So here’s my life story in six words:

“Hurricanes swirl inside a rosy teacup.”

In September I went to see my therapist and all I could talk about was that I was so happy and content. I was happy that I had been honest and brave. I felt peaceful because I was taking time every day to be alone and to ask myself what I felt, needed, and wanted. I felt so connected with myself. I felt  satisfied in teaching my kids and enjoying them. I was (at least briefly) in a groove with staying on top of the details and routine of life.

And now. My seasons seem to change much faster than the seasons of the year. I still feel deeply contented in teaching my kids at home. That feels like something that I’m meant to do, that’s right for them and right for me. I’m actually still keeping up more or less with daily life. Yet I am anxious and depressed. I want to hide from everyone. I have been feeling the beginnings of panic rising up when it comes to being with people. I feel that I need to listen to that, but then again, I am not looking to head down the road to agoraphobia. I feel a frantic desire to get out of here, to go back to America…and then I remember that I would take myself with me. I feel trapped by my location, trapped by my religion, trapped by my (unnamed) profession. And trapped by being myself.

I have stopped spending time alone checking in with myself. I’m not even sure why, because I loved doing it and was grateful for it every day. I feel so lost, and I don’t know my own mind and heart. Am I rejecting my faith, or am I going through a dark night of the soul? When I want to change parts of my life, to get out and away, am I contemplating authentic, life-giving changes, or am I running away? When I cry out to God, I catch myself because I don’t know if I’m praying out of pure habit or out of faith that runs deeper than all of my doubts. How can I even tell? I don’t even know what questions to ask myself. Sometimes I really wish someone could hear me and tell me what it all means, what is truly going on beneath all of this turmoil. Of course, wishing that, I am smiling wryly to myself and wondering how I would respond if someone did actually tell me that they knew what all this was about.

The truth is, I am not ok with being at this place. It feels like torture. I have not allowed myself to rest in not knowing what I believe, in not knowing where or what I want to be. I do not feel safe without certainty. I feel very open and vulnerable, and not just vulnerable, but…unacceptable. I’m looking for the word for what I feel that is making me so anxious, and I guess that’s it. I don’t feel that I can accept myself where I am, and I worry that I am unacceptable to God and to people of faith in this place of feeling unravelled, young, afraid, uncertain, and perhaps rebellious.

Naturally, my next question is what do I do about that? I think being at peace with where I am would not only be a lot more livable, but would help me make progress too. I don’t know how to do that. Suggestions welcome.

I’ve been offline for a number of weeks, and one would think that I would have a lot to write about, but I’m not sure that I do. In some ways, I think that’s a good sign…that instead of the jumble of thoughts and feelings rushing every which way, my insides have become quite a bit calmer and more focused. (I’ve also been really busy!) But I do have a little more about my journey to share.

I took a big step recently. Minus personal details, which I’m trying to keep out of this, it may be hard to explain. Faith, spirituality, and (dare I say) religion are a big part of my life. I feel like I have  built everything on those foundations. So when I find those parts of my life shaking, crumbling, and changing, there is not much about my life that is undisturbed. There has been so much shaking that I have been seriously thinking about whether I can even stay a Christian with integrity (or whether I want to!) It is freeing to allow myself to be that real, but it is a terrifying thought. In the last six months or so, my reaction to being in this place has ranged from fear that I am going to hell, to wondering if my friends and family would still love me if I wasn’t an “insider” anymore, to trying desperately to gain some sense of spiritual safety or solid ground, wondering what changes I would have to make in my life to feel like I had the freedom to find answers, and all intermingled with a sense that as much as this process hurts like hell, I still feel that my overall trajectory is healthy, good, and exactly what I want. 

As one might imagine, being honest about how I feel with people whose relationships and opinions I care about is a very frightening thing. I had to do some of that this summer though. Telling important people in my life that I am having serious questions about my faith felt a lot like letting people down, betraying them, and becoming an outsider (read “bad person”).  I did live through it, though, and despite my tears over the pain of it, I was really proud of myself for having the courage to be honest.

It was a step. I’m trying to celebrate each step I take. I am happy to be making even small moves toward greater authenticity.

I am terrified of letting the little one out. I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think she went away because she couldn’t be there for what was happening…I think she went away because it was too terrifying for me to have her there. Maybe it’s the same thing. I don’t know. But I don’t feel like I split her off to keep her safe. It feels more like I am her enemy. Like I split her off so that I could survive.  How could I do that to her? But I can’t think about who I was as a child without hating myself.

