religious abuse

When the Bible Wasn’t Enough: Sage Lynn’s Story

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Sage Lynn” is a pseudonym.

Content Warning: Suicidal Thoughts

“God is real,” I confidently asserted. “There’s indisputable proof, and his existence and saving us from hell is the only thing that makes life worth living.”

A girl about my own age countered, “God is a myth. Evolution is scientifically proven. God doesn’t exist.”

“Actually yes, he does. He created the world– science has disproven evolution over and over, but people don’t want to believe it. I believe in God’s sovereignty. I believe that he takes all the terrible moments of our lives and changes them into something beautiful, something worth having. Otherwise there’s no point in living.”

“I can find a purpose in living without God. No one really needs him. If you have to believe in a pretend deity to find meaning, then that’s not such a great way to see things,” she replied.

“Without God, nothing makes sense,” I replied. “People have been trying to find meaning without him for ages, and it just doesn’t work. He is the only one who can redeem the messes of our lives, the things we wish we hadn’t done and the things done to us. Without him, all the suffering in the world is meaningless, including ours.”

“You can believe that, but God doesn’t actually exist and life does have meaning without him,” the girl stated.

Thinking of this exchange makes me cringe. I am sick to my stomach, want to throw up and shove the memory of it far out of my head. But it’s important to me to remember. I was eighteen at the time, suicidal, depressed, starving myself to death, in the hospital because I had overdosed–at that exact moment I was sitting in a psych ward with six other teenage girls and two psych techs, in some group for coping skills or the like. The techs intervened at that point, bringing the group back on point, but I spent the rest of the group writing notes that bolstered my worldview that believing in God was the only thing that made life worthwhile and possible.

A few days later, after the 72 hour hold the emergency room physician placed me on expired, I checked myself out of the hospital. As a semi-minor, I had to have a meeting with my parents and the treatment team before I was released. My parents’ pastor and the biblical counselor I was seeing came along too. At that meeting, the treatment team asked me why I thought I was safe enough to leave the ward. I answered with more of the above, about having purpose because God was working everything together for good and it was all going to have a higher purpose, and I would continue to cling to that and draw strength from that and use it to fight the suicidal urges. The pastor and counselor and my parents all told me how proud they were that I defended my faith against psychological attacks. “You have the right beliefs,” the counselor told me. “That is what makes life worth living. We just need to help connect your head and your heart so that your beliefs guide your actions. God wants that for you–keep studying the Bible, praying, and asking the Holy Spirit to work in your life.”

After we left, I remember looking at the sky and being so relieved that I was out of the psych ward–yet so terrified because inside I didn’t know if the worldview I so stoutly defended was really enough to keep me alive.

And this is the story of my disillusionment with conservative Christianity. It wasn’t so much a lightbulb moment as a rocky path plagued by fits and starts, trying to go back, trying to believe, and coming up dry. Meeting people my religion condemned to hell and realizing they had a better outlook on life than I did.

Understanding that my parents’, pastor’s, and counselor’s approbation showed their overarching concern: that my soul’s security was more important than my body’s survival, that my ability to argue apologetics or memorize whole books of the Bible or “get my heart right before God” was more important than my ability to stop cutting or dreaming of death.

In fact, when I first started seeing the counselor, the first thing she said to anorexic, cutting, suicidal me was, “Before I even try to help someone with their life issues, I want to make sure they’re saved. Otherwise, dealing with the other issues will be ineffective.” When I ended up in the psych ward–again, and again–I would leave with resources to use, groups to attend, but the biblical counselor and pastor would tell me to quit them, to turn to their approved Bible studies and “counseling,” to pray more and make my life right with God. Over and over, this never worked. All the “right answers” just left me broken and battered, more wounded than when I’d begun to seek them.

Eventually, I went left home and started college. I was incredibly lucky to meet several therapists–ones with a degree who didn’t read me Bible verses for every session–who began to help me untangle the webs of lies and confusion I had been told. They affirmed my worth and value, and the priority of dealing with my depression and other issues, all without bringing the Bible into it or mentioning God or telling me my behaviors were sending me to hell.

As I healed, my parents expressed concerns about my salvation. In their eyes, my turning to secular psychology evidenced a rejection of the Bible and principles they wanted me to embrace. I spent hours trying to convince them–and myself–conservative Christian beliefs could be reconciled with reality in the world. I came up dry.
I also watched the way conservative Christianity treated people. I saw much talk about doctrine and scripture and grace and judgment and holiness and righteousness–and I saw an inability to listen to real people, real stories, real pain. From abortion to LGBT* people (before I had figured out I was one myself) to healthcare to immigration, I saw a plethora of articles and words about what should be done, what the Bible said about things, and precious little attention given to people who had lived these things.

Leaders my parents followed seemed to be more concerned about figuring out a doctrinal formula and backing everything up with Bible verses than they did with engaging in the pain and hurt in the world.

They were too quick to offer the “solution” that would fix some problem and prescribe the correct theology–talking–while refusing to listen or love.

A few months after I told my parents that I was queer, we had a conversation that had become commonplace. “I know you say this is how you feel,” my mom said, her face lined with concern. “But I ask you, who is Jesus to you? Do you call yourself a Christian? How can you back up that you are a Christian from the Bible?”
My voice trembling, the pull of religious fundamentalism that will always be in my blood tugging at my heart, I replied, “I can’t do this anymore. I won’t defend my faith to you. I don’t have all the reasons and all the answers and all the doctrines–and I don’t want them. I will never be able to justify my faith or lack thereof or uncertainty thereof to you. It only ends up hurting me and not answering you. My God, when I believe in them, is not the same as yours. They never will be. I am done. Defending my faith, defending conservative Christianity, almost killed me. I can’t go back. I am sorry, but this is not a conversation I can have anymore.”

