Tag: Trauma

C-PTSD, Childhood, Crime, Dad, Family, Fear, isolation, Parents, Poverty, Stress, Trauma

This is Five

Deb M

Part 6

During kindergarten and first grade, we were lucky enough to live only two buildings away from the elementary school. It was a great place to live because I could walk to school easily and it created a cozy environment. Our block was mostly middle-class homes mixed with apartments. About a block and a half from our building was a tiny store where I bought ice cream and popsicles. I learned to jump rope and ride a two-wheeler when we lived there. When everyone had gone home for the day and the parking lot was empty I would go and hit tennis balls off the school building. I got pretty good at returning the ball with my huge adult man-size tennis racquet. Even at the age of 5, I was already a free-range kid. I played by myself and most of the milestones of that age like getting the chickenpox or learning to ride a two-wheeler I experienced alone. Jerome was my one friend. He lived next door and would often come over to play in the backyard. He was kind of an odd duck and he was bullied at school. We got along ok even though he would never let me play Spock when we played Star Trek. Spock was a boy and I was a girl so that was a no go for Jerome. I always admired Spock because to me he seemed to be the most intelligent. He is still my favorite. 

My parents bought me a red bicycle. It came with training wheels and I kept asking my dad to put them on for me. Of course he did not do it and one day I got tired of waiting. I drug my bike out to the driveway/parking lot of our building determined to teach myself to ride. Because it was the middle of a work day there were no cars in the lot, thank goodness for small blessings. I hopped on my bike and attempted to balance and move the pedals at the same time. I spent the whole afternoon trying to bike up and down the long driveway. I fell often and my pants now had holes in the knees. By the end of the day both of my knees were skinned and blood ran down my chins and into my socks but on the other hand I was riding my bike! I was so excited to show my mom and dad when they returned home at the end of the day. My mom was really upset when she saw my knees and her and my father started to argue about how he was supposed to put the training wheels on my bike. On this day their fighting could not dampen my spirits. I could ride my bike and I learned all by myself. For many years, really up until young adulthood, riding my bike was an escape for me. I loved the speed of it all and how far it could take me from home and my everyday hell.

Before I learned to ride my bike I wanted a Big Wheel! Other kids had them and I was glued to the commercial every time it came on the television. My parents eventually bought me one, but not really. They purchased a knock off version that was actually better made and more sturdy but it was just not the same. It was rusty brown in color and had real tires. It left me longing for the red, yellow, and blue plastic that the other kids had. Fitting in was hard. I just wanted what the other kids in my neighborhood had. 

My father is Mexican and that created some hurdles. We did not know any other Mexicans and no one really looked like me. Poverty and religion did nothing to help. We were dirt poor for much of the time we lived there. The cracks in my parent’s marriage were already starting to show. I have always wondered why at times we had no money but then at other times we seemed to be doing pretty well. I can remember times when we would go out to dinner on Friday nights and my mother would take crafting classes. Neither of my parents could really manage money but the swings in our fortune seems to swing too wildly for money management to be the only cause. 

My father came home one day with a brand new red Firebird with black leather seats. I have no idea how he was able to afford this car. When he first brought it home my mother was not pleased but eventually she made peace with it. Once in a while, my mother would drive his car when we would travel to see my grandparents. She learned to love the car and received many speeding tickets while driving it. I know there were times living in that apartment when we had no food, so I’m not sure where the money came from. After infidelity, money was always the hot topic of my parents’ disagreements. We were often one bad week away from having our lights turned off or having no food. At this point, my dad was still mostly living with us at home but before long that would all change. My father was a bit like a feral cat. He wanted to be able to come and go with the assurance that he would be welcomed back with open arms when he needed a place to come home to. Even in his happiest relationships he cheated. He couldn’t bear to live the sedate life of a middle class married man. He wanted to mix it up with different people. He craved novelty and despised feeling caged. I think he had a deep hole inside of him that he could never fill. He was always seeking women and praise and no matter how much he received it was never enough. He was always on the make and I’m sure his red Firebird helped him feel more confident when out looking for women. I have no doubt that my father loved my mother, I’m sure he loved me too in his own twisted way, but he loved himself more. He felt entitled to be unfaithful and resented being questioned. He led two lives, one where he was married and had a child and then another where he was single and had no responsibilities. When he was feeling beat up by the world he would come crawling home to my mother but when he was feeling high on life we were on our own. 

After he and my mother split I took her place. I would see him when he was between women and then not when he was dating someone. I grew up resenting this and always seeing myself as second place in his affections. I felt disposable. I have always believed that one of the biggest issues between myself and parents is the fact that I could really see them from an early age. I think I made them uneasy. They never hid anything from me so I couldn’t help but see it all. I tried to hide from what I saw. I wanted to believe the best about them. I needed to be able to trust them. It was easy to see that they did not understand each other. At this point I still wanted them to stay together, but it would not be long before that opinion changed. 

Several major things happened while we lived on School Rd. First, a man broke into my bedroom while I was asleep and my dad had to chase him off.  The man managed to get one whole leg and the top portion of his body through my window. I can still remember my dad standing in the doorway of my room holding a flashlight and yelling. He is wearing a white T-shirt and boxers. The wind was slightly blowing and the curtains on my window moved in the breeze. By the light of the flashlight, I could see a figure with one leg dangling over my windowsill. Before I could really register what was happening he was gone. My parents called the police and I remember the cops trying to get prints off my windowsill. They also looked for footprints outside but it was raining and so nothing could really be found. This event made my sleep issues even worse. I think it also fed into my mother’s fears and may have triggered her worries about locked doors and windows. It gave my father something to brag about. My dad was a golden gloves fighter in his youth and he always saw himself as tough. Now he could tell people how he scared this guy away and saved his little girl. Experiencing this made it even harder to be a kid home alone. There were periods when I had a sitter and then periods when I did not. Just like with the money issues I have no real grasp as to what caused the lack of childcare. 