I think I knew that there was no way I could please my mother if my little girl was there. She has desires and needs and feelings and is human. I couldn’t please my mother and be human. So I sent her away. I don’t know when. I don’t think there ever was a “me before abuse”. Even when I picture being born I feel fear and the need to be protected from my mother.

But now that I want her back, if I can…I’m still terrified. I mean really, really scared. I’m so scared to allow her back. I both desperately want her and am terribly scared that I won’t be ok if I have her. I’ve survived this long by staying in control, by only letting my humanity out in carefully measured amounts, if at all. What will happen to me if I have to let go of that control.

I am reading When You’re Ready: Am woman’s healing from childhood physical and sexual abuse by her mother, by Kathy Evert and Inie Bijkerk. I connect more to Kathy’s story than to most anything else I have read about abuse. She got to the point in her therapy process where her little girl started expressing sexuality. The little girl is demanding love and affection from the therapist, and then feeling sexual feelings, and it’s freaking out the grown-up Kathy. I am so there with those feelings. It’s exactly what I’m afraid of–my little one demanding things and totally humiliating me, especially if it’s related to sexuality, but about many other things too. I’ve always been so terrified of humiliation. And now I think my little one wants to do it to me. How can I treat her with acceptance? Kathy did it; she kept at it even though it was painful and humiliating, and she hated it. I don’t know if I have the strength for that or who would help me. I think it would take some extreme security measures for me to feel safe to let her out.

I want to add that my little one was not safe with my mom, but my mom was always trying to get to her. It was forceful and invasive, emotionally, and put up all the defenses I could figure out to keep her out. Not that it really worked.

When I started therapy, my counselor wanted to do EMDR. We tried a few times. It was a really painful experience. It felt like the same kind of emotional rape that I experienced with my mom, because I didn’t feel safe letting the little girl out, so it was a battle–feeling that I should, was supposed to, but she was not going to come out when I felt so unsafe. That is the kind of battle that I have been having internally most of my life. It’s incredibly painful. If I’m gonna do this, I have to find a way to do it more gently.

I have a little one in me who doesn’t seem to have words. Whenever I crack open the door to the place where she is, I feel a hurricane of rage and grief with no words or pictures attached. I gag as if I’m going to be sick. I cry, but I don’t know what I’m crying about. I can’t take it for long, then I shut the door again and it goes away.

Sometimes I think I can hear her, and sometimes I think I can’t. Yesterday I thought she spoke to me. She said, “Why can’t you pay more attention to how I feel, and worry less about figuring out what happened?” When I want her to talk and tell me what all this stuff is about, though, she won’t.

A few years ago I started having a picture of me, and another me in a garden. The other me looked completely lifeless, laying on the ground, looking dead. I couldn’t get her to respond, no matter what. I didn’t know what to do. Everytime I come back to that scene, she’s just as lifeless. I’m scared that I’ve lost her, that she’s dead, that she was killed years and years ago. I’ve acted like she is. I’ve spent so much of my life not allowing desires, opinions, thoughts…or beating down those things in myself because they are too dangerous. I remember myself as a child and teen and I hate that I just accepted pain, abuse, heavy weights and expectations and ridiculous sense of “law” and guilt and shame…no argument, no rebellion, no questioning, no fight…as if I were dead. Where was my life, my ability to be a person?!

In the last couple of years I feel more like something (someone?) in me has come awake. I am finally able to see things as if I am outside of the oppression, instead of under it and thinking it is normal and just the way life is. I’ve started trying to listen to and trust what’s really in my heart, and to act on it, trying to speak what I feel sometimes, even when it is scary. And I’m having glimpses of my actual childhood feelings sometimes. Like sometimes I remember the normal places of my life, like schools or church, and I can feel the heavy sense of guilt and shame. Everywhere I went, it was there.  I never think there’s anything that dramatic in my childhood…but remembering how I used to feel is almost too much to handle. I just glimpse it every once in a while.

These feelings of waking up make me think that maybe my little one is alive after all. I’m really struggling to reach her. Have been for a few years now. I think I always try to reach her on my terms, though, and with myself in control. I’m terrified of letting her have control. Now I’m thinking I need to be the big one in this relationship and let myself deal with the pain and fear by letting her show me what she felt and share it with me without trying to control it. I’m not even sure I know how to do that. But I want to.

I’ve been running away from the healing process lately.  I’ve been avoiding dealing with things. I feel something wrong/bad/guilty if I think about coming to look at the abuse survivor’s forum I’m part of.  I’ve been keeping busy with kids and housework and whatnot, and going hard…distracting myself pretty effectively but feeling very uneasy underneath.

