Victim vs. Owner

[cherylannhannah]

Hi Ladies!

I am currently recovering from surgery so I've had a few days to spend some time reading through and digesting some of the stories that are on here. Some of them made my heart squeeze with pain, particularly those that were written by children brought up in QF homes. I wonder what kind of story my own children would write?

Vyckie has invited me to set my story down and I intend to do that in the next month or so. In the meantime, I thought I would share something with you that has helped me transform my life.

Through providence and the kind offices of a dear friend, I was introduced to someone who has since become my business and life coach. One of the first things that he impressed upon me is that where I am today is the result of every decision I have ever made to this point in time. He also urged me to read a book called, "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" by T. Harv Ecker. I only got so far into the book before I quit reading. When asked why, I told him that I didn't like what it was saying. Basically the first premise is that people who are successful in life own their life and know that they create what they have. People who are unsuccessful in life are victims.

The characteristics of a victim are that they blame others, blame circumstances, and continually justify where they are at because of the first two items. I didn't like reading that. I didn't want that much responsibility for what happened in my life and that of my children. It was far, far easier to blame my ex-husband, blame my ex-church, blame the QF movement, blame my parents, blame God, and explain my failings in everything in the light of all this crap that I had going on in my life.

I soon discovered however, that if it is true that I helped create that mess, it is also true that I could create something different. My choice always is to be a victim or to be an owner.

The question I asked myself is, "What kind of legacy do I want to leave my children?" If I remain a victim, I perpetuate victimhood in my children and there can be very little resolution because none of us can change what happened and what we experienced. But if I own what happened, even the things done *to* me against my will, then I regain the power to transform it into something that works in my favor and I no longer am the helpless pawn of fate or others. It all lies in your perspective.

I won't go into all the details of what has transpired in my life in the last 4 years since my home when phut. That can wait for the full story when I get it down. What I did want to say here is that it is my *practical* experience that life long wounding, bitterness, and anger need not be our lot.

I would also like to say that leaving behind the QF movement doesn't mean you are left behind by God. Believe me, I came very close to losing everything and teetered on the brink. In a five week period of time I lost my identity as a homeschooler, lost my identity as a wife and homemaker, and was excommunicated from my church. All my reference points were removed in a short period of time and I flew by the seat of my pants, terror-stricken. I was too afraid to attend any church because of abuse issues I experienced from elders. In the end I had all my religiosity and niceianity stripped off til I was left naked and shivering in the cold wind of reality. But not for long.

I don't feel like a Christian any more because my experience of being a Christian had been one of continuous guilt and falling short and the need to confess my ever-growing list of weaknesses and failures. All the love, joy, peace, etc., that were supposed to be my lot as a believer were far from me in my Christian walk. But you know what? I wouldn't trade the last 30 years if it were possible. They made me what I am today.

I lost religion but God didn't lose me. Therein is my hope and hope for my children that they too can overcome the abuse and hardship. I can remember cleaning the church I attended one day and just crying my eyes out over the horrendous mess I had helped make of my life and that of my children as I was stacking chairs. And God brought to mind that passage in Isaiah about not quenching a smoking flax or breaking a bruised reed and it dawned on me that this is exactly what I was -- broken. I was broken. And those words were written for me. And that hope was mine.

I used to question why God would arrange things in such a way that we would bear and raise children at a time in our life when we typically think we know it all and have no wisdom, no understanding, and no humility to know this. Then I realized that just maybe He does this so that we would understand that He really doesn't expect perfection from us in this life.

I still fall into being a victim multiple times a day. It's my default. It's the default of the human race from the time that Adam pointed the finger at the woman and she in turn pointed to the serpent. But I don't have to remain a victim. Sometimes I'm a victor.

[cherylannhannah]

I forgot to mention one important piece of information. If you can lay your hands on this book, it is so worth every penny you pay for it: Re-Inventing Yourself by Steve Chandler. Another good book by the same author is 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself. They both show the door out of victimhood and into strength and healthy living.

[nikita]

This is really good stuff. I have some thoughts on it in general terms. It is just my experience and my thoughts, I don’t profess to speak for anyone but myself. Everyone is in a different space and that is kind of my main point.

I believe that our lives are best understood as a journey. What that journey might be depends on who the person is and what they believe, but pretty much we are all on a path from point A to point B. Maybe it’s linear, maybe it’s expansion, whatever. That’s not important. What is important is that we are all at different places and wherever we are is where we are supposed to be, not that we should stay there but that is where we are, now.

