A lot of people are asking me why everything I’m saying must be public. Why not just go to counseling, why not sort it out privately?
We have tried. I’ll go into more detail later. In short, as my little sister explained it today: “mom and dad believe the way to solve their family problems is if they can’t control a child anymore, they kick them out and won’t let them back unless we agree to more control.”
My first sister was kicked out in the early 2000s, and at 18 years old she was given the option to live in Kevin Swanson’s basement, having counseling sessions with him and my parents every night until she succumbed to their authority, or to leave and never see us again. She lasted for two weeks before she couldn’t take it anymore, and I didn’t see her for three years.
My second sister was more abused than any of us, and she just hopes we can all get along. The most healthy thing she did for herself was literally move to the other side of the world. She’s very torn over me going public, so please, if you have the urge to contact somebody or ask questions, message me or Alicia or Lydia. She doesn’t need the extra pressure.
When our parents kicked Lydia and me out last year, we saw the pattern for the first time, and thought perhaps we were wrong to feel abandoned by our older sisters. I tried to confront my parents more than once, and it always ended with me in tears, feeling guilty and ashamed for ever seeing anything wrong with them. Mom and dad found a counselor last month who we planned to go see, but then they took the liberty of spending two long sessions telling their own story to this counselor before inviting Lydia and me to join the conversation, and asked us to write an essay about our top three grievances so they could deliver these to the counselor secondhand.
We gently informed them that we thought they were controlling and cared too much about their reputation, and they said they disagreed. We said there was physical, emotional, and financial abuse, and they didn’t reply. We backed out – there were too many red flags surrounding the attempt to reconcile. We later found out that this counselor was recommend by a family friend who gave Christian counseling to both my sister Alicia and me (conflict of interest), and who made me distrust therapy in general for a long time.
Lydia and I received messages from my dad saying we would not be allowed to visit our family until we followed their demands to reconcile on their terms. Both of us heard the phrase “Our love is unconditional, but our welcome is not.”
This abuse and dysfunction has been going on for the two dozen years since my parents met – and my mother abused my older sisters before my dad entered the picture. My parents chose to make everything public when they put us on TV, happy and smiling, to demonstrate how great our family was. Extended family knew about it, observers noticed hints of it, nobody did anything. My youngest brother is three years old, so if nothing happens, my parents will continue doing this for at least another fifteen years. My older sisters didn’t have a voice. I’m using mine now.
“How can I pretend that I don’t see
What you hide so carelessly?
…It’s not what it seems
Not what you think
No, I must be dreaming…
Help, you know I’ve got to tell someone
Tell them what I know you’ve done
I fear you…” -Evanescence
I have blogged very little about my family, even though I know many of you follow me because you’re interested in what a girl with fifteen brothers and sisters has to say.
I never thought of much to write about. My family felt normal to me. There was nothing deeply introspective or philosophical about it. My lifestyle was intriguing for people because we were different. That’s all.
Recently, the trending hashtag #WhyIStayed gave domestic violence victims a chance to tell their stories. They piled in by the hundreds – women and men explained how spouses, significant others, and parents had abused them. I chimed in with this tweet:
In it, she says that when we ask why the abused people don’t leave, we’re asking the wrong question. Such a question blames the victim for being in the situation. She also tells her own story, and says she didn’t know it was happening.
Her husband beat her, but she didn’t think of herself as a battered wife. That’s how many, many victims feel before they get out. Abuse is the norm, especially for children raised in abusive homes. Some abusers may even tell their victims that it could be worse, and abuse is what happens in other homes, but not here.
Often, victims don’t realize it’s a problem until the breakthrough moment. For me, the breakthrough was a few things – being told that I couldn’t live in my parents’ house anymore was one. For Steiner, the breakthrough was “a particularly sadistic beating.”
Every morning I wake up and think, “How did I never see it before?”
Some days, I have trouble getting up in time for work. It’s debilitating to look at my past as something different than what I thought it was.
Nobody has to ask me why I never said anything about my past in abuse. I ask it of myself, and I question my own sanity. I trusted my parents completely, and I couldn’t identify manipulation or emotional abuse. I was physically abused, and I don’t just mean that I’m opposed to spanking.
I didn’t know I was abused. For every violent incident or when my parents lost their tempers, I had three options. First, I could blame myself and assume I deserved it, or that one of my siblings deserved it. Second, I could see this instance as isolated and minimal, totally out of character, and thus erase my logical ability to recognize patterns. Third, if the first two options didn’t work, my parents apologized profusely and demanded forgiveness, which meant I could never bring it up again.
The life of abuse isn’t full of anger, getting thrown and smacked and bruised, and being yelled at and torn down. That’s only part of it. You also feel special and needed. You don’t feel like life is hell, even if it is, because you know how to force a smile. It feels good to damage your own health and wellbeing for your abusers, because you’re told that you’re doing what is right. You fight for acceptance and admonition, because you’re always getting small tastes of it, and it’s always just out of reach.
The breakthrough moment isn’t the only reason domestic violence victims don’t leave. They also stay in their situations because they feel trapped. Once they know what’s going on, it’s unsafe to leave.
The reason it’s unsafe is because nobody knows about it, and if you speak up, the perpetrator threatens and punishes.