That day marked a turning point for me. I gave up trying to reconcile my beliefs with conservative Christianity. Even though my heart still longs at times for the familiarity and rules that defined life for me for so long, I know I can’t go back. That bridge is destroyed, and it is for the better. If I remain a Christian, it will be in spite of conservative Christianity. In the end, love, truth and knowledge will win, defeating the hate-mongering, fear-mongering lies sold to people to modify their behavior. Until that day, I choose to live in love and acceptance, even if that means I don’t have all the answers

Story of a Homeschooler

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Tori Wright.

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Laurie Works’ blog Laurie Works. It was originally published on May 25, 2015 and has been slightly modified for HA.

I grew up a homeschooler.

The news this week has made it more salient than ever, even though it’s something I’ve been slowly processing the past couple of months. I’ve been reading a ton of posts on Homeschoolers Anonymous, as well as chatting with a blogger and real life friend who was homeschooled. The resources I’ve found have resonated so deeply with me. I’ve wanted to share now for a while, but writing out what it’s like to be a homeschooler is really not easy. Especially when you have 12 school years full of it.

That’s right. I wasn’t just –a– homeschooler. I was one of –those– homeschoolers. Schooled at home the whole way through.

People ask me all the time if I like it, and I’m close to honest. I say I liked it until high school, and then I was miserable. But the truth is I had moments of misery the whole time.

Being homeschooled especially sucks when you hate being at home.

There’s no way out.

I hated being in 2nd grade for 3 years after my youngest sister was born because my mom was “too tired” to keep us going on our schoolwork. I hated how the neighborhood kids made fun of us for it.

I hated in high school how I had no friends but my sisters. See, along with being homeschooled, our home church was 2 hours away in the small mountain town of Granby, CO. So we really had little access to friends. And then when we did, the church kids thought we were weird and tended to avoid us.

I tried my damndest to not be one of the socially awkward homeschool kids, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re restricted to an apartment all day long.

Oh yeah. We lived in a 900 sq. ft. apartment in Denver, CO. With a family of 6. 3 bedrooms. I shared a room until I was 19.

I got sick of my sisters. I got sick of us getting lumped into the same group all the time at church events. I didn’t hate them, but when you’re with someone so much, it’s hard to want to be with them more. That in itself was annoying, but I dealt. What really sucked about being at home was my dad.

What I saw growing up was not the even more extreme dysfunction I see now. I didn’t realize that his obsession with God giving us 1.7 billion dollars was actually a problem. Nope, what I was focused on in my teen years was his abuse.

My dad was verbally abusive to us from the time I was 5 years old.

I remember little of when it started, but I know it was bad enough my mom wanted to take us to her mom’s house in Nebraska. I’m not sure why she decided to stay. The abuse continued, though, and some of it echoes in my ears. My dad threatening to leave. My dad screaming “I’M THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSE!” My mom reading books on submission and slowly fading into silence.

Or the subtle abuse of his anger when we didn’t speak up during our nightly “discussions.” Though these are a typical facet of fundamentalist homeschooling (nightly “devotions”), ours were different. These discussions were reiterations of my dad’s belief that God would give us this astronomical amount of money. He would talk about the “coincidences” of the day and how they were signs pointing to God’s will for us. If we didn’t have any input or anything to share, my dad would get angry. However, if we tried to talk too much, my dad would get angry. And when I say angry, I mean yelling. Sharp remarks. Heavy sighs. Looks of annoyance. Sometimes stomping out of the room.

If we spoke, he was angry. If we were quiet, he was angry.

We couldn’t win.

It was a radically strange combination of fundamentalist teachings such as submission (my dad LOVED John Bevere and his teachings on spiritual authority) and my dad’s delusional beliefs. I have friends who say that my dad created a cult with us, his family. We were forced to buy into his belief about this money: I clearly remember my dad working very hard to convince my twin sister to “just have faith” that this money would appear. He eventually cowed her into “believing” it. If we didn’t buy in, he pleaded with us in this fashion, or got extremely angry and verbally abusive, even threatening to leave us. On top of that, we were isolated from the outside world due to the fact that we were homeschooled with a church so far away. I wasn’t allowed to go out for sports as a teenager or to get a job.

There was only 1 person that I know of outside the family that knew about this money business, and that was our trustee.

Yep, we had a trustee. And 4 empty trusts (one for each of us girls) connected to an umbrella company that my dad formed to be a funnel for “the money” when it came. You can still look it up as a Colorado business: Oversyte Investment Company, LLC. Because of the trusts my dad found us a trustee. He was the only one that heard about my dad’s ideas. I have to wonder now what he thought of the whole thing. But the trustee was young at the time, only 22-23 years old. A kid. He was probably enamored of the whole thing. My dad was good at casting a spell (read: charismatic).

What was honestly weird though was that my dad spent more time asking our trustee about his life than he ever spent asking us about ours.

My dad talked incessantly about “the family” and how important “the family” was. Yet he never really knew any of us. And “the family” really just meant that we fell into line behind him and became part of his missionary force to the rich people of the world.

I never told anyone the dollar amount of my dad’s delusions until I told my ex-husband. I was probably 19-20. After that I didn’t mention it to anyone else until I was 22, and I told my therapist. She was shocked. Her reaction woke me up. Maybe this whole thing really wasn’t normal.

The amount of secrecy I felt I had to hold really rings true to me with this crazy Josh Duggar situation.

I understand family secrets, far far too well.

I clearly remember my dad telling us, “Don’t tell anyone about this money stuff. They’ll think we are crazy.” I kept that pact for somewhere around 10-12 years. A decade.

All this amounts to one thing. I grew up in a fishbowl. A small, small fishbowl nowhere close to the ocean.