The ‘shoulds’ are what tied most of us up in knots in our respective cults, groups, families, whatever we are trying to work our way away from or understand. Where we were was never good enough, there was always some weakness, some shortcoming, some standard, some way of being or thinking that wasn’t enough, wasn’t meeting someone else’s ideas of who we are, should be, should become.

We’re used to living like that. And when we try to come out of it we tend to want to go some place comfortable which is usually some other place like that. And we can oppress ourselves all over again.

Which brings me to your post and the idea of the journey. You are in a place in your journey from whatever to wherever for which the books and advice given are, based on your own report, completely appropriate for you and extremely enlightening and liberating. Otherwise I doubt you would endorse them so enthusiastically. And I am so glad that you are there, that this is helping you. Because the advice is very good advice. You can learn much and do much with that advice. And I happen to agree with it (as far as I know about it) to an extent. For me.

But for years after I left the cult and had other problems as well (we all do, don’t we?) when someone gave me that kind of advice or recommended books like ‘The Purpose-driven Life’, things like that, it was like someone was shutting a prison door on my soul. I didn’t feel liberated by that philosophy, I felt like I was being crushed by it. Once again I was lacking, not where I should be, not who I should be, I needed to improve, I needed to step up, I needed to be someone else than who I was. And it was suffocating and paralyzing to me.

I had to come to a place where I could really feel like I was okay with who I was and that I was exactly who I was supposed to be, intrinsically. That I was the sum of whatever biology, environment, and experiences that combined to make me who I am and whatever soul and spiritual being I possessed, and that was okay. It was not perfect, it was not by any means a stopping point. I had many faults, needed to do things and make changes and grow and learn. But it was okay to be this imperfect person, own my own self with all my flaws and needs, and work out my own life without imposing the life plans and goals and standards of someone outside of myself in an artificial way.

And only then did the books and advice and all stop being completely oppressive and suffocating to me. Although I still get the heebie jeebies walking down the self-help aisle at the bookstore, and ‘The Purpose-driven Life’ still makes me want to kill myself. YMMV.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a process and we are all on our own journey and we may not all be in the same place. And it’s okay if we are not. So if the advice and the books and the new ‘shoulds’ feel wrong or oppressive to anyone, it is okay to be in that place if that’s the place you are in. And if you are at a place where they are helpful and encouraging and help you grow then that is a great place to be in too.

But if you feel like a prison door is coming down on you, put the book down, is all I’m sayin’.

[nikita]

Oh, and most of the 'you's' I used in my post were directed at 'you the gentle reader' and not 'you Cherylannhannah'. I just wanted to offer my point of view, not disparage the books or advice given. Like I said, it's not bad advice, and it's good to hear what is working for people because it may work for others too. If that's the place you are in right now.

[arietty]

Cheryl I am glad you found stuff that works for you. Personally I think the word "victim" is too charged to use on a forum where people are usually somewhere on a continuum of having this word stamping their lives. Maybe they are laden with guilt and are taking TOO MUCH ownership, because that is what they were trained into.. you get that with people who are adult children of alcoholics and other codependancies and for them to actually acknowledge that yes, a part of them was victimized by other people is a freeing thing. We no doubt have people who are right now curled up in a ball of pain who might find an exhortation to take ownership just one more thing they are going to fail at.

This bit.. "The characteristics of a victim are that they blame others, blame circumstances, and continually justify where they are at because of the first two items. " while this certainly has truth in it for many of us it can be very freeing to actually assign blame where it needs to be. Many of us experienced in the church that as women the blame was always, always on us. Bad marriage? Just read this book about how to make yourself more submissive, be a better wife and that will fix it and if it doesn't.. well you obviously didn't do what God required of you. It's a light bulb moment to see that blame can be assigned to someone other than us. I remember how scarily freeing that was, like a weight off of me.

It is good to move on. I remember watching a film in which the main character asked in a dream sequence why traumatic images from his past were walking with him and interacting and he was told "because that is where you are living".. and that was a big moment for me. I determined not to live there anymore, in the past of pain and abuse, and to create a new life for myself and my children. That was about a year or so after the big split. But while I was creating that new life I still had to deal with court cases, threats of violence, past church friends rebuking me and the disaster the years of abuse had left us in.