I wasn’t safe to talk about my family life until now. I had to get a new bank account, so my dad could stop financially abusing me with easy transaction-making access. I had to get my own car, so my mom could stop using rides to my much-needed mental health therapy as reason to tell me I was ungrateful if I stepped out of line. I had to buy my website’s domain name from my dad so he couldn’t delete my blog for prying the mask off my family’s face.
These stories have always existed. I was taught to tuck them away as if they never happened. To speak of them would be unforgiving.
There’s so much to tell. I’m assuming that those of you who don’t know anything about my family can use Google to fill yourselves in on what I’m referencing. My parents love the spotlight, so it’s not hard to find the pieces.
Ages will be estimated. Because my parents deny so much of what happened, I can’t confirm exactly when certain events occurred. I’ve chosen to include specific ages for the sake of narrative.
Also, I want to say a thing about abuse. I am not labeling everything in the following stories as abuse. Some things are abusive, some things are just a little weird, and some things are totally common. “Bad” and “common” are not mutually exclusive terms, but I want to be clear that I don’t classify everything my parents ever did as abusive.
Never letting my older sister and me grow our hair very long, and pressuring my sister who wanted short hair to keep it long, was bizarrely controlling. It was just a piece, a detail, of how our bodies were not our own.
But the time my mom grabbed my ear as a small child and threw me on the hard wood floor so my head rang, or the time my dad hit my sister over forty times with a belt not as punishment, but because she had a rebellious spirit, or when my brother wasn’t allowed to attend his regular extracurricular activities for a couple of weeks so nobody would see the bruises my mom left on his face…I think it’s fair to call those things abusive.
I’m just telling stories about my past, so there’s a mix of everything: the abusive, the controlling, the bizarre, the good, how I dealt with it, and how I see it now. I’m undecided on a whole collection of things. Parenting, for instance, is something I can only write about as someone who well remembers being a child, not from the perspective of a parent.
I predict this, and some of it has already happened since Friday’s teaser: people will say it’s disrespectful to put these stories on display. Others will say I’m complaining about things that aren’t a big deal. Still others will discredit my voice because I sound angry and hurt, as if the people who’ve been hurt have no right to speak up about what they’ve experienced. I will be, and have already been, accused of lying. I’m prepared for all of these things.
You have to reassure people when you’re talking about such things, so here’s that reassurance: I have a great support system from friends since losing trust in my parents and connection with my siblings. Yes, I have friends who disagree with me, so I have accountability. Yes, I’m prepared for being accused of slander and I can back up my claims. I’m moving forward in my career, and I’m in mental health therapy. I am living in a safe place.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on October 1, 2014.
I pledged to myself that I will not sacrifice my daughter on *the altar of men* by sending her out of my home, care, and protection at age 18 just so that she can get a degree and achieve some worldly status. I will count those years as a precious time for my wife and me to prepare her for the wonderful task that’s ahead. The job of being a wife and mother is a high calling and I would argue is the most important job under the sun.
The first thing that occurred to me is that this isn’t Heitman’s decision, it’s his daughter Annalise’s decision (Annalise is only five at the moment). Whether Heitman likes it or not, when Annalise turns 18 she will be a legal adult and he will have no control over her decisions. Or will he?
Our current system of paying for college is messed up—including our financial aid system. If Heitman’s daughter wants to file a FAFSA to apply for financial aid, she will have to have a parent’s signature. If Heitman refuses to sign her FAFSA, Annalise is out of luck where financial aid is concerned—unless, of course, she can prove that she was abused. But I’ve seen that process, and it can be complicated, because you have to present supporting evidence. And besides, what if she isn’t abused, at least in any legal sense of the term?
But of course, even this presumes Annalise qualifies for financial aid. She might not. The general assumption is that when a young adult’s parents make too much money for her to qualify for financial aid, her parents will pitch in and help pay for her college. After all, the system is set up specifically to help young adults whose parentscan’t afford to pay for their college.
If Heitman makes enough money, Annalise may not qualify for financial aid.
So, Heitman could deprive Annalise of financial aid, and it’s possible that she might not qualify anyway. What then? It’s very unlikely that Annalise will have money to pay for college herself, especially given the rising expense. She might have a family member—an aunt or grandparent—who could help her out, but chances are her only other option would be a loan. And guess what? Someone has to cosign a loan. What if Heitman refuses to cosign a loan? Annalise might be able to find an uncle or cousin to cosign, but that’s uncertain.
Our current college financing system presumes that parents—whether poor or rich—want their children to be able to go to college. It assumes that parents of young adults—and we’re talking anyone between 18 and 24—will help pay for their children’s college if they can afford it, and that those who can’t afford it will sign their children’s FAFSAs so that they can get financial aid. But these assumptions are not always accurate, and when they’re not, it’s the young adult who is left holding the bag.
Our economic system is set up such that some of the greatest financial burdens an individual will bear occur at the very beginning of adulthood. Unfortunately, when a young adult’s parents don’t help them out—by signing a FAFSA, helping out financially, or cosigning loans—their futures and options may be severely curtailed. Yes, there may be other options—various trades, attending community college while working—but some doors are simply closed.
What of Heitman’s plan for Annalise to spend her adult years as a wife and mother? The trouble is that during the years parents—usually mothers—spend as homemakers and caregivers, they aren’t accruing social security benefits, they don’t make money, and they don’t acquire career skills or work experience. Now yes, there are things that matter more than money. But the trouble is that, in the system we currently have, a mother who stays at home (and it is usually the mother) is incredibly dependent on her husband. She’s dependent not only in a current sense (financially) but also in a future sense (social security benefits) and in a sense that increases over time (as the gap on the resume widens).