I was trapped in an environment where I was abused and ridiculed if I stepped out of line or had my own opinions.

Or, I was ignored. Either/or. I was literally stuck in a small apartment from 1997-2007 – 900 square feet for 3 teenagers and a girl under 10 years old. Mentally and emotionally stuck in a dream world of my dad’s which included weekly trips to the corporate airport, trips so frequent I can still name off dozens of types of corporate jets.

Family secrets have an incredible hold. My dad’s own sister didn’t know any of this until last year (!!) when I finally broke the silence. I’d been terrified to disclose anything to his family before; I don’t know what I was afraid of, other than finally disclosing a “secret.” But when I told her she was remorseful and regretful, saying she would have done something if she’d only known.
I’m telling this story to add it to the other voices now speaking up about homeschooling. I’m telling this story because I think it’s important.

I’m telling this story so maybe someday soon the government or SOMEONE can hold homeschool parents accountable.

Why? Because in a fishbowl, isolated from the ocean, it’s far too easy to keep things secret. Things like 1.7 billion dollar delusions. Or, in the Duggar family, molesting 5 young girls. Accountability is needed.

I’m telling this, too, because it’s time. Because holding this in for so long has hurt, and I’m ready for all of you to know. And honestly, this is just the beginning.

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Sixteen

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 January 11, 2015 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Fifteen

Part Sixteen: Gray

I can look back at pictures of those years, and somehow, I look happy in some of them.  I know that somewhere in that time I took a trip to Germany with my grandparents.  It was one of the few happy times I can remember.  In contrast, the rest of those two years, from 15 to 17, were very dark days for me.  Our home life was not happy.

Besides my dad being depressed, which lasted at least a couple of years if not longer, the discipline that my brother B received continued, and in some respects, got worse.

Once Joe LaQuiere was not there to cow B into fearful submission, my dad had a tougher time getting him to toe the line.  A now-teenage B became disrespectful, angry, arguing and talking-back to my dad.  He cared less and less that he would be punished for it.  My dad gave up using a wooden paddle on my brother.  He moved on to more creative tools, searching for one that would put the fear of God into his wayward son.  Sometimes it was a belt.  Sometimes it was a thin rod like that used for caning.  Then, he found himself the winner.  I don’t know what it was made out of, but it was a length of doubled-up, flexible, white line of some kind or other, about 1/8″ in diameter, and he used it like a whip, hitting indiscriminately whatever was in reach.  This whipping hurt far more than a wooden paddle ever could, and it left no permanent marks, which all the corporal-punishment manuals, like the Pearl’s book, To Train Up a Child, which was a staple in my parents’ bookshelf, all were quick to warn against.

If it doesn’t leave a permanent mark, the books said, it was fine.

I would be on constant alert and tense when my dad and B started getting into it – I knew with inevitable dread that it would end in a whipping, and I swear I hated them nearly as much as B did.  My dad would hit his limit, grab B and push him to the basement stairs, and down they’d go.  The next thing I’d hear is my brother crying, then screaming for my dad to stop, while my dad chased him around the basement, whipping him as he went.  It seemed like it would go on forever.  In hindsight, it was probably only 10 or 15 minutes each time.  But it was enough.  It was too much.  With every beating I had to hear, my own heart was getting ripped to shreds, and my fear grew.

My mom would calmly go about her business, ignoring the cries and pleading from below.

More than ever, I tried to use my influence and experience to head off any altercation between my brother and my dad.  I played peacemaker as much as I could, and I begged the children not to do anything that would set my dad off.  We all knew how he got when things made him angry, but somehow I was the only one who tried to do anything about it.  I had always been the one to try to placate my dad and walk the fine line to avoid his wrath, but now it became a desperate need – I HAD to prevent him from getting angry, or my brother would pay the price.

Meanwhile, the whippings had the opposite effect to the one my father intended.  They made B even less tractable than before.  With each beating, he grew harder towards my parents.  He sneered more openly at them.  He grew more rebellious and more angry.  My dad continued these whippings until B was nearly 17.  Then, one day, B stopped taking it.  I remember it so clearly.  That day, when my dad tried to shove him up against the wall, B pushed back.  That was all.  That was enough.  He had grown bigger than my dad, and now, in that instant, he realized he was stronger.  It took my dad just a split second to realize what had happened.  He could no longer physically control his son by violence.

He took his hands off my brother, and said B was so far gone in his rebellion that normal discipline had no effect on him anymore…since physical buffeting was useless, he was spiritually turning B over “to be buffeted for the sake of his soul”, as it says somewhere in the bible.

I knew better, and so did B.  My dad was simply afraid of what would happen.  He never whipped my brother again.

It was some relief to know that I wouldn’t have to hear my brother’s screams from the basement anymore.  But it didn’t change anything else.  Life was something to be endured, long and weary, with no end in sight.  I became obsessed with the color gray.  I thought about it, wrote about it, all the time.  My life was gray.  Everything was gray; meaningless and gray.  I felt like I was slowly being smothered by a gray pall, and I no longer had the will to resist it.

Then, finally, came the day when I couldn’t bear it any longer.  I remember we were going somewhere in our big van, with the younger kids, and my mom driving.  I remember the seat I was sitting in.  It’s a crystal clear memory in my head.  I sat there, with daily life going on around me, while a storm of pain and desperation raged in my heart, and I knew I couldn’t take even one more second of living my hated life; and in my despair I cried out in my heart, “God, I don’t even know if You’re there anymore – I know You don’t love me, and never have – but I don’t have anything left to turn to anymore!  You’ve taken everything away, and I have nothing left – if You even can, just HELP me, please!  Do SOMEthing!”

And in that moment, for the first time in my entire 17 years of life, I felt God’s LOVE.

