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Post by arietty on Jul 8, 2009 21:36:49 GMT -5
Control over one's children is the way to ensure they won't embarass us and make us look like bad parents.That's an interesting statement, Madame - because at the same time they set up that control, these parents make it so basically anything a child does (wear regular clothes, talk loudly, run, not do everything you say, express themselves, get angry, be unhappy) are embarrassing - so there's no real gain for the parent, just more things to worry about and more contests of will with the kids. That pretty much describes my husband's childhood. Their mother's list of things that embarrassed her is VERY long.. and pretty much anything the kids did outside of existing in silence meant her disapproval and religious lectures, because in her mind it made her look bad. She had many very odd things that were on her list of rules, where she got them I have no idea.. certainly not from her mainstream evangelical culture. She raised three children to never express any opinion or preference for anything.. even today when they are with her they just sit and wait, in a state of eternal deferring, for her to make even the simplest decisions such as whether to put coffee on. A few times I have witnessed the more lively one express a preference first, without waiting the customary (and very long) deferment time for the mother to express her will.. and this is promptly rebuked. The one with the temerity to have a preference is rebuked for selfishness and not taking into consideration that others might feel differently. This is for the SIMPLEST day to day things. Everything is expressed in religious guilting terms. When I was first with my husband I would get frustrated at how he would immediately back down and how he would simply not be able to tell me what preferences he had about anything. Now I only see him like that on the (thankfully very rare) visits he has with his mom.
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Post by arietty on Jul 8, 2009 21:25:30 GMT -5
Thanks for your story Erika It's interesting how often people in this movement end up marrying young. You were lucky in your choice of husband but a lot of folks just grab the first one that seems reasonably okay because that is their only route to being an adult. Outside of this movement you would normally spend a few years in a relationship before marrying with the choice to break up if it didn't work out. The whole courtship thing, ending it is seen on par with divorce so young people are just compelled to marry once they start that process. Even in my mainstream church they all get married several years earlier than the norm. 19, 20.. and they're married.
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Post by arietty on Jul 5, 2009 9:58:47 GMT -5
I am still a Christ-follower, yet I had to leave God. That God. The God that I thought was God but really wasn't. The God I worshipped during that time was a Being who was very concerned with performance, EXTREMELY (and I mean extremely) concerned about following the proper authority chains, and would punish those who failed to obey. (I had the real God and this $%^# lie of a God all mixed up and morphed together...little bit of truth, little touch of lie, makes for one big believable lie)... I think I am at the point where every time I think I might be returning to God I get the God you describe here in my head and I end up shelving the idea of God altogether and just zoning out. I can kind of hold a vague idea of God in my head, with a few quotes from Jesus here and there but any actual following and thinking about God sends me crashing back into the some terrible edifice of failure and expectation and rules.
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Post by arietty on Jul 3, 2009 20:06:30 GMT -5
Very good FAQ Vyckie and I hope to comment more later on (the noise level from my offspring is at this time shattering my concentration).
I liked "It's important to be as direct as possible in expressing your own concern for your friend's situation." When I was at my most zombied out and just kind of stunned 24/7 as a way of coping I had a friend tell me, "I am very worried about you because you seem to me to be very depressed." What really got to me when she said that was she is a very unobservant person, not tuned into feelings (a QF'er herself) and that sentence was so outside her normal language. I knew if she had observed this and said it it must be pretty bad.
Yes honest language is very helpful. It is also validating if you are in an abusive situation for people to use the word abuse. Most of the time the focus when my ex showed his anger publicly was on supporting HIM. Now when I see a man behaving abusively or just like a big jerk in public around or to his family I know that it is far worse at home.
Be the best friend you can be. Making yourself indispensable if you can is a wonderful thing, but at the very least make yourself available. Most moms experience some isolation being stuck at home during the toddler years, with children you can't take to a lot of places, kids being sick in winter etc.. it's a season for most women to have all your outside options just become way too difficult to attempt. Now imagine this goes on for 10+ years, sometimes 20 years! I pretty much stopped visiting people once I had a lot of smaller children. QF women can end up never going out, especially as more and more shopping can get done online. Make your home child friendly and let her know you WANT her to come over with all those kids, make or buy her some lovely food and have her and the kids for lunch. Be someone she can have a break from her home with, even if it is only to go to your home. Make sure she doesn't have to feel stressed over what her kids are doing in your house.
