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What Christian Abusers Don’t Want You to Know
Surviving religious trauma often feels like playing, “Two truths and a lie.”
I want to let you in on a miracle. It’s not a story I tell very often — pretty much only in my memoir. Heads up, friends, this story starts out sad.
It takes place sixteen years ago in the living room of a hundred-year-old house in the Cumberland Mountains. The floors and windows were scrubbed bare, and if I’m honest, my soul was too. I stood staring at the rain completely ashamed. I felt like I was evaporating.
I felt ashamed for being. For breathing. For taking up space in this room. I knew I was failing at the one thing I wanted to do more than anything in the world: raise a happy family.
In my hands, I held the large manila envelope holding my ex-communication papers. On the desk, lay a letter from my only friend at church, admonishing me to obey the elders or she’d have no choice but to support my shunning.
In town, I had homeschooling co-op friends who had no idea (or merely sneaking suspicions) that something wrong was going on at my house. Online, I had secret friends who I listened to and hung on their every word…sometimes arguing, sometimes challenging, sometimes longing with envy. I couldn’t let them know what my life was like behind these closed doors.
