Browsing Tag

abuse

Feminism

they took it down

celebration

That’s what I felt like last night around 11 pm. Then I started crying.

First, I want to thank all of you for joining me in asking Leadership Journal to #TakeDownThatPost. Seeing so many of us rally on twitter, and on facebook, and reading the e-mails you were sending … it was extraordinary.

I also wanted to say this, in case they ever have the chance to read it.

To his wife: you are an incredible woman. What you did when you left him was amazing, and courageous, and I – a stranger you’ve never met—am proud of you. You did the absolutely right thing in what must have been one of the darkest times of your life.

To his victim: I wish there was a way to express how much my heart broke for you. My horror if my rapist had the opportunity to manipulate and deceive Christian leaders all over the country would be inexpressible. Hopefully you didn’t know that he’d been given a platform, but if you did, I hope you know that everything we did to get that post removed, we did for you. You are a child of God, and we love you.

~~~~~~~~~

It took the Leadership Journal five days to remove the post, and there were some significant bumps along the way, but they did, ultimately do the right thing and removed it. And not only did they take it down—the absolute best I was hoping for—they apologized. And it wasn’t a non-apology of “we’re sorry you all were stupid enough to be offended.” It was a real, legitimate apology.

I read it, and I laughed, and rejoiced. We did it. They listened. It was . . . incredible. This week had been so hard because I fully expected them to continue ignoring us, to delete our comments, to silence our criticism, to block us and ridicule us. Since when would a Christian media outlet recognize that they’d screwed up so epically? I was cynical, and my cynicism made me angry because I desperately wished that I didn’t have a reason for it. I hated that an entire editorial team had been taken in by a manipulative abuser, and that they had allowed a rapist into a pulpit to spread his lies.

And then I cried, because oh how I wish I weren’t so surprised that they’d done the right thing. It is a sorrowful thing to know that it is so extraordinarily rare for a Christian organization to admit to wrong doing.

So, thank you, Leadership Journal and Christianity Today for not taking the road that so many Christian leaders before you have taken.

But what now?

They were right in one thing: Christian leaders desperately need to be educated about child sexual abuse, clergy abuse, rape, and sexual ethics. To me, it is the most glaring and hideous fault in the modern American church, that they are negligently ignorant about this issue and the lives that are at stake.

I would like to see the Leadership Journal replace that hideous screed with posts—not just one, but many, and again and again and again in the years to come—from the perspective of victims and those who work with abuse survivors of all kinds. The American evangelical church knows nothing about abuse—not physical abuse, not domestic violence, not spiritual abuse, not sexual abuse—and that needs to change. Now.

They need to go to pastors like Jeff Crippen, who have been working with abuse survivors for decades. They need to ask the leaders at GRACE to do an entire series about how to identify abuse and how to properly respond to victims, especially children.

They also need to think about bringing more diversity into their editorial staff. All of them are men. I can’t help but believe that if they had a woman on the editorial staff, this atrocity would never have happened. Women are the targets of sexual violence in a way that men simply aren’t, and because of that we are going to be much more aware of what sexual violence is and the ramifications that it has on victims.

During this week, it was women who were leading, women who were telling our stories, women who were starting and participating in the hashtags #TakeDownThatPost and #HowOldWereYou. Men were there—good, amazing men—but the overwhelming majority of the voices calling on Leadership Journal were women.

We are half the church, after all.

So—you did the right thing, Leadership editors. You apologized. You took it down.

Don’t let it end with that.

June 14, 2014 by
Feminism

things you can do for someone in an abusive relationship

comforting friend

I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t written this post yet– of all the things I should be writing about, this is probably one of the more important. Every so often I get an e-mail along the lines of “I think my son/friend/sister might be in an abusive relationship– what can I do?” and I always take the time to answer these individually, and will continue to do so. However, over time, I’ve realized that there’s a few things I say to pretty much everyone, so I figured I should collect them into a post.

~~~~~~~~~~

Before we get started, there’s a couple terms I need to clarify: abusive behavior, abusive relationships, and abusers.

Someone who is not an abuser can engage in abusive behaviors. Human beings are quite capable of hurting each other, sometimes very deeply and consistently. Our relationships can be unhealthy and co-dependent, and can have various features that are abusive. Those relationships can sometimes be healed, and sometimes they need to be ended. However, there is a difference between someone who does abusive things and an abuser.

An abuser is what American culture tends to think of as a “sociopath,” although it is extremely important to point out that not all sociopaths and psychopaths are abusers. Sociopaths and psychopaths are mentally ill people, and with good and effective treatment can live productive, rich lives, filled with healthy relationships.

An abuser, on the other hand, lacks empathy, a moral conscience, and is driven completely and totally by their own-self interests and in protecting their self-image. They will go to any length to get what they want, and they do not care who they hurt. They are primarily interested in maintaining control in their life and over the lives of their victims.

~~~~~~~~~~

One of the most important (and most complicated) questions should be talked about right up front: should you report it to the police?

The answer: “it depends.” The important thing to keep in mind, however, is that it is extremely difficult for police investigations to move forward without the cooperation of the victim– if the victim denies it, which they are quite likely to, then the investigation will probably stop there, and the victim will face punishment from their abuser for telling anyone “exaggerations” or “lies.” If the victim has confided in you about their abuse but are unwilling to report it themselves, then you need to be extremely careful about what you do with that information. Chances are you could endanger the victim even further. If you break their trust, then they are also unlikely to trust you in the future, when they might be more willing to go to the police with you.

If they confide in you that they are being abused– and they recognize it as abuse– then you should encourage them to make a report. Make sure they know that they have your support– that you will go with them, that you will be there, that you will defend them. That you will not leave them no matter what. That you have their back.

Do not say things like “if you don’t report this, then s/he could go on to do this to someone else. This is your duty.” It is not their responsibility to report their own abuse. Yes, the police can rarely ever do anything without them. However, their only “responsibility” is to themselves. They could quite literally die if they report it, and quite often they are the only defense between their abuser and other people, such as their children.

Individual circumstances might be different, however. If you believe that the victim’s life is in serious and immediate danger, then that changes things dramatically and you should probably notify the police. If the abuse has escalated to that point, then it is possible that a police investigation could be successfully conducted.

Again, all of this depends. Every situation is different.

~~~~~~~~

comforting

One of the first things I encourage people to do is “be a safe place.”

People, in general, don’t enjoy having their choices criticized, and while remaining in an abusive relationship isn’t actually a “choice” since their autonomy has been suppressed by their abuser, they tend to think of their relationship in those terms. If you criticize their choices, then they could respond defensively, and the only thing you’ve accomplished is entrenching them even further into their relationship. You will become someone who just “doesn’t see him/her the way I do” or who “doesn’t understand what is really happening.” Frequently, victims see themselves as being necessary to their abuser’s well-being. They are helping their abuser to get better. They’re not blind to the problems– they just see those problems in different terms.