Simple luxuries to me were things like someone else cooking for me and serving me. To be welcome in a friend's house with all my kids and to have someone serve me a lovingly prepared.. sandwich (!!) was actually an incredible pleasure. The normal style of socializing among QF families is two QF families get together and the women spend the entire time cooking vast amounts of food, serving vast amounts of children and cleaning up vast amounts of plates. The men stand off to the side during all this and talk. Sometimes my ex would want to visit another QF family and I would try and get out of it. Though I was desperate for social interaction I dreaded how exhausting and boring all that cooking and serving was going to be.
If you can actually organize a few hours of babysitting and take your QF friend out that would be awesome. If you are in a church together you could make it a women's ministry thing to make it more palatable for her to exit the home alone. I used to ache over these silly coffee mornings and movie evenings that my church had in their women's ministry program which of course I could never ever go to as I had no one to watch my many children. My season of being stuck at home with little ones was never going away. How wonderful it would have been if someone had scooped me up and said "we want you to come! let so-and-so have the children for a few hours and come with us!" If you do this make sure you bring approved educationally biblical dvd's for the children to watch.. this might relieve the mom of her fears that the babysitter will be overcome with the sheer quantity of children too.
Simple luxuries.. these are some of my most intense experiences after getting out of an abusive marriage. I still value them. A cup of coffee at a cafe I don't have to justify to anyone. The freedom to sit there by myself and enjoy it. I think it is very hard for women not in these situations to get how isolating it can be. I remember when I took my QF friend out to lunch, it took weeks of arranging.. she was all AGLOW and giggling the entire time, she was just in a huge tizzy about how exciting it was!!
If people understood how wonderful it is to have someone pay attention to you, to care enough about YOU to want to do something nice for you well.. I guess people don't understand it because they have normal lives where these small luxuries are just part of their every day. When I was QF I really ached for these things.
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Post by arietty on Jul 1, 2009 21:37:55 GMT -5
Hopewell, we lost a newborn too (under different circumstances), and I think what they did was very healthy. It is important for all the family members, young siblings included, to acknowledge and grieve the loss. Heart-wrenchingly difficult and painful, yes, but better than stuffing it The teaching they will receive about god's will, etc. makes me sad but they are getting it all the time anyway. I completely agree, I thought it was very healthy. People please don't get snarky at this family and their choices. I would hate to have this turn into the FJ forums. People are different and I daresay we don't know how we would react to losing a baby like this until we face it. It seems to me that they put a lot of thought and care into this funeral and made the time for their family to cherish their baby as a baby. Other families I know who have lost babies late term have done similar things, it has nothing to do with your religion or beliefs, it's just a healthy grieving choice that some families choose.
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Post by arietty on Jul 1, 2009 1:32:58 GMT -5
I'd be pretty cheery if someone was paying ME 60,000 to make dinner and do the laundry for the cameras!
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Post by arietty on Jul 1, 2009 1:09:45 GMT -5
Such a big and nice looking baby.. so very sad to read about the funeral. Yes it is weird to have that all on a public blog, but people are different. Often when a family loses a baby the baby becomes "forgotten", not mentioned by friends and family members and that can be very hurtful. So maybe for them this is a good thing.. the whole blog is full of pictures of the children, and their little boy is there too.
