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Post by Vyckie D. Garrison on Dec 30, 2009 9:45:20 GMT -5
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Post by journey on Dec 30, 2009 12:49:45 GMT -5
This was SO good....
I remember looking forward to the mail, and, YES, it did seem like they all came at once! In so many ways, particularly in the beginning, they were a lifeline... It was the source that said,
"You are not alone. We are doing this too. And by doing this, we are all doing great things. Don't give up. Don't feel like it's all crazy. It's not. It's the right way, the God way. Speaking of which, here's an additional step you need to take, just one more thing you need to add to your list of convictions...."
And, YES, I used to get so much inspiration from the stories of those who were tortured and killed for their faith. If they could do it, surely I could handle my much lesser version of prison, right, for the glory of God?
It was a really big shock, the day I realized that they were in prison by FORCE, but I was remaining in prison by CHOICE. Though, to the patriarchal/complementarian world, it often is viewed as no choice at all, and they teach accordingly (like the heartbreaking blog post you described). To stay or not stay with your abusive husband (or father) is not a choice.....No, it is your Christian DUTY.
*sigh*
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Post by krwordgazer on Dec 30, 2009 23:36:58 GMT -5
The really awful thing is that these same Christians would, I'm sure, speak very negatively of the communists who imprisoned Christians, of the terrorists who took the priest hostage, and so on. And yet here is a father or husband who is supposed to be following Christ, who is behaving like a terrorist and making his home into a prison for his wife and children-- and they won't say a word against him. No one confronts him with his appalling behavior-- behavior that is evil if anyone else does it! Instead, they encourage it, by encouraging the wife and children to submit to it. It makes no sense at all.
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Post by eriktrips on Dec 31, 2009 0:59:08 GMT -5
I want to say, my dear child.. the family is not supposed to be a prison. The home is not supposed to be a place that needs to be survived.
thanks so much for this. I have to say honestly that reading some of the stories on No Longer Quivering are somewhat triggering for me and so I do not come here often to talk about them. I understand that the abuses and gross inconsistencies of the worldview of extreme fundamentalism should be self-evident--and they are, but having lived with these sorts of messages since I could understand human speech, I sometimes get confused when I am reading because when I was six years old I had no critical faculties--what child would?
but so thanks for interjecting this. it makes complete sense and maybe these things should be obvious, but the part of me that still lives back in that time cannot always tell. I survived my family, but only just barely. for a number of reasons I have a great deal of difficulty dealing with my family now, but this is one of them: I had to survive my own childhood, and escape it in order to continue living, so my memories, even when they are of good moments, are always tinged with panic and fear that I never could take anywhere because there was nowhere to take them.
my therapist tells me it must have been like living with the enemy, but it was worse: it was being completely dependent on the people that said they loved me but they also loved the god who was sending me to hell and thought they were doing me a favor by teaching me about these horrible things that were going to happen to me if I did not "make my decision." the reasons why I could not do this on a timetable that pleased anyone are varied, but the fact was that I was terrorized simply by the visions of the tribulation and of hell. my parents were not physically cruel and they were relatively liberal in letting me go where I wanted and hang out with whomever I wanted, but emotionally I was bound to a doctrine of something far worse than death and my imagination took that to some harrowing places.
anyway. thanks.
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jwr
Full Member
Posts: 218
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Post by jwr on Dec 31, 2009 7:22:39 GMT -5
To Ariety,
I just read parts one and two, and it was really good. Of course, I feel weird saying the word "good" in this context. It was horrendous. But it was good in the sense of very well written; it was a window into life behind the veil, a life that most people never get to see, but they need to.
As in many cases on this forum I got a creepy feeling while reading; because it again showed me how closely my world has intersected with all this stuff. I was never in YWAM, but was greatly influenced by its founder, Loren Cunningham. And I was familiar with their ship Logos. It used to dock in Calcutta and offload literature here. (But until today I never knew they passed out the Above Rubies mag.) They have another ship called Anastasis, which is probably still afloat.
I'm really glad you escaped from the martyrdom. I think Kr's observation is really good. Why are terrorist-kidnappers condemned, even killed by special forces troops, but fundie men who do the same right inside the USA are looked up to as godly? Why not send hostage negotiators and spec ops troops to the suburbs of America?
Finally, you've replied and interacted with several of my posts since I first joined, but I never knew your context; you were just an electronic name to me. But suddenly you've become a 'real' person. You've probably mentioned this before, but if you don't mind can you refresh me: at this point are you a Christian in sort of a refugee status? Or an atheist, agnostic, or...?
Thanks again, and have a great New Year.
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Post by sargassosea on Dec 31, 2009 10:00:33 GMT -5
Martyrdom serves to make us increasingly comfortable with suffering. This is such an important truth that I think bears repeating as often as possible. The 'powers that be' are never more happy than when we embrace their abuse and claim it as our prize. Oh, and I simply adore spiky
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Post by airlie on Dec 31, 2009 21:35:06 GMT -5
Yes, this confirmed so much of what I've been coming to believe over the last few years.