Victims need to know that you love them. That you accept them. That you are trustworthy. That you take the time to understand. Sometimes, they might even approach you with “haha, my partner did this the other day, isn’t that crazy! They’re so funny!” They want someone to confide in, but they want to do it on their terms.

Listen. Be perceptive and alert. Ask leading questions, and see if they might be willing to give you details. Ask things like:

Have they done something like this before?
How does it make you feel when they do something like that?

Try to see if they can be honest about what their relationship is like and what the problems are. Establish patterns– that it’s not a one-off, that what they’re doing fits into things they’ve done before. It’s important to avoid the “every relationship has problems” pitfall, however. Yes, relationships take work, but there is a difference between two people working on figuring out their communication problems and abuse. Do they think that this would ever be “normal” in a healthy relationship? Contrast what they might be rationalizing as “problems that need work” with what are actual real-life problems that need work.

In an abusive relationship, a problem is “I must never, ever go to this person’s house ever again because they would not like it.” In a healthy relationship, a problem is “I should probably talk to my partner about why they don’t like it when I spend time with that person, and I have the ability to make up my own mind and form a compromise, if I want to. They trust me.”

~~~~~~~~~~

As a part of removing a victim’s agency and autonomy, abusers will do everything they can to remove any sense of self-worth, value, and confidence. They might make the victim feel as if they are illogical, as if their own thought processes cannot be trusted. That they are stupid. Ugly. That no one else will ever want them.

You must do the opposite. Let them know that they are a smart, funny, capable, competent, wonderful, valuable person. That you value your relationship with them, that their presence in your life means something to you. That you like them. That you believe in them. That you have hope for their future. That they are fine just they way they are, that they do not need to be “fixed” by their abuser’s “reforms.” Give them something to believe in besides what their abuser is telling them.

~~~~~~~~~~

Be watchful. Pay attention. Abusers can be extremely talented manipulators. They can be charming, friendly, and popular. They can seem extremely well put-together; fashion conscious, meticulous, educated, articulate. They can be someone you’ve known for a very long time. They can be a respected figure in your community, a self-giving public servant.

They can be anyone.

They are usually the person you would never suspect.

They don’t usually have beer-bellies and stubble. They don’t keep a baseball bat near-at-hand. They don’t have to be alcoholics. They’re rarely obviously stupid. They don’t have to be overtly aggressive and domineering, yelling and slapping people around.

It’s not at all unusual for you to second-guess your instincts about a person or a relationship. No one wants to believe that someone we know could be hurting someone else we care about, and we can go a long way in rationalizing behavior we see. Oh, they just had an off day. They’re stressed. It’ll pass.

What an abusive relationship looks like in public can be very difficult to spot, especially if you didn’t know the other person before the relationship began. There can be signs, however– things like does s/he stop a sentence in the middle after their partner/parent gives them a significant look? Does s/he acquiesce to everything the other person wants immediately, even when it’s obvious that’s not what they want, and they don’t resist? If they disagree, is one of them consistently “winning” with hardly any input from the other? Do they try to anticipate what their partner/parent wants and seem stressed if they don’t know how to figure out what that could be? Have you ever seen small aggressions– pinching, pulling, being physically insistent, grabbing tightly, leaning in to whisper angrily? Have you seen them cuss their partner/child out, using degrading and humiliating language?

Keep in mind that while we tend to think of physical abuse as horrific and physical violence as unacceptable, verbal violence is just as damaging, sometimes even more so.

All of these, on their own and in isolation, could mean absolutely nothing, which is why they’re all easily to rationalize. However, if someone is making you uncomfortable, trust that feeling. If you think that something is off, pay attention. Just because they seem to be overtly affectionate in public most of the time, one act of physical aggression completely overrules a host of “I love yous.”

Start keeping a written record of everything you’ve personally witnessed, no matter how small it might seem at the time, and make sure you have a date/time and what the general circumstances were (“at so-and-so’s birthday party”). If they confide something in you, write that down, as well– and try to put things in chronological order. Abusers tend to escalate their behavior over time. Having a written record could be extremely useful later if they decide to report the abuse to the police, for personal reference, and for helping the victim establish patterns.

Also, for victims, the abuse is easy to all blur together and they can lose track of dates and events quite easily– did this happen at this outing, or that one? Was it in summer, or winter? It’s all a monotonous wreck to victims, so having a record can be extremely useful for keeping their memories clear, especially when they go the police who can be antagonistic and disbelieving.

~~~~~~~~~~

comfort friend 2

Don’t let the abuser isolate their victim from you.

This does not necessarily look like the victim suddenly cutting off all contact with you under orders from their abuser– although it absolutely can. More often, however, the abuser is going to be paying close attention to their victim’s relationships and friendships. Any minor disagreement, any falling out, any tussle, any fight– s/he will use that against you. Things that you would ordinarily never give a second thought about will become knives that the abuser uses to cut you out.

“Wow, she was such a bitch to you. Are you going to let her get away with that?”
“You deserve a better friend than her. She doesn’t care about you.”
“She’s just out to destroy us. She never liked me. She’s jealous.”

One of the most common ways that an abuser will isolate their victim is to make their victim start behaving in a way that makes you, their friend, not want to be around them. She used to be an incredible person– but since she’s been with him, she’s such a bitch. I just can’t stand being around her anymore. She’s changed. I thought our friendship was worth something, but I guess not.

And, it is quite possible that your relationship didn’t mean that much to them, and they really are just treating you badly. But Heaven knows I treated my friends like total shit– it’s an effective tool for isolating victims, because not only does it remove you from a place where you could see their abuse, it also makes you less sympathetic.

It could also look like the abuser saying things like :

“I just want to spend time with you. Just the two of us.”
“I don’t like big crowds of people. Let’s just stay in.”

And… they slowly drift away until you don’t see much of them anymore. Some of this can be due to the first-blush infatuation; people in love do like spending all of their time together, and tend to stop hanging out with their friends as much. However, if your friend completely falls off the face of the earth, reach out to them. It could be nothing– or it could be an abuser isolating them.

~~~~~~~~~~

And, lastly, get a bunch of information ahead of time.

