homeschool

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Eight

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

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HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 19, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Seven

Trigger Warning: Depictions of physical abuse and gaslighting

Part 8: A Whip for the Horse, a Bridle for the Donkey, and a Rod for the Back of a Child!

From the beginning, my little brother B was a happy-go-lucky troublemaker, more interested in exploring and trying new things than in whatever rules he might be breaking!  Like most small boys, he was often getting into things he shouldn’t, being loud, engaging in rough boy-play, and sometimes careless with the truth.  Nothing too unusual for a small boy (or girl!).  These small misdemeanors brought scoldings from my parents, after which he’d continue on his happy-go-lucky little way.  He wasn’t a bad kid.  He was just a kid.

His personality did not sit well at all with Joe LaQuiere and his philosophy of parenting.  Everyone had the responsibility to be self-controlled and model godly behavior at all times, he said, and children were absolutely no exception.  The reason everyone around Mr. LaQuiere had bad results (bad children) while his were good was that he recognized that it was a misconception that children needed to act and be treated as children.  They should absolutely not be held to a lower standard than anyone else – that was insulting them and their Creator.

They were subject to the same expectations as adults.

And if they violated the rules, stern discipline was the key to correcting the problem.  “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”, said Mr. LaQuiere.  If you want to correct the wrong bent in a twig, you must exert as much force as necessary to force it to stay in a straight position and maintain that force until the new position becomes permanent.  Children are malleable.  If they are expected to act like adults, they will learn to act like adults.  They will rise to the level of expectation placed on them – and if they don’t, it is the responsibility of their parents to forcibly hold them to those expectations.

From the first, Joe LaQuiere zeroed in on my brother B as a “bad seed” in need of a strong hand of correction.  He didn’t like his attitude, his carelessness about rules, his little-boy jokes, or his tendency to be found in the middle of any mischief.  These were all characteristics of a fool, he said.  Mr. LaQuiere despised anyone who was a fool.

Because B was a fool, Joe decided he needed to make an example of him whenever possible, to teach him (and the rest of us watching) a lesson about how God feels about fools.  This started when B was five years old.

One of the character flaws Mr. LaQuiere hated most in B was a tendency to lie to avoid getting in trouble.  As B was always getting scolded for getting into mischief, he’d often lie about things to avoid being punished for his little crimes.  Mr. LaQuiere decided this was one thing he would not stand for, and he intended to stamp it out quickly and forcibly. He informed everyone in the group that my brother B was “a liar”, and nothing he said was to be trusted at any time.  Unless there was independent verification from someone else “trustworthy”, any statement B made was jumped on and accused of being a lie.  Mr. LaQuiere encouraged all the men in the group to join in on “helping” to correct B in this way.  One time, the husband of my mom’s best friend, Mr. W, decided he would give B an object lesson.  He pointed to a green ball on the grass and asked him, “What color is that ball?”  B said it was green.  Then this man turned to me, and asked me, “What color is that ball?  Tell me it’s yellow.”  I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to respect and obey all adults, so I squirmed a little, and said it was yellow.  He turned to B and said, “See?  You’re a liar.  I trust your sister because she tells the truth.  You…you’re a liar.  It doesn’t matter what you say: everything you say is a lie.”  That scene impressed itself deeply on my memory and my conscience.  It was just one of many conflicts that raged in my heart from then on.

I knew B hadn’t lied, but I was told that adults were infallible, not-to-be-questioned, and God’s direct representatives to us.  How does a child reconcile those two things?

Punishments (though they were never called that–Mr. LaQuiere made it clear that this was “discipline”, never punishment) were many and varied.  B was often made to stand in the middle of the floor for some misdemeanor or other, and stay there all day, missing meals, until Mr. LaQuiere said he could move.  He wouldn’t be allowed to work with the other boys and men (“that is reserved for boys with good character who we can trust”) and was made to help Mrs. LaQuiere with laundry and other “women chores” as a mark of shame.  He had all privileges revoked, even the privilege of speaking sometimes, or having anyone speak to him for days at a time.  He was “tomato-staked”, which meant he was to be within twelve inches of Mr. LaQuiere or my dad at all times, and not allowed to interact with anyone, because he “couldn’t be trusted” out of their sight.  But those were the mild punishments.

“The rod is for the back of a fool,” Mr. LaQuiere would say, and he didn’t mean it figuratively.  In the bottom drawer of a tall chiffonier in his living-room he kept The Paddle.  About 2 1/2 feet long, and 1/4 inch thick, the Paddle was made of wood and had finger-grips carved into it, to make spanking easier for Mr. LaQuiere.  It was an instrument of fear to all of us and used to “correct” children for anything from minor rule infractions to major “sins of rebellion”.  The offending child would be sent to fetch their own instrument of punishment and bring it back to Mr. LaQuiere.

In our own homes, our parents would inflict corporal punishment: in Mr. LaQuiere’s home, he always carried it out personally, no matter whose child it was.

B was sent to get the Paddle more than any other child in our group.

Being “paddled” involved telling the child to bend over and hold his ankles.  They were not to let go under any circumstances until Mr. LaQuiere finished the punishment and said they could move.  They were also only allowed to cry silently, or as silently as possible.  Wails or screams were punished with further beating.  Any infraction of the rules resulted in starting the punishment over again.  The minimum number of “paddles” was 5, but that was reserved for extremely minor infractions, or for very young children, maybe 3 – 5 years old.  For most of us, the average beginning number was 10, but this was quickly increased for any breaking of form while being paddled: if you let go of your ankles, Mr. LaQuiere started counting again from the beginning.  If you put your hands behind you and they got hit with the Paddle, Mr. LaQuiere started again from the beginning.  If you cried loudly, he started over.  If your crying sounded angry, he started over, and sometimes tacked on extra paddles for showing “rebellion”.  It was common for my brother B to be struck upwards of 20 times during one “paddling”.

Each “paddle” was accomplished by Mr. LaQuiere taking a full-bodied swing and hitting the exposed rear end of the child with the full force of an adult male (this was modified for the small children, but it still hurt good and proper, as it was intended to).

For the children that were considered “good”, like me, spankings were rarely experienced first-hand.  Instead, Mr. LaQuiere told my parents that I was a child “who learned best by watching”.  Meaning that I wasn’t actually committing offenses deserving of being spanked, but I was forced to watch all my siblings and friends get spanked, because that would teach me to be “afraid of sinning” and I would be even less likely to sin myself.  I was forced to watch a lot of these spanking as a young child.

What made it the most traumatic for me, even more than seeing my terrified brother or cousins being hurt, their wide eyes streaming tears as they fought to hold back the cries that would earn them further punishment, was the fact that Joe LaQuiere treated it like it was funny.

He would smile, laugh, and even joke with the other adults while he was carrying out these beatings.  This was to show that he wasn’t punishing “in anger”, but out of love and genuine care for us.

Once when I was 9 or 10, during a public “paddling” of my brother B, I ran into the dark front room and hid under the piano, my tears mixing with my panic.  I sat there in the dark, hugging my knees, until Mr. LaQuiere’s oldest daughter came and found me and coaxed me out, telling me “everything was fine”, and “there was nothing to be sad about”.  I dried my tears and went with her, but the fear remained.  Maybe these kinds of experiences – watching my siblings be hurt by other adults while my parents watched and joined in laughter – are why I can’t remember ever being afraid.