I started kindergarten when we lived on School Rd. As usual, something that should have been focused on me was focused on my parent’s drama. My mother couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take off work to take me. When I think of my own little ones going to kindergarten it fills me with bittersweet memories. As a mom, you are both proud and sad. I think I cried with all four of mine making sure to do it once I was in the car so they couldn’t see. I do not remember it being much of a big deal for my parents. My father had his own business and so it wasn’t hard for him to take me. I was so excited because he told me we were going to go out to breakfast beforehand! This was a big deal! I was such a daddy’s girl. He took me downtown to eat which was kinda far from my school and when we arrived at the restaurant my dad introduced me to a woman. She sat down and had breakfast with us and much to my surprise, she and my dad had a long conversation in a language I did not understand. I knew my father could speak Spanish but I had no idea he could speak French. So what I thought was going to be a special first day of school breakfast with my dad became the day I realized he was cheating on my mom. At this age I had heard them fight about his infidelity but I did not really understand what it all meant. I did not have the language for it but I knew something was off. After breakfast he took me to school very early, I was the first one there, and I had to sit there with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel some part of me thought I had done something wrong, somehow participated in his wrong simply by being there. After school, my mom and I talked about the highlights of the day. I finally broached the subject with my mom. She was mortified and more than that she was furious. I told her everything I knew, which wasn’t much. I did know the woman’s name, it was Jennifer and she was a French professor. Of course, my father tried to pass her off as just a friend but my mother wasn’t buying it. After that things were never the same, she always suspected him and he always gave her a reason to. Jennifer had an apartment on the lake and my father took me to visit with her. She was nice enough but I just couldn’t feel comfortable around her because I knew the pain my mother was going through. My mother would cry and tell me that men are dogs who cannot control themselves. It made it hard to love my father. I felt guilty for wanting to see and spend time with him. She would call him a “dirty Mexican” which made me feel bad about the part of me that was Mexican. I was old enough now to understand that my father and I were different from most of the people around us. Over time my mother would become more and more unstable when the topic of my father’s infidelity came up. Once she took me with her when she went out looking for him. At this time they both worked at the same place and mother suspected my father was carrying on with a co-worker. My mother drove over to her house with me in tow. Like Karen from Goodfellas, my mother called to my father’s mistress through the door. She banged on the apartment door and finally, the woman answered. She only opened the door a crack but that was all we needed to see my father sitting in a chair in his boxers. My mother did not have the foresight to leave me in the car so I bore witness to her calling to my father and him shaking his head refusing to come to the door. I don’t remember what happened after this. I have since learned that this often happens around traumatic memory. You remember the event but maybe not what happened just before or after. This is because when in a state of trauma your brain doesn’t make a memory in the same fashion as it does when just experiencing life normally. I only imagine how humiliated my mother must have been. When she was in that state of upset she would drive like a lunatic all the while crying and screaming. I can only imagine how scared I was. To this day I know exactly where that apartment building is and which unit she lived in. It remains a landmark representing pain and the ghosts of the past. 

The last major thing I can recall from School Rd is hunger. I don’t think my father was around much at this point. He had a key and would come and go as he pleased. Home or not he couldn’t really be relied on for financial help. When I was in grade school we had the option to walk home during our lunch hour and have our lunch at home. I never made this choice unless I had no other option. It was a warm spring day when I dashed home over my school lunch break. Feeling for the key around my neck and using all of my strength to turn the deadbolt. I didn’t have much time and so I raced to the kitchen and found the peanut butter and a butter knife. I didn’t bother to sit down but instead scooped as much peanut butter as I could onto my knife. Grinning, I licked a huge chunk off and felt the emptiness of my stomach subside. I continued scraping and scooping the almost bare jar until it was time to go back to school. Hunger was with me for much of my childhood and the peanut butter was all we had on that day. No bread, no jelly, and no milk to wash it down. At this age I really loved peanut butter so at least I really enjoyed the one food we had available. There was some shame with this act. It felt wrong to only be eating this one thing for lunch and it felt wrong to be licking it off the butter knife. We had learned all about a balanced diet at school and I knew this wasn’t going to cut it.  One day our next-door neighbor asked me why I was home in the middle of the day. When I told her I had nothing to take for lunch she took pity on us. She met my mother at the door later with groceries. My mother smiled tightly and said thank you. Once we were safely inside our unit she let me have it. I learned that day that I was never allowed to talk about being hungry or anything else with other adults. My mother warned me about this thing called social services and how they could take me away if I complained too much. She also talked about God and how we should always look to him and not the government for help. Very early on she instilled in me a fear, fear of other people, fear of the government, fear of the rapture, fear of God, and lastly she taught me to fear her. There were other times when we had enough food and I would end up in conflicts mostly with my father. It seemed to me I had no control over what I put in my body. Much of the time there was very little to choose from in our house. It wasn’t very often that my mother would let me pick things from the store because we were always on a budget. This meant there wasn’t much variety to choose from at home and then my father had very strong ideas about food. One night after sitting at the table taking too long to eat my peas my father decided he would force-feed me. I was about five years old. He held my mouth open and made me eat all of the peas on my plate. I was out of control sobbing and almost immediately ran to the bathroom and threw up all of my dinner including the peas. This involuntary action earned me a spanking. From then on I almost never felt good about food, either because we didn’t have enough or because I felt judged for what I did and didn’t like. My father liked to preach to me about eating and exercise. Every choice I made equaled me being good or bad, the stakes were always so high in my family. Both my parents were very judgemental but my father was more judgemental about food. I am much more relaxed about food now but I feel like it has taken me a lifetime to overcome my anxieties around food. I cannot bring myself to put a pea into my mouth. 

As I grew older I questioned why God did not provide for us and then I would remember that to suffer was to be like Christ so I should be happy to have this struggle. When I would ask people at church about why bad things happened to us they would always say so that we can help others later on. They would remind me that God has a plan for all of us and his ways are not our ways. My child mind was too little to understand the ways of the almighty God. Through all of this, I developed the idea that money was bad and wanting it was worse. There were higher things to be concerned about. Focus on heaven and maybe you will forget being hungry or being bullied for being poor. I had one horrible tormentor who was worse than the rest. One day she and her lackey discovered me riding my bike after school. I was wearing a new off brand puffer vest my mother had purchased for me. It was ugly. Lime green and yellow. It wasn’t a cool color like the other kids had, but my mother had tried and so I wore it. My bully stepped out in front of my bike so I would have to stop or hit her. When I stopped she spit all over my vest. Then she and her lackey laughed and made fun of me as I cried. I biked home to clean up my vest. I felt terrible because my mother was home and she would see the mess. But yeah, focus on heaven and forget being worried about your off-brand clothes and no food. 