  • Find the rape crisis centers in your area and collect their addresses/websites.
  • Get a list of the rape advocates in your area, their phone numbers and organizations.
  • Know where you could go to get them into a domestic violence shelter.
  • Know which police service has jurisdiction in what area. Sometimes it’s the city police, sometimes it’s the county sheriff.
  • Know who has jurisdiction at the victim’s house, at the abuser’s house.
  • Have the phone numbers to call to file a police report.
  • Know how to get to the police station.
  • Keep a list of local hotlines available (suicide, rape, domestic violence).
  • Gather brochures for shelters, crisis centers, etc.
  • Have a few books about what abuse is like in relationships, like Why Does he Do That?
  • Be familiar with public services for rape and abuse victims, like the SANE at a hospital.
  • Know what procedures are like; what the victim might have to go through to have a rape kit done, for example.

~~~~~~~~~

I realize that a lot of what I said here could be simple, non-abusive things. Sometimes people have social anxiety and they really, legitimately, don’t like big groups of people– or going out at all. That’s ok, and if their partner is consenting to that and wants to support them in that, that’s fine.

However.

There’s a reason why abusive relationships happen, and it’s because all the abuse can seem so totally normal. It can all be so easily explained, justified, and rationalized away. All of it. When taken individually, what they do isn’t even really that bad. And it slowly builds, and the abuser slowly escalates, and suddenly they’re “tripping” and falling down flights of stairs.

~~~~~~~~~~

That is all I have for now. I will probably periodically write more posts as more things occur to me and I receive more questions– they will be linked to this post.Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments, to help make this post better.

April 22, 2014 by
Theology

church statistics and abuse

sadness

[trigger warning for child sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence]

I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but from the reading I’ve been doing, sometime in the last 30 or so years there’s been a subtle shift in how churches talk about growth. What my reading tells me is that this is at least somewhat connected to the rise of the “mega church,” with it becoming impossible for pastoral staffs to simply look around their churches and understand who their congregation is.

There’s a certain appeal to evaluating church growth by the numbers, especially when church sizes seem to be ballooning. Applying business models that are intended to bring growth can be extremely useful for a variety of organizations, and churches are, really, just organizations. Organizations that are almost totally defined by “growth,” for better or for worse. Even in Acts, as my partner pointed out yesterday, the apostles tossed around a lot of numbers. Peter, especially, has one famous speech about Pentecost and how many were saved.

In the churches I’ve been in that have talked numbers– “X many people were saved! X many people were baptized! X many people have joined our church in the last year!”– the focus has almost always been hope. Numbers are real, concrete indications that we’re headed in the right direction, that what we’re doing is making a difference. Numbers are people.

But, in the last year, my perspective has changed quite a bit. I used to hear those numbers shouted from pulpits all over the country and exult right along with the preacher. And, in some ways, I still do. But, when I hear about how many people regularly come to church, and how many children are in Sunday school, and how many babies are dedicated, a completely different set of numbers starts spinning around my head, and it makes my heart ache.

My heart has been especially broken this week, since Bob Jones University decided to terminate the investigation they’d hired GRACE to do. I wasn’t a student of BJU, but I did grow up in that world and I know many people who were– and I know how important the GRACE investigation was to them, how much hope it had given them that maybe, just maybe, BJU could turn over a new leaf.

But, just like the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, and just like Sovereign Grace Ministries, and IBLP, and just like countless other churches and ministries all over the globe, BJU has decided to do what far too many other Christians have done: turn a blind eye to the abuses happening under their watch– abuses they are allowing to happen through their silence, abuses they are complicit in.

I know how hard it is to face the bleak reality that there are so many people willing to hurt others. That abuse in so many forms is commonplace. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to be a pastor and stand in front of your congregation and know that there are abusers and victims in your church. That you could be shaking the hand of a pedophile or rapist after church. That you could be eating dinner in the home of a batterer. That you can’t know. Not for sure.

But, this is a reality that does need to be faced. We need to look it dead, square in the eye and let it change us. We need to keep in front of us, always, that people are hurting and desperate and don’t know a way out. That most victims don’t even know they’re being abused, that abusers cloak themselves in forgiveness and grace and redemption, that some abusive husbands will use “I am the head of this home and you are my wife, so you must submit to me” as a weapon.

So, because this needs to be something that we know, something that changes how we talk, changes the advice we give, changes the way we love the people in our churches– I’ve broken down an average church size by the most reliable statistics we have.

Most churches in the United States have an average church attendance of around 500 adults, 125 children. Most congregations are dominated by married adults, so in this “average church,” there are 200 married couples, 275 women and 225 men, 64 girls and 61 boys. This means that in this church:

That’s a possible 256 people– 40% of this “average” congregation— who have been violently wounded by some kind of horrific abuse. This isn’t something we can afford to ignore. This is something that should utterly break us and radically transform everything we do as a church body. We can’t be dismissive of hurt. We can’t ignore that there’s darkness and pain and suffering. We can’t preach messages filled to the brim with ideas that can be turned into weapons by abusers. We can’t afford the blithe, non-committal “if you’re being abused, you need to get out,” and then move past that as if it doesn’t happen here. We have to stop burying our heads in the sand with our “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle!” and our “faith like a mustard seed!”

We have to be the ones who love the hurting and the broken, who acknowledge their pain.

February 13, 2014 by
Feminism, Theology

victims and abusers, and why church is not safe

my fair lady
[trigger warning for abuse]

If you follow me on twitter, you might have noticed that I watched My Fair Lady this past weekend, one of my favorite movies from when I was younger, but a movie I haven’t seen in years. And while I enjoyed the nostalgia and singing all the songs again, it was not an entirely pleasant experience and I probably won’t watch it again. Watching Professor Higgins, listening to him sing “Let a Woman in Your Life,” realizing that he never uses Eliza’s name and instead prefers to call her wretch, insect, and baggage, and understanding for the first time that Professor Higgins is an abuser . . . it was rough. The scene when the maids are ripping Eliza’s clothes off her body and you can hear her screaming, begging them to stop, pleading with them not to touch her– I had to bury my face in Handsome’s arm and try not to cry.

Our culture– our movies, our books, our television shows– is filled with abusers. It seems like everywhere we go, we can see an abuser being presented as a regular person. Many times, these abusive characters are written to be sympathetic. These abusers are given story arches that tug at our heartstrings, and all their abuses are ignored. Look at him, the writers ask us, look at how sad he is. Don’t you just want to help him get better so he’ll stop being so mean to people? The problem is, that is exactly the method John* used against me to convince me to stay with him. Don’t go I need you he’d say, so I wouldn’t. I would stay with him, accepting his abuse and believing that I could help him get better.

This attitude that abusers are just regular people who can be jerks sometimes appears in evangelical contexts, too, but with another concept tacked on: because every human being is wicked, perverse, and evil, we are all equally awful people. “There but for the grace of God go I,” they say in pulpits and podiums all over the country, and the people listening to these sermons hear about how “aren’t we all capable of doing things to hurt each other?” and somehow what happens is that everyone is a victim, and everyone is an abuser, and the ability to stop and say no what that person is doing is evil and I need to get away from them disappears.

Recently I heard a lesson based on Psalm 52. PerfectNumber, who blogs at Tell me Why the World is Weird, has been going through the Psalms, re-examining them, and has been showing me a picture of a God who cares about justice and seeks out the poor and oppressed, and seeing the Psalms in that light has been incredibly restorative to me. I can read some of the Psalms now and see a God of Justice who hates it when abusers hurt people, when the poor are ignored or taken advantage of, a God who comforts good people when they’re hurting. That is beautiful, to me, and is one of the reasons why I still think the Bible is valuable even though I have questions about it.