I live with fear every day of my life since then, and it took me well over a decade after we left to realize that it is really not normal for a child to live life in constant fear.

The thought of how I’d feel if my own children were forced to endure or watch the things I was made to, makes me want to vomit.

When my brother B was 10, he developed a nervous tic – an involuntary twitch in his eye. I’m personally surprised it didn’t start sooner. It started off happening every time an adult made eye contact with him but increased until it was nearly a constant thing.  It was nearly impossible for him to look anyone in the eye.  To correct this “misbehavior”, Mr. LaQuiere told my parents to put rubber bands on his wrist, and snap him every time he did it.  His wrists were red from then on; even so, it was a long time before he could learn to control the eye twitching.

“Paddlings” were not the only punishments my brother B endured.  As he got older, it seemed like any and every expression of anger, contempt, disgust and violence was fair game.  The most violent of the treatment took place during the times we were working construction with the rest of the families.  My memories of this time are somewhat hazy, maybe because my subconscious is protecting me, but I easily recall him being called “lazy” “foolish” “ignoble” “idiot” “knucklehead” “stupid”, and other names — not by other children, but by the adults.  In addition to the regular beatings he received in public, or behind closed doors in Mr. LaQuiere’s home office, he was often dragged places by his hair.  He was thrown against walls.  He was held up against the wall by his throat, high enough that his feet dangled off the ground.  These things were mostly done by Mr. LaQuiere and the other men in the group, but eventually they were also done by my father in the privacy of our own home, as he fought to control an increasingly-troubled B who was getting older and older, and still a “problem” to his authorities.

Other children were considered “hardened” and “problem children”, but none received as much time and attention at the hands of Joe LaQuiere as my brother.

B was targeted for verbal, emotional and physical abuse from the age of 5 until we left the group when he was 13 (though the pattern continued at home for many years after that).

Years later, my dad would express regret over this treatment of B, but his most recent comments on the situation to me were that “he doesn’t have much sympathy for B and J, because they weren’t ‘innocent’, and also, it’s hard to feel too bad for them when they’ve gone on to make bad life choices as young adults”.

I’d like to ask my dad why he considers my brothers “not innocent” for acting like children, but seems to carry no lasting guilt for himself for letting other full-grown men physically abuse his sons and joining in on it himself.

I’d like to ask him how he can see the devastation and depression in my brother B that followed and that has plagued him through his adult years, and not feel responsible.  How he can’t see the link between the abuse and the high level of control they grew up under and their tendency to make “bad choices” later on.

But I also feel guilt myself.  Guilt that I didn’t stand up for my brother.  That I didn’t tell somebody who could have stopped it, though we were strongly ingrained with fear of Child Protective Services, and heard horror stories of older children who “informed” on their parents, and had CPS come snatch all the children away.

So calling CPS would never have entered my mind as a possibility, even if I hadn’t been too afraid to take action.  Though my adult logic can admit that I couldn’t have done much, if anything, to stop the abuse, I still feel guilt and grief over what was done to my brothers, and my own inability to stop it.

Part Nine>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

Reflections of a Homeschool Graduate: Part One

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

Homeschool

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kallie Culver’s blog Untold Stories. It was originally published on June 13, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

Homeschooling: Where I Came From

One of the core reasons for me wanting to start Untold Stories is because of the healing and hope I have found through reading other blogs by homeschool graduates who have had similar experiences and difficulties in growing up, moving into society, and facing the reality of growing up in the conservative Christian homeschool world.

While I realize that many of our experiences differ, common threads reveal themselves in story after story of pain, exclusion, confusion, betrayal, abuse, doubt, faith crises, questioning loyalties, and more.

Growing up all I heard and was surrounded by were glowing reports of how homeschooling was everything God meant education to be. Then when I moved out on my own, I had such a difficult time adjusting to the real world that I spent years feeling like I had been duped and left on my own to figure out how to “de-weird” myself. Finding sites like Homeschoolers Anonymous and Recovering Grace proved to be beacons of hope after years lost in the dark seas of doubt, hating myself and my past, and doing my utmost to hide any signs of it from my peers, while at the same time mask the pain and anger I felt from loved ones still within its circles.

It has taken me a long time, but I am realizing that I can be honest about the confusion, pain, trials, and dangers of the world I grew up in. In doing that, I also don’t have to be ashamed of it anymore or try to paint a rose-colored picture of it. For so long I felt like I had to choose one option or the other. I have found that people put pressure on you from all sides on this subject.

Outsiders grow uncomfortable with your lack of familiarity with pop-culture, or find it wildly funny and strange when you miss an obvious social cue – so easily make you the target of yet another awkward homeschooler joke. Insiders still within the community exude a variety of emotions from growing angry with you for questioning the norms and potentially damaging homeschooling’s reputation, to reminding you that it wasn’t all bad and to not hurt good people by making them feel bad for well-meant efforts, to shunning you altogether. Folks interested in homeschooling want to know if I would recommend it, but then when I hesitate or speak truthfully, they usually don’t want to hear my experiences any more as they assume I am bitter, had an extreme experience, and am not worth hearing out. People who get to know me think it doesn’t bother me when they make fun of my upbringing or my family or immediately assume I won’t understand something. The thing is, while I have learned how to laugh at myself and laugh with others – there is a difference between when you are laughing with people and when you are fake laughing to cover your embarrassment for allowing it to happen yet again.

One of my favorite authors, Brene Brown, wrote “Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

My journey with Untold Stories is a journey in belonging. It’s about learning to accept myself and all that comes with me from my past to my present. It’s learning to be vulnerable in healthy ways and at the right times with the right people. I have been working on this homeschooling factor for a long time. For years I was an emotional time bomb, just waiting for a person to hit the button, where I would either explode outwardly if I felt safe enough or implode inwardly all the while putting on a good face. For years all I did was assess each situation I found myself in and become the person I needed to be to fit in.

Being Kallie wasn’t an option, because I had believed the lie that being myself wasn’t good enough. A belief like that is so pervasive that even when you start to realize it in one area of your life and attempt to change, there are one hundred other areas in your life where it has spread that you are still oblivious to. I am learning that the process of moving from striving to fit in to acceptance and belonging is a constant cycle of trying, failing, trying again, succeeding, and finding yourself doing it yet again. Because of this process, and because homeschooling was such a huge influence on my life – it is important for me to stand up and take a seat at the table of voices weighing in from personal experience.

I know that many parents out there believe they have a right to stand up and defend their choices. I know that many parents out there today who are considering homeschooling often find it easier to hear from someone who talks about it in glowing terms that ease frustrations, downplay limitations, and contrast negative experiences with a public or private education experience. However, in the end, when making a healthy decision what’s really important is to hear all the facts before making the best decision for you and your family. Parents who have homeschooled can speak from experience on what it’s like to be the parent, but they can not speak from experience as to what it will be like for your child. To know that, you have to speak to those of us who were those children.

I know in my own family this can be an emotional subject, as we have all changed over the years, and processing through the past honestly is never an easy feat. However, for parents all I ask is that you take time to quietly and patiently listen. There is a time and a place for sharing your emotions and reflections, but know that for us, as adults speaking to our parents, attempting to voice the truth of how we felt, knowing how you might question our decisions, and striving to be honest about what it’s been like to live away from home—these are some of the hardest things for us to ever do. Even for those of us who weren’t abused, or for those of us who haven’t already been rejected by parents, the fear of rejection or dismissal claws at us.