This is especially true if a woman did not attend college or gain work experience before transitioning to life as a stay-at-home mother.
As for me, I was lucky. My parents taught me that my role in life was to be a wife and mother, and absolutely not to have a career, but they still sent me to college. They told me they wanted me to have a backup plan, and options available if I didn’t marry immediately or if my husband someday were to lose his job or die. They also said that college-educated men generally want to marry college-educated women, for the intellectual compatibility. In fact, they described the money they paid for my college as my “dowry.” Of course, college graduates marrying college graduates is likely more about social homogeneity than intellectual compatibility and college is not always necessary to ensure that a young woman is prepared to support herself.
But Heitman isn’t saying that he wants to prepare is daughter to support herself using avenues outside of college. He explicitly states that he doesn’t think his daughter should be prepared to support herself. I’d like to say that Heitman is unaware of just how dependent he plans to make his daughter on her future husband, but his words make it clear that that’s not true. He argues that it is right and natural for a woman to be dependent on her husband—and obedient to him. And of course, divorce is not seen as an option. A married woman is supposed to be shackled to her husband, for good or for bad.
And besides, what if Heitman’s daughter doesn’t marry straight out of high school, or until her thirties, or at all? What would Heitman have her do—live at home with him, waiting for her prince charming to appear?
Unfortunately, he answers this question with a resounding “yes.”
I’ve read a variety of commentary on Heitman’s article, and want to highlight this bit:
Better titled “Many numbered reasons your daughter will distance herself from you when she realizes she has been given free will and stops being afraid to use it.”
This father may not realize it, but his assumption that he can dictate his daughter’s life trajectory and make her adult decisions for her will likely come back to bite him in the end, especially if he deliberately sabotages her options. Again, I have watched this happen. I know young women who have found themselves in this position, with parents unwilling to sign a FAFSA or help out in any other way.
The young women generally make it through, with blood, sweat, and tears, but their relationships with their parents generally don’t.
Trigger warning for Hurts Me More Than You series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.
Additional trigger warning for Traveler’s story: descriptions of self-injury.
*****
Traveler’s Story
Here are the lessons I learned from spanking:
1) Suppress your conscience; avoid the consequences of your actions.
When I was very, very young, I unrolled a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom and then left the mess behind when I got distracted by something else. The mess was discovered, and I feared being spanked if I was implicated. Instead of confessing, I asked “what will happen to the person who says they did it?”
“Nothing except they will have to clean it up,” my mother responded.
“Oh, well in that case, I did it,” I said, and gladly cleaned my mess.
With the fear of violence removed, I was happy to answer my own conscience and fix my mistake.
2) You can’t make up for your mistakes; you can only suffer for them.
One morning, I was late starting homeschool because I had gotten distracted during my chores. It didn’t matter if I was sorry, or if I promised to do better, or if I made my bed on time for the rest of the week, or if I even offered to do other chores to make up for it. Forgiveness could not be obtained from my mother until she hit me until I cried. I truly wanted to make my mother happy and to do right by her. But, a spanking taught me that there was no way to make things right anymore.
The only way for me to be forgiven and returned to my valued place in the family was to submit to physical pain.
3) Violence and humiliation can be deserved.
When my family rejected me as an adult for my sexuality, I began to abuse myself. I thought of it as a method of atonement. I would beat my shins against a table to raise welts and bruises. I would scratch at the skin on my stomach, upper thighs, and arms to make myself bleed.
I felt like I deserved to hurt.
I deserved violence. I deserved humiliation. I deserved emotional abuse.
And why shouldn’t I? My family had always taught me never to let anyone hurt me. But yet, they crossed those boundaries repeatedly when I was a child. I learned that there were situations where violence, humiliation, and a lack of self-respect were deserved.
Is it so hard to imagine that these toxic thoughts could have carried over into my adulthood?
Facing Our Fears: How the Voices of Homeschool Alumni Can Help Homeschooling was originally prepared by R.L. Stollar, Executive Director of Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) for the 2014 Great Homeschool Convention in Ontario, California. HARO’s mission is to advocate for the well-being of homeschool students and improve homeschooling communities through awareness, peer support, and resource development.
You are free to share or distribute this presentation with proper citation of its source.
To view and/or download a PDF of Facing Our Fears, click here.
Trigger warning for Hurts Me More Than You series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.
*****
Sophia’s Story
My mom said that she received smacks on the head by her mom with a ruler as a child, but not very often, because she always “learned from her mistakes.”
I was spanked so often because I was a “strong-willed child,” and refused to learn from mine.
I didn’t mean not to learn. I just wasn’t ever sure of what it was I was supposed to be learning. I’ve blocked most of these episodes out, but there are a few that stick in my memory. There was the time I was 8 and my sister was 6, and my father was convinced that we had deliberately killed his favorite plant in our garden. He took the “rod,” a zingy rubber object, marketed by a Mennonite company specifically for spankings, and told us to go to my sister’s room.