But, in this lesson, a couple things happened. First, Psalm 52 is about Doeg, from I Samuel 21 and 22. Doeg sees David at Nob, and at some point when he thinks that the information is valuable, he tells Saul– and Saul orders to have the priest Ahimelech, who gave David the holy bread, executed. When Saul’s guards refuse to kill the priests, Doeg is willing, and he kills Ahimelech, 85 other priests, and then slaughters every single last person and animal in Nob.

In short, Doeg is evil. He is only interested in using whatever he can for his own advantage, and is perfectly willing to kill priests and slaughter an entire village. That is what Psalm 52 is about– David is describing a man who “boasts of evil” and “plots destruction.” David is talking about an abuser– and that God will bring justice, and that people will “laugh at him.” In my experience, the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a narcissistic abuser is to be laughed at.

However, while the teacher talked a little bit about that, the main focus of the lesson was “how should we respond to problem people? How should we react to troublemakers?”

Problem people.

Troublemakers.

The abuses, the violence, the narcissism, the obvious self-interest, the willingness to slaughter innocents just to get ahead completely disappeared. Doeg was a “problem person” for David. The teacher spent some time asking us to envision the “problem people” in our lives, emphasizing how we probably have tons of people who cause problems for us because they’re selfish. But, we need to examine ourselves, he said, because we could very easily be someone else’s “problem person,” and we shouldn’t forget that. We could be someone’s Doeg. And, if we have a Doeg, a “problem person,” in our life, we should just trust the lord to take care of him or her.

I wanted to scream.

Because there is so much wrong with that. If we have a Doeg, who is not a problem person but is in fact an abuser, in our life– we should absolutely do something! Being in a relationship with an abuser is incredibly difficult to escape, and when the Church seems to constantly be sending the message that abusers are just problem people and we could be just as bad, too, it makes it that much harder for victims to get out. Victims don’t need more reasons to stay in an abusive relationship– they already have reasons. What they need is for a pastor or teacher to love them, to look them in the eye and say abuse is wrong and if you’re being hurt you don’t deserve it and I’ll do whatever I can to help you get out. Saying “oh, that abuser who is perfectly willing to use violence? He’s just a “problem person” and we’re all “problem people!” is … well, it is evil in its own way.

There’s another way abuse is ignored and downplayed, another twist on the “we’re all equally evil” theme. A while ago I heard a sermon that was about how much Jesus cares about us and how no matter what we’re going through he’s there for us and can help us with whatever’s going on. At the beginning of his sermon, the preacher spent a lot of time describing a bunch of different scenarios we could find ourselves in– except almost every single example was connected to “poor decision making” in some way. The only time he mentioned abuse was so vague and non-specific it could have meant anything from “your friend gossiped about you behind your back” to “your father raped you”– and it was at the end of a very long list on all the ways people are capable of getting themselves into terrible situations. He never, not once, during the entire sermon made a distinction between situations you are responsible for creating and situations where it is happening to you and none of it is your fault. In fact, he did the exact opposite– he conflated poor decision making with abuse not once, but six times.

Abuse is not normal.

Abusers are not normal.

They are not “problem people.” Not everyone is capable of abuse. We’re human, so we’re capable of doing hurtful things, selfish things, but that is different from abuse, and we desperately need to recognize that they are not the same.

Abuse is evil and the church needs to stand up and say something about it. Pastors need to look into the eyes of 20% of the married people in his church who are probably being abused and say the words abuse is wrong and you don’t have to stay there, you don’t have to live with them. Youth leaders need to sit down with their teenagers and say you have the right to determine what happens to your body. Sunday school teachers need to listen to the children in their classroom with the awareness that 1 in 4 girls  and 1 in 6 boys are being sexually assaulted or raped by a relative or family friend.

But, in my experience, churches tend to be silent. Pastors don’t talk about it. Teachers use softened language. No one wants to look this bleak reality in the face. And because we are silent, because we refuse to look victims and survivors in the eye, because we are blind and deaf, because we tell each other that abusers don’t really exist and we’re all equally capable of doing hurtful things we don’t have the right to say “this is wrong, this is evil, and it must stop.” We ignore the victims and survivors in our churches when what we should be doing is shouting from every single rooftop that the church is a safe place, that we will love, and we will help.

December 3, 2013 by
Social Issues

learning the words: abuse

into the light
Tamara Rice is an editor and write and a frequently loud-mouthed advocate for victims of abuse within the church who blogs at Hopefully Known. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

trigger warning for child abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse

Where I come from abuse was a term reserved for vicious violence. I’m not really sure why or how this protection around the word came to be, but I know that great care was taken to distinguish between parents who were abusive and parents who were merely … very bad parents. Between sexual boundaries being crossed in a way that was sexually abusive and in a way that was more … molestation. Between spiritual authority being misused in an evil way that was spiritually abusive and in a way that was simply … unfortunate. Abuse, in short, was reserved for what I now might put in the category of sadistic torment—the stuff they make horror films about.