The pressure to respect and to never dishonor your parents sits in your stomach like a brick.

Emotions of hatred, anger, and blame that have piled up from every time you were made fun of, misunderstood, felt cheated of a life most other kids had, felt behind in your education, had to add one more thing to your list of stuff you missed out on and are trying to catch up on – all of these feelings and more rise up like bile in your throat. You want to lash out. You want to direct it at someone, and yet you can’t because you look at your parent whom you love so much and whom you also know loves you, and you can’t blame them. So you stuff it down and you blame the system for duping your entire family, rather than honestly admit to being angry at God, the system, and your family. I have had many of these conversations with my own parents. I have handled many of them poorly, as it is often so much easier to redirect emotion and refuse to face what you are actually feeling.

I also know that I have parents who have listened, even when it hurt them. I am blessed in that I have parents who daily live out the reminder to me and my siblings that parenting is never perfect but a process. They have communicated again and again with their words and their actions that what matters most is fighting for relationship, honesty, and vulnerability even when it’s painful. And that means rethinking decisions, agreeing to disagree, or apologizing.

For those of you potentially considering homeschooling, check out resources like Homeschoolers Anonymous. Listen to stories from parents and children who grew up homeschooled. Embrace accountability, structure, high academic standards, and work to make sure that your child is truly getting the best educational opportunity and experience that they need, not what you want or only what is convenient. Make decisions with the question in mind, will my child thrive from this or live to regret my decision for them?

For those of you who meet us homeschool kids, instead of following the crowd in laughing at them or making indirect sarcastic remarks that you know go over their heads—come to their defense. Help them feel more comfortable and take time to try and understand where they are coming from. Just because it seems like they don’t pick up on everything doesn’t mean they are oblivious. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been in a social setting, where even though I may not have understood all the references being made, I knew I was being mocked, made fun of, or was the topic of conversation. Also know that as we grow more comfortable with our past and ourselves, we can also learn to joke about it ourselves and with others. It’s a balancing act really that differs for every person, but honesty, a listening ear, and some quiet observation will go a long way.

So, with this introduction, in the upcoming weeks I am going to be sharing my Home- Schooling Untold Stories. I would love to hear from you all on what your experiences have been, or thoughts you might have on the topic!

Part Two>

When Siblings Become Swords: Trista’s Story

HA Editorial Team9 Comments
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Søren Niedziella. Image links to source.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Søren Niedziella. Image links to source.

HA notes: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Trista” is a pseudonym.

I grew up in patriarchy. The seeds of powerlessness and fear were sown in me from my earliest years. Having a voice or power in my family was not easy, in fact, it was a constant struggle. However, this system and hierarchy created and maintained by my parents allowed the rivalry and teasing typical of siblings to grow into unhealthy imbalances of power.

There was a distinct hierarchy in my family. Masculinity and age determined your respect within the family unit. My position as a girl and the youngest member of 7 children meant I was the lowest of the low. My position was to toe the family line, get along and agree with those who were ‘above’ me.

There was one sibling I did get along with very well. She (Anne) was two years my senior, and we were joined at the hip since I can remember. In many ways she faced the same trials I did, however, her sweet and caring demeanor made her a more naturally lovable person.

I was told that I should ‘submissively endure suffering as Christ did.’

I was regularly told I was inept, stupid, crazy and extreme. When I was mercilessly teased or abused to the point of tears, my mother would reprimand me for not loving my brothers. She told me stories of how much she desired brothers. It “shocked” her that I could not “endure a little teasing.” She would have traded most anything to have brothers. Teasing was normal and I was “weak,” “like a little girl” to be offended by the rudeness of my siblings.

On several occasions my mother told me the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saying he loved his enemies and died for Christ. She asked me how he could be so holy and I was complaining about teasing? “Isn’t that silly?”

Minor errors or failures on my part were magnified and viewed as my identity. Once, one of my sisters, roughly 10 years my senior, told me, “You are inept, and incompetent. I know a five year old who knows how to use a key. No wonder mom and dad don’t let you do anything.” This rant was delivered after I accidentally broke her key to the house by turning it the wrong direction in the keyhole. At the time, I was 13 years old I was already insecure. The verbal attacks against my character only made me more angry, hurt and hateful towards myself and those around me.

As a girl it was my duty to ‘support the men’

Although an imbalance of power existed between me and all of my siblings, this imbalance was larger when the sibling was male. As a child I was expected to serve my older brothers without question. If they requested something I was ‘unloving’ if I did not do as I was told. Anne and I were often required to make food for them, clean up after them and in other ways serve them. When they were in college, we were required to make food for guests they had come over and prepare for parties that they were hosting.

My brothers were also heavily involved in sports. My sister and I were told, “You need to support and love your brothers.” When we begged to be involved in activities, sports or anything social, we were told that such things would conflict with our brothers and we “need to love your brothers. Why do you not want to support them?”

Under the patriarchy, it was clear girls did not matter. Our development, desires and needs were entirely subservient to males, because men act, while women are acted upon.

These things caused more anger in my heart. I hated being told I was useless, what I wanted didn’t matter. I would cry out in anger to God, “Why did you make me a woman?? I can’t do anything because I’m a girl and girls are useless.”

I felt a need to punish myself for being crazy

As a child I did not know how to cope with the feelings of helplessness, uselessness, hate and anger. I turned to self-harm at the age of 12 as a means of coping with how horrible I felt about my identity. Being homeschooled posed problems to self-harm. I was constantly watched, and my parents openly mocked the idea of therapy and mental health. They portrayed mental illness as a weakness, something attention seeking individuals contrived to gain pity.

I would find creative ways of hurting myself. I would chew my nails and fingers until they bled. Often my fingers would be raw from excessive chewing and peeling layers of skin off. I would scratch myself, especially my stomach, until I bled. I would ‘cut myself while shaving,’ craving the release I felt when my legs bled. Hiding in my closet I would bang my hands against a pole until they became swollen. One time I even purposefully beat my head against a wall in an effort to give myself a head injury.

I craved affection. I wanted to experience love.

I sincerely believed no one in my family cared about me. Part of the self-harm narrative was an effort on my behalf to gain the love of my family. In my mind I would rationalize, “If I am hurt very badly they won’t be mean to you. They would want to help you, right? See, they really do love you. You need to try harder to really hurt yourself.”

Often I would ponder dark thoughts, sure no one would notice if I were dead. I thought perhaps people would be happy to have the ‘crazy’ girl gone. I wanted to die, but was not sure how. It was something I constantly thought about. I would day dream of being murdered, mutilated and beaten to death. These imaginations served as a mental outlet for my pain.

I was careful not to display my pain to others. Instead, I developed a dual identity. I hated my siblings, but I desperately craved their affection. They were the only people on the planet I interacted with. If they did not love me, I believed myself beyond the love of anyone. In my world, friends were not allowed. Thus, if my own family did not love me, who on God’s green earth would ever see anything lovable in me?

On the outside, I was confident, defiant, strongly defending myself, rebelling in any way I could, actively antagonizing others in an attempt to exact revenge. This was the way my anger reacted.