All spankings were bad, but we particularly hated “The Rod.” When my mom first jubilantly returned from a homeschooling convention with it, my dad tested it on a stack of newspapers, cutting through several of them with a moderate hit. That afternoon, my dad decided to use it on us to force us to confess that we’d killed his plant (which we’d never touched. It probably died because it was the wrong kind of plant in the wrong kind of climate.)
He alternated between us two bare-bottomed little girls, zinging each of us repeatedly, giving us an opportunity to confess, and then zinging us again.
We cried and cried until my sister decided to make up a confession, but she didn’t understand what she was confessing to (because she’d done nothing wrong). This made my dad madder, and he continued until he got tired, then sent us to our rooms to “think about what we’d done”.
My mom found me in my room later, sobbing and reading Lamentations. I picked Lamentations because my Sunday School teacher told me the word meant a deep expression of sorrow. I hoped it would make me feel better, but I was pretty sure God wasn’t there anyways.
I may have only been 8, but I already knew about fear, and pain, and hate, and injustice, and wishing I could die.
*****
Odessa’s Story
“If you only had listened..”
“The Bible commands it..”
“What if you had broken the instruments they used or threw them away? Then they couldn’t have hit you any more!”
I was powerless and indoctrinated to believe I deserved it and was rebellious for not wanting it over quickly. Society says I should have had power and told someone, yet the culture I lived in has repeatedly informed me that I should have listened and I never would have been hit, not even once.
Those who use the Bible to justify hitting their children, stop. It is time for a re-evaluation of what the Bible really says. It’s time to ask deep questions of yourselves.
Those of you secular parents, please reconsider.
It doesn’t matter how fast, how hard, or with which instrument you use – whether it’s your hand, or something else entirely – spanking your children truly does damage their very heart, soul and mind; not to mention their little bodies.
You may not think you will ever harm your child. If you are hitting them, you are every single time you lay a hand or instrument on their little bodies.
The truth has been repeated often for over 30 years: Spanking leaves long-lasting effects on children.
No matter how calmly or “biblically” you spank, you are still damaging your children. The Bible never actually commands spanking, not once. That the quote “spare the rod, spoil the child” is from a bawdy poem called “Hudibras” and is talking about sex, and the “rod” in the Bible was a symbol of parental or ruling authority, denoting discipline; not physical harm. It makes me wonder how a sexual poem came to justify child abuse and was conflated with the Bible.
Here are a few things your child may experience, or are at high risk for, if they are spanked:
Alcohol or Drug dependency
Asthma
Attachment Disorders
Auto-immune Disorders
Cancer
Cardiac Disease
Decreased Language Skills
Externalizing behaviour
Mental Disorders or Emotional Disorders (Aggression, Low Self-Esteem, Oppositional or Anti-social behaviour)
Poor moral internalisation/regulation
Reduced Empathy
Suicide or Suicidal Ideation
Please reconsider your discipline methods if corporal punishment is one of them and talk (often!) with your children. No one deserves to be harmed by their parent for any ideology, even if it is part of your culture. If you truly want world peace, it starts with your babies.
Trigger warning for Hurts Me More Than You series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.
My parents disciplined us “right” — just like the books said.
They were always calm and loving, rarely spanking out of anger. They truly loved us and believed that if they did not punish for wrong-doing with a spanking, we would not turn into good, moral people. They were not selfish and did nothing for their own benefit, but for ours.
Usually, a discipline session would start when one of us would do something wrong. This could be any infraction from “back-talking” to disobedience to lying. And “back-talking” could mean anything other than “yes, ma’am”. Because obedience should be instant and cheerful with no negotiating or it’s not true obedience. We could not have an opinion, only first-time obedience.
We would get sent to our parent’s room to wait til it was convenient to them to come discipline us. There were times when they’d forget they sent us there. Then they’d feel guilty and let us off the hook.
We often hoped they’d forget about us.
We’d sit there waiting in mental agony. One of them would come into the room, sit us on their lap when we were little, or when we were older, just sit next to us on the bed. They somberly explain that foolishness is bound in the heart of a child and a spanking will drive it far from us. That children are to obey their parents in the Lord, for this is right. That they had to spank us because they had to obey God and God wanted them to punish our sin, just like God punishes their sins. Then we’d lay on the bed, often with our pants off since pants provided cushion from the blows, and get 3-4 swats with a wooden spoon or switch, never their hands (although hands were last resort if they couldn’t find a wooden spoon). If we resisted at all, it would be another 3-4 swats for not submitting to the deserved punishment.
I had a very difficult time laying there still while being hit so I often got double or triple spankings.
Submission and a broken will were just as important as the punishment for our sins. After all, if your heart is not right, what good will a punishment do? They’d then hug us for a while, tell us they loved us, that they had to do this because they loved us and loved God and wanted to obey God. I remember seeing tears in their eyes on occasion.
When they said “this hurts me more than it hurts you” I believe they really believed that and that it really did hurt them.
Not everyone trapped in fundamentalism can completely shut off their hearts.
I often sat there in rage waiting for my parents to come spank me, angry at myself for getting caught or not being able to keep my mouth shut, making myself feel better by plotting all kinds of revenge on them. I have a very distinct memory of being 6 years old and laying on my bed after a spanking, rage consuming me, longing for the day when I was bigger and stronger and I could hit them back, dreaming of all the violent things I would do to my mom. This made me feel overwhelmingly guilty yet satisfied at the same time.