It was warm, and it engulfed me, wrapped me up in something indescribable.  In that blinding second, I KNEW, for the first time, that God loved me.  I FELT it.  I had never felt anything like it before, and I never have since.  It was an inescapable certainty.  I had cried to God, and He had answered me.

Part Seventeen>

Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Fifteen

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

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 January 10, 2015 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Fourteen

Part Fifteen: Black Days Ahead

The next few months were kind of a blur.  They were awkward.  We still ran into our friends/acquaintances/ex-cultmates often.  I didn’t know how to think of them or how to act when we saw them.  I’m sure it was equally awkward for them.  Within our family, not much changed.  We followed the same rules, lived the same lives as the people in the cult we had just left.  We just did it separately.

The main difference was my dad sunk into a deep depression.  I couldn’t rely on his sense of humor and warmth to carry me through the dark and confusing time I was now in.  He was now convinced that he was a failure, and nothing could reach him in the dark place he had sunk into.  I wasn’t the little girl that idolized her daddy anymore, but I was a teenager whose life had just been torn apart, and my dad was the one constant I relied on.  No longer.

I really felt like my dependence on my dad was the last feeble crutch I had left to cling to, and Someone had just kicked it out from under me.

Now I was not only confused and scared, I was bitter.  Bitter at a God I didn’t know, who had taken away the last piece of my security.  I decided that God existed, but He didn’t love me, and He never would.

About a year into our exile, my parents started looking for a new church to go to – a mainstream church, no more home-church for us.  We visited church after church after church.  They felt cold and unfriendly.  Even if the people smiled at us, I knew they had no idea what kind of people we were and where we came from.  We were in foreign territory, and no one spoke our language.  We would try one church for a couple weeks, then move on.  Occasionally we attended one for as long as a few months.  We weren’t allowed to do anything youth-related, so we just sat and listened to sermons with my parents.  I didn’t like it.  None of the teaching was challenging.  The preachers weren’t engaging, and no one cared about me, no matter where we went.  I didn’t like church.

I preferred the warm camaraderie of the cult family that we were now irrevocably cut off from.

Eventually, the church we were attending merged with another church, and we stopped going.  Then my parents found a new place – a Plymouth Brethren congregation called Lakeside Bible Chapel.  It was just a tiny bit more comfortable than the rest because they celebrated the Lord’s Supper every week, like we used to do.  Most things were still unfamiliar and uncomfortable.  They had a worship band.  They had a youth group, and the youth group (that we weren’t allowed to go to for a long time) had an actual BAND with DRUMS.  Even when my parents decided to let us go to Sunday school and join in on some youth group activities, we weren’t allowed to attend the youth worship service.  We had to stay in the main auditorium until the worship part of the service was over because my dad didn’t want us corrupted by the worldly music.  The people dressed in sleeveless shirts or even t-shirts sometimes, and wore things to church that my parents would never allow even at home.  But, we stayed.  Eventually, it became our new church home.

If anything, having a church “home” just made things worse for me.  People were always smiling at me in the halls and saying “How are you this morning!” in the friendly, yet impersonal way that left no possibility of a real answer.  I would plaster an empty smile on my face, and nod in return, and they’d walk on.  I hated being there.  At home I didn’t have to pretend things were fine.  At home, I started dressing like a boy.  I went for the baggy carpenter jeans and masculine t-shirts.  I pushed my parents for permission to cut my nearly waist-length hair.  It got shorter each time.  By the time I was 17, it was short enough that I was mistaken for a boy more than once.

It was my silent protest against a world that had betrayed me in every way.

My mom took the change personally.  “You’re doing this because you don’t want to be like me,” she’d insist.  “You’re just trying to be the opposite of me, and that’s very hurtful.”  She was wrong.  I wasn’t changing because I didn’t want to be like her.  I was changing because I hated being me.  I hated the fake smiling mask I had to wear on the outside.  I hated the growing darkness within.  I was empty.

The confusion and despair I felt, the anger that I couldn’t express, all crystallized into an intense self-loathing that grew strong roots deep into the soil of my self-image, fertilized by the years of repressive and damaging training that had taught me that I was only worth something as long as I could measure up to perfection.

I hated to be around people, and I hated to be around myself.  I hated everyone and everything, and most of all, I hated myself.  I took a look into my own heart and saw all the ugliness crawling inside, and I finally understood, with the finality of despair, why God hated me.

I used to lock the bathroom door, and look at the big bottles of pills in the medicine cabinet, and fantasize about swallowing handfuls of them.  Sometimes I’d pour them into my cupped hand and look at them for a while.  But I never took them.  My fear of standing in judgement before a God that despised me was too great.  I wasn’t ready to be sent on to more eternal torment.  So, I would put the pills back, and live through another black day.

When I was younger, I liked to draw.  I hoped to be as good as my uncle someday, who was an artist and drew amazing portraits of his children and wife, pictures that hung in the place of honor in my grandparents’ living room.  I hoped I could become good enough someday that my dad would be proud of me.  But those days were long gone.  Now I drew without creativity or inspiration, without purpose.  The last thing I drew was a bleeding heart that was ripped in two, sewn jaggedly back together with black, ugly stitches.  I finished this self-portrait, and then put away my pencils for a long time.

I’m not sure how the rest of my family was handling the move.  I feel that of all of us, my sister R was the least affected.  She started going to College and Career at our new church and made some friends.  My brother B took some time, but eventually even he made a good friend at church; heart-breakingly, it was probably the first time since he was a little kid that he found someone who actually liked him instead of treating him with contempt and abuse.  This friend was his lifeline, and without him, I’m not sure what B would have become.

My parents made friends quickly, and they were well-liked and respected in their new church.

People admired how well-behaved and clean-cut we children were, and people would commend my parents for turning out such great children. 

It was rather ironic.  My little siblings even started going to Sunday school, and to all appearances, we all settled into our new “normal” life.