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Post by arietty on Jun 25, 2009 19:21:21 GMT -5
I've personally watched women in the Patriarchal movement ignore sound medical advice for all kinds of needs at the instruction of their husbands. I've watched them put their lives, intact bodies and their children at risk when the husband says to do it. Yes, I've watched loving husbands demand a reluctant wife get care. But, the danger of Patriarchy is when the husband does NOT literally lay down his life for his wife, patriarchy says that even in the face of his failure, she is to submit and if it results in her death, then she will be rewarded in paradise. I had a dear friend when I was QF (her husband does not allow her to talk to me anymore) who had some serious medical and psychiatric problems. Her husband HATED doctors and never thought they were necessary. Even when one of their children had heart surgery he refused to have anything to do with it, wouldn't talk to the doctor or accompany his wife to the hospital. My friend's own problems got so bad she had to have another homeschooling woman come over under the ruse of taking her shopping and secretly take her to the doctor for the care she needed. The husband eventually found out about it and threatened to throw his wife out on the street if she continued to take the medication but he did not follow through on this because he needed 3 hot meals a day and someone to educate and care for his large family of children. This man, while not cruel or violent, was a complete dictator in everything his family did. I always remember how his children were not allowed to eat things he himself disliked, such as peanut butter. Another homeschooler told me that she had the mom and kids over to her house once and she served the kids peanut butter sandwiches and the mom made them all promise not to let the dad know.. and the kids were just thrilled about this like it was some forbidden pleasure (which it was). Multiply this kind of crap by 1000 and that was their life.
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Post by arietty on Jun 25, 2009 19:07:44 GMT -5
I am so happy she is not going to die and that it appears she may recover well!!
Rejoice I think the majority of anger in this situation is directed at the midwife who really does seem to be living in lala land. A woman in her 9th pregnancy, supposedly carrying twins, overdue, by her own words feeling that something is not right.. this is a lot of good reasons to go get some OB care, ultrasound to confirm the "twins" were okay, measure the amniotic fluid etc.. really if nothing was wrong that would have only served to be reassuring for the mother. If there was something amiss to not seek this care out is negligent. It is hard to make good choices sometimes when you are heavily pregnant, exhausted and worried and you look to your medical carer to help you make good choices. In this case this mom's pre-birth care was negligent and not respecting of her own worries. No this did not cause the embolism but that doesn't make it any less negligent.
I have 8 children myself and have had one home birth. All my births have been midwife care and midwife delivered, a normal thing where I live. I am angry when I hear about a midwife putting ideology over medicine, whether that ideology is from the "Birth in Zion" style teaching or whether it is way out newage your-body-knows-all teaching. Seen and heard about terrible midwife care from both those perspectives.
I am not mad at Carri, I am mad at the woman she trusted.
And let me add that this is not a "sad forum". It is full of real people from very divergent life backgrounds. In my experience the patriarchal movement attracts men who are arrogant and flawed in some way. No this is not the only kind of men involved but it is an attractive thing to hear for a man who never felt in charge of anything, perhaps has failed at his work choices or felt frustrated by his lack of success in life. They listen to this teaching and all of a sudden they get to be the KING in their own home and all their pettiness and arrogance and selfishness is sanctioned as God's Divine Plan. And that uppity woman they married can just shut up now.
I am now married to a man who would be quite repulsed by all this teaching if he bothered to listen to it.. the need to control and lead is just not a part of his make up. He does the stuff he is good at and I do the stuff I am good at and our household runs smoothly without needing to have a "head", LOL.
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Post by arietty on Jun 24, 2009 18:46:26 GMT -5
As to all the diapers and home made sanitary pads and toilet paper-- IME some people really enjoy frugality even when it's not necessary. I have known a few women who make their own pads, they just plain enjoy using products they have created themselves. From what I saw of Carri's blog she is a very creative and energetic woman and sewing brings her a lot of joy. When you have that creative frugality thing going you love being able to make for yourself that which you are expected to purchase. I have seen some powerful creativity at work in some women with this inclination. It does not make you a freak, it must makes you outside the mainstream.