Other times, my desire for affection would win and I would berate myself and say, I matter and I’m going to earn their respect. When my efforts failed I would oscillate back to hating my siblings and the pain they caused in my life.

Today, I am in my early twenties, a senior in college and headed towards a successful career. Yet when I am around my siblings, I feel like that hopeless, unloved child again. I never felt loved by my siblings. It is hard to feel love from people who hurt me so badly for so long. I still acutely feel the pain inflicted from childhood. It is impossible to negate years of being dismissed as a silly, crazy little girl.

The patriarchy damages its victims in many ways. In my case, it removed the joy of having those I call family.

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Six

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

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HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 3, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Five

Part Six: Modesty- Because SKIN is a Four-Letter Word

I remember the first time I heard the word “modesty”.  I was eight.  We were all gathered together on a Wednesday night, listening to Joe LaQuiere talk.  We were dressed up somewhat nicely, because it was our version of church, and I was wearing a dress.  The adults were sitting on the couch, and the kids were sitting on kitchen chairs or sprawled on the floor.  I remember I was lying on my back, propped up on a pillow, listening to Mr. LaQuiere and thinking that he was the most godly man I’d ever meet!  I was more than a little in awe of him.  He commanded attention and respect with his voice and his self-proclaimed exclusive knowledge of How We Ought to Live.  Out of nowhere, he turned to me and asked if he could use me as an object lesson.  I was completely thrilled to be noticed, because I was so quiet and shy that I was used to people forgetting I was even there.  I shyly agreed.  He turned to one of his older sons (the dark-eyed one all the girls had secret crushes on) and asked him, “What color are her panties?”  His son looked and said they were blue.  I was mortified.  Worse than mortified.  Humiliated.  I was already painfully shy and shrunk from public attention.  To be put on display in front of everyone I knew–all of them snickering at me–it was the worst thing I had ever felt.  I wanted the floor to swallow me.  Mr. LaQuiere proceeded to say that the reason he and his son, and now everyone, knew what color my panties were, was because I was displaying them by how I was lying.  Modesty – that was it.

I was lacking modesty, and it was worth the small price of one little girl’s feelings to bring it to the attention of his flock.

From now on, we needed to be careful about what we were wearing, and how we were sitting, standing, or lying down in our clothes.  No one wanted to make the fatal mistake I did and open themselves to the same ridicule.  That was my introduction to modesty.

Modesty: it’s the topic near and dear to many a home-schooled heart.  No one was concerned about the “braiding of hair” or “the adornment of jewels” that Paul actually talks about (we all wore our hair french-braided most of the time, or at least, all the girls who had long enough hair did: be still, my envious heart!).  But everyone was very concerned about the feminine figure and especially with the question of whether or not the girls nearing puberty were “showing” inappropriately through their turtlenecks and jean jumpers.  Mr. A had seen some evidence of this and had stern discussions with the parents of the offending girls, who passed the scolding on to their embarrassed daughters.  Our mothers were worried.  Was it time for “those” conversations and the mandating of bras?  Whispered reprimands were given, and sometimes girls were sent in disgrace to grab a sweater.  Some of the older girls were banned from wearing turtlenecks altogether.  I was a little bit jealous of them.  No one would ban me from wearing a turtleneck.  At least they had something to hide!  Puberty and budding little-girl breasts also brought up the issue of hugging, and all girls, whether they had “bumps” to hide or not, were strictly ordered to avoid giving any hugs that could result in their chests brushing the other person.  Most of us chose to avoid hugging altogether, rather than engage in obligatory, awkward, arms-length hugs with anyone.

This was so foreign to what my life was like before I met the LaQuieres.  In earlier times, I would wake up, scurry to grab some clean play-clothes, and head out to play.  I couldn’t have cared less what I was wearing while I was playing, as long as it didn’t get in my way.  I had a favorite outfit: my yellow-and-pink shorts with little cherries on them, and a pink t-shirt with ruffled sleeves.  They matched my white tennis shoes with the hot pink laces that I wore proudly crisscrossed around my ankles three times (they were really long laces!).  My sense of fashion may have left something to be desired, but hey, I was only eight!  When it was cold, I wore long pants and sweaters.  When it was hot, I wore shorts.  When we played in the sprinkler, I wore a bathing suit with little yellow ducks on it.  Dresses were reserved for Sundays and church, and holidays.  I spent my days practicing cartwheels and climbing trees, so it seemed logical that I’d end up in pants most of the time.  Those days were now over.

The new attire was to be modest and gender-specific.  It was an abomination to the Lord for girls to look like boys, or boys to look like girls, we were told.

From now on, girls were to wear dresses, all the time (unless very special circumstances warranted pants for the sake of modesty).  Of course you could ride a bike and roller-blade in a dress, if you really found it necessary to engage in those activities.  Why couldn’t you?  As for climbing trees, that wasn’t really lady-like anyway.  Did I want boys to try to look up my dress?  Well then.  Maybe I should find something better to do with my time.  Swimsuits became a hot topic.  A serious discussion was held by the grown-ups, led by Joe LaQuiere, who pointedly said that wearing swimsuits was essentially parading around in your underwear in public.  When did that become appropriate?  Goodbye swimsuit with the little yellow ducks on it.  Hello, big oversize t-shirts and knee-length shorts!  I found my new swim clothes to be annoying and hampering.  How was I supposed to learn to stand on my hands underwater when I was constantly being chided by my mom for letting my huge t-shirt float up in the water, letting people catch apparently-tantalizing glimpses of my one-piece swimsuit underneath?  This was too much for my practical 8-year-old self, and I tried, mostly in vain, to argue my way out of wearing at least the huge t-shirts, pleading their impracticality.  When we were swimming by ourselves at home, I sometimes even won my case!

Later on, swimming became even more restricted.  Mixed-gender swimming was strongly frowned upon, if not outright prohibited.  We avoided beaches and swimming in public places more and more.  Public pools became off-limits, because they wouldn’t allow girls to wear shorts and shirts over a swimsuit (which for some bizarre reason they insisted on classifying as “clothing”, not appropriate pool attire).

Even dresses were not modest enough by themselves.

The more crafty of the mothers sewed dreadful lacy white “culottes” for all the girls, so that if we were so immodest as to allow a glimpse of something, that something would only be old-fashioned grandma shorts, which hopefully wouldn’t turn anybody on.  The other creative solution to the problem of female modesty was to buy all our clothes in women’s sizes, thereby ensuring that they would be at least three sizes too big.  Thus the dangers of accidentally displaying a curve or bit of skin were averted, causing all mothers to heave a collective sigh of relief.  They had done their jobs.  Of course, this meant necklines that were far too big or low for most of us, which required the extra step of sewing custom inserts into all the dresses.  But that was a small price to pay for the moral safety of their offspring!  When I look back at pictures of myself during this stage, I was invariably wearing long flowery dresses that hung off me like a scarecrow, complete with big lace collars and huge shoulder pads that stuck out 4 inches further than my shoulders.  I actually liked the shoulder pads, because they gave me a sort of shape, which was more than nature let me have.  I looked like an inverted triangle, but it was a real, recognizable shape, and I was pleased about it!

When I was 12, I was wearing dresses and sometimes (only at home, shh!) jeans that were a women’s size 6.  Today, seventeen years later, and a few sizes bigger, I can’t fit into anything larger than a women’s size 2.  Usually I can’t even fit into women’s sizes at all, and have to shop in the Junior section.  Yes, it’s a little embarrassing, but nothing could make me go back to the days when I wore flowering tents with linebacker-shoulder pads!

