Thirteen Years

An anniversary

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:

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

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.

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

Photo by Thomas Vimare on Unsplash

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.

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1. In case you haven’t noticed, the footnotes are here for all of my scattered asides instead of sticking them in parentheses! Anyway, this is the first year, that I can remember, when I wasn’t even thinking about the anniversary, which I think is a huge marker of healing, and I do celebrate that! Most, if not all, other years, I would be thinking about it for weeks.

2. Praise God for what therapy taught me, for His healing and sanctifying work in my heart, and for a safe church that I call home.

3. My abuser’s name was John. I think it’s time for me to use it.

4. I lived with John and his family in dorm style housing with a handful of other young women, for quite a number of years. I plan to go into this part of my story more in the future.

5. Please know that I am not downplaying the need for trauma informed therapy, but the internet is not a good therapist, and there’s a culture that has formed around that I have noticed keeps people wrapped up in their trauma as an identity, and it steals away resilience and the deep work of healing.

6. KJV calls Job’s friends this, and I love it.