I was the only one who couldn’t find a place to fit in.  I tried to sit in youth group and listen to yet another watered-down talk on bible passages I had heard a thousand times.  The shallow theology bothered me.  The lack of depth and interest in spiritual things bothered me.  The people…well, the youth leader overlooked me entirely.  It was a definite failure on his part not to recognize the quiet desperation that sat before him Sunday after Sunday…I’m not sure why he didn’t attempt to reach out to me, especially as he usually did with any other new teens that came along, but suffice it to say, he never did.  It was a familiar sensation.  I had always been the one that nobody noticed.  Unsurprisingly, the other teens in the youth group mostly ignored me.  A few were actually friendly, and I was very grateful, though I didn’t know how to respond or relate to them.  We were like two different species.  They talked about boyfriends, Superbowl Sunday parties, going to prom, and school cliques.  These were also the topics addressed by the youth group leaders.  These things were as foreign to me as they would have been to a pygmy.

No one had anything to say about what to do when your world’s been torn apart, or you hate yourself, or how to escape God’s wrath and disapproval.

I got no answers from church, and the friendliness of the other teens dissipated by the time we had been there 2 months.  I was left alone, and I didn’t even care.  I didn’t care about anything.

Part Sixteen>

Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Fourteen

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 October 7, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Thirteen

Part Fourteen: Leaving the Fold

During the last couple years we were in Joe LaQuiere’s cult, doubts were slowly crystallizing in my dad’s mind, no doubt increased by Joe’s inability to accept any criticism or challenge to his opinions.  I remember my dad being one of the only people willing to disagree with Joe on anything.  The other person who had no problem voicing open doubt was my uncle H, father of the S family.  In fact, a very heated argument between Joe and my Uncle H was the precursor to both their family and our family leaving for good.  I believe it was regarding his oldest son, my cousin J, who was around 16 at the time.

My Uncle H decided it would be a good experience for J to take a job with a landscaping company, mowing lawns.  Joe LaQuiere was vehemently against children being employed in the outside world, away from the direct supervision of their parents.

He was also very angry that my Uncle H would make this decision without consulting him first and getting his permission.

My Uncle H got very upset in return, saying that it was HIS child, and he had the right to make what he considered the best decision for J, regardless of what anyone else thought.  This argument went on long into the night, and involved many raised voices, and the other families ranged themselves in support of Joe…I don’t remember if my dad even supported my Uncle H in this.  The end result was the S family left the group.

It was very sobering to all of us who were left, and Joe LaQuiere made it clear to his followers that the S’s desertion was their first step on the road to inevitable spiritual disaster.  He would tell us horror stories of other families who had been obstinate and left the group, spurning his advice and counsel.  All of them came to horrible ends.

He told us that these families self-destructed, ending with the older children rebelling against God and parents, reporting their parents to CPS for child abuse, who took the other children away and ripped the family apart.

This was what we had to look forward to if we left the fold.  His phrase for this was “crash and burn”.  That is what happened to everyone who left: they all “crashed and burned”, and he gave the most dire warnings to us so that we wouldn’t suffer the same fate.

Then, about 3 weeks after the S family left, my dad called a family meeting and informed us that we were not going back.  We were leaving.  This was met with tearful protests and disbelief by most of us.  I initially agreed with my dad on principle because I idolized him and therefore took his side on everything, but eventually I caved and wrote him a letter saying that I agreed with my mom and sister R and wanted to stay.  The only person who was happy about leaving was my brother B.  He was so happy it was heart-breaking.

He told me later that he was afraid to believe it was true and lived for weeks in constant fear that it would turn out to be a mistake, leaving him trapped again in his personal hell.

At first it was unclear to us as children whether this was permanent or temporary.  Joe LaQuiere came by that first week looking stern and dropped off a yellow manila envelope at our front door.  He refused to come in.  He treated the visit rather like the proverbial “shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them”.  He apparently didn’t want to be polluted by the act of crossing our threshold.  The manila envelope contained a letter that we were never allowed to read.  I caught a glimpse of it once, and sure enough, it contained the dreaded words “crash and burn”.  When my parents read it, my mom cried.  My dad looked very grim.  I was told later that the letter contained warnings and dark predictions for the spiritual future of our family.  Joe made it clear over and over again throughout the letter that my dad was a failure.  A failure as a spiritual leader, a failure as a father, a failure as a husband…a failure as a man.  In Joe’s mind, we had sealed our fate when we chose to leave.

We were on the path to destruction, and no one could help us.

This began one of the darkest periods of my entire life.

As difficult as it had often been to live as a part of “the group”, leaving felt a thousand times worse.

Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Thirteen

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

BarnHA 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 September 21, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Twelve

Part Thirteen: The Squeaky Wheel and the Persistent Widow

There’s an old saying, “It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.”  It basically means that he who complains loudest gets attended to first.  Joe LaQuiere used to like this saying very much.  He used it, funnily enough, to instill competition for his attention among his followers.  If one family wanted help and asked him for it, that was fine.  But if another family asked him for help and was waiting on his doorstep early in the morning, well….they were placed first priority.  They received the coveted attention, and the first family would just have to wait for another day.

Any time you could show your zeal and fierce determination to shove anything and anyone aside to get to Joe first, he would honor it by giving you first priority and kicking others further down the line who didn’t show your passion for his help.

Families that wanted his time and attention would show their determination to be close to him by tagging along with him all day while he ran errands.  Nothing was allowed to get in the way – not even meals.  I remember endless hours following Joe around Home Depot with my little brothers and sisters in tow, our legs tired from walking, stomachs empty and pinching, because we hadn’t been given anything to eat since breakfast, and it was 4 in the afternoon.  In the adult-centric world in which Joe lived, children ate…or didn’t eat…according to his schedule, not theirs.  Only nursing babies were lucky enough to have meals provided during these outings.  Our parents quickly stamped out any complaining, making it clear that our empty stomachs were a small price to pay for the chance to be with Joe all day.