“And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20. 

I was not moving any mountains which meant I did not even have faith the size of a mustard seed. My mind was failing me. I could not believe hard enough to save my family and I couldn’t control my doubts. Doubting God was a big no-no and I was failing big time in that department. At this point, I never put any blame on God but took all of the blame on myself. I must be doing something wrong if I could only figure out what it is! I wish that I understood why I took on so many adult ideas when I was so little. I suspect it was because I was never allowed to be a child and my parents always spoke to me like I was an adult. Oversharing caused me to consider things only an adult should worry about. 

Around age five is when many of my worries and fears really kicked into high gear. I worried about my keys and setting my alarm and on top of that, I wasn’t really sleeping. I don’t think I was ready for this responsibility so it took a lot out of my 5-year-old brain. I would lay awake at night thinking about the rapture and the ticking of the clock would remind me of the beginning of “A Thief In The Night.” As a side note, to this day a ticking clock can trigger me. I will start to feel like I cannot catch my breath and my fight or flight reflex will kick in. 

I wore two keys around my neck. One for the outside apartment building door and one for our unit lock. I can remember struggling hard at times to turn the key in the lock and I remember asking adults in the complex to help me if they were passing by. Not the safest plan. If my mother was running late for some reason I would worry. I would often get to school very early because I was worried about being late. Before leaving the house I would check my lunch box multiple times to be sure my lunch was in there. Through all of this I learned to be very responsible and also a little neurotic. When scary things happened, no matter how big or small, there was usually no adult around to help. 

Sometimes when my parents fought it was just screaming and yelling. My mother would get in my father’s face and he would shut down. Often it felt like violence could break out at any moment.  I know pushing and shoving happened between them. My mother would make some pretty scary threats and I believed she was capable of carrying them out. Now I am not saying that my dad was innocent. He was awful with money and his source of income was not always the most reliable. He left my mother to pay all of the bills and carry all of the stress of working and raising me. Add onto that all of the cheating and it is easy to understand why she would get upset. She would cry and rage and I would be in charge of comforting her and helping her to cope. This was a big job for a little girl. This job would often leave my stomach in knots. So much to be concerned about. Money, cheating, my mother’s mental health and then just regular kids stuff. I was made fun of throughout my young childhood. I never had the “right” clothing. My mother would shop for me at Prange Way and fashion was not the consideration. Her concern was getting the most bang for her buck. I begged for Garanimals when I was really small but I don’t recall her buying them often. She once bought me these knock off Nike’s and for the rest of the school year this one boy named Mike called me “Polish Nike’s.” My mother tried to get me what I wanted but it was always a little off and so I was often the butt of the joke at school. My mother was a very hard worker and I don’t fault her for not having money, at least not when I was young. Her work ethic was stellar, it was just her mothering that needed some work. 

One fight I remember very clearly involved my mother raging at my father after finding evidence of his cheating in their car. I crouched in the lowest part of the hall closet and watched through the barely cracked door. She was pushing and shoving him and he was raising his arms to defend himself. Her words rang out through our apartment, “If you ever do this again I will string you like sausage from the trees!” At the time I couldn’t really understand what her words meant but once I became old enough to understand, her words chilled me to the bone. She even went so far as to grab a sharp kitchen knife. As she brandished it at him my father looked like a little boy. He never forgave her for those moments and would bring it up often as an excuse for why he left her. Hiding in the closet I cried and wished that they could figure out how to get along. In those moments I tried to make myself as small as possible, something I still do today when I’m confronted with very angry outbursts. They both seemed unaware of how their fights impacted me. They never attempted to hide any disagreements from me. My father would always leave and tell me to watch over mom. When I would go off to spend time with my father my mother would tell me to love him and be kind. No matter what they did to each other and no matter how they spoke about each other to me, at the end of it all would come the admonition to love the other parent. They both reminded me it was my duty to honor my father and my mother. It was like they could not love each other properly so they used me as a surrogate. My father knew my mother needed watching over so he tasked me with that. She knew he needed acceptance and love, so she tasked me with that. No thought was really given to what I needed. When he wasn’t staying with us he would arrange to see me. My mother would dress me up and I would wait by our big picture window for his car to pull up. Sometimes he wouldn’t show. He would later tell me they had been fighting and he did not want to risk my mother coming out and making a scene. This left me standing at the window for hours. Each hour washing more and more of my hope away. I needed a break from her and I missed him so much. She never pulled me away from the window. I remember one day he was supposed to come to get me at lunchtime and I waited for him by the window until my mother forced me into bed. I was in the second grade. 

I could never understand how my father could leave me with her. He always claimed to be afraid of her and the violence she threatened but then felt fine not only leaving me with her but tasking me with caring for her. As I got older I would challenge him on this topic and he would always say he never believed she would hurt me, but how could he be so sure? In my father’s narrative everything was my mother’s fault. He cheated because she was mean and he left because she was violent. He couldn’t come around to help with finances because he did not want to fight with her. In other words, in his mind he bore no responsibility. I suspect my father was fighting demons no one knew about. He never wanted to talk about his past and when he did his stories never added up. I always felt like he was hiding something from me. They were just really bad for each other. While I was still in elementary school they both tried to commit suicide on the same day. I stayed with a family friend and then my aunt until my mother was able to leave the hospital. It was on that day I decided I just wanted them as far away from each other as possible. 

C-PTSD, Calvary Gospel Church, Childhood, Compassion, Pastor John Grant, Poverty, Sexual Abuse, Trauma, United Pentecostal Church

The High Price Of Turning A Blind Eye

Deb M

 

I have often wondered why so many people seem to turn a blind eye when they see something that doesn’t seem right regarding a child. Maybe they did not see anything but they heard a rumor and maybe they thought it was none of their business. As a child abuse survivor, I’m here to tell you that when you make the choice to turn a blind eye you’re abandoning that child. You might feel that it isn’t your concern or that the child’s parents should be the ones deciding what to do. If you only take one thing away from reading my blog I’d like you to take away that you may be the only thing standing between that child and a lifetime of trauma.