Under these narrow definitions, abuse was rarely encountered in my growing up years (or so we thought), and maybe that was the whole point. Defined as such, abuse was kept at arm’s length, out of our circles. Abuse happened to people on the news and in salacious Stephen King novels, it didn’t happen to us, it didn’t happen in our fundamentalist Baptist church, it didn’t happen in the missionary community we were part of overseas.

~~~~~~~~~~

By the time I reached my 30s I had very little to do with the faith community of my childhood. I had married a man in ministry and had gone on to be part of churches and religious organizations where legalism was rare and the kind of fundamentalism I’d grown up with was rarer still. I got it out of my system and left it behind. And then in 2011, I got sucked back in.

I began to fight alongside several old friends to bring justice for the victims of a missionary from our childhood and to call into account the Baptist mission board who had been mishandling the pedophile’s exposure for over twenty years.

Even now, it’s hard to put this story into a few brief words. The pain is still thick at the back of my throat and the journey isn’t over. But from the moment I stepped back into that fundamentalist world, the term abuse grew to encompass so much more than violence. I grew to understand it in its fullness, as it was meant to be understood–as I wish I had understood it from a very young age.

abuse defined

The justice endeavor began as an effort to bring healing to a friend and her family who had been deeply wounded by the pedophile and mission board, but over time it became very clear that I suffered sexual abuse myself—something I had long pushed back and denied and reasoned away, despite it explaining decades of emotional instability. New information made it undeniable, and I had to face the things my mind had hidden. Then, as I fought for justice, I became the victim of spiritual and emotional abuse as well.

First came the e-mails and blog comments from total strangers calling me a tool of Satan and an enemy of the gospel. Verses were thrown at me—at us—and we, the victims,were admonished not to touch “God’s anointed.” The vile things that self-proclaimed Christians will say in anonymity is appalling. If self-righteous curses of “shame on you, you whore of Satan” could kill, I’d be dead from the anonymous e-mails of vitriol and hate I have read.

The harder we pushed for justice, the closer the abusers came. Now it wasn’t just strangers dishing out spiritual and emotional abuse on the internet, it was people we had called “aunts” and “uncles” in our youth. Verses, again, were thrown at us. We were reminded to forgive, reminded of the supposedly innocent family members who were embarrassed and hurt by the pedophile’s public exposure, but who—let’s face it—probably knew a certain amount but lived in denial all along. “What about them?” the emails would say. “You’re being evil and cruel. They don’t deserve this.” And they, the family, didn’t deserve it. That’s true. But neither did we, and neither did any other child.

False familial titles (the cult-like “aunt”/“uncle” monikers) and childhood nicknames were doled out in long e-mails, phone calls and voicemail messages from those whose were rightly being questioned. I stopped taking the calls, stopped listening to the messages, but not before a few left their mark. “This is your ‘Aunt’ ______. We’re hurting so much over all these accusations. We looove you, Tammy,” she said, her voice thick with emotion I couldn’t understand given we’d hardly known each other, hadn’t seen each other since I was fifteen, and she was using a name no one outside my family had called me in over two decades.

It was a poorly disguised attempt to guilt me into silence over a leadership “mistake” her husband had made. Her husband should have be shouting from the rooftops that he’d been wrong, done something criminal under the mandated reporting laws, done something morally shameful. But instead the wife was sent to sway me, to spare her and their grown children this sadness.

Her voicemail haunted me for weeks, not because she got to me, because she didn’t. It was because she had tried. Because she had invoked love and false familiarity and spiritual obligation in her desperation to silence me. I was shocked—utterly shocked—at the subtle insidiousness of it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The misplaced resentment against us, against me, personally, grew to epic proportions when a friend exposed a second pedophile a few years later—and by misplaced resentment I mean more spiritual and emotional abuse. I mean using scripture wrongly and improperly, using relationships and pasts and church authority wrongly and improperly, I mean hurting and injuring by maltreatment, I mean the continuation of corrupt practices and customs, I mean language that condemns and vilifies unjustly and intemperately. I mean all of those things above that Webster’s and Farlex tell us are the definition of abuse. I suffered these things publicly and privately from the mission board, from people I barely knew, and from people I knew well.

At one point, a man who grew up on the same mission field as I did launched a Facebook page vilifying me. His page banner labeled me a fascist, but the reality was he didn’t even know me well enough to use my married name of almost twenty years. One by one, I watched as adults and former friends of my formative years overseas “liked” his page, all because they didn’t like men they admired being exposed for the havoc they had wreaked in the lives of young women who were now middle-aged and grown and no longer being silent.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, really, except that then this Facebook group started in on my faith, mocking me, using my words against me, twisting who I was. Knowing I shouldn’t read their bitter words that came from a narrow view of faith I didn’t even subscribe to, I read anyway, sickened that I had become the target of hate and abuse when there were pedophiles sleeping as free men.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The spiritual and emotional abuse of these years, and the time I spent coming to terms with my sexual abuse—it’s all left me battered.

I retreated for quite a while after the Facebook incident, and I’ve never made a full comeback to that particular justice effort. I wish so much that I could tell you that justice and truth won out. That doing the right thing and exposing sin (no, make that crimes) paid off. But it didn’t and it hasn’t. It has been the most painful exercise in futility of my life.

My consolation, however, is this: I know what abuse is now. Sexual. Spiritual. Emotional. And because I’ve learned the word I can call it what it is. I can give it a name. I can see it when it happens to me or in front of me. And I can cry and grieve and hurt, but then I can get up and walk away and find healing in a safer place. Because the word has lost its power now that my vocabulary has grown.

October 4, 2013 by
Feminism

he would say I "cried rape": false allegations and rape culture

prosperina

serious trigger warning for verbal abuse, psychological abuse, emotional manipulation, sexual assault, rape, and rape apologia.

I’d never seen so many fireflies in one place before. It was early summer in Virginia, and I was sitting, sheltered under a gazebo, watching golden lights flicker on the undisturbed, clear surface of a pond. It was one of those perfect summer evenings, when the gentle breeze feels good brushing against your bare arms, and the air feels close and warm, like a light blanket fluttering around you. It was one of those moments when silence felt comfortable, when words hung motionless in the air.

The words I’d just spoken seemed to surround me, hanging like broken ornaments from silent strings.

He raped me.

It was the first time I’d ever said the words out loud, to anyone. Ever.

I’d known it was the truth for a few months now. The words had been rattling around inside of me, glass shards I shied away from touching, from letting come up my throat and exist outside of me. But, I’d said them, and the trueness finally settled inside of me, and it was like I hadn’t really understood them before I’d said them, out loud, in a place where someone was listening.

It didn’t take very long for that to shatter.

You’re lying. Insidious, and the accusation felt more real to me than the fragility of my words.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A while ago I wrote a post about consent, and what it has come to mean to me. It’s the most healing word I own, because it tells me that what happened to me wasn’t my fault, that it happened to me, that it was not what I justly deserved. I had never given him my consent, but that didn’t matter when I was on my back on the blue shag carpet, and I said the words please, please, stop, I don’t want to do this and he used his watch to cut my knee open and then called me a goddamn fucking bitch.

And, on that post, just like every post I’ve ever seen when a woman dares to talk about rape and consent, a man who had never commented on my blog before, who had never liked a post before, who I’d never heard of before, anywhere, and who has never commented since, deigned to comment to tell me about false allegations and how horrible, how awful, how destructive they are.

I did my best to be civil. But, by my last comment, you can tell that I was angry.

Let me be absolutely clear: false accusations are horrific. I would never deny that, would never try to argue that they aren’t.

However, there is a reason why I, personally, react to them consistently being introduced into conversations on rape and consent on a visceral, whole-body level. Hearing about them makes me physically ill– to the point where I have actually vomited because of discussions concerning them. Any time I try to talk about it with Handsome, I end up shaking and weeping, fighting off a panic attack.

A few days ago, I realized why.

I was engaged to my rapist– had been engaged to him for almost a year by the time he raped me. He sexually assaulted me… I honestly don’t know. The number of times is probably in the hundreds. Looking back over our relationship, he had been grooming me for that moment for literally years. It had started small– minor things I could brush off as cute, as innocent, as harmless, but things still done to me without my consent. Slowly, so slowly I couldn’t tell what was happening, everything intensified. And, through it all, he made absolutely certain that I knew beyond all doubt that there was no such thing as no. If I said no to anything— if I didn’t instantly answer when he called, if I didn’t immediately change my clothes when he told me to, if I didn’t comply with every request the second he made it, I was punished.

He also made it brutally, horribly clear that he was not interested in only demanding and taking– if I was not at least a semi-active participant in my own assault, he would punish me for that, too.

That part of my story is usually the one I can never talk about. I’m shaking, right now, as I write these words. Today, I can say the words “I was raped” and talk about my experience with some measure of calm, almost detachment. But this? How I engaged in my own assaults? How I deliberately ignored my feelings of revulsion, of disgust, the intense nausea? How I initiated sexual encounters with him, even though I didn’t want to? How I did my best to be sexy for him? How I did it all knowing if I didn’t, that he would punish me, or even worse. leave me?

This has left me with deep psychological scars that appear in my life as neuroses. Some of the most humiliating experiences of our entire relationship occurred in bathrooms, and, because of that, I cannot, cannot, take a shower in a strange place without struggling with flashbacks and panic, and I can barely get in and out of my own shower without spraying it down with Lysol before and after, although I am slowly getting better.