Part Seven>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Five

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

< Part Four

Part Five: A Brave New World

This marked the end of my childhood proper; from this point on, I felt, and was expected to be, more like a small adult than a child.

It was also the end of thinking the world was a friendly and safe place.

My sense of security and my unconscious trust in adults as havens of reliability was replaced by uncertainty and an ever-increasing tendency to withdraw into the safety of my own thought life.

Outwardly, a period of relative peace settled in, with weekly meetings at what was to become not merely a resource for child-training, but our new “homechurch” family.  Sometime around this point we stopped attending the Baptist church that we had been attending since I was a baby.  It used to be pastored by Pastor Chase, a fine old preacher, who I adored and respected enormously, as much as you can adore and respect anyone when you are 4 years old.  The times I got to skip Sunday School and sit in the adult service to hear him preach were my favorite!  Then Pastor Chase either retired or died, I forget which, and was replaced by Pastor Boymook.

I despised Pastor Boymook with all the fierceness my 4-year-old self could muster, not just because he wasn’t Pastor Chase, but because I instinctively felt with the intuition of a child that he wasn’t completely genuine.  He was a smooth talker, and I didn’t trust him.  Pastor Chase always talked to me like a person; Pastor B talked to me in the condescending way some adults use with children because they think they aren’t smart enough to know the difference.  I hated that.  My opinion of him was just reinforced when I went through a class he taught as a prerequisite to being baptized, when I was 6.  The other members of the class were two adults, and when we finished the class, we were all given books as presents.  I was thrilled!  Being precocious, and a child of parents who valued books as a self-education, I regularly read all sorts of books that were “too old” for me, and understood most of them.  I read all of my dad’s books that I could get my hands on, and I was excited to have a new “grown-up” book of my very own!  Pastor B handed the adults thick, leatherette copies of some classic Christian theology book.  Then…he handed me a children’s board book, with colorful pictures and simplified stories about Jesus.  I hated it.  I was insulted.  Even my copy of the NIV Bible, which I used to look up Bible verses and follow along during the sermons, was more advanced than this.  Pastor B had sealed his fate: he was officially persona non grata to me from that day on.

I wasn’t sorry to leave Pastor Boymook behind for our new Wednesday night “church” – at least Mr. LaQuiere talked to children like they were adults too, and I found that very gratifying.

Little by little, Mr. LaQuiere became the final word in all matters of our daily lives, whether the issues were theological, familial, financial, or even regarding the kinds of food we were allowed to eat.

Traditional church was bad.  Public school (even private school) was bad. Letting your children play with other children was bad.  Eating pork and seafood was bad.  Christmas trees were pagan, and therefore, bad.  So we started a new way of life.  We cut out all pork products from our diet and replaced them with things like turkey bacon.  There was no substitute for marshmallows, which I was sad about.  Who knew they were made from pork by-products?  We shunned the neighbor kids for their “corrupting influence”.  We banned Christmas trees from our home.  I hated this one the most. I missed the Christmases of old, with the twinkling lights of our tree glowing through our frosty front window when we came home on dark winter nights.  I missed falling asleep to the lights of the Christmas tree, shining in the dark and promising the wonder of Christmas mornings and presents as-yet unwrapped!  But we all had to sacrifice for the sake of godliness, so that was that.

Joe LaQuiere had an obsession with the Jews and Jewish traditions (hence the “no pork” rule).  He explained to us that the Jews were God’s “favorite people”, and we should be following their example.  If your father had a favorite son and gave him special rules, wouldn’t you try to follow the same special rules so you could gain the approval of your father as well?  If we wanted God to be pleased with us maybe it wasn’t absolutely written in stone that we must act like the Jews, but certainly it was going the extra mile, and aren’t we told to go the extra mile?  If we loved God with our whole hearts we would do everything we could to please Him.  So we replaced traditional Sunday church-time with Saturday Sabbath.  The Sabbath was the day God instructed all of us (not just the Jews) to rest and not to do any work.  It was treated very seriously.  This meant not only no physical work but also no playing games, no reading books- except for the Bible (or maybe very spiritual books, if approved by a parent…cue ‘Elsie Dinsmore’), no buying anything at a store (causing others to work) from sundown Friday night until sundown Saturday night, and in general being quite solemn, as befitting a day in which we are to honor God.  It was also the day we took “the Lord’s Supper” (not “communion” – that sounded too much like what those people in regular church did).  All the women wore head coverings during the Lord’s Supper and worship time and sometimes the whole day long.  My sister and I and the other girls were exempt until we were about 12, then we were considered adult enough and required to wear them as well.  The men would pour out red grape juice (wine was alcoholic, and being definitely warned against in the bible, was not an acceptable substitute) in crystal glasses, one per adult, and after reading the new testament portions about “this cup is the new covenant in my blood; drink it in remembrance of me”, we would solemnly drink it, after first being warned that not taking it seriously, or worse, “partaking with unconfessed sin on your conscience” could result in getting seriously sick, or even dying, because it says so right there in the bible.

Once I was old enough to take part, I always worried that there would be some sin I had forgotten about and secretly wondered if this would be the time that it caught up with me.  I didn’t know if dying in this manner would invalidate my salvation or not, so it was especially nerve-wracking not knowing if my final destination hung in the balance!  It seems like a silly worry when I look back on it today, but it was taken very seriously and was just one of the things that contributed to my believing that being constantly guilt-ridden was a normal state of being!

Sin of any sort was a serious matter, and we were constantly reminded that not only was our sin the reason that Jesus had to die, but also that God specifically demanded that sinful, rebellious children be stoned to death (the process was described quite graphically to us), and though we somehow were able to escape this fate by the skin of our teeth, it is what a holy God said we deserved.

With this new solemn knowledge of sin came the reassurance that we could be accepted by God if we lived “godly” enough lives.  It was hard to give up Christmas trees, and bacon, and our friends, but we had been given the Rulebook for Eternal Life, and we were going to live by the rules!

It was a brave new world.

Part Six>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Four

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

Trigger warning: graphic depictions of infant abuse

< Part Three

Part Four: Rebellion is as the Sin of Witchcraft

Later on, in that first year of Wednesday night meetings, I remember the child-training starting in earnest.  My youngest brother at the time, J, was a year old, and I remember him being an exceptionally happy baby.  He had reddish curls and an infectious grin, and he laughed all the time!  We have pictures of him playing in the grass, or being bounced by my sister or mom, and playing in the sand at the beach, and he was smiling in all of them.  That all changed.  Mr. LaQuiere decided it was time to teach his parents-in-training how to properly train obedience in children.  The only way to get good obedience in was to get bad rebellion out, starting as young as possible (which in our case was already too far behind us he said–if he had known us sooner he could have started training J when he was only a few months old and still a fresh slate; but as J was already a year old and set in his ways, we had better not lose any more time!)  So the process was started of teaching a wiggly toddler to sit quietly and obediently on his parents’ laps.  Refusing to sit still, whining, or worst of all, arching the back in protest, were all signs of rebelliousness in a baby (we were directed to the verses of how “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child” and assured that babies are born with this sinful rebellion that starts to show itself practically the moment they arrive home from the hospital).

