Once Upon a Time in My Oceania

  Healing isn't pretty.  It's raw, it's emotional and it can be downright messy.  Often, healing is portrayed as moving on from a terrible time in our life and into a new happy, thriving chapter, filled with smiles and freedom. Rarely do we see the messy parts–the set backs and mistakes, frustration and tears, the moments where we're convinced we've gone backwards on our journey instead of forward. So often, the actual process, which is complicated, isn't highlighted. We only see the crushed victim, struggling to keep their head above the rising water and then suddenly jump to the part where they're a survivor and thriving on the shoreline. We don't talk enough about the swim, the days and nights of being able to only tread water, fighting to stay afloat. We show the rescue, but not the recovery. In many ways, the hardest part is starting that recovery and being committed to learning ways to help us process the old and navigate the new. It's about re...

One of the most wonderful times of the year is upon us and signs of the season are everywhere we look. I found myself happily smiling at holiday lights decorating neighborhood homes and the brightly lit Christmas trees gleaming through their front windows. I love wreaths on their front doors and the warm, homey feeling I imagine is just beyond them. The holidays are supposed to be joyous, filled with loved ones and the love they bring to you on display just like those decorations. And although many do find that to be true this time of year, sadly, not all do. Cult survivors can be that exception and some don't have a home to go back to for the holidays.  This can be for many reasons and through this blog post I'm going to try and tackle some of those possible reasons. I hope that by doing so others will open their hearts and consider survivors of all stripes, and the difficulties they may face during what is supposed to be the jolliest time of year. Shunning Shunning is sadly c...

  I cried today. Bawled. Snotty nose, swollen red eyes, and shoulders that shook cried. What caused this intense reaction? Christmas cards. I thought 6 years later I'd be stronger than this. That it wouldn't bother me as much. That distance and its friend time would have helped heal this old wound. I also naively considered the fact that this year my life has had much more happiness, new and unexpected changes, that were also welcome and that those things would lessen the sting. I thought I had grown and yes, I know I have in some major ways.  But the truth is it still hurts. So I'm writing this. To my family who I won't be seeing this holiday season because I left the Church: I think we all secretly dreaded the holidays long before I left. The stress to be perfect, to add up to others' depictions of good Christian families was tough. There was always so, so much pressure. Or maybe that was just me feeling it. But, I think we always knew that, although there were la...

With all the dizzying aspects of leaving a cult, I couldn't imagine a life of happiness and fulfillment, let alone a life where kind souls would enter my life and change it for the better. I was concentrating solely on the confusion, grief and surviving of all the years where I was owned by a manipulative and controlling force that was my past church and the movement it belonged to for some time. I was unprepared, so unprepared, and my personal circumstances only complicated my exit and the eventual few years afterwards. I'm thankful I left, but for me, leaving was just another traumatic experience to process. I'd go on to shut down, crippled by that grief, reeling from years and years of living in a constant state of survival mode. To say it was a dark time in my life would be an understatement. I once told someone dear to me that I was like the dead just walking around. I just existed. It felt like a lonely existence, too.  Coming back from trauma isn't an easy task. ...

  I was taught to never lie. Never exaggerate, never utter a falsehood, never "bear false witness." I, like many raised in the strict world of fundamentalism, feared telling anything but the truth. Unless it was a means to avoid punishment, I was that person who would stand by what I perceived as truth. And yet, looking back I found that wasn't always the case. There were many lies I told during my time entrenched in Christian Fundamentalism and often those lies were lies I told to my very self.  These lies had extreme power over me. Power over my actions, my view of the greater world and the isolated one that was my only life. Many of these lies were lies I'd utter for only my ears to hear as I pondered my current circumstances in that environment and how I was unhappy and feeling helpless. Often, I felt like a captive more than a Christian.  These were the lies I told myself in fundamentalism... I'm all alone. I'm the problem. I have to stay. Every church is...

Living life with chronic illness comes with its own struggles to overcome, along with the added reality that your new "normal" may look entirely different. Of all the many things a person faces when confronted with an unexpected health condition, the questions of Why me? Why this? What did I do to deserve my health failing? can often be visited in the mind of a chronically ill patient. I grew up in an environment that always knew the answer to these questions: God made you sick.  Witnessing a manner of all illness afflict many an individual during my time in the Christian Fundamentalist movement, I don't have to traverse long down a path in my mind to recall the reasons why God would allow sickness in a follower's life. It was always one of two reasons: A trial for a believer to overcome and bring God the glory once they were healed, or the direct result of an unrepentant sin committed.  The latter reasoning tended to be the most widely accepted opinion in-group. It s...

If leaving a high control group was difficult, the steps afterwards are equally difficult, and trust me, they are. Taking that scary first step out will be the hardest and most emotional decision you will ever face, even if it is always the absolute right decision in leaving a controlling group, church or relationship. But the days after successfully making that exit are just the beginning of a long and sometimes tedious journey.  Recently during a conversation on trying to navigate life post-cult, the statement was made that every decision, every obstacle is a mountain. Something simple and ordinary to most individuals can seem as a mountain and one that, in order to move forward, a cult survivor has no choice but to climb. I've climbed a lot of mountains in my life. I've made that heartbreaking feat of surviving abuse, of fighting for a sense of justice. I told an unsavory character just recently, "I stared down my abuser at 12 years old, you don't...