I say all of that to say this: if I had known that what had happened to me was rape, if I’d had any understanding of what consent was, if I’d known sex you don’t want to have is rape, maybe I could have done something. I could have gone to the police, filed a report. I could have gone to my college’s student affairs office and asked for help.

But, I know what would have happened.

Anyone involved would have gone to John*. And he would tell them that I was lying, that I was his fiancé. He would have directed me to his parents– because he had made sure they witnessed me “initiating” physical things, like cuddling and touching and kissing. He had the entire campus on his side– he leveraged his popularity and his fame against me, deliberately doing everything within his power to discredit me as that “crazy bitch.” Years after I’d graduated, students still knew who I was, and what I’d “done to him.” And the police would have marked my report a false allegation, and I would have been dismissed as a liar.

The student affairs at my college would have expelled me for sexual misconduct, and almost four years of college would have disappeared, with unaccredited, nontransferable credits.

I know this because it happens every. single. damn. day.

I know this, because I took one of my friends to the hospital to get a rape kit, and they took pictures, and the police interviewed her. But then her case was dismissed, and when she asked them why, they told her they had talked to her ex-boyfriend, who told them she was lying, that it was consensual, and he had witnesses of her kissing him, and, then the officer started yelling at her for treating the police like her own personal puppets and they have “better things to do then waste time on attention whores.”

I know this because another one of my friends went to our college administration to ask for their help, and told them what her boyfriend was doing to her, and they expelled her for “sexual misconduct,” and her family kicked her out of their home.

I know this because another woman on my campus was being sex trafficked, and when our college found out about it, they expelled her, and not only did they expel her, they splashed her story around the entire campus and every single last woman on campus was explicitly told that if we are sex trafficked it is our own fault.

I know this, because when a woman says I was raped the very first thing that the entire world starts screaming at her is you’re a liar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is why bringing false allegations into conversations about rape and consent is so damaging. We aren’t reacting negatively because we don’t think that false allegations are horrible, or that false allegations are insignificant and easily dismissed, because they aren’t. We are reacting this way because we live in a world where false allegations are the dominant narrative. Because false allegations are a nearly-universal part of any conversation about rape, when a woman says that she is a rape survivor, one of the first things that becomes a part of that conversation is suspicion, cynicism, and dismissal.

We are told that if we didn’t handle the situation exactly the way some person on the internet thinks it should be handled, then our credibility is questioned. If we answer the invasive, boundary-violating inquiry “did you report it?” with “no,” then everything about our story is frequently dismissed. Because reporting a rape, to these people, is just as simple as reporting any other kind of crime, and why wouldn’t you? The only reason why you didn’t report your rape is, secretly, you know you wanted it. People who are true rape victims would have no problem with reporting it. And if you were really raped, you don’t have to worry about being dismissed. Any woman who’s worried about being called is a liar is only worried because she actually is one.

I understand why men are so afraid of false allegations. I get that, I really, really do.

But we desperately need an alternative. Right now, the conversation is completely polarized, and the story of the woman who “cries rape” is winning. Because rape victim and liar are so close together, so rhetorically linked, we live in a world where reporting your rape can be one of the most violating, horrible experiences of your life. Where up to 95% of all rapes go unreported because of what happens to women who come forward.

That is a world we need to change.

July 31, 2013 by
Theology

the commandment with promise

manna

One of my best friends during my college years was abused by her parents.

I helped them.

Lizzie* is one of the most amazing people I have ever known. She completed an incredibly difficult course load (20 credits every semester, with winter and summer classes squeezed in around the edges) and maintained a 4.0., all while also assisting in freshman chemistry courses and tutoring anyone who asked– including me, when I needed help to study for my GRE.

She is a fierce, strong, independent, and courageous woman. She’s faced challenges I can’t even bear thinking of– she is eshet chayil: a woman of valor. Of the numerous trials she endured, some of the most severe were dealt out to her by her parents. To many of the people who saw glimpses of her life, all they probably saw were helicopter parents— a bit controlling and demanding, maybe, but not abusive.

I knew better.

I watched her starve herself every day because she didn’t have time to eat– she constantly skipped meals in order to work on her assignments. I begged her to come with me to breakfast, lunch, dinner– but she couldn’t. If she got anything less than an A in all of her courses, her parents would be enraged. I knew. I saw it happen, once.

I listened to her mother scream at her on nearly a daily basis that she was ugly, revolting, unlovable, and undesirable. Her education was her only shot, her mother told her, because no man would ever want to marry her.

I sat with her when she cried because she’d just found out her parents had left another church because of her father’s lack of propriety toward teenage girls.

I kept my phone next to my bed at night during the weeks I knew her father was threatening her family with committing suicide, praying that his ‘hunger strike’ against his children’s supposed ‘misbehavior’ would end.

I massaged her shoulders, arms, and wrists when the stress and intensity of her life caused her so much pain she could barely move.

I gave her all my phone credits because her parents demanded that she call them every Sunday afternoon regardless of whether or not she had the time.

I held her when she broke down after her parents had violently and forcefully ended not one, but two relationships with amazing young men who were deemed “worthless pigs” by her parents, even though they refused to even speak with either of them.

I listened to her worry about what her younger siblings were going through, watched her desperately try to distract her parents, to show her younger siblings how to avoid her parent’s wrath and fury.

I could go on, and on, and on. These are just the tip of the iceberg– the trauma and damage she suffered at the hands of her “godly, loving, Christian” parents could fill a book. She was emotionally crippled by them– rendered almost incapable of expressing or even having emotions in any normal, healthy way. She struggled to find outlets– poetry, music, stories, but she found it impossible to let anything truly affect her. Numbness and detachment were the only ways she had of coping.

And even thought I bore witness to nearly every single thing they put her through in college, the only encouragement I was allowed to offer was no encouragement at all. The only thing I was allowed to say to her was obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right, and honor your father and mother.

I spent years in college wondering what I could do to help Lizzie. I sat with her on every Sunday afternoon, watched her take a deep breath and steel herself every time she called home, tried to help her get through what I now know are panic attacks every time a phone call ended. I knew to the very core of me that what her parents was doing was wrong. Not just wrong– vile. I wanted to tell her nearly every day that she didn’t have to deal with this– that she could walk away, that she didn’t have to listen to their threats and slurs. I wanted to tell her that her parents were liars.

But, every time I tried to say the words, honor your father and mother would stop me.

Somehow, I was aware that Ephesians 6:4 is coupled with the admonition for children to honor their parents: that fathers are explicitly instructed to “not provoke your children to anger,” but I was not able to see verses three and four as connected, and inter-dependent. Because of what we had both been taught about how to read the Bible, verses like Ephesians 6:3 are treated the same way as Ephesians 5:22. In both of these instances, the command for children to honor and women to submit are independent of the commands for fathers to not provoke and husbands to love. In this frame, it does not matter if fathers or husbands are abusive and unloving– the commands to honor, obey, and submit still stand.

This method of application results in consequences so horribly disastrous and horrifying that the only thing left to say is that this application must be grossly inaccurate.

Women cannot be required to submit to abusive husbands.

Children cannot be required to obey abusive parents.

This cannot be how the Bible works. This cannot be the proper understandings of these verses. To allow this interpretation and application is to invite destruction into our lives. It’s to blithely give abusers, rapists (marital rapists or otherwise), and potential murderers the “biblical” vindication to believe that what they are doing is right and just.

There must be a place in our understanding of Scripture that allows for nuance, complexity, and grace– in order to place what seems to be dogmatic, unalterable commands in the daily-ness of our lives must mean that we make adjustments. That we see the balance presented in these passages. We must read all of Ephesians, not just handpicked verses that seem to be calling for unequivocal application. We need to see that Paul is asking us to walk in love and wisdom, to expose with our light the abusive things done in darkness and in secret.

We should recognize the whole pattern of these two chapters, that Paul was completely upending anything anyone knew about how society should function– that the life-changing part of these passages was not children, obey or servants, obey, or wives, obey, but for fathers to not do anything to provoke their children, for husbands to sacrifice themselves for their wives, for masters to stop threatening their servants and remember that everyone is equal in Heaven.

The Pharisees saw Jesus and his disciples working on the Sabbath– farming, reaping, harvesting. This, to them, seemed to be an obvious and direct violation of the commands regarding the Sabbath. It could not be clearer to them that Jesus, the man running around claiming to be the Son of God, a mere mortal who blasphemed God and claimed the ability to forgive sins, was breaking the Commandments. Scripture was very clear, very plain. There was no debate, no opportunity to even misunderstand this Command. They even had their stories about the time in the wilderness and the gift of manna, and how they were commanded to gather a double portion before the Sabbath so that they might observe the Sabbath rest.

And what did Jesus say to them? I desire mercy. He asked them to not condemn the guiltless.

Mercy, meaning divine favor or compassion.