In isolated churches where the outside world is not welcome, children have no one to turn to but those inside of their little community. If the community is more interested in protecting its reputation than protecting the life of the child than that child really has no chance. Not only will they deal with the trauma of whatever abuse happens to them but they may deal with the trauma of not being believed or of feeling unworthy of protection. It may take a lot of courage to speak up and you may have to endure criticism but in the end, is it ever wrong to try to protect or save a child?

If any of the adults around me had stopped to think about how odd it was that a 30ish-year-old man was spending so much time with me they might have asked some questions. The heat of that attention may have scared Steve off from abusing me, he may have felt he was being watched. Had one of the women who knew about this come to me just to check in and see if everything was ok maybe that would have given me a chance to open up, or again it may have scared Steve off. I told him pretty much everything about what was going on in my life. The time he was spending with me was so out there in the open for anyone who was paying attention to see. If you were one of the people who went out after church and shared a meal then you knew he was driving me around. If you were part of his group of friends you knew he was taking me on road trips with him. These adults could have saved me from some of my trauma.

When Steve Dahl was abusing me our church averaged around 250-300 depending on the Sunday. Steve played his trumpet in every service. He and his wife sat in the second row. He was popular and well liked. A man like that doesn’t just disappear from a church and nobody notices he is gone. A woman doesn’t have her husband suddenly leave and no one know what is going on. Her sister was suddenly gone too, so there is another person gone. Pastor Grant would have said something to the elders. The women of the church would have had some idea what was going on with Debbie, Steve’s wife, it would have been out there amongst the congregation. That is a lot of adults choosing to turn a blind eye. Choosing to say nothing. As a child, I could feel everyone stepping back from me like I had some disease they might catch. I knew they knew. I felt judged and unworthy of love. No one reached out to me in love, no one checked in on me, this added to my trauma. I am sure they assumed that pastor Grant would take care of it but maybe they should have checked to be sure. If love and compassion were present then I feel that backing away from me wouldn’t have happened. How do you back away from a wounded child? If they really thought I was a seductive child or whatever they are trying to say now, why didn’t that drive them to ask questions? Even if they had chosen to reach out to me at this point they could have saved me some trauma. If love and therapy had been applied here things could have turned out very differently for me.

In all of the intervening years running right up to the present if any of the adults who heard rumors or flat out knew about what happened had come to me and checked in they could have reduced my trauma.

C-PTSD encompasses trauma coming from many different sources over a long period of time. Food insecurity and poverty featured heavily during my childhood. This was no secret. I can remember one day when my mother took me for a school uniform fitting and another woman who was there commented on how I was so thin I looked like I could just blow away in the wind. On another occasion, I worked very hard to be on the honor roll at school and the reward was to go on a field trip out of town to a museum. I was sooo excited! There was only one problem, my shoes developed a sudden hole in the bottom and I was too embarrassed to go. We had no money for another pair of shoes so my mother called Roy and asked if he could help. He asked another student if she could loan me a pair of shoes for the day. I was mortified. I wore the shoes and the young woman who loaned them to me made sure everyone knew what had happened. Then I gave them back. Well, that solved the issue for that one day, but what would have really helped was if someone had offered to buy me some shoes. Maybe Roy who worked in the school and was my youth leader, or maybe this girl’s parents who were elders at the time. Instead they turned a blind eye. There were adults who knew we did not have electricity from time to time. One person, Ida Cox helped my mother. I remember it was such a big deal and made my life so much easier for a time. The other times we had no electricity no one helped. I know people dropped me off to that sad dark house after church. There were never any lights on. I would open the door and this dark heavy oppression would hit me like a wall of despair. Sometimes my mother would be sitting on the porch outside to greet me and other times the house would be silent. I would feel the way to the stairs leading up to my bedroom and then feel for the oil lamp to give me some light. Didn’t these adults wonder why they never saw a light come on? On one occasion a young adult man dropped me off after a service and I invited him in. My mom and stepdad were not there for some reason. I had nothing to offer him but Koolaid and at one point he asked me about the cooler on the floor. I explained to him that we have no power and that is where we kept our food. I even opened it up briefly to show him the contents. He smiled tightly and soon was out the door. I felt embarrassed and immediately wished I had not invited him in. Another blind eye.

I grew up feeling like everyone could see my pain and no one would help me. I grew up feeling unworthy, sometimes hungry, sometimes lonely, always unloved. This is the garden my trauma grew out of. The harvest of my childhood is an adulthood full of unraveling. First you have to figure out what is wrong with you. You can sense early on in adulthood that you are not like most people. Then you start the long journey of trying to heal. You try dozens of things until you land on some that help. Most help a little but there is no magic pill. Mine is a life of lost potential. I was too busy struggling to survive to do what most people do in their young adulthood. I had no one to help me figure out how to go to college. I had no desire to live with either of my parents and so I moved out at age 17 and got my own apartment. I worked hard to survive but there was no time to nurture myself or think about how to fix what was broken. When you think about turning a blind eye think of me and maybe reconsider. Would one adult be able to solve all of my childhood issues? Probably not, but if I could have entered adulthood with one less layer to my trauma it would have made a huge difference to me.

I believe that churches give too much power to pastors. They often feel that the pastor knows about things and is taking care of them. In legalistic churches, they often blame the victim and stand in judgement instead of applying love and compassion. They may gain salvation but they lose their humanity. The people at Calvary Gospel certainly seem to have lost their heart. How can they side with the abuser over and over again? They pray for the abuser and the victim becomes the problem. This may be why some people feel it is better to turn a blind eye. If they side with the wounded it will not be long before they are also wounded. It is selfish self-preservation. If you are in a group that causes you to silent that inner voice that tells you something is off then I advise you to run! Don’t let an organization like Calvary Gospel take away your humanity and care for children, the poor, elderly, and suffering. Don’t turn a blind eye, say something, reach out and offer your help. If you do this you can hold onto your heart and maybe help someone else to heal theirs.

 

 

 

Age 11

 

As I look at the photos above all I can think is that she deserved better from all of the adults in her life.