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Post by arietty on Jun 24, 2009 18:12:49 GMT -5
The problem with the Carri situation is the midwife imho. The bad midwife gave her misinformation, bad advice and antiquated treatment at a time when Carri seemed like she was quavering on what she should do. Midwives are not legally allowed to practice medicine or attend births in Indiana without the oversight of a MD or a registered nurse. It doesn't seem like her midwife was overseen by anyone or even had must training. Of all the people who's poor choices led to this tragedy it is the midwife who should be held legally culpable. If not for the crap info she was spoonfeeding Carri, Carri might have actually gone to a real doctor or nurse and had a safer birth experience. The situation with Carri's midwife reminds me a great deal of the midwife experience of her own that Vyckie posted. I completely agree. Here's a fact: many people will never be educated consumers of their own medical care. They will place themselves in the hands of an expert, whether it's Dr. ThirtyPercent Cesarean rate or whether it's Sister Christcentered Birth. Once wedded to this medical expert via fear, ideology or a faith like trust they are going to find it very difficult to listen to dissenting voices because they have given their critical thinking over to this expert. This is why the medical experts need to be accountable!! Just imagine if this midwife had been accountable to someone overseeing her practice, an OB or some other midwives. You would dramatically increase the opportunities for someone to say, "hey, this is a red flag, lets get this mom in for some prenatal care". It's one thing to rail against the stupidity of the family here but lets face it, MANY people are quite stupid. We need to work from that point and make the experts people will be blindly relying on accountable and medically sound.
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Post by arietty on Jun 22, 2009 18:45:20 GMT -5
Vyckie I relate to everything you said.. I think it was only recently that I suddenly realized I no longer thought I would be invincible in childbirth and that God would automatically protect me. That belief just stuck with me whenever I considered possibly having another baby. There is a very militant UC homebirther where I live who refers to any birth involving a medical person examining you vaginally as "rape". She has a lot a followers. Tragically this year she had her baby die after laboring for 5 days at home by herself. Not a christian or QF, these fervent beliefs whether in God or in the power of a woman's body and "convictions" (I'm starting to hate that word) can lead all kinds of people to make dangerous choices. I have a friend who has 11 children and she has had some terrible problems with blood clots, had to be on medication etc.. and there was a very real risk she could die during some of her pregnancies. Her legs were swollen and covered in huge gnarled veins that stuck out. I had a lot of guilt and fear over this because I was the one who gave her The Way Home to read, back when she just had 3 kids. Even when I was still QF I used to think that if she died I would be responsible on some level. It's just so incredibly sad. Sad that we can believe God will take care of us but not allow him to take care of us through the advancements of medical science. Sad that we can value our "conviction" above everything and be terrified to re-examine it. Remember that blog commenter who claimed if we ever veered from a conviction we had never really been convicted? Such pride in our own understandings.
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Post by arietty on Jun 9, 2009 19:24:12 GMT -5
Castor, how awful for you. It's painful to read about that but I know it too well from christian life.
Frankly christians are veritable vampires. People actually say upon hearing that something terrible has happened to someone that this might be the time they can get them to turn to the Lord, they go their side not primarily to comfort them but to convert them. I understand many people do this with good hearts but it is abusive nonetheless.
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Post by arietty on Jun 9, 2009 19:21:37 GMT -5
I think one rule of thumb is that you respect the boundary of the child's own mind. You can tell them how to act, but you can't tell them how to *think*. Telling a person their feelings or thoughts are wrong (either that it's wrong to think/feel them or that they don't actually think/feel that way). So you can teach a child not to hit, but you can't teach them not to feel angry - and if you force them to act as if they don't feel angry (stay sweet!) or tell them they shouldn't feel angry because it's not Christlike, you're impinging on their self. Or, you can teach a child they have to taste everything on their plate, but if you tell them "don't make that face, you like that!" they are going to justifiably think you're trying to rewrite their reality. (Or, as aimai said, you're substituting your own experience for theirs.) I completely agree and this is where I am often at odds with other parents who seem (to me) to be trying to mold their children into replicas of their own tastes and values. Some examples: They don't like computer games so they relegate this to something the child is allowed to do only minimally.. but they do like sports so they are happy to let the child participate in/watch sports for a major portion of their leisure time. Never a good thing to say about the child's musical tastes, "how can you listen to that".. if the family is christian this will be used against the musical interests and anything not to the tastes of the parents is easily weeded out. That the parent could actually sit down and listen to the music, try and appreciate what the child likes about it, familiarize themselves with it.. well this doesn't happen. It should though. I could go on and on.. in my observations children are often prevented or discouraged from pursuing interests and ideas simply because the parent doesn't share them. This creates a very big disconnect in adolescence between the two generations. I often suggest to other parents that they should try playing the computer game they don't want their kid to spend all Saturday on to see why he likes it so much but I have yet to find a taker on this, LOL. They don't know anything about the game and they don't want to know, it is relegated in their mind to a waste of time and that is where it will stay though a whole generation feels otherwise. The same with music, I try and encourage parents to listen to their kid's music and see what is so precious about it to them--because music is often intensely important to the adolescent. Sometimes I suspect that other people see me as immature because I have many of the same interests as my kids..they have taken on my interests and I have taken on theirs. The music most beloved by 4 of my kids was introduced to them by me, we have gone to concerts together and eagerly follow what that group is doing. It's been a very mutual back and forth thing, I listen to a lot of music they have told me about too. I haven't quite gotten into the techno one of my kids loves but I sit in his room and listen to it for ages and he can always come out and tell me to come listen to this amazing track he discovered. I seem to have gotten off topic.. I guess my point is I see parents boundary setting where it is ultimately a matter of taste and interests, not morality. Christians worry so much that something they don't relate to has some seed of badness in it that they must keep out of the home. They make the leap that because something is of no value to them it has no value.