The very last time I was spanked, I was 13 years old. I had “back-talked” to my mom, and in a fury she sent me to my room. She came in to spank me and I initially tried to submit, but I couldn’t take it any more. I was taller than her by that time. I turned around and tried to grab the spoon, defending myself. She became even more enraged, but I also sensed her surprise. We repeated this multiple times, both of us crying, until she gave up and told me to stay there til my dad came home. Hours later, Dad came into the room and sat down. I was sullen and depressed. But, for the first time, I realized that I was able to stop them now and this elated me. Dad talked to me, I don’t remember what was said or if I was even listening at that point, but that was the end of the day-long discipline battle. They never tried spanking me again. My other siblings weren’t spanked past 8 or 9 years old.
My parents were often asked “How do you get your kids to obey like they do? Your children are so well-behaved!” They’d smile and counsel other parents on godly discipline. I smiled on the outside like the good girl I was, but on the inside I seethed and thought “if only you and they knew that we’re just really good at not getting caught.”
Spanking and authoritarian parenting didn’t make us “good kids”.
It made us sneakier kids, clever kids, kids who knew how to play the system to get what we wanted and avoid what we didn’t.
I daresay that when people proclaim “My parents spanked us right, never in anger”, they would describe a spanking like my parents practiced. And perhaps their parents were like mine, good people duped into thinking that if they didn’t punish and control their children, those children would end up rebels, perverts, and in jail. They took literally the proverb that promised if children are beaten, their souls would be saved from hell. Parents like mine were not the abusers you read about: people who were perverted and got off on beating their kids. They were not evil. Yet they practiced abusive parenting techniques because they listened to the wrong people, accepted fear as a motivator, and gave in to the tantilizing promise that they could direct their children’s future “in the way they should go”.
They made the wrong choices for all the right reasons.
Stories of horrendous abuse abound in our circles, but I write this to show that abuse happened even among the non-extreme families, inflicted by the parents who only wanted good for their kids. That abuse in discipline is not just physical but often psychological and almost always spiritual.
I saw what I now know to be glimpses of empathy and doubt in my parents, the logic inherent in them trying to get through the illogical spiritual abuse of the system that they were in, that they were inflicting on their kids. It’s not so easy to just be angry at them when I see them as victims of pervasive spiritual abuse. Yet they did have a choice.
They chose that abusive system, a system that hurt them and hurt their children.
Eventually much later, they chose to leave it. But that was not before the damage had been done, damage I and my siblings and my parents are still recovering from a decade later. My story and others like mine are complicated. The emotions that follow us are complicated. Rage and anger are mixed with empathy and forgiveness, and there’s no telling which one of those will come out on any given day — as memories come to the surface and our stories are processed and healed. I have given myself permission to feel them all, without trying to justify my feelings to myself.
Yes, they loved me. But they also hurt me. One of those is not more real than the other.
My parents spanked us “right”. Yet it was all still so very wrong.
I was once one of God’s elect, chosen to come to Earth in these latter-days to usher in the Second Coming of Christ.
Now I’m a spiritual mutt, belonging to no religion, believing in no gods, and “speaking evil of the Lord’s anointed.” I’ve become exactly like Korihor, a Book of Mormon villain, who winds up smitten by God for his unbelief.
How did I fall so far? Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), of course.
The first time I heard about D&D, I yearned to play it. I was a homeschooled teenager with few friends. Even among my peers at church, I didn’t feel accepted. My one respite from constant loneliness was reading novels of fantasy and science fiction.
Dungeons & Dragons held an almost irresistible lure. Here was a game where you could pretend to be a different person. You could solve puzzles and explore mysterious and magical realms. It sounded perfect!
But D&D was forbidden. Like tarot cards, Ouija boards, and even ordinary playing cards, anything to do with magic or mysterious symbols was presumed to be imbued with evil forces. Wicked spirits clung to those D&D figurines, to the strange books and polyhedral dice. They lurked, waiting for a chance to creep into the minds of young people, to possess them, or worse — to drag them away from God and into a life of sin and sex, addiction, devil worship and human sacrifice (in roughly that order).
Such were the images of the game in my impressionable young mind: a collection of scripture fragments, urban legends and fearsome admonishments from my mother. The cover of the Player’s Guide revealed this truth: pictures of scary monsters! Scary things are evil. Because evil is scary.
I’d been told that D&D taught kids to cast actual spells. Someone was just bound to accidentally summon a demon; it only follows. As my mother always said, it’s all fun and games until someone joins a coven. (Then it’s just fun.)
D&D is the gateway drug to Satanism, I had no doubt.
The demonization of D&D started in the 1980s. Patient Zero is now thought to have been a woman named Patricia Pulling. The aggrieved mother of a teenaged suicide, Pulling blamed her son’s tragic death on a pretend curse which had been placed on his character during a role playing game he’d played at school. When her lawsuit against the high school was tossed, Pulling took a forty-hour course and became a private investigator. After much sleuthing, she discovered other murdered or suicided children who were also D&D gamers. With no other relief at hand, she resorted to the best possible course of action: write a pamphlet calling for a ban on make-believe-monster-slaying, fictional-spell-casting, and pedantic rules-lawyering with mysterious, multisided dice. (Does anyone even know what those things are for?!)