This rebellion needed to be corrected, because rebellion was the most serious and evil of all childish sins – “like unto the sin of witchcraft”, as the King James Bible says.

This correction was accomplished in various ways.  Mostly it was through repeated swats and slaps on J’s leg or bare bottom, hard enough to sting, every time J tried to get down or refused to sit still.  They worked with him on this for longer and longer periods of time, but instead of turning docile he fought it harder and harder.  He cried a lot, and these “training sessions” dragged on, and on, often into the wee hours of the morning.  Mr. LaQuiere assured my parents that though J was clearly a very rebellious little boy, they could break his will and train it out of him, if they would be firm and not give up!  So they kept at it, day after day.  Little J would cry himself hoarse, but he wasn’t allowed to get down, or fall asleep, or even nurse, until he submitted and obeyed by sitting still and not crying.

Often times Mr. LaQuiere would insist that J had to be trained only by my dad, because it was clear he wanted his mommy, and he shouldn’t get his way because that would reinforce his rebellion.  At least once, when they were fighting him (training him) all night and couldn’t get him to stop crying, they took turns, at Mr. LaQuiere’s direction, holding him with his face stuffed into the sofa cushions until he stopped crying, when they’d let him up to breathe. Then he’d catch his breath, cry some more (“disobedient, rebellious cries”), and they would stuff his face back into the cushions.  This was bewildering and terrifying to me as a young child.

My world was suddenly confusing and no longer safe.

I was intensely distressed at my baby brother’s crying and at how much he had to be punished.  At the red marks on his legs.  At Mr. LaQuiere’s insistence that they pull down his little diaper to spank him because it “didn’t hurt enough” being spanked through a thick diaper.  Confusingly, my parents seemed all right with this and assured me in whispers that everything was fine – this was for Baby J’s own good, and he was only crying because he didn’t want to be good.  It was in his power to stop it and be obedient at any time.

Over the course of the next few months, 1-year-old J eventually gave in and stopped fighting.  He also stopped smiling.

He became a sullen, withdrawn baby, and this change in temperament was permanent.  He never went back to being the bouncing, bubbly baby I remembered.  His sullenness was further evidence of his rebellious nature, we were told.  His laughter wasn’t the only thing that was silenced: he didn’t speak his first word until he was nearly 4.

This was the beginning of the “secret” child-training methods that my parents were to learn from Mr. LaQuiere and use over the next eight years that we were a part of his group.

Part Five>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Three

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

 

< Part Two

Part Three: Ice-Cream and Dr. Seuss

We met a lot of new families that first year.  There was the K family, with five kids and counting (they ended up with ten, I think), who were already good friends of the LaQuiere family and had been for a long time, so either they were already good at the secret training method, or they were mostly exempt from it because they were best friends.  Then the R family, with two kids, who were best friends with the K family, and also mostly exempt from the secret methods, for reasons unknown.  Then came the regular families: the T family, who had mostly girls, all pretty, with long, curly black hair down their backs that I envied intensely, being myself a plain child with super-fine, straight hair that my mom kept cutting short to my chin despite all my protests.  The N family, who had girls my age, a teenage son, and a baby.  Then the J family, who had a bit of a stigma attached to them because Mr. J was divorced, and this was his second wife.

We all knew this was considered a mark of shame, in the secret way that children know something without ever actually hearing it said or being allowed to talk about it. 

My mom’s best friend from high-school, Mrs. W, also came with her second husband (they were both divorced and remarried – Mr. LaQuiere spoke at their wedding), each bringing one child of their own. Needless to say, this was also considered one of the Lesser Families by the unspoken rules, and they were always fighting about each other’s children too.  (He thought she babied her son too much, and she thought he played favorites.)  They were probably the most unhappy family starting out, but we all knew we had our own issues, so we weren’t (openly) judging.  Last but not least, came my aunts and uncles and assorted cousins, the A’s and the S’s, who became a very large part of the story later, in two very different ways.

I don’t remember too much about those early days – it seemed like a lot of fun and games at first!  We were young enough not to pay too much attention to the adult conversation, though that changed pretty quickly, and mostly we just read books on those Wednesday nights: great quantities of approved-for-kids books, of which an oddly high number were about Amish children.  The best ones were Dr. Seuss, which they kept around because they provided valuable object lessons for the trainee-parents, but we didn’t know that at the time.  All we knew was, for voracious readers like ourselves (our parents actually made rules about where we weren’t allowed to read books – not in the car, not in the bathroom, not in bed, not at our friends’ houses, not on the way home from the library…) it was book heaven!  Also—and this was, to be honest, the major lure of Wednesday nights–there was ice-cream.  Not just ice-cream.  ICE-CREAM!  In over a dozen flavors and dished out generously in huge bowls: more ice-cream than our excited little eyes had ever seen before!  The LaQuiere family bought Breyer’s ice-cream in bulk from Sam’s Club and stored it in a huge chest freezer in their basement filled with nothing but gallons and gallons of ice-cream!  We knew, because occasionally we’d get sent down there by Mrs. LaQuiere to grab a refill, and it was a sight that made our gluttonous eyes gleam with avarice!  I’m not sure I can entirely blame my love-affair with ice-cream on this weekly ice-cream orgy, but it was definitely a factor, believe me.  Anyway, except for the ice-cream and the books, I don’t remember too much of that first year.

We were already homeschooling because my older sister R was a very bright child and bored with kindergarten at the Christian school my parents sent her to, so they figured what the heck, they could surely do better at home.  So they took her out of school, and that one year of kindergarten was the only public schooling any of us ever had.

It turned out, though, that homeschooling was the ONLY godly option, so it was lucky we were already doing it!

The LaQuiere family had started homeschooling back in the days when it was illegal and dangerous to do so.  They drove their children around in dark vans and kept them away from windows in case someone saw them and called the cops.  But they were determined to do what was RIGHT for their children and avoid the sinful lies (I think this meant “the theory of evolution”) being taught in the public schools. My parents also agreed that this was a worthy goal, and so our future as homeschoolers was settled and sealed.  I only vaguely remember those early days of being homeschooled, but I know we had little desks, and my mom made us chant the Pledge of Allegiance with our hand over our heart at the start of every school day. Aside from that it’s all a foggy blur.  I definitely learned to read and write and generally thought school was great fun, so my mom must have been a good teacher!

Part Four>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Two

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

 < Part One

Part Two: Welcome to the Secret Club

Though I don’t know this for certain, I think my parents started going to Mr. and Mrs. LaQuiere for advice on how to handle my handful-of-a-sister.

They were at their wit’s end at that point and desperately needed to find “The Answer” to how to have a well-behaved child.

Such a stroke of luck it was for them that someone recommended Joe LaQuiere, who had a beautiful family of five perfectly-behaved children, all with names starting with J (Mr. LaQuiere’s first name started with J).  I always felt sorry for Mrs. LaQuiere because her name did not start with J and sympathetically felt that she must feel bad about being the outsider in her family.  They were a wonderful and happy family, and their child-raising-methods clearly worked because they had grown children, as old as twenty, and not one of them had ever rebelled or gone through “difficult” teenage years (they didn’t believe in the word “teenager”, because it was steeped in worldly rebellion).  Not even as little toddlers did they ever so much as go through the horrible misnomer of the “Terrible Twos”! Their toddlers (and children, and young adults, and grown adults) all were as sweet and obedient as any proud parent could wish for, and it was all through a secret method of training that Mr. LaQuiere would share with us, if we wanted.  (I mean, if our parents wanted.  Children’s wants don’t matter, haha!)

