Once Upon a Time in My Oceania

  By Kara Blocker I’m 17, singing a solo in church. I hit a high note, hold it, close my mouth and a hammer begins pounding on my head. I thought I was dying. “Don’t disturb the service, the show must go on,” drilled in my brain since childhood leads me to run down the aisle out the front door and begin puking on the sidewalk. Alone and scared, I didn’t want to bother anyone so I just run home to the parsonage and collapse into bed. I wasn’t dying. And now, thousands and thousands of excruciating migraines later I know that I won’t die from them, I’ll just wish I could. I felt punished. What did I do wrong? What did I eat? Did I sing too high? Was I breathing improperly? Was I afraid of my uncle/monster in the audience? What did I DO, so I can fix it and NEVER DO IT AGAIN. As every migraineur knows, I obsessed over triggers. I’ve now spent nearly half of my life in migraine pain. Approximately 40% of every hour, every week, every year for 33 years. It has interrupted most of my...

  By Laura Launderville A few weeks ago, I stopped to play the piano at my small town’s municipal building. Some days I feel drawn to the safety and freedom of feeling my fingers on the keys of a piano and the melody that flows from it. I learned to play the piano when I was fifteen. For years, I longed to be able to play and contribute a talent to the church and God. I had started to learn as a child but had forgotten how to play later on due to trauma. As a teen, I asked my twin sister, Lydia, to help me learn. She had been playing since the age of seven and was more than happy to help me. She also knew how special it was for me to learn. I finally learned and was able to contribute what little I could. For me though, music became an escape. I could play and my emotions, usually complex, would flow out in a melody. Learning to play, I, of course, had to learn hymns to play in church. Original music was discouraged unless the pastor could look over the lyrics to the song. Because ...

  A huge part of my journey of healing from my time in a religiously abusive environment has been using my voice to talk about that journey. It’s a unique journey and one that only some people will understand. Since 2017, I’ve written posts and articles about my experiences and the injustices I witnessed. Hearing directly from victims of cultic environments has been a humbling experience. Those conversations range near the hundreds (at least) of the number of times I’ve talked to survivors one-on-one, and their stories always left an impact on me. They still do. It took so much courage to speak up, to share, to be vulnerable. I found those very things to be true for me, whether having my own conversations with past members of the group I left (the Independent Fundamental Baptists), sharing my story with someone new that became part of my safe circles post-cult, writing this blog or having articles published on the topic. Saying out loud to another person, “I survived a cult” is dif...

  I prayed for revival. I wept and cried, pleaded, and begged that God would send a mighty awakening in the IFB movement. At the time, I didn’t know I was praying for the Independent Fundamental Baptists; only that I was praying for Christians. I was taught real Christians were independent, fundamental and Baptist though. We were the “saved” ones, the separated, and sanctified. And because of those things and the teachings I grew up with (not to mention the fear), believed with my whole heart. I took the “man of God’s” words seriously and I did as was told. So, I prayed. I prayed God would revive us. I never got to see a mighty revival overcome the IFB. Not over the years I was there. I struggled to understand why that was the case when so many of us had to have taken that seriously and followed the rules. Before I left, I realized it would never happen. When I heard that I and other young people were at fault for the absence of revival, I felt betrayed. It wounded me and others ...

  I believed every story the preacher man told me, even the gruesome details he spewed with vengeance in his voice and the spit that left his mouth. I took every warning so seriously, could feel the life leave my body as he warned of touching the Holy Scriptures with dirty hands. For weeks afterwards, I would examine my little hands for even the faintest of dirtiness, worried I’d disrespect God and endure his wrath, even to the point of death. That is just one of many examples of how literal I was as a child taught to believe things incredibly literally. I can’t explain how much that literalism damaged my mental health till this day or the impact it has had on me understanding people as an adult. I joke that I’m just a literal person, but the truth is I was told to take things so seriously or I could face eternal consequences. A child’s mind is very impressionable. They are molded by the adults in their life. Their view of the world is crafted by what they are told, what they w...

  Part of recovering from a cult is healing the parts of you that the cult hurt. In my case, a cult controlled, and its fear ruled my entire childhood. There are only photographs of my childhood days in cult clothes and doing most activities connected to the church. It’s very hard for me to even look at these photos without feeling a deep-rooted sorrow for my child self. I know now what I had missed, but mostly am aware of what was taken. I’ve been out closer to a decade after spending my first adult years as well inside. There is no secret key to healing from a cult experience. But there are strategies through things like professional counseling and connecting to survivor communities and such that can prove helpful. I’m not simply healing from a cult (although there is nothing “simple” about surviving a cult), I’m also healing from emotional, verbal, mental, physical and sexual abuse and overall neglect. It impacted my everyday life, has touched even my future in ways like diffi...

  Much of my life has operated around this broken and problematic thing called black-and-white thinking. It’s how my beliefs were ingrained into me, how I made my decisions and the lens through which my emotions were translated. One thing was either one way or the other, and there was never any middle ground. It was either wrong or right, black or white, good or bad. There was never an in between, no place for doubts or unanswered questions. Everyone around me displayed this mentality, and because children often mimic the adults in their lives, I, too, grew up with much of that mindset. Even after leaving fundamentalism that thrives off such thinking, those thought patterns have unfortunately followed me. While trying to find my views, my values, and my own way, I’ve found that the mindset I grew up with still finds ways to seep into my subconsciousness. For example, humans make mistakes, and a good person can do bad things, but still be a good person. That is just a part of being...