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Post by arietty on Jun 9, 2009 18:36:18 GMT -5
I'll have to think about any suggestions to add to this fantastic FAQ.. but the Titus 2 and Prov 31 woman thing does come to mind, those verses are pretty much the mandate women follow.
I think the Quiverfull word comes from the Hess's book A Full Quiver, it was picked up and used by online groups. Certainly I have seen many woman refer to their families as quiverfull on forums and mailing lists.
I had some contacts with Catholic homeschool families who would never use the word but do not use birth control. There are large groups of conservative, often Latin rite only Catholics who homeschool and have their own conservative Catholic curriculum. They separate themselves from the wider Catholic church and are very old school pre Vat II. Very nice people I might add, at least the families I met were.
The FAQ is great in how you describe the gradual adoption of these beliefs as a package. It's amazing to think about, how a family can go from using Focus on the Family as their main reference for raising kids to the Pearls, all the while thinking they are lead to walk a narrower and purer path.
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Post by arietty on Jun 8, 2009 21:22:23 GMT -5
Tapati I have just finished reading your story in your Livejournal, all the entries about your marriage, thank you for writing it. It brought back a lot of memories of my own naivety and innate idealism (I also married young).
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Post by arietty on Jun 7, 2009 21:34:38 GMT -5
A better way (though probably not 100% accurate) to put it might be that deciding to leave an abusive relationship, I would think, should be as easy as deciding to take your hand off a hot stove. Arietty, you say it's more difficult than that, but I just don't understand why (again, the line of logic gets to a certain point and there's just a mental disconnect for me. Though I hate very much to even think it, maybe there's just an inherent difference in personality types that causes some people to be predisposed to a mindset that encourages vulnerability?) A abusive marriage injures the abusee and a hot stove injures the person touching it. End of the logic line- no "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s. And what if you had been raised to believe or come to believe that DIVORCE was going to involve far more burning than the hot stove? What if you believed in Hell and thought that breaking a marriage really put that on the table as an option? Or don't even bother with Hell, just open up any Christian magazine today or any secular media 20 years ago and you will find endless articles and statistics about how divorce damages children. That meme has been a very aggressive one, hence generations of couples staying together "for the children". Many women come to believe that by leaving they are choosing the lesser of two evils. Truly, it is a hard thing to believe that you are not choosing an evil by leaving for yourself and your children, you are choosing a very good thing. (I think that went a long way to estranging me from my fellow christians, that I always stated that my divorce was 100% a good thing). Some of the women I've know who have spent years in abusive marriages are the strongest women I've known. They are bound there by ideology, fear based ideology for the most part. Sometimes they are hugely idealistic, they believe everything WILL be better even if this does not happen until Heaven. It takes a lot of strength to persevere in an abusive situation, believing this is what you are called to do by an omnipotent being. These women are not pictures of vulnerability. Sometimes they are pretty damn fierce. These are the people who usually burn out and find themselves with crumbled beliefs and wake up and smell the coffee of what this belief system and their devotion to it has done to their families.
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Post by arietty on Jun 7, 2009 18:37:38 GMT -5
The point for me with these questions is that they are trying to get the woman to justify her actions because it is assumed that there is something not ideal about those actions. The ideal is that you get married, work hard at it, attain a reasonable level of happiness.
