Thoughts After Restore 2022

A couple weekends ago, I attended the second day of the Restore Conference outside of Chicago. I hadn’t really planned to go until I heard that some friends from Tears of Eden were attending, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see them as they’ve been an important part of my healing this past year.

I will be honest: I was nervous about the conference though. I recognized many of the names on the speaker list, which told me that the conference would address spiritual abuse and other abuse in the Christian church, topics I’ve been researching and writing about for a few years now. But the tagline—“A Conference Restoring Faith in God and the Church”—didn’t quite resonate with me and my own journey after abuse…

To Those Who Liked Me Better When I Was Abused

You liked me as a quiet, meek, first-to-clear-the-table, last-to-speak-up girl. You liked me voiceless.

You wanted me submissive, obedient—powerless—and happy about it.

You told me to just keep submitting because it would all turn out okay. You said God would work everything out for good, but then you went home and minded your own business because you aren’t God…

You Are the Author of Your Story

For most of my life, my story was dictated to me. God had already planned my days, and if I wanted to honor him, I was supposed to follow my father’s interpretation of the Bible in order to fulfill God’s plan.

I was always a secondary character in this story. One could say the protagonist was God, the controller of the universe, but since he’s invisible, his stand-in was my father, eventually to be replaced by my future husband.

I remember once as a twenty-four-year-old, when I was trying to assert myself, I was told, “You can think whatever you want, but you can’t act on it.” That statement encapsulated the essence of the spiritual abuse I was experiencing…

The Rules of Fundamentalism

We never called our churches “fundamentalist.” We were Reformed. We were Presbyterian. We were Calvinist. We thought we were the true Christians.

Now that I’ve left, I use new language that I would never have used before to describe my childhood church and the homeschooling world I grew up in: abusive, high-control, legalistic, cult, fundamentalist. These words help me explain what really happened. But of course, they weren’t words that we would have used for ourselves back then . . .

Getting Out of a High-Control Group

Eight years ago, I left my life as a stay-at-home daughter in the Christian Patriarchy movement.

I was struggling with depression, anxiety, and terrifying fear. My voice was silenced, and I had no agency over my life. I was not allowed to get a job outside the house, not allowed to go to college, not allowed to date. I had few friends and was mostly cut off from extended family.

The conservative Christian church I was a part of as a teenager was deeply invested in teaching strict gender roles, homeschooling as the only way to raise children, courtship instead of dating, and father-controlled families. Hate speech toward women and the LGBTQ+ community was preached from the pulpit. In this church, I learned to fear everything and to hate myself . . .

On Loss and Leaving

I’ve been thinking about those of you who have lost through leaving.

Maybe you have lost your family, community, sense of safety, belonging, friends, church, or work. Maybe you feel this loss in ways you can’t share with others. Maybe you have lost everything, or what used to be your everything.

Maybe you feel like you’ve lost yourself.

Leaving can mean different things: leaving behind something or someone you care about, leaving a faith, leaving your past self in an effort to grow into who you are becoming. For me, leaving Christian patriarchy meant losing some family relationships, losing the scattered kind of community I grew up in, losing my sense of certainty, my support network.

When I left, I felt like I was losing pieces of myself, only to find that leaving was the only way to healing, to becoming more whole. . . .

Silent No More

Sometimes I write because I want to talk back to the patriarchy, the fundamentalists, the Vision Forum thought leaders who spoke into my life so much, with so much damage. Who put law above love. I want to be authentic with who I am and what I have experienced, speaking after so long of being unable to use my voice. . . .