D

 

 

Calvary Gospel Church, Childhood, Compassion, Pastor John Grant, Sexual Abuse, Sin, Survivors, Trauma, United Pentecostal Church

Some Things Never Change

Deb M

As new things develop and as I work through my personal trauma I have to ask where is the bottom? Where is the bottom when it comes to Calvary Gospel’s crimes against its congregation. I watched their Sunday morning service after they learned of Glen Uselmann’s charges and I was surprised. I shouldn’t be but I find that they never cease to amaze me. As they sink lower and lower I wonder how did they get this way? During their service, there was no mention of healing for the abused but there was mention of healing for Glenn. They did not display humbleness or any sense of self-reflection. What they did display was a sense of being persecuted. Pastor Roy Grant once again did not speak to his congregation. I have watched many regular services now and he has not spoken at any of them. I have to wonder where is his leadership? The speaker mentioned the torture of the saints and those dealing with depression but no mention was made of the trauma survivors. It is important to keep in mind that we survivors are the children of their congregation. They raised us and their lack of compassion towards our pain is nothing short of stunning. They continue to direct all of their love and compassion towards the ones who committed crimes against their children. When they speak out against myself and others they often say that we mischaracterize their views on women. I do not understand how they can say that when their views are so obvious and on full display. As girls, we were made to believe that we were second class citizens in the kingdom of God. Not just second class citizens but walking sin that needed to be covered up, hidden, and we needed to be ever vigilant lest we caused our brother to fall. Whatever they actually believed the message that was delivered was that men bear no responsibility for their actions but little girls should somehow be capable to make or break a man in the lust department. Little girls were told not to bring shame on the church by reporting, not to ruin a grown man’s life, and to take responsibility for the whole situation. Little girls often bore the stain of whatever happened while the men would go on to make their mark in the ministry. If women are truly the weaker vessel then why are they given so much responsibility to carry, especially young girls? It is also important to point out that we are talking about children. Grown men should not be lusting after children. A girl of 11 or 12 is a child. Most of the rest of society can see this why can’t they? They act so put upon, so persecuted, and they seem to have no awareness of their responsibility. As they dig in their heels they risk falling deeper into the pit they have created for themselves.

D

Calvary Gospel Church, PTSD, Support, Survivors, Trauma, United Pentecostal Church

I Can’t Believe I Have To Say This

Deb M

I can’t believe I have to say this but…here it goes…I don’t care what anyone thinks about me writing this blog. If you don’t like what I am writing about you can always feel free to scroll on by and just ignore it. I know that there are some out there who have grown up within the same church as I did who did not suffer the same level of trauma. Maybe you are whiter or had better parents, or just got lucky. No one can say why some people end up with PTSD and others do not. It could be that I am a more sensitive person than you, or it could be that I took it all more seriously. That being said, I am who I am and I have PTSD and that means that whether it was 30 or 40 years ago doesn’t really matter to me because my brain reacts like it is happening right now. I can’t just let that go because my mind will not allow it. Don’t think for one minute that I have not spent my whole adult life trying to leave it all behind.

I write for me. I write to give my child self a voice. I write to drag the sins of the past out into the light. I write in hope that others will be less afraid to step forward. I write to create change. I desire that one day those who oppress the young through fear and intimidation will fall and other more compassionate leaders will take their place. I write to give a voice to all those who are too afraid to speak, those who came before and after me for whom the stakes are too high. Yes, a lot of time has passed and it might make some more comfortable if I just shut up about it but I can’t do that. I cannot be quiet as long as other children are at risk. Just because I have made it out doesn’t remove my responsibility to let the world know that there are still others left behind. Who is speaking for the kids of color at CGC right now? Who is speaking for the girls being abused right now? I have zero reasons to believe that because most of the daily work has passed from father to son that everything is magically better. Those adults who knew about my abuse and turned a blind eye are still in leadership roles and I’m not just talking about the Grants. I will continue to speak up about this until CGC has dissolved or the UPCI has stepped in and removed the current leadership. This isn’t just about the distant past, it is about now. If you felt you had to run away from that place then you know something is wrong there. Not everyone can speak up for those kids who are still there, I understand that, all I ask is that you not throw stones at me as I try to.

Childhood, EMDR, Rapture, Self Esteem, Sin, Trauma, Uncategorized

Celebrating Life

Deb M

The last month has been a struggle. It started with me struggling to live with fibromyalgia followed by a pretty bad fall down my basement stairs. In the midst of this, I started EMDR which has brought up some emotional stuff. In case you do not know what EMDR is here is a link https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/ When I went to my first session I really wasn’t sure what to think. I wasn’t able to access much emotion even when talking about the hardest subjects. I tend to dissociate when I talk about my childhood. It is a skill I learned long ago and as dysfunctional as it is I am grateful for it. It has enabled me to survive. The therapist warned me that I might have dreams, even nightmares, and I did for about five days.

All of my dreams were different but the same. In each dream, I was faced with having made a mistake. Someone was angry with me and I was frantically trying to fix it. I was left feeling inadequate, unlovable, and unworthy. These dreams led me to think about my childhood and where all of these feelings come from.

“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Psalms 51:5

From a very young age, I was taught about heaven and hell. I believed that I was disgusting to God because of my sin and that he was only willing to accept me because of Jesus. My religious family saw childhood infractions not as normal childish behavior but as sin. My mother would often remind me that God is always watching and hell would be waiting for me when I didn’t want to clean my room. After all, it was right there in the ten commandments. Honor your father and your mother. By not cleaning my room I was not honoring her and therefore sinning. All sin led to one place.

One thing I am being treated for using EMDR is my insomnia. I have had it my whole life and no amount of sleeping pills seems to fix it. My doctor suggested trying to get to the root causes through EMDR. The echos of my childhood come to me at night when I close my eyes and try to rest. I’m hypervigilant meaning I can’t relax enough to fall asleep and once asleep I awaken easily. I have long since given up my fear of hell and the rapture but because my formative years were spent in fear of these things my hind/lizard brain still thinks there is a threat. This is part of why I have PTSD and all these years later I am held captive by the demons of my childhood.

“For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3

I was a fearful child. I was afraid of dying and having some unrepented sin, I was scared of God. I was afraid of missing the rapture and being left to fend for myself. I was afraid of my parents. Both of them spanked me with a belt and my mother was emotionally and mentally abusive. I was afraid of my pastor and other adults in the church.