Why did you leave? Why did you stay? There is no single answer to these things, it is not a question like "why did you touch the stove". It's part of the long journey of life. If you find it difficult to understand vana think about other relationships in your life, friendships, work relationships.. most of us have at some point either ended such relationships or allowed them to die by attrition. This is accepted, people move on, relationships sour. But marriage is held up as measure of a person's health and success in life. We are called to explain and justify why it ended and why we didn't end it sooner in a way we never hear when it comes to all the other relationships in our lives.
I don't know about you but in these economic times I have known a lot of people very unhappy at work, with a horrible employer or awful co-workers they dread spending 8 hours a day with.. but they have to stick it out because they simply do not have any other good options. They have mortgages, kids, insurance needs.. and it's not as easy as removing their hand from the stove. Not easy at all. It can take a woman quite a while to work out her options for leaving.. the financial, the practical (who lives in the house?) and the emotional because it is a very difficult thing to be abandoned by your support network of a community. Christian women in certain communities know this will be the case.
There is not one point of leaving or one point of staying. I know when I left physically I had been on the journey of leaving for quite some time emotionally, mentally and spiritually. I know other women in abusive situations are on their own journeys and there is a lot more to them walking away from the man than removing their hand from the stove.
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Post by arietty on Jun 2, 2009 19:59:12 GMT -5
So, to simplify it in response to unhappiness men don't do the whole "die to self" thing that women do. This doesn't seem to be in their vocabulary. There are literally hundreds of christian women's books all about how to die to self.. this is not limited to QF folks, it's straight evangelicalism.
If a christian man is unhappy he either acts out or deals with it in a healthy fashion, same as any man.
If a christian woman is unhappy she is very very likely to go down the dieing to self road. She will be led by the hand down this road by her counselors, her christian magazines, her women's bible studies.
I cannot even imagine a man being counseled in this manner!!
Really, this kind of blows my mind thinking about it.
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Post by arietty on Jun 2, 2009 19:52:30 GMT -5
Well my point is that dying to self when unhappy seems to be very attractive to christian women but I have never heard of men twisting themselves into knots to do so. I think men are more likely to act out in a christian marriage in response to unhappiness. Women, perhaps, are constrained by the need to be a good example to the children.
Healthy people deal with unhappiness by talking about it and examining it and seeing what part of themselves and/or their circumstances need adjusting.
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Post by arietty on Jun 2, 2009 19:32:03 GMT -5
What it means is STOP COMPLAINING.
"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." Romans 8:28
The truth is only women agonize over these things and try and mold their unhappiness into holiness, praying for the "refiner's fire" to burn off all the dross. Yes that's a big generalization but I have never heard of a married man applying this thinking to his own unhappiness.
In my experience unhealthy married men deal with their unhappiness by getting angry or developing a secret life (usually porn) or allowing work to take up their whole existence. Sometimes substance abuse too.
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Post by arietty on Jun 2, 2009 18:19:14 GMT -5
At one point in the marriage I talked to my pastor's wife about my husband's anger problems. She told me what she said to every woman in that church who came to her with marital problems (I know this because some extensive comparing of notes happened after they left that church)..
"Men are very very stressed these days and we must do everything we can to support them."
It's bizarre how men are both simultaneously supposed to be respected and looked upon as authority figures AND they are so infantilized. They are so easily stressed so you have to pander to them, they are dominated by their sexual impulses so you have to be always available to them, their emotional needs have to always come FIRST and if there are any, ANY problems in the marriage it all comes back to the woman.
So if the evidence of "stress" continued.. whether that evidence was drinking, anger, failure to care for the family then obviously this poor poor man was not getting enough support from his wife.
One woman in that church was always having counseling with the pastor's wife. I was in women's bible studies with her and she would often ask for prayer for her failings at being a wife and talk about how rocky their marriage was, how unhappy her husband was because of HER. I never could quite get what these failings were but this was a theme for many years for her. She was chastised by the pastor for talking about her marriage problems at one point because it was seen as undermining her husband. I ran into her some years later. She was divorced. Her husband after years of marriage and quite a few kids came out and told her he was gay and had always been gay. Apparently they get along fine now and co-parent happily. All I could think of was all those years of her trying to fix, under constant pressure to fix, something that was unfixable in that marriage except through the ending of it.