I am blessed to be married to a man who did not believe in having children unless both agreed. He respected that I did not want children right away, and we agreed to limit our family for reasons of age and health after we had two. His family would be considered very much "quiverful" and both his mother and several sister-in-laws were nasty to me when I refused to have a pregnancy test upon returning from our honeymoon.
When we did have our first child after five years, they got me on all the magazine lists -- Above Rubies, Teaching Home, Practical Homeschooling, and the others. At first I read and re-read these, trying to seek what it meant to be a stay-at-home mom. Then one day I realized that so much of these magazines was legalistic and didn't reflect the dynamic, flexible aspects of the Christian life that I had. It was as if the women were enslaved to their families and not in true partnerships with their husband. So I ended my subscriptions.
But it's still something I encounter in homeschooling circles. I know what I believe, but it seems to be increasing in influence, overtaking some groups such that you are made to feel guilty if you don't agree. That in itself should be a warning sign!
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Post by rosa on Dec 31, 2009 22:15:21 GMT -5
Arietty, this is just beautiful. Thank you for writing it.
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Post by peaceofchange on Jan 1, 2010 18:57:19 GMT -5
I agree with these ladies...this post is a beautifully written insight into the heart of a woman entrapped in this movement. My heart goes out to this woman that you were and I wish I could offer her an escape...
It reminds me of a time that I told a quiverfull friend about a horrible thing that happened in my own life and she responded to me in my heartbreak by saying, "Well, remember, it's better than you deserve."
I suppose if we think we deserve imprisonment, we will stay imprisoned.
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Post by journey on Jan 2, 2010 0:59:43 GMT -5
Peaceofchange, It is so true. As long as I thought I had no choices, I, well, had no choices.
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phatchick
Junior Member
Medicated for Your Protection
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Post by phatchick on Jan 3, 2010 4:15:07 GMT -5
I It reminds me of a time that I told a quiverfull friend about a horrible thing that happened in my own life and she responded to me in my heartbreak by saying, "Well, remember, it's better than you deserve." That, IMO, is one of the worst things about that life. It steals compassion. When we have no sense of compassion or respect for ourselves, it's hard to feel it for anyone else. When you're taught that "whom the Lord loves, he chastises", then we think that if we're not suffering enough, we don't truly love the lord. Worse yet, he no longer loves us. Life becomes this big suffering game with the "winner" being the one who can claim the title "Ultimate Martyr for Christ".
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athenac
New Member
I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy
Posts: 39
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Post by athenac on Jan 5, 2010 1:33:16 GMT -5
The 'powers that be' are never more happy than when we embrace their abuse and claim it as our prize. That is what it's all about, right there. Very well put.
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Post by AustinAvery on Jan 5, 2010 18:35:39 GMT -5
my therapist tells me it must have been like living with the enemy, but it was worse: it was being completely dependent on the people that said they loved me but they also loved the god who was sending me to hell and thought they were doing me a favor by teaching me about these horrible things that were going to happen to me if I did not "make my decision." So Eric, how did you get out? Arietty's story here--unless I've missed something--hasn't yet come to the point that she escaped form that mind set, although in her musing I think we can already see the thought process at work. Vyckie, as piercingly intelligent as she is, still only broke free at the point when her and her child's survival depended upon it. You mention that you are seeing a therapist, so forgive me if this is the wrong time for this question. It just seems that you somehow pulled yourself out of that oppresive place, and I wonder how you did it and what you think gave you the courage to do so.
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Post by eriktrips on Jan 10, 2010 3:35:20 GMT -5
So Eric, how did you get out? ... You mention that you are seeing a therapist, so forgive me if this is the wrong time for this question. It just seems that you somehow pulled yourself out of that oppresive place, and I wonder how you did it and what you think gave you the courage to do so. **adding a spoiler at the top to say that I do mention childhood sexual abuse in what follows.** I actually got out a very long time ago--at least I lost my faith very young, when I was about 16 years old and only three years after I finally did "walk the aisle" to be saved, so my time within the fold was short. It's complicated to sort out how it happened, though. I think I can attribute part of my own realization that this mindset was too small for me to the fact that I turned out very queer. I should mention that I am transsexual, and so at that time I was a girl in high school in the Deep South of the US and feeling some very unrecognizable feelings for one and than another of my best friends. It wasn't until a few years later that I came out to myself as a dyke, so while I was still in high school I simply got very confused, felt very isolated, and very depressed. I was also dealing with that return of the repressed that Freud assigns to adolescence: I had been sexually abused and raped as a child, and told no one, so although I was not yet experiencing specific memories, I was dropping into a state of self-destructiveness that was centered around the shame and humiliation from those experiences and that I had kept to myself while also obsessing on burning forever--it probably comes as no surprise that I currently suffer from Complex PTSD, but that's getting ahead of the story a bit. So I was feeling about as low as a kid could feel without being actively suicidal. I wanted to run away from home, but I knew that as a teenage girl I did not stand much of a chance of finding a very good life for myself if I headed down to Atlanta, which was the only place I could think of to go. My relatives were 3000 miles away in Washington state. With literally