If we are not reading and applying our Bibles with love, grace, mercy, and compassion at the very forefront of our thoughts, we are allowing the opportunity for injustice and a language of carnage to become a part of what we think is right.

May 14, 2013 by
Uncategorized

Spiritual Abuse Awareness Week and Blog Link-up

into the light

This is just an announcement– most of my lovely readers probably already know about this, but just in case there’s someone who doesn’t:

Hänna, from Wine & Marble, is kicking off the Spiritual Abuse Awareness Week tomorrow, March 18. She will be hosting the first day of the three-day link up, focusing on the question:

What is your story? Share your experience — showing the details without going into specifics about places or people involved. What made the environment spiritually abusive? Was it language, unspoken social codes, beliefs, assumptions, expectations? How did these factors enable the abuse? How did you eventually leave, and why?

I hope that tomorrow is a really important day. One of the biggest problems facing the modern church, I believe, is that it’s incredibly difficult for people to spread their stories about their experiences with spiritual abuse. Part of overcoming that will be by showing that the spiritually abused have a voice, no matter how well-connected or powerful their abuser is.

The second day will be hosted by Joy from Joy in this Journey, focusing on:

How has your experience affected you? What has it done to you emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, etc.? What has your journey been like? How have you gotten where you are today? Do you feel you’ve healed? What do you still struggle with?

This was one of the hardest things I had to realize about getting away from my spiritually abusive environment– it followed me, because it was inside my head. Spiritual abuse, just like every other type of abuse, has long-term consequences.

The third and last day will be hosted by Shaney Irene, talking about:

Why should those who haven’t been hurt care about this issue? What do you wish you could tell those who want to help but weren’t close enough to know or see your situation? What do you wish every pastor knew before starting ministry? What would make the church a safe space for you?

Optional, for those who didn’t do the first two days: What did you learn? What changes will you encourage in your churches, etc. in order to prevent spiritual abuse and provide healing?

Also, Rachel Held Evans will be participating in Spiritual Abuse Awareness week with her series “Into the Light.” I’m excited about that, because, well, it’s Rachel Held Evans. What’s not to like? And Elora Nicole will be hosting anonymous stories of spiritual abuse all week.

Please get involved, either by writing your own story or reading other stories– or both.

March 17, 2013 by
Feminism

prince charming, part two

As my relationship with John* progressed, the abuse escalated. Like most women in an abusive relationship, I continuously rationalized and justified it. I internalized his perspective, and was earnestly trying to be a better girlfriend–surely, if I didn’t constantly make mistakes, John wouldn’t have a reason to abuse me.

Now that I have a few years of distance, I can identify that thinking for what it was. It took me a long time to realize that I had been in an abusive relationship. It took me two years to realize that he had raped me. I started looking for help.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there isn’t a terrible lot of material for Christian women escaping from abusive relationships. Most of the advice centers on “loving your husband through it.” Women are encouraged to stay in abusive marriages, sometimes explicitly. Often, the encouragement to stay in an abusive relationship or marriage is implicit– God hates divorce. The abuse can’t be so bad that divorce is justified. I’ve heard preachers say that there is only one possible situation where leaving your husband is ok– if the abuse is so bad that he’s going to kill you or your children. They ignore the damage of spiritual, emotional, and verbal abuse. Forget conversations about rape in marriage — marital rape isn’t a possibility in IFB or complementarian rhetoric. Being married is equal to eternal sexual availability.

The resources are appearing, now, as more and more people are realizing the potential dangers in complementarianism and the inherent abuse present in patriarchal teachings. However, what about young women, who are “courting,” or “dating,” and are in an abusive relationship? They could, technically, leave at any time– but they don’t.

Part of the reason I wrote about in roses — that the purity culture traps young women, once they have crossed any kind of “purity” line (such as physical touch or caresses, or any thing remotely sexual, including “dressing immodestly” to phone sex or sexting). Once you’ve surrendered your purity, you’re done. You no longer possess the “greatest gift a girl can give her future husband.” I did, already, thinking that he could be my future husband, but now definitely must be, or I’m ruined.

But there’s also the emotional purity, the unrealistic demand that girls keep their heart “intact.” So what happens when they fall in love, and they’ve “given their heart away”? What happens when they’ve followed every precaution available, gone along with the courtship method, and they still end up with a broken heart?

Well, in my experience, the evangelical world is silent. Either they looked at me like I was nuts for worrying about this, or they just shrugged. There’s no use crying over spilt milk– your future husband will just have to make do with a piece of you missing. Just try not to let it happen again, ok?

But, here’s what I’ve learned since then.

Dating is fun. The “dating game,” as Joshua Harris phrased it so disparagingly, is chaotic, and frustrating, and wacky, and funny, and romantic, cute, and sweet. Yes, I could end up embarrassing myself– and I did, when I asked George* if I could have his number and turns out he had a girlfriend (jerk, we’d been talking for three hours and you didn’t think to mention that?) Yes, I might end up crossing lines I’ve been told my entire life were a hard limit (like slapping Jack* because I’d let him rub my back but that didn’t mean he could grab my boob, go home, you’re drunk). Yes, you’ll be putting yourself out there (like being honest with Dan* who turned out to be a little bit crazy and wanted to perform an exorcism), and you might, just maybe, get hurt in the process (like going out with Mike* who suddenly stopped talking to me and two months later ended up engaged– and they are blissfully happy). Or maybe hurting someone else (like Jim*, who liked me a whole lot more than I liked him, but we had a lot of fun watching the World Series together, and now we’re friends. Wait– yes, being friends after dating is possible, too).

But y’know what?

That’s not a bad thing.

We shouldn’t be so consumed with “guarding our heart” that we forget there’s a whole world full of people that have no clue what they’re doing– including us. That we’re all in this together, and just because I wanted to hang out with a boy –and oh gosh is he cute– doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. I got to know him, if for no other reason than that he’s a boy, and he was different, and he taught me a lot about what it means to be a friend. I figured out what I liked, what I didn’t like, and realized that having that information was important. I learned not to think “could he be The One?” and to go with the flow for a bit.

Yes, I “test drove” some cars and “tried on” some shoes I didn’t ultimately buy, but I learned to be myself in a relationship. I learned about myself while engaging with different men in romantic and platonic ways. When I finally met my husband, I could see in him everything I’d learned to value. He was perfect for me– and I was perfect for him, but only because I’d discovered who I really was.

February 12, 2013 by
Feminism

prince charming, part one

I was helping a girlfriend get ready for a formal event one day when she asked me about my boyfriend, and the, ah, tempestuousness or our relationship. Did I really think fighting that much was healthy?

I shrugged, dismissing her question. Of course our relationship was healthy– we were courting, weren’t we? And, anyway, I’d be bored out of my mind if our relationship wasn’t this passionate. If we never had a fight– good gravy, that would be so uninteresting, so dull. I liked the roller-coaster, and I would never want to get off and exchange it for something placid and listless.

When I was being at all honest with my friends,  I would tell them that John* and I had a “disagreement,” or that we’d “fought.” What I didn’t tell them was that these “fights” involved a whole lot of John screaming at me and a whole lot of silence from me. My version of the events, to my friends, had me sticking up for myself– like the time he told me that I would be getting breast implants after we got married, and I supposedly told him “no way.”

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

Nearly a year and a half into this relationship, one of my friends gave me a book called Boundaries in Dating, a book I probably should have paid a little more attention to. I read it, obligingly, until the authors made an offhand comment about how most people probably wouldn’t want to marry the first person they ever dated.

I immediately returned the book to my friend, telling her I couldn’t accept the authors’ beliefs as valid. Their presentation conflicted with what I knew to be the truth about boy/girl relationships.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I remember reading that sentence pretty vividly– it was halfway down a right-hand page, nearly a third into the book, right below a page break. The authors were about to launch into a new point about how dating can give people perspective on the opposite gender, but I stopped, right there, and just stared at what they had said. My reaction was visceral and violent.

What do the mean people wouldn’t want to marry the first person they ever dated? Of course they would! That’s the whole point!

My reaction was informed by about a dozen years of some hard-hitting indoctrination. It came from a whole host of sources– I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which I think most of us have at least heard of, down to Stay in the Castle (which, ironically, a friend of John’s gave to me after he broke our engagement as an encouragement that I should get back with him), to lots of object lessons.

The best “object lesson” I can remember is one about Pop Beads– a Sunday school teacher brought a whole strand of these up to the platform, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. She told a story about a little girl who loved her daddy, and her daddy loved her. Her daddy wanted to give her everything her little heart desired, including a string of pop beads. He did buy her some, and initially she was oh so grateful, but her gratitude eventually gave way to surliness and isolation. She was so happy with her Pop Beads that she started ignoring the daddy she loved so much. One day, her daddy came to her and asked her to throw her Pop Beads into the fire. If she really loved him, she would do this for him, because he missed her, and getting rid of the Pop Beads was the only way. After an interminable amount of time, she relents. The next day, he brings her a strand of pearls.

Moral of the story: what God wants for you is so much better than what you want for yourself. You should wait for his perfect timing, and he’ll bring someone into your life that is so absolutely perfect for you. Anything that you have before God brings this perfect person is a ridiculously cheap imitation, a knock-off, a nobody.