Today I look back on Joe’s behavior and see him as a bit of an egomaniac.  The more your world revolved around him, the happier he was.  The more you idolized him and gave up things to prove your devotion to him, the better he was pleased.

He wanted a fan club, ready to fawn on his every word.

I’m sure he felt he deserved that, because he was doing everything right in his own estimation.  He got it right, God approved of him, and this was his reward: his own groupies who would push and jostle to be closest to him.

Some members used to make jokes about the story in Mark where two of the disciples tried to claim the places to the right and the left of Jesus and would substitute Joe’s name for Jesus’s.

We weren’t concerned about getting to sit next to Jesus – we wanted to be next to Joe!

Joe LaQuiere encouraged this currying for his favor, even though it caused divisiveness in the ranks.  He would dismiss any hurt feelings by saying “The squeaky wheel gets the grease”, and then he’d shrug and walk away, and the triumphant family who had shouldered their way into first place would turn and follow him.

Another story Joe liked to use to demonstrate how we should be was the Parable of the Unjust Judge.  A poor widow goes before an unjust judge and pleads for him to hear her case and give her “justice against her opponent”.  He refuses to listen to her and sends her away.  But she is persistent and stubborn and keeps coming back day after day, after day, after day.  Finally the unjust judge, who doesn’t care about justice, gives in and settles her case, because he’s so sick and tired of seeing her in his courtroom.  Persistence wins the day!

These were our role models to follow: the squeaky wheel and the persistent widow.

In practice, it worked something like this: Let’s say my family wanted to go see Joe LaQuiere to get his help with some more child-training.  We would get up in the morning, get ready to go, and drive over there after breakfast, say 10 AM.  Ordinarily this would be enough to be first in line and get Joe’s attention all day.  But let’s say another family heard us say the night before that we were going to come over at 10.  So they got up, rushed out the door, and got there at 9 AM.  Joe would let them in, and when our family arrived, we were sh*t outta luck.  He wouldn’t see us that day, or at the most, he’d say we could wait until the other family was finished, but he had no idea how long that would take.  He might or might not get around to seeing us.  So we’d either wait around half the day, or pack it back into our 8-passenger van and go home to try again another day.

It quickly became clear which families were willing to go the furthest to guarantee Joe’s time and attention.  One family was willing to go further than anyone else.  Not only did this family take every opportunity to arrive earlier and stay later, but they were willing to do whatever it took to beat out the competition and get one-on-one time with Joe.  Then they took it to the next level: they bought a house on his street.  Joe was tickled and flattered at this show of zeal for his time and attention: and he gave it to them, generously.  They became his new favorites.  It became very rare to find them at home – they were always at Joe’s house, every day, every weekend, day-in-and-day-out.  They started going there after breakfast and would stay all day.  Then they started coming before breakfast and eating with the LaQuiere family.  It became next to impossible to talk to Joe without this family standing right there, “holding their place in line”.  The rest of us chafed a little at the special treatment they were getting.  It was nearly impossible to beat them for first place in line anymore.  They lived practically next door – I remember once or twice that we managed to get to Joe’s house early enough that they weren’t there yet, and boy, were we smug!  It was a pretty good feeling that this time we got to be around Joe all day, and they had to wait!

I can’t believe Joe actually encouraged this pettiness, but clearly he was more focused on getting his ego stroked than on preventing jealousy and petty competition between his followers.

One time my parents found a temporary solution to holding on to first place in line for a few days: we just got Joe’s permission to stay at his house.  It was like a sleepover that lasted for a week, except of course, it wasn’t about having fun, it was about being next to Joe all the time, to hear his life wisdom on each daily situation as it came up.  At the time, I thought it was just about the coolest thing ever!  We ate all our meals with the LaQuieres, we did chores with Mrs. LaQuiere, or got to tag along on errands with the older kids.  We slept on sofa beds or in sleeping bags every night.  Best of all, we knew we were finally the Number One family, at least temporarily.  We got Joe’s undivided attention for nearly an entire week. We felt like we were on the inside, and everyone else was stuck on the outside.

For that one week, we were special.

As you can imagine, this didn’t sit well with the family I mentioned earlier.  They were determined to regain their first place in line.  So the next thing we knew, they had moved into Joe’s house…for good.  It was the ultimate line-jump.  They now had access to him 24/7 and had permanently cemented their status as first-in-line-to-Joe.  Never again did any of the rest of us come close, not even when three of the families also bought houses on the same street, one of them actually directly across the street from Joe’s house!

It didn’t matter: he had accepted the first family as adopted family members, and Joe considered that they had earned their spot in the sun, no matter how much anyone complained. 

From that day on, their family has lived in Joe’s house, a permanent part of his household.  They still live there today: I don’t think they’ll ever leave.  For legal purposes, they “live” in their house down the street.  That’s where their mail goes, because they aren’t legally allowed to reside in the same house as the LaQuiere family….zoning regulations or something, I don’t know.  But they do anyway.  Within five years of them moving in, the LaQuiere family built a huge addition on their house.  It was poorly designed, and an eyesore that the whole neighborhood winced at, but it made sure there was plenty of room for the LaQuieres and their new “adopted” family.

Even this wasn’t close enough of a connection for the mom of this family: she used to laughingly claim Joe’s youngest son as the future husband of her oldest daughter.  At the time, her daughter was 8, and his son was about 16.

True to her word, about 12 years later she witnessed her daughter marry this same son, making at least part of her family “real LaQuieres” at last.