Al Gore had not yet invented Facebook, but mimeo’d copies of Pulling’s pamphlet spread like chicken pox at day care. Faster than you could click ‘Share’ on a cat-in-a-shark-suit-on-a-roomba meme, Pulling’s inventions became the one point of doctrine upon which Baptist, Catholic and Mormon moms could all agree.
Television networks broadcast credible-sounding news reports (like this 60 Minutes piece), saying that D&D caused suicide. They were ubiquitous enough that I saw at least one when it aired. The ‘logic’ usually went something like this: players became so involved with their characters that they lost all track of reality, and when their character died, they were left with no reason to live.
Or maybe, the deeply superstitious speculated, kids were actually being possessed by demons, who (for some reason), wanted to immediately kill off the host they’d just spent centuries trying to attract. Hey, you can’t expect demons to be any more logical than the religious leaders who invent them, right?
D&D remained forbidden fruit; just one more thing I wanted that I couldn’t have. Like wanting to stay up late enough to watch ‘Doctor Who’ on PBS. Or to date boys before I was 16. Or even to wear shorts in 105 degree summer heat.
Then life happened. I met a guy, and we got married. I got pregnant, then divorced, and I became the worst thing any Mormon girl could be: a divorced single mother. Divorced! I was used goods at the ripe old age of 20. All without so much as having ever rolled a natural 20. (Those cursed dice again! What are they for?!)
So there I was, a twenty-year-old with a wee baby on my hip. LDS singles who’d avoided me before my marriage now barely spoke to me. Afraid they might catch a bad case of divorce—or worse, sex!—people steered wide when we passed in the halls at church activities.
I needed friends.
My interest in science fiction drew me to RadCon, a fan convention. This outing would be risky: people would be playing D&D! By going, I’d place myself within temptation’s grasp. Burdened with the guilt of “crucifying Christ anew,” I went anyway.
Finally, after years of dreadful yearning, I walked among scattered tables festooned with nerds, stray game pieces, and cold pizza, trying to decide which would be my first tabletop role playing game.
Not D&D, of course. That was the Big One; a horror reserved for degenerates who’d surrendered to some demonic over-mind.
No. My first game would be something safe. To me, that meant science fiction. Fantasy games were inherently malevolent, with their wizards and monsters. But sci-fi would be totally okay.
No magic spells or demons; just robots and computers.
I lingered in front of the table for Cyberpunk 2020. Finally, I decided: This is the one. Nerves jangling with fear and excitement, I sat down. Immediately, my conscience screamed: This was the top of the slippery slope that I’d been warned about!
But I needed human connection. I needed a sense of belonging. I needed fun. So I played. And I had a blast. I connected. With people! People who liked me. People who didn’t make me feel like a freak.
I wanted more. But not D&D, no way! Rather, I found a weekly Shadowrun campaign with an open spot. It had trolls and elves and magic, but also guns and bombs and computer hacking. I felt fairly certain that the inclusion of technology would make it safe from the influences of the devil.
I almost lost my nerve. One dark night, in fitful prayer—the kind that Mormons call “wrestling with God”—I told the Lord that I was going to do this, because it made me happy. It was the one fun and fulfilling thing in my lonely, stressful and depressing life.
I was gripped by an overwhelming sense that I was about to cross a forbidden line. Was that the Holy Spirit, telling me not to go? Was he saying that this would separate me from God? Was it possible that I would surrender my soul to Satan, between rolling dice and downing potato chips?
I imagined a rope tied round my waist, the other end connected to God, as I jumped into the black pit of Outer Darkness. If things get out of hand, I told Him, you yank me back.
Then I willfully, pridefully (a dirty word, for a Mormon), joined the Shadowrun game.
After Shadowrun came SLA Industries, a far-future space cyberpunk game that was disturbingly violent and completely screwed up. No demons or magic there (psychic powers don’t count, right?), so I was still safe!
I’d heard about the Camarilla, a live-action role playing game. Players didn’t just sit around at a table; they dressed like their characters and walked around, interacting, pretending to be vampires, which had been a shameful fascination of mine since I was little. What could be more exciting? Or more risky? (Well, besides D&D.)
I joined the Camarilla, though I was very careful to play non-gothy characters. To be extra sure, I didn’t wear black. But I hung out with goths, and people who smoked and swore a lot. We listened to heavy metal music.
I made tons more friends.
Breaking the final taboo proved astonishingly easy. One evening, it just happened. I sat on a couch with friends and we played D&D. At this point, the cautionary tales seemed superstitious and silly. It was just fantasy role play, and there were far more hardcore games (I’d played them), and obviously there were no demons hiding under the odd misshapen dice. The worst thing I actually had to worry about were power gamers, with their obnoxious desire to kill everything in sight.
I was still a true-believing Mormon. Very much so. But now I had far more friends outside of the Church than in. This was a sin, in and of itself. Mormon youth and single adults are strongly “encouraged” to associate with other Mormons, and if you intended to make friends outside the Church, they should not be of the sort that came out of closets and wore T-shirts that said, “I only wear black till they make something darker.”
Worse, I’d met people from other faiths.
Not just non-Mormon Christians, either. There were Buddhists, Wiccans, and even a real-life Satanist.
They were all very nice people, who had interesting things to say. They tolerated my beliefs, and I tolerated theirs. They weren’t evil or scary. Not even the Satanist, in spite of his black fingernail polish.
