying to process my story on my own, like perhaps, I would lose my story somehow, or that I would suddenly be overtaken by abuse if I wasn’t always watching out. But I began to panic less, and that meant that more of my rational part of my brain was on, and I could hear and process truth better. I could also notice my symptoms before I was overcome by them, and this helped me deescalate more often, and stay grounded in the moment.

In addition to removing myself from online spaces and being inundated with abuse stories, or retelling or talking about my own as much (like I said, there is a place for it), I learned to practice several things during this time, and I want to share two of them with you now:

1. Containment

2. Self compassion

Containment, simply put, was me learning how to be able to have a place to keep everything (my trauma stories) until I could come back to therapy to work on them. There are lots of ways to visualize this, but the only thing that worked for me was to place them into God’s hands each week after a session. (I know He was already in total control of my life, but I felt like I could just tell God that I was leaving these things for now, and actively doing this practice helped me step away from constant, unnecessary processing. I say unnecessary because things will naturally come up all the time, but it was best, at least it was for me, to not actively engage all the time.) I was not squishing down my emotions or memories, but I was acknowledging them, and learning that not everything was as urgent as it felt, and I could put them away most of the time until I was ready to deal with them again.

Self-compassion sounds a little “woo-woo” to people who grew up the way I did, being told that liking yourself was not a good idea and it was Christian to basically hate yourself. But what I learned was that I was trying to use the same tactics my abuser did on myself when I began to feel an emotion I didn’t want to feel or “shouldn’t feel.” Like, for example when I would start panicking at church for no apparent reason, I used to try to force myself out of that emotion, rather than being curious about it, looking at it objectively and then addressing it. Then, once I was able to locate which emotion it was and the likely why, I would speak truth to myself with compassion. Often, I would put my hand on my heart (This worked for me, and actually you can calm your nervous system down with hands on your heart exercises. Here’s a link to a podcast that discusses this and other helpful things.) The reason I was able to become so mindful ( I know this also can be a woo woo word, but it’s a real thing!) was because I had withdrawn from the constant trauma cycle, and began to notice and name my emotions. Then, I could speak to them. One Sunday, early on as I was learning this, I was beginning to panic at church, and I remember putting my hand on my heart and calming down, rather than internally yelling at myself, “Why are you feeling anxious! You’re safe! Stop it!” I acknowledged the emotion, and I gently reminded myself of the safety of the place I was in, of God’s work in my life, His love for me, and the rising panic broke into soft, and open tearful release. My body understood it was safe. I was leaving situational strength. I could be in the moment at church, and I could participate in the service with a clear mind, and it was a lot easier to receive God’s Word and to feel safe in church in this state.

I think these practices, or something similar to them, are crucial to healing from our trauma and rebuilding our faith because something else trauma does is alter our core beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. An element of spiritual abuse or abuse within a faith environment is that these events can alter our core beliefs about God, and if we are constantly in fight or flight, it makes it so much more difficult to access the Truth and internalize it, as a replacement for lies. I have said before that I believe it was both the EMDR therapy and the “ordinary means” that helped me heal from my post trauma diagnosis. I’ll discuss more of this in my next installment on how to address our trauma and inform our trauma of truth, rather than letting the false core beliefs learned to keep us stuck next week!

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Links I mentioned:

Heidelberg Catechism

Song—I am Not My Own

Thanks for listening!

Contact:

Reconstructingyourfaith@gmail.com