I finally got still yesterday. I feel that place where there is something dirty even deeper down than the memories I’ve dealt with so far. My feeling is that it’s still about my mom, but I don’t know. It’s the feeling that always tells me I’ve done something horrible and it frightens me so much. Is it just the emotion of what I already know? Or is it something else? I actually don’t feel that frightened of it right now. I want to know what it is and face it.

Getting still and feeling that was pretty low key yesterday. But I feel really depressed today. Feels like the life is sucked out of me, and I want to cry, but nothing has touched that place that allows me to cry yet. It really hurts, and I don’t even really know why.

Something touched a place near a memory recently. I read someone’s blog post about having been abused by women. It made me feel something…familiar…and it didn’t seem like my mom. Close, but no cigar. Haven’t hit the memories yet. I’m trying to be patient. I wish there was more I could do.

Is it unfair to fear that the church reflects who God is? And if God is so different from what the church so often reflects…is it unreasonable to wonder if the gospel can really be true, if it’s “working” so poorly among its followers? I think about the cruelty that some in the church exhibit toward those who are different from what the church thinks they should be. I think of the abuse I suffered from people who are sincere Christians, really trying to follow Jesus…not evil hypocrites, just really hurting people who think that they wouldn’t be like “the world” because they are Christians…but guess what? They are. I think of how many injustices the church turns a blind eye toward (and I include myself in this failure), because “just the gospel message is enough.” We don’t have to really help people, except for spiritually and intellectually. I think of what a good face the church puts on, and how hard it is to be honest and vulnerable with struggles and pain and failures.

When I think about all that, I think two things. I feel angry at Christians and the church. And I hope that God’s grace is big enough that he can include/have mercy on even followers of Jesus that damage others so badly and reflect his character so poorly.  I have to believe there’s hope for everybody with God if I’m going to believe there’s hope for me. I mean, it’s not like I live up to what Jesus taught. And I’m so scared that there’s not hope for me. If Jesus really can forgive the church, and me, then I can’t see how he wouldn’t embrace the whole world, whether they affirm that “gospel message” or not.

The most frequent topics that trigger me are religious ones. Anxiety and panic rise so automatically in some Christian settings. Just going to a Christian website sets off that hand starting to grip my throat. That happens even with ones that I know are different than the people who hurt me. I still go to church, and I don’t get triggered every week, strangely enough. Christian children’s stuff often does trigger me strongly. Certain topics definitely set me off. Spirituality laced with fear, Christians and politics, “answers”, along with anything else that taps into my fear/sense that it is not ok to be a real person.  

I got really anxious today thinking about the idea of someone praying for me/about me. I got scared of being really powerless and at the mercy of someone’s prayers and at the mercy of God acting on behalf of those prayers. Part of me wants to believe that spiritual “powers” don’t really exist: God, angels, demons, and all the ways that people might manipulate those powers. That’s because if I do believe they exist, I feel so powerless and unsafe.

Then the thought came into my head, “What if God does exist, and he is powerful, but he really is loving?”  It was a thought that spoke to my fear in that moment. It’s something I’ll need to chew on for a while.

I’m confused. I know it is common for abuse victims to struggle with their sense of reality. You know, like when it finally clicks that what happened to you was sexual abuse. It feels like the earth is spinning off its axis. Your whole perception of reality seems to have been wrong. Of course, the new perception makes a lot more sense, helps you connect with all those puzzling feelings that you just couldn’t get to the bottom of before, and makes you feel validated in a way that you hadn’t felt before. Of course, the catch is that you actually have to face all that ugliness that you’ve been stuffing for so long. And when it gets too real or too scary, the brain automatically tries to protect itself: “Maybe I just made that up. It wasn’t really that bad. Maybe that wasn’t really real. I’m crazy. I’m an idiot. What if I just made up this whole really elaborate thing just to make sense of my life?…” I’ve watched other people go through this cycle as they try to make sense of their abuse. It is clear to those listening…that is, if they are not too scared to hear it…that the rationalizations, minimalizing, self-blame is not true. From the outside, it is obvious that it is a defense. But from the inside, it is unclear, confusing, disorienting. You don’t know who you really are or what your  life is.

I’m having one of those moments. On a forum I am part of, a question was posed having to do with prayer ministry to someone with a history of abuse. I decided to answer. This has been an area with a large impact on me, and I really wanted to share my experiences. Very few of the recipients know anything of my history, so it was a real disclosure for me, and took some bravery, but it felt great! I didn’t have doubts. I didn’t really fear that I would regret sharing. I felt like I had found my voice at a new level, and that I had opened up my heart in a really freeing and honest way. I felt like more of a person because of what I wrote. One woman wrote me back and offered to connect me with a friend of hers who is a survivor of profound abuse. She wondered if her friend might have more resources for my healing process. Suddenly I am freaking out. The thing is, I didn’t share details of the abuse. I just shared what my experience with prayer ministry had been as an abuse survivor. I didn’t even say sexual abuse. A lot of what I experienced was emotional abuse, and that would be enough for what I shared to make sense. I didn’t say who my abuser was, or use any gender pronouns. It was a big deal for me just to identify myself as an abuse survivor and to share so much of how that has affected my faith.