Naturally my parents were very excited, and so were we!  Here were these very cool kids (they were older than us – older kids are cool just by virtue of being older!) and something that sounded tantalizingly like an adventure!  We would get to start coming to Mr. and Mrs. LaQuiere’s home to observe them, and they would visit us at our home to observe us, and we would get to see first-hand how this magical method of child-training worked!  Most importantly, in my mind, they had a miniature barn in the backyard and ducks! And the kids got to gather and eat the duck eggs, and how often do you get to do that as a suburban child?  Never, that’s how often.  But now we were lucky and got to gather and eat duck eggs too; which, for the record, are quite strong-tasting, and I wouldn’t recommend them at all.  But still, the novelty was the thing.

So we went to their house to observe them, and they came to our house to observe us – actually, as it turns out, they were observing us the whole time at both houses, which was rather unfair, I thought — and they sat us down and gave us their observations, which wasn’t nearly as fun as I had initially thought it would be.

It turned out that we were doing all sorts of things wrong.

A lot of them were things I didn’t even realize were wrong, and I was rather crestfallen to realize that while I thought I was being especially good, I was actually being bad. I had thought that I would know the difference at least, but here was the bona fide list of crimes we had committed, things like “talking back to parents” instead of instantly and cheerfully obeying.  Or acting disappointed (“having a fallen countenance” they called it) when we were called away from something fun and told we had to go home.

I don’t really remember the other things on the list, but I left the initial diagnosis feeling quite ashamed and shown-up in front of the cool LaQuiere kids, and I wished their parents wouldn’t have paraded our faults out when they were right there listening because now they wouldn’t like us. Actually I don’t recall them really liking OR disliking us – they were just dutifully cheerful and happy with everyone and treated us all the same.

It turned out that we were not the only family seeking Mr. and Mrs. LaQuiere’s help (I’m just going say “Mr. LaQuiere” from now on, because while Mrs. LaQuiere was a most dutiful wife and supported everything her husband said, she really didn’t add anything of her own to the discussion). Lots of other families needed their help too, and they would all meet together on Wednesday nights for training times with the LaQuiere family, and now, we were invited too!

It was like being invited to join a special club!

Definitely exciting enough to forget my initial embarrassment over my list of character deficiencies!  We started attending on Wednesday nights, and so did my mom’s brother and sister and their families. (I think that one of them was actually the connection that encouraged us to meet Mr. LaQuiere in the first place.)  So not only did we get to join a special club, but our cousins were all a part of it too!  Life couldn’t get much better for a 7-year-old!

Part Three >

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The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part One

HA Editorial Team8 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

 Part One: The Day I Turned Bad

My earliest childhood memories are all good. Playing “cave spelunking” in our basement with my dad and siblings, the big climbing tree in our backyard, playing Indians with shell-face-paint at the beach with my cousins, going fishing with my dad, capturing fishflies and keeping them as pets: a collection of small childhood pleasures like those most of us have stored away in memory somewhere. I liked my early childhood. It was good. I liked my family. My life was safe and happy, and I don’t take those two things lightly!  By some odd quirk of personality, I was one of those kids that lived to please.  I was not only happy to do my own chores but other people’s as well, and I used to get scolded for using up whole boxes of Kleenex to wrap miscellaneous small things to give as gifts to all and sundry (no laughing, Kleenex is the imaginative child’s wrapping paper!)  My mom would call me “her little sunshine”, and I think in many ways I was my parent’s golden child. My older sister, R, was a free spirit, quite mischievous, with just enormous quantities of energy that she had to expend every waking moment!  She was in constant motion for at least 8 straight years.  With such an energetic first child, having a second-born who was quiet and lived-to-please must have seemed like a godsend to my parents! My little brother B, who arrived two years after I did, took after my older sister.  So that made it two to one and probably wore my parents out good and proper, while making my halo glow even brighter by comparison!

I was probably about 6 when I came to the dawning revelation that my eagerness to please and do things for everyone was leaving me with quite the unequal work load.

I would make my own twin bed in the morning…then my sister’s…then my brother’s…then my parent’s big double-bed, which was quite a feat for a small 6-year-old!  I was also a budding perfectionist, so sometimes I just re-did everyone else’s work after they did it, just so it could be done better, to my own strict and exacting standards.  In retrospect I sound rather obnoxious, even to myself!  In any case, I noticed that I was the one always getting asked to help with everything, while my sister and brother got out of work by virtue of complaining.  My good nature was being taken advantage of!  This unpleasant discovery rankled in my small soul.  I decided it was unfair, and from now on, I was just going to do my own work and no-one else’s.

I always looked at this decision as the moment when I started to “go bad”.  I don’t know if I remember the exact moment or not, but it was kept fresh in my memory, because my mom was always asking me about it, for years and years afterwards. “Do you remember the day you decided to stop being sweet and helpful?” she’d ask, sighing a little.  “You used to be such a sweet little girl.”

She would heave another sigh, and then ask, “Do you remember why you decided to stop being sweet and good? Did Satan talk to you, and put that idea in your head?  That was when you turned into a selfish girl.”

I think this was just my mom’s way of complaining for the good ol’ days when she had at least ONE easy child to deal with. But at the time it instilled all sorts of guilt in me and left me wondering if I had, indeed, made a pact with Satan that day, because certainly I didn’t act as nice afterwards.  This actually became a major point of doubting my own salvation for me, because I had “said the sinner’s prayer” at the ripe old age of 3, and wasn’t I supposed to keep getting better and better after I was saved? But here I was, turning selfish and bad at the age of 6, when I should instead have been comfortably far down the road of righteousness!  These doubts and guilt plagued me for years; I’m sorry to say.  I always think one should explain salvation a little better, even to young children, so they don’t fall into these sorts of theological pitfalls. Over-simplistic theology definitely never helped me as a child, and I bet I’m not the only one.  Anyway, after I “turned bad” at the age of 6, I went on still enjoying my life despite being the selfish little sinner that I now knew I was.  Then, when I was about 7, we met Joe and Mary LaQuiere.

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

Part Two>

Man Shares Personal Testimony of How Bill Gothard Used Bible Verses Which Led to the Abuse of Children

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Julie Anne Smith’s blog Spiritual Sounding Board. It was originally published on March 26, 2015 and has been slightly modified for HA.

Last month, “Dash” commented on an older SSB article, Bill Gothard’s New Program/Ministry: Total Success Power Teams. He used some strong words to describe his experience:

I am a survivor of Gothard’s cult. I experienced unspeakable physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from my mother and father, who were at one point among Gothard’s “model parents.” Gothard is not human. Gothard does not deserve compassion. Gothard is not a man, and he does not have the slightest shred of decency or humanity within him. Bill Gothard is a monster in human form, and as far as I am concerned, he can’t die soon enough.