I'm kind of a tough minded person and I did have one friend who was always probing me.. like she was suspicious as to how I was managing to put so much into my new life when my old hell was still hounding at my heels, as if I might be in denial. But for me I could not wait to get on with my NEW life fast enough. I have always been good at compartmentalizing my life but I am aware that many find that an alien way of being. It was hard work starting from scratch in every possible area of my existence.. friends, finances, belief system, entertainment choices, housing, child raising.. wow.

Nikita I also puke at Purpose Driven Life. How EXHAUSTING.. hey people I have 8 kids, I don't need a book to tell me how to spend each day with purpose. And if I want to spend the day lying on the couch watching tv that's my business too! GAH, I am glad to be FREE of all these how to be better at prayer, marriage, quiet times, hospitality, evangelism, inner peace books that the church pushes in its endless fads of self-improvement. I no longer have to think about whether what I am doing right this minute is pleasing to God.

So, as ever, wonderful to read about other people's journeys. I am looking forward to your blog posts very much Cheryl.

[kisekileia]

The big problem I have with "you own your life and are responsible for what happens to you" is that it means "if you are NOT succeeding, it is YOUR FAULT," which is simply not true in many cases--especially when there is abuse or disability involved. I really can't find it in myself to be supportive of that sort of philosophy.

[cherylannhannah]

Dear Nikita,

Thank you for your thoughts. I completely understand where you are coming from. There are still some places I am not ready or willing to go; case in point: reformed message boards. I have one exception there -- I still read Douglas Wilson's Blog and Mablog.

I have an alternative health practice which requires me to do some travelling. One of the families I stay with in my travels are lovely Christian people who attend a Christian Reformed church. They've invited me to attend with them, but I can't bring myself to go there yet.

My answer is not the answer for everyone, or not for those who are not ready for it yet. I wasn't ready for it when my marriage blew sky high several years ago. My intention in writing this is to provide a resource for those who are ready, and also perhaps be a source of comfort and hope that there is a way out of the mess and life isn't over. You can still find joy and happiness and escape the bitterness and pain of the past. I'm proof of that. I'm also proof that in rejecting the QF lifestyle and doctrines, you don't need to throw away your faith in Christ. All God did for *me* is strip off the religiosity and he replaced it with a faith that isn't necessarily pretty, but which is real because it got tried in the fire. Some people sign their email posts with "In His Grip" and that was certainly my experience because I wasn't trying to hold on to Him.

Peace,
Cheryl

[cherylannhannah]

Jun 6, 2010 1:44:34 GMT -5 kisekileia said:

The big problem I have with "you own your life and are responsible for what happens to you" is that it means "if you are NOT succeeding, it is YOUR FAULT," which is simply not true in many cases--especially when there is abuse or disability involved. I really can't find it in myself to be supportive of that sort of philosophy.

I'll try to explain how this works for me. One of the first things that happened after my marriage ended was that my children and I were able to speak the truth about our experience. Up to that point in time whenever the children would grow enraged with their father over some new injustice or provoking thing he had done, I would try to smooth things over by reminding them that he was a good provider and we all had a roof over our heads, food, etc. I was finally able to say to the kids, "Yeah, your father is a jerk and what he did was wrong," which was very validating for them.

My husband had a nasty habit of choking people who argued with him, punching me and the children at times, throwing furniture, etc. We finally called it for what it was. And yes, we were victims of this abuse and violence. I don't own what he did. What I do own out of that was the fact that I *allowed* it to go on for almost 26 years. What finally got me to overcome my fear of stopping him was when my eldest married daughter, who was pregnant with her first child and doing all the introspective mommy stuff, called me and said that I hadn't done enough to protect her and her siblings from their father. That, more than anything nearly broke my heart. No child should need to be protected *from* their father, and no mother should need to be the one doing the protecting. I determined then and there that I would never allow another situation like that to go unchecked. Within weeks my ex had yet another child down on the ground with his hands around his neck, choking him as a form of "discipline." That's when I told him to get out.

Am I telling someone who, as a child, was subjected to abuse to own the abuse that was inflicted on their innocent souls and bodies as though it was their fault it happened? Absolutely not. They are victims. But they need not stay there though acknowledgement of that state of victimhood is surely the beginning step out of it. For me, I was accustomed to think of myself as a strong woman and it was really hard for me to admit at first that I was a victim alongside my children.