I took the fact that I could not pray us out of poverty and I couldn’t seem to fix my parent’s marriage or my mother’s depression through prayer as rejection. I believed that if I prayed God would hear and answer, I was taught that God was the one person I could count on to meet all my needs. When all I heard was silence I wondered why? I processed it to mean that I was an exception. God would meet people’s needs, I really believed that, just not mine. Was I so broken and bad that God couldn’t hear me? I became obsessive about repenting to be sure I had no sin hanging around when it came time to pray. Maybe it was the amount of time praying that counted? Maybe I just had not prayed enough? One thing was for sure within my calculations a truth emerged, whatever the problem was it was my fault.

My parents used me as a weapon in their war against each other. I tried to love them both equally and I prayed for them both regularly. My mother believed that divorce was a sin but she got one anyway so I worried about her and her relationship with God. I witnessed her wrestle with God for money, money for rent and food, and I listened at the door when she prayed. She would cry and speak in tongues for hours. I felt shut out from her when she retreated to her room and I felt bad for her when I heard her cries from behind the door. She was trying to reach God and apparently it wasn’t working because she kept going back and each night her tears would flow, they were not tears of joy.

Over all of those years I learned to be tough. I learned to shelf my needs in order to care for both of my parents. Neither of them were all that mentally stable and so I managed their sadness and feelings of rejection while feeling rejected myself. I kept my sadness to myself. My parents were not equipped for empathy. Everything was about them and what was going on in their lives, I was merely there, like furniture and furniture doesn’t have needs.

The church did not care about my needs. They cared about keeping me in line and filling me with fear so I would never leave or think for myself. I never found acceptance there, I only found judgement. It seemed to me that I was too poor, too brown and too me to ever be ok in their eyes. The fact that I was sexually assaulted by Steve Dahl only made me more broken and defective in their eyes. I felt beyond repair, at times I still do.

Over time I let go of the beliefs of the church and my family. It was all about survival. Most of the time I am ok, at least on the surface. I am proud of what I have made of my life. If I scratch beneath the surface, which is what EMDR has done, I can see the still open wounds of my childhood. This makes me kind of angry. I have worked so hard to move past all of this and it makes me so angry to be confronted with how it all still hurts and haunts me. My reality is that I still feel unloveable. No matter how much love I receive from family and friends I still feel unloveable. I can never trust that love is real or that it will stick around. I am still very guarded even after all of the work I have done. I still struggle with feeling inadequate no matter how many successes I have. No amount of praise will allow me to feel my work or art is good enough and no amount of success takes away the sting of feeling not good enough. All of this leads to the unshakable feelings of unworthiness that cover me like a gray cloud. No amount of working on my self esteem seems to heal the wounds of being told I was bad from birth, born from a sinful woman, and only saveable through the grace of a God I could not trust.

This brings me to now. This morning I have been thinking about all of this and trying to process before my next therapy session. In the midst of all this, I need to remember to celebrate my life now as it is. I have to remember to love myself and to celebrate all of my successes even if they are not perfect. In many ways I am proud of my life and what I have overcome. I believe I am a good person and worthy of love and acceptance, even if my hindbrain hasn’t gotten the memo. I’m proud of the family I have raised and I have to try to remember to allow myself to be warmed by their love. For now, my struggle continues and for today I’m choosing to celebrate life even with the ghosts lingering in the shadows.

“I was born in a thunderstorm
I grew up overnight
I played alone
I played on my own
I survived
Hey
I wanted everything I never had
Like the love that comes with light
I wore envy and I hated that
But I survived
I had a one-way ticket to a place where all the demons go
Where the wind don’t change
And nothing in the ground can ever grow
No hope, just lies
And you’re taught to cry into your pillow
But I survived
I’m still breathing, I’m still breathing
I’m still breathing, I’m still breathing
I’m alive
I’m alive
I’m alive
I’m alive…”
Sia

 

2020, C-PTSD, Childhood, Depression, Physical Symptoms, Sexual Abuse, Stress, Survivors, Trauma

Trauma and Illness

Deb M

Happy 2020! If you are new to my blog I encourage you to start at the beginning even though there is a lot of content to get through. You will understand my story better if you start at the first post. This year I suspect the content of this blog might shift a little. I want to focus a bit more on the after-effects of trauma and how it impacts people long term. I know that it continues to affect me and many others I have contact with.

About a month ago I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and possibly another autoimmune disorder. There is a lot going on with my health, way more than I have the time to get into here. I firmly believe that my illness has a lot to do with the trauma I suffered in the past. There is science to back this up. Women are much more likely to suffer from fibro and those who have been through childhood trauma are even more likely. There seems to be a real connection between fibro and childhood sexual abuse. Even more so there is a connection between childhood trauma and autoimmune disease in general. I find this to be a fascinating topic. Many survivors I know suffer from depression and anxiety due to their past abuse and many folks with autoimmune disorders also suffer from mental illness.

I think the physical burdens carried by abuse survivors speaks to how hard or impossible it may be to “just let it go.” We are often told to forgive and forget but when your body is still experiencing things decades later it can be hard to just pretend like nothing ever happened.

If you are a survivor, have you suffered from an illness that you feel is connected to your past experiences?

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-links-adult-fibromyalgia-childhood-sexual.html

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/chronic-pain-and-childhood-trauma-2018033012768

 

Calvary Gospel Church, Childhood, Rapture, Salvation, Sexual Abuse, Shame, Stress, Trauma, United Pentecostal Church

Set Point Stress

Deb M

Maverick and I going for a walk in the snow. This is one of the things that helps me cope with stress, especially in the winter.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking and not writing. There comes a point when you have expressed all of the surface junk and everything underneath seems so much harder to put into words. I am at a point in my life, 49 years old when things are not moving as fast for me as they were when my kids were little. I have a bit more time to breathe and time to reflect on things that I want to unravel. One of these things is stress.