I learned from them, which is even worse. The things they told me made sense. I discovered that prayers were answered for people of other faiths, too. Wiccans called this phenomena “magic,” but it didn’t involve summoning demons. In fact, aside from the addition of candles and incense, it didn’t seem all that different from my Mormon prayers. I learned Buddhists were really chill, relaxed, and very accepting of me. More accepting than most Mormons I’d met. Even the atheists were kind!
These people allowed me to be weird. For the first time in mylife, I could relax and be myself, talk openly about my interests, and even be liked for it.
Some part of me already recognized the true danger in role playing: exposing myself to “the world,” which tainted my mind with new ideas. Ideas that conflicted with, and even refuted, many LDS claims.
I made one last effort to get straight with God, to “Chose the Right” and rededicate myself to the Mormon Church. I still preferred the company of gamers and geeks, but God wanted me to find a righteous LDS husband. And I wasn’t going to find him among heathens. So returned to church, leaving most of my friends behind.
Only now I had something to compare my LDS life to. In stages, it dawned on me that I had never been happy at church. I’d never been worthy enough and I’d never had the kind of spiritual, uplifting experiences that I’d had with those supposedly “wicked” and “sinful” worldly people.
And I never would.
I wasn’t good enough for the Mormons, but I was good enough for the geeks. And I’d adopted a few of their beliefs. These were like tiny seeds, which I’d fit into the cracks that riddled the cinderblock wall of Mormonism.
From those seeds, green shoots sprouted, their roots prying against the foundations of my Mormon belief. In time, I discovered additional kernels, which fit those widening gaps in the LDS paradigm.
These new beliefs suited me better, and they were more compatible with facts and science. New thoughts lent me additional mental flexibility. Limber vines of reason began to eat at the brittle mortar of tradition, until eventually, the whole wall fell.
I no longer believed in God.
It could be said that my path out of the Church was inevitable. My heart never fit, no matter how closely I followed the Church’s commandments.
Perhaps D&D was merely a catalyst: the accelerant that sped the process of reframing my beliefs. But without it, without that window opening my mind to thoughts outside the stifling Mormon ideology, I might still be there, doing my best to pretend to be someone I’m not.
D&D led me down a path of temptation, until my heart became desensitized to the Holy Spirit, and I could no longer hear the gentle whisperings of God. Too late to turn back, I had been misled, brainwashed by the ways of the world. I am well ensnared in Satan’s grip.
Or so I would have once believed.
Today, I recognize that the path I took was one of liberation. By choosing to follow my heart in spite of the Church’s frightening conditioning, I made a saving throw that rescued me from decades of spiritual slavery.
So thank you, Gary Gygax, creator of D&D. Some might say that you summoned an elder demon, which is even now destroying the very fabric of American morality.
But in my story, you are the hero.
*****
Luna Lindsey
About the Author
Luna Lindsey Corbden was born into the Mormon Church and left the faith in 2001, at age 26. They now live in Seattle, WA and write about topics of interest to them, including psychology, culture, and autism. They also write science fiction and fantasy. When they’re not busy traveling to improbable worlds, or thinking hard about this improbable world, they’re enjoying life with their improbable family. Their new book, Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control is available in e-book and print.
Trigger warning for Hurts Me More Than You series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.
*****
Lana’s Story
My father never hugged me. The only physical contact I had with him as a child was from being beaten. He used the belt that he wore looped through his jeans every day, and he struck me with the leather end enough times to leave bruises and welts. Apologizing for the back-talk or broken object was pointless, I was told, because “it was too late for apologies.” The point now, I was told, would be that I learn from my mistakes. This happened to me, I was told, as young as age four or five because the Bible said that children needed to be trained to respect their parents in order to learn to respect God.
I guess the Bible didn’t command that he hug me. Or, if so, I wasn’t ever told that it did.
I just wanted a hug when I was a kid. Being a kid is tough, especially when your mother is difficult and has mental problems. I was scared of my father and never felt comfortable showing him things I made. Drawing, poems, dances. I used to hide from him. One time he said children were indentured servants who paid their way with chores until they turn 18. This could have been funny but he never hugged me. My mother would admire and appreciate my creativity, but not my dad. He could be so mean and sarcastic. And it really hurt, especially the threats, because I knew too well what it felt like to be beaten. The only times I remember him being nice was when other people, outside of the house, were around. He was always so much nicer to other people than he was to me as a child. This broke my heart.
The sight of a leather belt still makes me nervous. Belts made of other materials are okay. If I let my mind wander to a certain dark place, I can still feel the terror of anticipating being hit with his belt and hearing myself sob, “no, stop. really. i’m sorry. i mean it.”
I can still feel the terror of knowing my words meant nothing and would change nothing.
My dad never really told me that he loved me. He would sometimes send my adult self gifts and letters, and it would make me feel weird and guilty. I don’t want things from him. I can’t love him back. I know he’s lonely now and he wants attention from me, but I can’t do it. I just can’t. This kills me.
“A form of physical punishment in which a beating is applied to the buttocks.”
That’s not entirely incorrect although in my case (and my siblings) spanking involved being beaten or hit on any available body part, including face and head. It included getting pushed or shoved against furniture or walls, or getting grabbed so hard that welts were left on my arms. I’ve been hit with rulers, leather belts, the buckle of the belt, metal spoons, wire whisks, acrylic spoons, yard sticks, and of course hands & fists.