I came very close to killing myself several times the first couple of years out of the marriage. I actually had one leg over the bridge when God orchestrated a weird intervention which I'll tell about later. I can tell you now, I wouldn't go back and trade ANY of that sorrow, grief, torment, or abuse for anything because I know now it was part of what has made me who I am today and it brought some rather wonderful people into my life that would otherwise not be there. I like who I am now. In a weird way, my ex and my abusive elders were working for me in ways that neither they nor I could see at the time. I haven't changed my history or the truth of what happened. All I did was reframe it and look at it from a new perspective, and that was what set me free.

Peace,
Cheryl

[journey]

This is a really good post and the comments after it are interesting, too.

I've put a lot of thought into this subject...

First, I agree 110%, arrietty, that there MUST be a calling-to-account for those who abused us. In my case, it was an abusive husband who enjoyed using theology to keep me in my place and inundated in various levels of humiliation. During my years in the marriage, I never imagined he was doing that to me on purpose...honestly, I was so brainwashed that I didn't realize there was abuse at all, until the end when my mind began working again, and even then, it was a sloooow dawning discovery...from discovering that the theology was itself abusive and then, from there, that my husband himself was abusive. It was slow, most likely, because I did not want to believe either of those things.

So, YES, I really think that it is important, for those who begin becoming aware of abuse, to assign the appropriate levels of blame upon the things that caused destruction, and to be angry (an appropriate response to abuse) about it. For Christian women, who are generally not allowed to be angry in the first place, this is a VERY important step in recovering oneself from abuse.

However, I really resonate with the eventual (and I think the word "eventual" is important, because the time frame will be different for everyone) discovery and realization that we have choice NOW *and* that we had choice THEN. Even if we didn't know we had choice then (because our theology said we didn't), the fact is, we did have it. We just didn't know it.

A fitting analogy might be the metaphorical prisoner locked away in a deep dungeon, discovering after twenty some years that, all that time, the key to the prison door had been right there in his pocket.

In the same way, the key to us being free from the prison of QF/Patriarchal theology and our abusive husbands was with us all along. The key was our comprehension that God did not require us to be lesser-thans, nor was abusive treatment what we deserved or had to put up with, etc.. The key was our comprehension that our husband WAS an abuser. The key was our comprehension that we were free to leave the abusive relationship. The key was our comprehension that we were a person in our own right, who could make decisions, who could set boundaries, and who could demand compliance with those boundaries.

It really made me angry, when I was first confronted with the thought that I had choice during the years of my marriage. WHAT? I had choice during all of that period of destruction? But the truth is...I did. And realizing that was so huge, because it helped me understand in a fuller way the immense POWER I have----power I have to use in my life for the rest of my life! It helped me see that I gave my power away (this is different for the abused child, of course. I am speaking of adults here, not of children).

And in realizing that what happened to me happened BECAUSE I gave my power away (through it being stolen from me, through me being manipulated or tricked, through whatever means it was), I am that much more vigilant to never give my power away like that again, to notice much more quickly when I am allowing my power to be taken, and to consider things in light of whether or not it is allowing me to retain my personal power or not.

In other words, the discovery that I was not a victim was a very empowering experience. It does not lessen the fact that someone evil manipulated my power from me. It does not lessen the fact that the destruction from the abuse WAS, indeed, destructive on so many fronts. It does not take away from the evil actions of the abuser, nor lessen his responsibility for those actions. It agrees with all of those things...but it does so in a way that does not leave me a passive victim, but as an empowered human being who gets to make CHOICES about all future steps my journey may lead me on.

There is a time to realize that we were victims of abuse....and to mourn and grieve and rage at what was done to us. But I think that it is supposed to be a phase in our healing, not a destination. I, personally, believe there is no true healing from abuse when we remain a victim. True, a permenant victim might be accurately calling out what happened *back then*, but a victim is stuck in the past, unable to live in the now and unable to walk confidently into the future.

I do not choose to be a victim, because I am no longer giving them my power. My power is mine. I use it how I choose (ideally, to love). Victims have no power. That is why I'm not a victim.

[cherylannhannah]

Journey, you so get where I am coming from in all of this!

One of the things that I have learned in my line of work is that some people actuallly like and want to be victims and most people are all too happy to accomodate them. Victimhood is the default position of the human race because it allows us to shift responsibility for what we do with our lives on to the shoulders of others.

Coming out of victimhood is not a denial of any abuse that took place. It is a step on the path to freedom and healing.

Cheryl