So in the wake of this letter/post (which I still do not regret), I suddenly realized that I probably have not actually said out loud to anyone, “My mother sexually abused me.” I have found other ways to talk about it because I have felt so tentative about it. I worry about people that know me, that they’ll think I’m blowing it out of proportion to use such strong words. I worry because I’m sure my mother doesn’t see it that way, and she would be horrified to know that I experienced the things she did as abuse (unless she did more than what I know for certain). (And yes, there is a profound lack of honesty in my relating to her…not that it would be wise to be honest at this point.) I worry because I don’t know if what happened to me fit all of the clinical or legal definitions of abuse. It’s just awfully murky and confusing, and the only clear thing is my sense of violation and invasion, and the damage she has left in my life.

I guess that going ahead and dialoguing with a woman I don’t know purely for the purpose of talking about healing from abuse is really striking me as stepping further out on the limb, and that has scared me back into confusion and denial. I’m getting more and more into territory where I can’t backtrack from being honest about what I believe in my heart…that I was sexually abused. That is really scary. I want to say that, at the same time, it feels true and right…but the fear is clouding things for me right now. Good thing I can keep taking it slow.

Last week I spoke with my mom on the phone; that’s not something I do a lot. She had been at a religious healing conference for the last week, and I knew that I was going to have to talk to her after she got back. She is a really zealous Christian…but really spirituality is like a drug to her. So I knew talking to her would be difficult…would she come back devastated because of not being healed? Would there be strange beliefs she’d come back with? I still hang onto my faith by a thread, but most institutional Christian things are very triggering to me, because of my main spiritual mentor all growing up being the woman who sexually abused me…because I put all of my anxiety and trauma into my relationship with God, so he became both my abuser and the other parent who won’t protect me all rolled into one. And because I have suffered a lot by seeking God as the cure (drug?) for my pain all my life, and it let me down. Of course, religion should fail as a drug, so I’m actually glad I’ve kicked that habit. I’m still trying to find out who God really is. Anyway, I confess, in my idiocy, that I was actually hoping that she would come back with a sense of conviction over what she did to me.

Mind you, I actually don’t want to have a conversation with her where she is distraught and apologetic. In fact, if I ever talked to her about all this, I would have to tell her that she is not allowed to apologize. Apologies have always been a way of glossing over how I feel…making it go away…having me reassure her that I’m not mad, that she’s not a bad mother, etc. It’s just that I’ve been dealing with this “image” lately…an image of her doing something to me, and I have no way of knowing right now if it is true or not. It resonates with me, but it would be a huge deal to actually think she really did it. And maybe wrong of me to think it. So I guess I had this foolish hope that she would come home and say blueorchid, I need to tell you that I did xxx to you when you were little…and then I would know that it was real and I’m not crazy.

But she didn’t, of course (say that). She came home on a spiritual high, seeming like she may have actually found some healing to some of her many physical problems, feeling like she has found spiritual and emotional breakthroughs and answers (heard that before). And, what I did not expect…I felt really guilty. I felt guilty because she is all spiritual and good, and I am the bad daughter who is angry and is not even near being able to forgive her yet. I’m like the poster child for all the stuff they’re preaching against…that’s what I feel like. It felt just like being a little girl again…and everything is my fault…and I’m bad because I get angry. I’m strange because I don’t want her to see me change clothes (what’s wrong with me because I want privacy?), and that I’m weird because I don’t want to be touched in certain ways. I just felt once again that I’m the bad one, and especially because I’m so angry with her now…in secret, of course…not much good could come of talking to her about it right now.

I think I’ve let the guilt go now, at least over this episode. In retrospect, it gave me a new window into observing the religious addiction. It adds another puzzle piece for me…the self-doubt I felt when she was on a high, feeling that all was right with the world, when I felt that all was wrong with it. Of course, as a kid I thought her perspective was the right one. Just another lesson in not believing that little voice inside of me. I probably have a good amount of work to do to let go of the guilt I felt all growing up over feeling that things were bad, when she was saying they were good. And more work to do to heal from all the times I felt ashamed of that little voice that was really telling me the truth.