Onions, Juggling Balls and Exposed Wires

    I was just glancing at the subtitle under the name of my blog here, where it says, "Working Each Day Toward Wholeness."  It seems a little ironic for how crappy I'm feeling today, but I'm also reminded of a time in my life several years ago that was very dark, and how I realized that progress can look very different from day to day, and that applies to what our best is, as well.  My best effort on one day may look outwardly like I have a lot on the ball because of getting many "checklist tasks" done, finishing projects, having a full work schedule, etc. but yet another day my great accomplishment is that I'm vertical and moving.

    It's great to understand that and I'm glad I came to that realization that long ago, but the lack of consistency really frustrates me.  I am the kind of person who likes to be busy and out there, but I swear that most of my adulthood has been such a struggle that way.  When I was younger, especially during my college years, I was busy ALL THE TIME, often overextending myself and keeping too many balls in the air--and in a lot of ways I was great at it.  Now it feels like all my balls fell to the ground and occasionally I find one and am able to to toss it up and catch it for a bit before becoming so exhausted that I don't even have the energy to remember where I let it land when I'm done with it.

    Today my nerves are shot.  I haven't gotten a full night's sleep in about a week; I'm often getting to bed too late (even for me) and then only sleeping for about 6 hours.  When night comes I feel a compulsion to stay up, even if I am tired, and my anxiety level is pretty high.  During times like this I become fearful of driving, worry more about my family members' safety when they are out and about, etc.  This past month the anxiety has been worse than it has been in years, and when it rears up this way I feel immobilized.

    Honestly, in some ways it feels like I have regressed by 5 or 6 years.  I have to keep reminding myself that I am in a healing process and that it goes in layers, like peeling an onion (Shrek would agree with me).  You peel back one layer and work through the stuff you find underneath it, and then after a period of time it's pretty cleaned up and you feel better.  Then the next layer starts cracking with the stuff underneath it that needs to come out and you have to deal with that.  Fortunately, my experience has been that although it DOES NOT FEEL LIKE IT SOMETIMES, that next layer doesn't start cracking until your system knows you are strong enough to handle it.

    This spiritual abuse layer I'm working on is brutal and is really doing a number on me.  I was given the recommendation to read the book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse by David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderen and started it this past week.  It is excellent and I felt a lot of comfort when I started reading it, just in the introductory pages.  As I'm going through it, though, so much is resonating with me and a lot of stuff is coming up.  This is scary territory for me, given how intertwined in my upbringing religious tenets were.  I'm very much going against the grain by looking at this squarely and actually stating my feelings, so on some levels it feels like rebellion (which in and of itself is not allowable if you want to be a faithful person and be in favor with God).  Scary stuff. In some ways I feel like I don't even know who I really am and it's very disconcerting in a lot of ways.

    I was in the car driving home a little bit ago and reflected that I feel like the end of a set of coated wires where all the wires are exposed.  I feel like all my nerve endings are exposed and raw.  It's icky.  But I'm determined to see this process through, rather than go back into denial, stuff my feelings with food or start getting busy to distract myself.

Spiritual Abuse and Making a Good Impression

    Since today is Sunday and once again I did not go to church, I decided to address some more aspects to the spiritual abuse I experienced in my home growing up.  Maybe if I get it out in writing it will be one less thing swimming around in my head.

    As I mentioned in my previous post here, I grew up in a community that was almost exclusively the religion I was brought up in.  Because of this, everything revolved around the structure the church provided in regards to church on Sunday, activities during the week, etc.  As I've looked back on that experience I've been so struck by the fact that the most important thing to both of my parents truly was how their children made them look.  I was told on numerous occasions that how I acted would make an impression to everyone I came in contact with as to what kind of parents they were.  I was expected to act, look and perform a certain way. I frequently heard remarks like, "What do people at church think of us now?" and it was usually over really petty, stupid things.  This was such a pervasive thing that I really didn't act like a normal kid. I became a very compliant, good little girl who could never do enough to please and who was extremely hungry for adult approval. So little positive reinforcement was given to me at home that when a compliment was given to me by a teacher or any adult, for that matter, it meant so much to me that getting compliments became the basis of my self-esteem.  If I didn't get compliments I felt terrible about myself.

    My parents were both raised in poverty and they both experienced abuse in their homes.  My father was raised in the religion I was brought up in.  My mother was raised in a small mining community that was more diverse and although her dad was a member of this church, he was not a practicing member and my maternal grandmother belonged to a different denomination.  She and the kids were baptized into the church when my mom was ten.   In listening to my mother over the years, it is very apparent to me that as she looked around her, coming from poor financial circumstance, she wanted the kind of lifestyle that she saw in others around her.  For whatever reason, the members of this church were more affluent and had nice things.  They functioned better as families.  I really feel that my mom's decision to be an active church member was because she wanted to LOOK LIKE those people.