In the comments, Dash was asked to share more, and did so with me privately. I have compiled them into this article (and at least one more article). Dash’s words were difficult for me to read, especially because of my own abusive childhood, but also because of many years of teachings I was subjected to as a parent, including Gothard’s materials, so I am going to issue trigger warnings for anyone who might be triggered by childhood abuse, by spiritual abuse, etc.

triggerzone1

Dash Explains Why He is Telling His Story Now

I have chosen to share my story with you because I’m 44 years old and it’s time for me to start talking, to anyone who cares enough to listen. I’ve already lost more than half my time to Gothard, and I want my life back. He’s 80 years old and I believe he is still damaging people in alarming ways, and he is leaving behind a deeply rooted, vile and secretively violent institution that seems to be poised to grind forth in his absence and continue churning out his awful work upon the next generation. I want to put a stop to IBLP, and I want to end Gothard’s legacy as utterly as possible. Everything he has ever written, touched, or talked about is poisoned and poisonous, and it must be destroyed.

Specifically, I’d like to talk about those aspects of Gothard’s teachings which were protocols for physical abuse: examples include blanket training, beating children with rods, and the sheer exasperation of parents whose children failed the rules of the program which would result in explosions of rage and indiscriminate hitting. In particular, Gothard’s distortions of the following verse were extremely detrimental:

Proverbs 23:13- Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.

Gothard devoted a great deal of written material, both IBLP and ATI, to using this verse as a premise for encouraging brutal beatings, albeit using roundabout phrasing and “soft” language which absolved him legally of any actual responsibility. At least, that’s how my parents interpreted it.

Part of my frustration in confronting Gothard stems from the fact that my family threw out a lot of Gothard’s most offensive ATI literature, some of which included blatantly racist arguments encouraging white followers to apply the “Quiverfull” practice, and to avoid miscegenation (in addition to the pamphlets encouraging beatings). So I can’t document a lot of these anecdotes. The basic literature quoting Proverbs 23:13, however, is part of the Red Book I believe; so it begins there.

“Spanking” vs Beatings

Also, I would like to be very clear about this point: “spanking” was not what we experienced in my family. These were actual beatings, ranging anywhere from five minutes to an hour or more. The beatings were delivered to the buttocks, thighs, and lower back, and sometimes the hands, fingers, and forearms (defensive injuries), in response to any perceived slight, offense, or rules violation.

Depending on the severity of the punishment, anything from a wooden spoon to a 3/4″x2′ dowel rod was used. My parents actually had an array of dowel rods to choose from (at least a dozen) ranging from a thin one about 1/8″ thick to the 3/4″ terror previously described. Occasionally my dad would use his belt, a heavy leather belt with a weighty brass buckle. Not often, though, because the belt would leave visible bruises.

My sister and I would go to school with huge black and purple welts across our buttocks, carefully placed so that they were covered by our clothes, and we would sit at our desks in excruciating pain with tears streaming silently down our faces. This was during our initial participation in ATI, but before we enrolled full-bore in home-schooling.

My parents were very clear that these practices were part of our Gothard instruction.

On the few occasions when I met Gothard in person, he actually stated that he believed spanking made children healthier and more successful. He would then quote the proverb about beating. He was very good about mincing words in order to evade responsibility.

If you have questions at this point, it would help the dialogue. I’m happy to type everything I can think of, but I get so bogged-down and blinded with rage that it becomes difficult to think clearly. Answering questions is very focusing for me.

(JA note:  On the next post, I have asked Dash specific questions and he responds to those questions.)

I’m not interested in confronting Gothard on Christian terms, in accordance with church protocols. He forfeited that privilege decades ago. I want worldly justice. I want a genuine reckoning from the man. I want to burn his entire legacy to the ground, and stand amid the ashes and say to the world, “This was a man who ruined thousands upon thousands of lives. Nothing to see here. Please move along.”

The greatest and most dangerous fallacy that I keep hearing from Gothard apologists is the argument “Gothard may be imperfect, but his teachings are still right.” No, no and no. This is a lie: an ugly, flat-out foul and evil lie, intended to continue perpetuating Gothard’s abusive legacy. Everything Gothard teaches is wrong, all of it, even his direct Scripture quotes, because the CONTEXT is wrong. It places Gothard in the seat of worship instead of Christ. Everything Gothard ever taught or ever will teach must be discarded. If people want answers, they should listen to the Holy Spirit, and not any human teacher.

The Dangerous Fallacies of Gothard Apologists

I’ve stated this in a previous email, but it bears repeating. The greatest and most dangerous fallacy that I hear from Gothard apologists is the argument “Gothard may be imperfect, but his teachings are still right.” This is blatantly false. Everything Gothard teaches is wrong, all of it, even his direct Scripture quotes, because the CONTEXT is wrong. It places Gothard in the seat of worship instead of Christ.

Everything Gothard ever taught or ever will teach must be discarded. If people want answers, they should read the Bible and listen to the Holy Spirit. They should not listen to Gothard or any other human teacher; they should make up their own minds.

The second greatest fallacy I hear from Gothard apologists is “Many families have a great experience in IBLP and ATI. If your family had a bad experience, it’s because you misinterpreted Gothard’s intentions.” This is also blatantly false. I believe Gothard does in fact intend for parents to beat their children. I would argue that anyone who claims to have had a good experience with Gothard, IBLP, or ATI is either lying, deluded, or sadists themselves. If you got 4-5 years into ATI and you actually applied everything in the publications that Gothard sent you, especially the material based on Proverbs 23:13, you would have had an identical experience to mine.

I would argue that those who believe that they had a positive experience with Gothard are the ones who are in fact misinterpreting his intentions… just as I would argue that those who defend his behavior from the ongoing accusations of sexual misconduct are deluding themselves as to his true nature, and are blind to the damage he has inflicted.

Dash Believes Bill Gothard to be a Con Artist and Explains Why

I believe that Gothard is a consummate con artist. In spite of the endless documentation of the damage he has done, Gothard still manages to convince his inner circle of friends that he is a good man with good intentions who merely stumbled a little bit, and his victims are more to blame than he is for making such a big deal out of “nothing.” There are two explanations for this phenomenon:

  •  The first explanation is that genuinely hurting people, like my mother, who are desperate for real answers and a real connection with God, are easily misled by Gothard’s overpowering charm, his carefully crafted image, and his claims of secret knowledge and a special understanding of the Bible. These people are broken to begin with, and the hurt piled on hurt that Gothard inflicts is too much for them to comprehend; they defend Gothard out of reflex as all abuse victims will defend an abuser, due to Stockholm syndrome and an inability to comprehend their own damages and failures.
  • The second explanation is that Gothard appeals to genuine sadists and sociopaths, such as your commenter Alfred who obviously has zero concern for Gothard’s victims and is committed entirely to defending Gothard and behaving as vindictively toward his accusers as possible. These people are reprehensible scumbags. I would use a more graceful word to describe them, but there isn’t one.

JA note: Alfred, who was mentioned above, is Alfred Corduan, who commented on this SSB post. You can also see his comments on articles at the Gothard survivor site, Recovering Grace website, where he continually defends Bill Gothard. 

 I would like to close at this time by saying that while I no longer call myself a Christian, I never gave up on Christ. I still believe in the Great Commandment:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I don’t do so well with the first part; loving God is next to impossible when I don’t know who God is, and I blame Gothard for that. I may yet end up in hell, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So I focus on the second part, and I try to love my fellow-man as best I can. That’s the best I can do. I can’t save myself. Only God can do that, if he wants to.

Part Two>

photo credit: bark via photopin cc