I cannot remember a time in my life when I wasn’t stressed. Stressed about my parent’s marriage, school, money, food, church, and god. Some might say that stress is a normal part of life and I agree with that to a point. Being stressed shouldn’t be your set point and for all of my life, it has been my normal. My first teacher about stress was my mother. She was always stressed and for good reason. Money was tight, her jobs were stress-inducing, her marriage was a disaster, and she was always afraid of missing the rapture. Along with that came other things like untreated Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She and my dad were always overly concerned about being late and so they created a child who is always early and never not stressed about time. Before we could leave the house my mother would have to check all of the nobs on the stove to be sure they were turned off and then check the door multiple times to be sure it was locked. Sometimes she would have to tour the rooms of the house to be sure all of the lights were off. She taught me to always check the backseat of the car for a masher even if all of the doors had been locked while we were away because…you never know. You never know became a big part of my life.

My experiences with the church and the UPC specifically only added to my stress response. I never felt good enough and always worried about my salvation and along with that came all of the end-time theology. The church was well acquainted with “You never know” and so they reinforced that message. You never know the day or the hour when Jesus might return. You never know you might have some unrepented sin hiding in there. You never know what book, movie or music might be a doorway for Satan to get into your heart. All of this made me one stressed-out kid and that in turn led me to be a stressed-out adult.

As you probably know we lay down these patterns as kids. Our brains and nervous systems are being formed and habits are laid down before we can even comprehend what is happening to us. So even after becoming an adult and being in a place of being able to make my own choices about what I believe my default is to be stressed. It’s funny how and when things hit us, it just hit me today that I’ve always been this way to the point of having ulcers when I was in grade school. I have always had what my grandmother would call a “nervous temperament.” So some of it is a natural disposition and a lot of it is learned. The whole time I was growing up and surrounded by religious adults I never felt the peace of god or grace. I felt like my mother, teachers, youth leaders, and others were always wagging their fingers at me saying be careful. Starting really young, “Oh be careful little eyes what you see, for the father up above is looking down with love.” Hmmm kind of a weird song, be careful because he is watching but “with love.” I learned the hard way after my interactions with Steve Dahl that I couldn’t trust myself or my body. My body could really get me into trouble simply by existing. This caused enormous stress and made me wish I could disappear. I started to feel like all men could be dangerous, also stress-inducing because well half the population were men. Along with checking the backseat, my mother would check closets and under the bed when we returned home from being out. She was checking for those dangerous men.

So what do you do when you realize your default is stress? One thing that brings me some relief is moving my body. I like to hike, go for dog walks, get to the gym, and do yoga. I enjoy dancing when I get the chance! I try to remind myself to breathe and I enjoy a hot bath from time to time. These are all coping mechanisms, what I am seeking to do is move my set point and that is not an easy task. There was a time when this would have been an impossible task. Before I started to give voice to my trauma and really deal with it I couldn’t have even approached this work but now I feel like maybe I can start. I am going to begin the process by just trying to move the needle a little bit. Rome wasn’t built in a day and so I’m going to try not to stress myself about stress. One simple thing I’ve been doing is trying to change my self-talk. When I get up in the morning instead of thinking, “I have to do all of this stuff today”, I try to say “I get to do all of this stuff today.” I remind myself that so much of my stress is self-generated and that I can cut myself some slack. I will probably post about this more after I have been working on it longer.

Does my experience sound like yours?

D

C-PTSD, Depression, Family, Fear, isolation, Rapture, Shame, Trauma, Uncategorized, United Pentecostal Church

The Process of Leaving and Dealing With Trauma

Deb M

When I speak with survivors one topic comes up over and over again. The people in their lives who love them cannot understand why they continue to suffer from trauma and pain from the past. Friends, co-workers, and people they interact with online often seem to want to give them the same advice. They want to offer you a quick fix and often that fix comes with a warning about not forgiving or holding onto negativity for too long. What they don’t realize is that the process for working through trauma can take a lifetime. Forgiving and “moving on” is not going to resolve the trauma responses coming from the survivor’s body. It can seem like someone has moved on but if you’re not inside their head and their body you can’t really understand. Triggers can make it hard to not think about things and can effect the body in some very real ways.

When first leaving an abusive group you’re probably in survivor mode. You’re trying to figure out how to get away and then how to live without the community you may have been in since birth. People who have known you all your life might shun you or feel the need to warn you about hell and the coming end times. You may lose family and will most certainly lose friends in the process. Often you end up feeling much more alone than you could have ever imagined. You may not have the social skills needed to maneuver in the new world you find yourself apart of and you may lack job skills or be poorly educated. Add to this a fear of hell and the rapture and you can see why just getting out and acclimating to the world can be a very tall order. Once you’re out you may find yourself dealing with depression, anxiety, insomnia, and loneliness. I consider this to be phase one of three phases.

When I started phase one I was a teenager. I went from a very insular community out into a big world that I was not ready for. When I left the church no one came looking for me. I struggled through the realization that they didn’t care. I always suspected that but when it became a reality it hit me hard. I went to public school for a year and found I had nothing to talk to my peers about. When I was in the church I felt weird like I did not fit in and then when I went into public school I felt the same way. Everyone was planning for their future. I thought I had good grades and could have gotten into college but I had no one to help me navigate that journey. Neither of my parents attended college. By this time my mother was already pretty sick and preoccupied with raising my bother and dealing with her abusive husband. My father’s attitude was that if I had a husband I did not need an education. He felt the same way about driving which meant I did not learn to drive until I was much older. I discovered that I had missed many of the milestones that my peers had experienced and would continue to miss them because I had no way to know what was normal and how to get those experiences for myself. Over time I came to realize that my Christian school had supplied me with a subpar education. If I had someone to help me navigate the gaps I could have taken classes to fill in what was missing, the issue is I did not know what I did not know. I worked in restaurants for a long time and got a little apartment for myself. I did what I had to to survive and tried to tell myself that I had time and everything would be ok. I was always afraid of a wrathful god. When I cut my hair and pierced my ears there was this moment where I was just waiting for lightening to strike. This new world was both exciting and scary.

The next phase comes when you finally feel free from the group and you try to convince yourself that you can live without them and just get on with things. Many people I speak to can be stuck in this place for decades. They convince themselves they are doing great and have just left it all behind. Reality is usually much different. Sometimes during this period addictions will show up as a coping mechanism. Many survivors try to fill their lives with activities, family and work in an attempt to forget about the trauma, but the unresolved trauma is still there like a ticking time bomb. During this time if you talk about your trauma or pain people will often slap you on the back and say something like, “But you’re away from them now so life must be good!” This is phase two.