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Twelve

HA Editorial Team5 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 September 20, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Eleven

Trigger Warning: Depictions of extreme medical abuse

Part Twelve: Exorcising Demons

Spiritual warfare is quite an interesting subject, all the more so because we don’t have much information on it, though what little we can infer from the Bible is quite fascinating.  Inferences to divine armies battling in the heavens, the devil being cast out of heaven, references to the “giant dragon” trying to devour the infant Jesus…what do we make of all that?  We know that in some hazy way these events are related directly to us, and that our actions affect the other-worldly battle going on in unseen realms.  But how exactly they’re related and clear specifics?  I have none of those, and I suspect you’re in the same boat.

I’m not sure where exactly Joe LaQuiere got his own beliefs on demons.  For Joe, spiritual warfare was simple.

Any bad attitude could be evidence of an indwelling “evil spirit”. 

Just like the devil went around “like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour”, we were taught that evil spirits were lurking everywhere, just waiting for the chance to settle in our hearts and souls.  If we gave them an opening through having a bad attitude, they’d jump on it and invite themselves right in.  So our parents spent time “rebuking” the evil spirits in us every time we were grumpy.  As you can imagine, this did not endear them to me.  In fact, hearing my parents order evil spirits to leave me, in the name of Jesus, just made me even more grumpy!  It felt very stupid and silly, because I knew I was just in a bad mood, not possessed by a demon.  But our parents took these things very seriously, praying over us and ordering the demons to leave.  If our bad attitude didn’t immediately vanish, that was further evidence in their minds that it was spiritual warfare they were dealing with.

This was the environment that existed in our group when my little cousin H started having seizures.  The first time it happened, they called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital.  She was prescribed anti-seizure medication, and I believe they even gave it to her, at first.  We heard about it the next morning, and even as children, were properly scared and worried for her.  I think she was about 6, but I could be off on the age…it was a long time ago.  We all hoped it was a one-time occurrence, and that little H with her blonde hair and sweet smile, would be fine from then on.  Then she had another seizure.  And another.  At this point Joe LaQuiere sat her parents down for some very serious discussions.

He was almost completely sure that these seizures weren’t medical – they were spiritual.

He thought they were being caused by demon possession, and he had a way to prove it one way or the other.  When she started having a seizure, or right afterwards, they needed to order her to say “Jesus is Lord”, because demons couldn’t say those words.  So if she said the words, then it wasn’t demon-possession, and presumably was just a medical condition that they could continue to treat with anti-seizure meds.  If, on the other hand, she refused to say “Jesus is Lord”, then they had a very very serious problem, and it was going to require a lot of prayer and work to drive the demon out.

With this fool-proof bit of theological wisdom in hand, they and Joe set to work on little H.  The next seizure came and went, and they tried to get her to say “Jesus is Lord”.  She wouldn’t say it.  There was the proof: their little girl was possessed by a demon.  This was further confirmed to them by odd things she would say…sometimes she would say there was a “black man” in the room, and she would want him to go away.  Even the little bit of reading that I’ve done on the subject has come up with information on visual and auditory hallucinations as a common and expected side-effect of epileptic seizures.  But apparently this research was outweighed by the expertise of Joe LaQuiere, who told them this was further evidence of demon possession: she was able to see other demons that were invisible to the rest of us.  The “black man” was clearly a demon, and little H needed to be delivered from her demon possession as quickly as possible.

So they stopped the seizure medication, and instead spent hours with her, Joe LaQuiere assisting, every time she had a seizure, ordering her over and over to say “Jesus is Lord”.

Often she would resist and fight them and cry, or say some variant of the magic words “Jesus is Lord”, but not the exact phrase.  I was told that many times they would be up with her all night, fighting and trying to hold her down to control the demon inside her.  This was a serious spiritual battle, and they were determined to win.  Joe LaQuiere told them they could, and they believed him.  Sometimes little H would say “Jesus is Lord”, and they would relax for a bit, believing the demon was gone.  Then it would start all over again with another seizure.  At one point I think she was having upwards of 12 to 15 seizures a day.  I’m not sure what else they tried in their quest to exorcise the demon from H besides prayer, and ordering her to say “Jesus is Lord”.  I was told of one time at least that Joe had them forcibly hold her in a shower as part of the process.  I’m not sure what affect that was supposed to have, but the seizures continued.  Little H started to look like she was in a constant daze all the time.  She didn’t act normally any more.  She didn’t talk much.

I don’t know how long this went on…I know that eventually the seizures lessened…for all I know, they put her back on seizure meds eventually.  I was never told.  The one thing we do know for certain: the effects.

H experienced permanent brain damage as a result of the untreated seizures.

Today she is in her 20s, but she’s never progressed mentally from the small child she used to be.  She is still sweet, but with the sweetness of a young child.  Her brain has been permanently scarred by the ordeal she went through, and her life will never be the same.  I grieve for her and her stolen potential.  What will happen to her now?  Will she ever be married?  Have her own family?  Have the emotional capacity to realize the spiritually abusive environment she is in, and the ability to leave?  I don’t know.

But I do know who is responsible: Joe LaQuiere.

Part Thirteen>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Eleven

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

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 September 12, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Ten

Part Eleven: The Good Girl Who Couldn’t be Good

The first few years we were a part of the LaQuiere cult, it was fairly easy to meet expectations.

Everyone viewed me as one of the “good” kids…I was a rule-follower by nature, and that made me a perfect fit for Joe LaQuiere’s legalism!