    An experience that illustrates the need they had for trying to impress other people to the extent that they did happened the day after I was baptized.  I was baptized at the age of eight on Saturday and was confirmed a member the next day at church.  The confirmation is done in the form of hands placed on the person's head and a blessing being given.  We had Sunday School before the general congregational service, and after I picked up my younger brothers, ages 5 and 3 1/2, from their classes, we went to the chapel to sit with our parents.  Our parents weren't there.  As we stood waiting and looking for them, our ecclesiastical leader noticed that we were feeling worried, came over to us and told us we could come up and sit by him on the stand and watch for them.  Right before the service started my parents showed up at the door.  My brothers and I were so relieved that we excitedly jumped out of the seats we were in and ran off the stand and up the aisle to them.  My parents were furious because we ran through the chapel in front of everyone and embarrassed them.  They found seats for the service and during the service I was confirmed as planned. When we got home my parents yelled at us about the fact that we ran in the chapel and what must everyone think of them for their children to be so irreverent.  Not one acknowledgment of the fact that we were SCARED that our parents weren't there and church was getting ready to start, or that we were relieved and happy to see them. They could have seen it as humorous, or allowed themselves to feel very loved as they saw their children racing over to them.  They lost sight of the fact that this was supposed to be a special day for me.  I should have been hearing, "We're so proud of you.  This is such a special day for you.  We're thankful for the kind of girl you are," but instead I was shamed and belittled and by the time the night was over I was convinced that every other person we went to church with had been completely horrified by my terrible behavior. During episodes like this, the only solace I had was to go to my room where it was quiet and hug one of my dolls.

    This experience did so much damage to my perception of how others saw me.  I am sure that there were amused smiles as people saw these three cute little kids rushing to greet their parents and that that's all it was. I seriously doubt that anyone was scandalized and I don't think people saw me as a stain on the family name, but I thought that was the case.  This also affected my spontaneity and fueled my need to second-guess my actions all the time.  I was so self-conscious after this episode; I hadn't realized I was doing anything wrong (which I wasn't) and so it really made me feel like I must naturally be a bad person to have not thought through the fact that running in the chapel was irreverent; I knew this but I was so scared that my parents weren't there that my relief at seeing them made my feet fly. I was one of two or three children being confirmed that day, and when it was my turn to go up to the stand I felt that everyone looking at me was thinking how embarrassing my conduct had been as the meeting was starting.

    As an adult, one of the ways this comes back to haunt me is when I see children on these occasions being treated with love and tenderness, and see the approval and pride on their parents' faces. Which is how it is supposed to be; I'm not resentful of the child being treated that way.  Sometimes these things trigger back the bad memory and I feel that humiliation and rejection all over again.

Me and God

    How do people who have been through abuse view and feel about God?  Assuming that God is real, is it okay for someone who has felt largely abandoned and unprotected in so many aspects of life to figuratively give him the finger?

    Because that is how I feel sometimes.  I may have mentioned before (and maybe not, I can't remember at the moment and I'm not going to go through previous postings to see) that I was raised in a very religious environment.  The geographical area I live in is predominantly one particular Christian denomination, and the community I am in has the highest concentration of members. Since looking at my internal world honestly I have felt like screaming and running away as fast as I can.  In saying this, I am not saying that the religion I belong to is wrong and I am not going to go into the specifics of which one it is, because I don't want others to pass judgment based on what my personal experiences have been.  My life has been largely enriched by my church activity and associations, with certain meaningful experiences coming at crucial times in my life that guided my path in what I believe to have been the right directions for me.  These experiences brought wonderful people into my life, brought about the circumstances where I met my husband, and in general have shaped me into the kind of person I am.  There has been a certain protection in choosing to follow the standards of living recommended in the church guidelines, and I am thankful for that.

    But here's the thing.  And it smacked me right between the eyes at one point during this past year what a conflicted relationship I have with God.  On some levels I really hate him (sorry, God).  And then I feel guilty when I consider all the ways my life has been blessed and I have recognized His hand in events that have taken place.  And I feel guilty because I'm supposed to love Him.  And I do love Him. . .but, wait.  I WANT to love Him, but it has always felt to me like I have to earn His love.  That He loves me IF.  Or AS LONG AS.  Or UNTIL or UNLESS.  IF I am good enough.  AS LONG as I do what's right, exactly right. UNTIL I make a mistake. UNLESS I screw up, even if I don't realize I'm screwing up.  Oh, I have always felt that other shoe ready to drop.

    That defining moment that smacked me between the eyes was realizing how much I FEARED God, and how that fear had reached into every facet of my life and was ruling every single decision I made, even on a day to day basis with seemingly small and insignificant things that really should be no big deal in the grand scheme of things.  The stress of that has caused me so much anxiety, sometimes to the point of it being debilitating. And I realized that my whole religious experience has been colored by my mother's view, and that I have seen through her filter, which is very warped.  When I read verses in scripture, that "or else" comes out loud and clear to me, and it's my mother's rhetoric and tone that I experience in my head.  It took me quite awhile to accept the fact that there was spiritual abuse in my home growing up.

    I told my husband that if God is a God of fear, I don't want anything to do with him.  Fear and love can't exist in the same place and we are told that God is a God of love, but I have rarely felt that.  What I have felt most of the time is the fear and a desperate yearning to be worthy of His love.  I decided that I need space, or what someone described to me as "fallow time" in regards to church, so I can sort this out and stop seeing and hearing everything through my mother's filter. It's kind of a weird place to be in and I actually never thought I would be that person, but here I am.  And I think I am doing the right thing distancing myself from the organized aspect of church, even though this is new and sometimes scary territory for me.  In a way I am putting God to the test.  If He really loves me unconditionally, then He understands why I need to do this and isn't angry with me.  He wants me to feel His love.  And if church is triggering me (which it has been), then I need to not be there because I need to keep myself safe.  I am trusting that He will reach out to me in loving, joyful ways to help me along.