~~~~~~~~~~

When I was about fourteen, my best friend and I made a promise together — we would “guard our heart.” We would protect our hearts from all the wolves in the world who wanted only “one thing” from us, and we would wait for The One who was the person God intended for us.

This, of course, implies that there can be only one option for us, romantically. Joshua Harris included a rather gruesome story in I Kissed Dating Goodbye about the dangers of the “dating game,” how it results in you giving your heart away in pieces, how you should try to give your whole, intact heart to just one person.

In my head, emotional purity rose to the same level as physical purity. Having a crush on a boy– even just noticing that a boy was handsome was enough for me experience near-disabling guilt and shame. I continuously judged my best friend because she was constantly having crushes– especially on people I thought of as obviously being a wolf. I was “better” at it, better at steeling myself, at not looking. When I got to college and experienced my first heartbreak, it only confirmed everything I knew. Women are designed to fall in love once. That had to be the goal.

What I couldn’t see was that all of this teaching was forcing me to stay in a relationship that was becoming more and more abusive. Because I’d fallen in love. I’d given my heart away. I’d done everything I could to make sure that this person was The One. We’d done everything right — he also came from the IFB culture, and he’d understood courtship. I’d waited to really “let my heart go” until he’d gotten my father’s permission. We were following all the rules about accountability and no physical contact (an easy thing to do, since that was also forbidden by the college) . . . I was very much assured that John was my own personal prince charming.

Photo by Alexandra Rust
February 11, 2013 by