nowhere to turn, I asked God for help and basically got.. no answer. Nothing! Nothing being preached at my church was useful for me, no "still small voice" arose to guide me to any semblance of self-understanding, my friends could not fathom the depths of what was actually going on with me, and I continued to spiral downwards no matter how hard I prayed. And so I began to suspect the worst--that there was no one there. I think I was also developing some critical faculties that I didn't have as a child, and beginning to spot the double-binds and circular logic in much of what I was being told. I became very cynical, and I would even say that within my depressed state I still felt enough youthful energy and rebellion to be able to take a critical distance from my life and see that the house of cards that was my mother's and my church's simplistic, absolutist reasoning couldn't stand up to the complex questions I was starting to have about myself and about how I was supposed to put together a livable life out of the rubble that was my childhood at that point. I graduated from high school at 17--I had skipped a grade in elementary school and so, mercifully, I had a chance to leave my parents home to go to college in just about the nick of time. I came to my own understanding that the faith I had been taught could not work for me, simply because it fell apart when faced with truly agonized and agonizing questions. I was extremely introverted and worked out pretty much everything for myself at this point. I went off to college, and although on the outside one might say that my first year was a failure--I ended up flunking out, suicidal, drinking and on drugs--I also discovered a world of philosophy, art, literature and music that was much bigger than the world I'd grown up in and had many examples of freaks like myself who were able to live full lives very much outside of the bounds of my childhood belief system. That world, the world of music, art and writing, eventually saved my life. I suppose I could even say that it is still in the process of saving my life, since it's been thirty years now and I've spent most of that excavating my way out of severe mental illness and using my own artistic/philosophical vision--heavily borrowed from many others, of course--to guide me. The short version of all this, for me, is that I got out because I had no choice: there was nothing in it that could actually help me--and I was in dire need of help--and so I had to look elsewhere. These days I'm sort of Buddhist in temperament but I'm still a heretic no matter where I go, probably because I have come to be very demanding of any system that purports to be able to save me. I honestly have not found The Single Answer yet, but it turns out that learning to live with uncertainty--and what is commonly thought of as perversity as an undeniable part of who I am--has brought me to understand that outgrowing the desire for perfect salvation is the only thing that has enabled me to begin to address what has been broken in me. Compassion for myself has meant that I had to find a way of looking at the world that did not exclude possibilities according to arbitrary rules. The most important thing to me is to reduce needless suffering in this life, both for myself and others. Fundamentalism increases suffering in this life, as far as I can tell--or it certainly has for me. And so it became untenable surprisingly quickly. Um. Did that answer your question?
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Post by AustinAvery on Jan 11, 2010 13:06:42 GMT -5
Um. Did that answer your question? Boy howdy! In spades. And I'm pretty much at a loss for words. Quite brave of you to write all of this here. So glad you found compassion for yourself. You've made me think in new ways about how rigid religion can harm one's sense of self. It does occur to me that what might be really important for you now is community. I hope you are finding it. At the risk of sounding like I'm proselytizing (and noting that you may want to avoid anything that smacks of organized religion), I belonged to a UU church here in the South that actively--as part of the congregation's mission--reached out to invite GLBT people to join us, to offer an accepting place to find community. Have you tried a UU congregation?
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Post by eriktrips on Jan 12, 2010 2:06:16 GMT -5
Um. Did that answer your question? Boy howdy! In spades. Sometimes I can get going pretty good in print. I would like to be more involved with some community somewhere, but between social phobia and PTSD partially grounded in fundamentalist church experiences, I get squirrelly around groups--to put it mildly. When group/congregation members go out of their way to welcome me, my first instinct is to turn and run. Not to say that UU churches necessarily do that--I haven't actually been to one yet. But I am constantly trying to get myself more involved with the San Francisco Zen Center and other Buddhist sanghas here--of which we have many, so I really should take advantage of that as long as I'm here. My experience at the Zen Center is that the people are very reserved and do not shower newcomers with attention. Some find that off-putting but I find it patient, compassionate, and possibly the main reason I came back after my first visit several years ago. I've sat at the zendo there many times and would like to go more often. There are a couple of monasteries in N. CA that would also be relatively easy to visit; I am hoping to go to at least one by the end of this spring. It's quite a process to get me out and among people. I also suspect that I might have Asperger's or be otherwise on the Autism Spectrum. Social situations are very complex affairs for me, in any case.
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Post by AustinAvery on Jan 12, 2010 16:15:27 GMT -5
eriktrips:
Understood! My wife works with kids who range along the autistic scale, all the way up to Asperger's. If you do have that condition, it explains a lot. As I suspect you know, while such individuals have difficulty dealing with social situations, they tend to be quite intelligent--often gifted--in other areas of life. I suspect your intelligence explains, at least in part, how you saw through fundamentalism at such a young age.
And I certainly didn't mean to push UU. The Buddhist approach sounds great (interestingly, my old UU minister, who has retired, and who was openly gay by the way, was a practicing Buddhist and Buddhist thought often made it into his sermons).
Good luck to you in all of this.
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