I’ve been hit for not eating, for eating too much, for not going to bed, for taking a nap, for talking back, for not talking, for being disrespectful, for not taking care of my younger siblings properly, for not making my bed, for not cleaning the house…the list goes on.
Always ALWAYS being told “I do this because I love you”, and “this hurts me more than it hurts you”. And also being told that God requires this as discipline.
Well, when you grow up from a young age with physical violence being intimately connected to love and religion, it affects how you relate to other people. It makes it hard to believe that people who don’t hurt you DO love you. It makes you believe that when you’re ok and not being harmed, it means no one cares. Rewriting that kind of messed up thinking is a difficult process.
And more so, it’s so very hard to unwind and relax. You grow up on edge, never knowing what you’re going to do wrong today that will end up with you being “punished”.
I don’t support corporeal punishment. I don’t believe that violence is intended in any religion – I think it’s a misinterpretation designed to control people and outcomes. It leads to isolation because you learn very young and very quickly that the people who are supposed to be safest & love you will always hurt you, so what does that mean for the rest of the people in the world?
Trigger warning for Hurts Me More Than You series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.
Additional trigger warning for Rachel’s story: descriptions of self-injury.
*****
Rachel’s Story
Maybe I’m the oddball, but, I was reading some articles on the lifelong effects that spanking children has on their emotional and mental development when it hit me.
Being spanked as a child is a large part of why I started self-harming as a teenager.
Let me unpack this statement a little bit.
From a child, I had been taught through example that physical punishment was the Biblically advocated way of training your children. To be fair, my mother absolutely hated spanking us, and would cry at night because she believed it was wrong, but according to Mike and Debi Pearl, corporal punishment until actual pain was achieved is the only way to properly “train up a child”. And, indeed, Proverbs supports this methodology to a degree. We were spanked for back talking, direct disobedience, rebellion, tattling…and the list goes on. Being spanked teaches a child that physical pain is the only appropriate atonement for his/her misdemeanors. While my parents truly loved us and believed that spanking was the Biblical way to train their children, I have come to question the subconscious impact which this ideology has had on the way I personally relate to punishment.
When I was 15, I reached a particularly low point in my life. My parents had just found out about a young man who I was involved with, and were extremely displeased with the content of some of our conversations (eg. swearing, his expressing a desire to kiss me, etc..) among other things. Feeling that a relationship was not in my best interest at this point, they grounded me for a week and lectured me extensively.
But, for me, this punishment wasn’t enough.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had become subconsciously convinced that punishment which did not cause physical pain was not adequate punishment.
Because, after all, a lecture was never good enough when I had sinned as child. Spanking was always in order. Therefore, as soon as I found myself alone in my room, I, almost instinctively, physically lashed out against myself, taking a disposable razor to my wrist until it was dripping blood. I felt instantly better. After which, I cleaned it up, bandaged it, and fell asleep.
Dad commented the next day that I seemed happier. I was even smiling!
It became a vicious cycle. Whereas when I was a child, if I did something wrong, I was immediately spanked and then the incident was forgotten, as I got older the spanking became less frequent, and lectures replaced corporal punishment. What I didn’t realize was that I had unwittingly adopted the notion that physical punishment is the only adequate punishment. So, if I did something wrong, or my parents were displeased with me, hurting myself became second nature.
I cannot tell you how harmful this mentality is.
When Christ died, HE took the physical pain punishment for ALL my sins. Knowing that my parents are displeased, natural consequences, or rebuke, should be punishment enough for me. Of course, there are consequences, but these should be natural consequences. For instance, if you eat twenty pieces of cake, you’re going to make yourself sick. This doesn’t mean that wrong should be condoned. If my brother hits me, he’s going to be told why that’s wrong and if he persists in wrongdoing, should be punished by a timeout or something similar.
Obviously, circumstances are different for every family, but for me, at least, being spanked unwittingly implanted the idea in my head that physical pain is the only valid form of punishment.
I’ve wondered for months why it was that, when I reached that point where my parents were so upset at me, hurting myself was an almost instinctive reaction. I didn’t even think about it. It felt natural. It felt…right. There was no question in my mind that I completely deserved the physical pain for disappointing my parents, allowing myself to have romantic feelings for a boy, and using bad language. I believe a large part of it is that when I was young, I knew I was in the doghouse if I had acted wrongly. Apologizing didn’t fix things. Being lectured didn’t change things. BUT, as soon as I had gotten the appropriate amount of spankings, everything was forgiven and I was reminded again of how loved I was. How does one make the mental transition from “I need to be physically punished for any transgression” to “Now that I’ve reached a certain age, a lecture or being grounded is adequate punishment”?
And for those who argue that Proverbs commands parents to spank their children (Mike and Debi Pearl, I’m looking right at you!), my response is that Proverbs is in the Old Testament, and although I don’t believe we should discount it merely because it happens to be before the birth of Christ, please show me a passage anywhere in the New Testament under the New Covenant which commands spanking children as a form of punishment! The verses in the New Testament on child rearing say to not provoke your children to wrath but rather bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Admonition is NOT the same as spanking.
And, while I’ll readily admit that my ideas on child raising aren’t completely developed yet, I agree far more with those who advocate not spanking your children, or only using spanking as a very last resort, than those who spank their children constantly for any real or imagined misdemeanor.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 