She was also told her husband was "very stressed", LOL!!
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Post by arietty on Jun 1, 2009 0:49:24 GMT -5
The way Kirk got out of the No-Win Scenario was to "change the parameters", a move labeled cheating by those in authority over him.
Vyckie you did make choices to give up your self and be submissive, choices within the parameters of your belief system. You made them freely and intelligently, at least to begin with. I know you did because I've read your story and I've been there too--a berean. However the parameters of that belief system make it very hard, once you've stepped forward in these choices, to veer to the left or right. The narrow path blah blah.. Personally I can say that while I made free choices towards my own oppression once I had signed that contract of belief I lived in fear of breaking it. The "tragedy" of divorce, condemnation, HELL.. gee there were a lot of reasons to keep choosing for oppression. And yes I agree, I (we) did choose that freely to a certain extent. But as is classically the case in any cult it's an easy (and well-stroked) choice to walk in and an earth shattering choice to walk out.
I only got out by changing the parameters. Kirk reprogrammed a computer and I reprogrammed myself. I had to walk away from my fear of the divorce meme, my fear of hell and my belief in the biblical god as he had been presented to me. While it was very hard to get out financially and practically it was the mental imprisonment within that belief system that was the real obstacle. Get rid of that belief system and the bars vanished and I can say truthfully the practical matters were almost a joy to work out in comparison.
And yes, this was labeled "cheating" by the authorities. An apt analogy in so many ways!
So I think there are a few layers to the matter of choices and free will. As the cult support groups say, "No one chooses to join a cult". And no, I didn't choose to join an oppressive belief system that would stymie my freedoms and suck the live out of my personality all in the name of Jesus (poor Jesus). It really didn't look like that at the beginning, it merely looked like putting other people first because love was the greatest reality in this world.
*sigh*
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Post by arietty on May 22, 2009 18:58:56 GMT -5
Vyckie I think you are doing the right thing making the blog a gentler place and these forums open for any kind of discussions. One of the main influences that led me out of the fundamentalist mindset was the internet. I was just in awe at all the FREE DISCUSSION people had. It was honestly like a swimming pool of fresh water had been thrown over me. WOW.. people had differing opinions, some quite in-your-face, and they said them and other people replied to them and actual interesting discussion ensued!! I was so used to everything having to be passed through the biblical-godly-don't-be-a-jezebel sieve and having to turn into namby pampy gruel before it was considered palatable.
I also started tentatively posting in a few forums online and to my amazement I found I had a voice, people LOL'd at my humour, they engaged me in discussions, they said amazing things like "that was really interesting Arietty, I hadn't looked at it that way before". I can't tell you what a revelation that was. No one had been interested in me or given me positive feedback in so long. With each step into internet-land I became more myself, remembered that I used to be good writer, remembered that I used to love discussions.. in the old days.. before there was an abusive overlord who would literally stand between me and a person I was talking to so the conversation would focus on him.
So. Keep the forums free but civil. This is the real world where opinions are valued without having to be agreed with.
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Post by arietty on May 22, 2009 18:45:58 GMT -5
OMG for a moment I thought my bookmarks had mated in the night and produced this bizarre chimera!! I was going to answer your first question but then you said "don't answer that", LOL This will be a very interesting series. No-win scenario indeed! I found the no-win scenario continued on after I left my ex like this: Concerned Acquaintance: WHY did you LEAVE, he wants to restore the marriage, blahblahblah condemnation for leaving Me: mumbled attempt to explain the abuse Concerned Acquaintance: If it was that bad WHY did you STAY and have all those kids? blahblah condemnation for staying and breeding That was not only from christians, heard that from all kinds of folks. Even now I hear that from people who are overly blunt: "Divorced after 6 kids!! Why did you have all those kids if it was a bad marriage?!" This is an unpleasant ambush of a conversation I haven't quite figured out how to respond to. Looking fwd to the series
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