I left my abusive group and then jumped right into another one. I hear that is not uncommon. I only stayed in that group for a couple of years before leaving. During this phase, I reveled in my freedom and filled my life with having children and experiencing as much as I could after a life of real restriction. The pain of my past never went away. It was always lurking in the background with it’s best friend fear. I tried to listen to what pop psychology told me. I tried to release the past and I tried to forgive. I tried to get on with my new life. Now I’m not saying those are bad ideas, all I’m saying is that they are a very simple answer for an extremely complex problem. They did nothing to address my C-PTSD and in the end, I just ended up feeling more broken because I couldn’t just get over it. Over time I got more and more sick. I have always had insomnia but as I’ve aged it has become much more constant. The underlying stress and anxiety brewing within me caused me to have severe stomach issues that I am still trying to heal. I also have asthma which I do not think came from the trauma but it is well documented that mental health has a big role to play in how severe asthmatic symptoms are. My body was trying to send me messages and I just kept turning the music up louder and trying to convince myself I was ok.

Phase three is what I like to call the “wake up” phase. Sometimes it happens suddenly and sometimes in little things that add up to a creeping realization. By this time the addictions are at a breaking point or maybe you just don’t sleep anymore. However it displays, you reach a point where you can no longer ignore the toll the unresolved trauma has put on your body. Things will pop into your head that you just can’t shake and you can no longer make excuses for. I feel people often reach this stage when they are in midlife and things slow down a little. They have age and experience which causes them to view the world differently. They are fully adults now and are in a better position to judge where they came from. This is usually a crisis breaking point. Illusions fall away and the past you have been hiding from is waiting there for you.

My phase three went on for a very long time. Over the years the creeping realizations would make it hard for me to ignore what happened in the past. When my oldest child reached the age I was when I was molested I realized how little she was. I could see how sweet and innocent she was and I had a bit of a crisis. These things would happen from time to time over the years. As I matured I could see clearly the past decisions that the adults made around me during my childhood as monsterous and cruel. For a long time I would make excuses for them and try to find ways to not face up to how bad things really were. Once I started writing this blog I started to really wake up. It felt like blindfold after blindfold was ripped from my eyes forcing me to look at the trauma I suffered and get real with myself about the repercussions of it. This can be really hard, when you get to the point where you can’t look away. You can no longer deny the truth in front of you or make excuses for people’s bad choices. It forces you to change the way you think and can really change your life in profound ways. Some people lose what remaining family they have, some people just realize the depth of what was done to them in childhood. With all of that comes fresh waves of grief, anger, anxiety, fear, and so on.

Once you can see the trauma you suffered clearly then you have to get to work on healing yourself and figuring out how to live in your new reality. This is where I am right now. I left the UPC when I was 16, I’m now 49, that’s 33 years to get to this point. I am one of those people who is always working on myself, I’m introspective and I’m always seeking self improvement and it still took me 33 years. This is not a quick process and I suspect I will be healing from it forever. I am ok with that and I hope that you can be too. One of the hardest things is when the people you love or just the people you want to like you seem annoyed that “you’re still dealing with that?” They question why you can’t just forget and be happy. If you love me or even just like me some the best thing you can do for me is accept me where I’m at. Understand that this isn’t something that is just going to go away. It is something I’m working on all the time. Sit with me when I’m sad and don’t try to fix it, just let me know you’re there. Take me out for coffee and listen even if you’ve heard it a million times. Lastly try to remember that I’m doing my best.

 

Book, Childhood, Family, Rapture, Trauma, United Pentecostal Church

The Uncomfortable Confessions of a Preacher’s Kid

Deb M

Yesterday I finally finished Ronna Russell’s memoir! I posted a review on Goodreads.

“This book was not an easy read. I grew up in a UPC church as well and at times it all hits too close to home. The author is so brave in her telling of her story! This is a wonderful read for anyone who is interested in learning more about the Christian denominations that exist on the fringe. The author’s vulnerability allows us into a world that many people never see filled with rapture anxiety, purity culture, and the pressure to be good enough. Beyond the church and the damage, it caused is a story of hope, self-acceptance, and self-love. She touches on religion, family, love, lost love, and finding and accepting oneself. I’m grateful she shared her happy ending because it gives hope to all of us raised in that atmosphere. I can’t wait to read what she writes next!”

 

I love memoir’s and this one is even more special because I can relate to it so strongly. It is not often that I have the opportunity to read about another woman’s experience within the UPC. When I talk with other survivors their stories always share common threads. For many, the fear of the rapture and hell is very real and then there is the sense of never measuring up. Normal sexual milestones tend to be suppressed and twisted leaving women feeling wrong and dirty. Secrets are everywhere and there is a knowing that comes with that. They are only secrets because they are not openly expressed but that is not the same as no one knowing or suspecting.

Ronna’s story isn’t just about the bad times it is also about hope, determination, and self-discovery. I owe her a special thanks because she has been an encouragement to me with my own writing. Women supporting women!

D

Books, Compassion, Sexual Abuse, Trauma

Learning About Trauma Responses

Deb M

I’m finally getting around to reading “The Body Keeps the Score.” I think I glanced through this book at some point but this time I’m really digging in. At first, it was harder than anticipated because of how it made me feel. I feel sicker and more broken than I did before I started. I did not know it was possible to feel more broken so that was a big shock! Now that I have settled in and I’ve had time to sit with the material I’m starting to feel more compassion for myself. Reading this book has shown me some of the reasons why I am the way I am. I feel like it has given me permission to forgive myself for how my life has unfolded.

Back a few years ago I read “Emotional Freedom” by Judith Orloff. I consider her book to be one of those life-changing books. Reading it truly changed the way I moved within the world. It helped me to disengage from the voices of my past and distinguish between my truth and the truth that was handed to me by my parents and other authority figures. I feel like reading “The Body Keeps the Score” is helping to continue the work I started with “Emotional Freedom.”

What books have you read to help you deal with spiritual/sexual abuse and trauma?

D