I got in some small difficulties over the rule to “never argue”, because my dad had taught me from an early age the delights of debate.  He gave me books on detecting logical fallacies, and my favorite game (though maybe not his) was to debate issues with him, and, if possible, win my point through rock-solid logic.  If I could use logic to prove to my dad that I was right, then he would concede, and I would get my small victory!  I’m not sure Joe LaQuiere knew my dad allowed this…if he did, he would have been very disapproving (as he was already very disapproving of my dad for trying to debate with him).  When I disagreed with my dad, it was called debating, and we both understood the rules and appreciated the game.  With my mom, it was called “arguing”, and she expected (understandably) not to have to logically defend every instruction she gave me!  So I was often in trouble with my mom, but that was pretty much the only crack in my “goodness”.

My sister R, by contrast, had plenty of trouble until she was about twelve.  She was very stubborn…she liked to contradict…and she did not like to follow rules!  Joe LaQuiere believed she just needed strong enough motivation and she would “snap to”.  He was right.  Turns out, what she needed was a strong enough personality to win her allegiance, and Joe succeeded at this around the time she turned twelve.  I’m not sure what he said or did that caused her to change, but she did an astonishing about-face, and from then on, Joe LaQuiere had her complete loyalty.  She was now his biggest fan: she started scrupulously following rules, and was determined to live up to his expectations and please him.  When we eventually left a few years later, she went to bat as Joe LaQuiere’s model pupil–she begged and pleaded and argued with my dad to no avail to convince him to let us stay in the group.  Both she and my mom had extremely strong ties of loyalty to Joe, and it was very difficult for them to let go when we left.

To this day, both of them (but especially my sister R) have a difficult time hearing Joe LaQuiere spoken of poorly.

They don’t like to hear his following called “a cult”, and my sister will still talk about his “wisdom” and how much of what he taught was “really good”.  She raises her children using many of his training methods.

Meanwhile, I didn’t have my sister’s advantage of a flattering conversion story to endear Joe LaQuiere to me, but he still seemed to approve of me for being the small rule-follower that I was, and I eagerly lapped up the crumbs of his approval like a starving puppy.  As one of the younger children, I would vie for the coveted opportunity to sit on his lap while he taught – the ultimate place of privilege.  It made me feel special and noticed. On one very special occasion, I was sitting at Joe LaQuiere’s feet while he was talking to the adults, just quietly listening to him, while Mrs. LaQuiere was getting ready for dinner, setting the table, and handing out related small chores.  My sister R was enlisted to help from whatever she was doing, and after a minute, she or perhaps my mom tried to pull me away to come help too.  Joe intervened, comparing me to Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, and my sister to Martha.  He said he wasn’t going to send me away.  I had chosen “the better thing” by sitting at his feet listening to him, and that was where I could stay.  I couldn’t believe it: it was one of the huge moments in my young life where I felt of value.  I never forgot that moment.  Occasionally Joe LaQuiere would also use me as an example of a “good child”, or say to someone, “S would never think to do that, would you?  She’s a good girl.”  And I would duck my head shyly, but inside I was beaming.  It felt so incredibly good to earn his approval!  I lived for those moments.

Like my sister, I too had found in Joe LaQuiere someone to hero-worship: someone to fill the yawning hole left in my heart by my shamed failure to make my own father proud of me.

Years later, when we left the cult, I joined with my sister and mom in trying to convince my dad to change his mind.  I didn’t want to leave behind the only source of approval I had.

Even though I was a veteran rule-follower, it was still more difficult than you’d imagine to earn an “A” in Mr. LaQuiere’s class.

He taught us that God had given all of us “everything we need for life and godliness” – which meant everything we needed to be perfect.

In fact, we were called to “be perfect” – it was right there in black-and-white in Mr. LaQuiere’s King James Bible: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.  Joe reasoned that God would never call us to do something that we weren’t perfectly (ha, see what I did there?) capable of doing!  Therefore, we could be perfect: we could live our lives and never sin, not even so much as one bad attitude or snarky look.  It’s pretty clear that if you can be perfect, and yet, you’re not perfect, it’s because you are choosing not to be.  Because of this, we were berated for any and every misstep, because our goal was to live perfect lives, and so win God’s pleasure and approval of us.

As a part of these impossibly-high standards, our parents used a system of public praise/shame to encourage all the children to work harder at correcting character flaws.

Every week, all the parents in the group would announce what character fault each child needed to work on, and then the following week, our “scores” would be publicly announced.  Those who did well…90%…93%…held their heads high!  Those who squeaked by with something in the high 80s could at least heave a sigh of relief and jump off the figurative hot seat until next week.  But those with bad scores had nothing but public shame to look forward to.  They would be reminded that not only were they required to please their parents and God in everything in all their outward actions, but to be perfectly obedient inside as well, in their every attitude.  Nothing less would satisfy a holy God.

As a champion rule-follower, (with no small amount of pride in the fact, I may add!) nothing less than a perfect score satisfied me.  But it was surprisingly difficult to achieve, even for someone like me.  I did get a perfect 100% the first few weeks…but as Mr. LaQuiere would have said, pride goeth before a fall.  The very next week I was supposed to work on “not arguing”…and on “doing everything I was asked without question, with a good attitude”.  Not only did I scrupulously avoid arguing with my mom, giving ingratiating smiles and being sickeningly cheerful while I followed out every instruction she could think up, but I even swore off debating with my dad!  Finally Wednesday night came around, and before we left for our weekly meeting at Joe’s house, my dad tallied up our scores and averaged out percentages.  He told us what we had earned, and I waited eagerly to hear that coveted “100%”.  I knew I hadn’t argued even once – I didn’t trip up a single time all week – I had been perfect!  Then my dad gave me my score…99%.  I gulped at the unfairness of it, and had to stop myself from arguing with him (talk about pouring salt in the wound!), which would have been punished by my dad lowering my score even more.  I carefully asked him why I only got 99%, and what I had done wrong.  He informed me, my mom nodding in agreement, that the 99% was because he wanted me to learn that I was not perfect, and that I could not be perfect, and that a 100% would be puffing me up with sinful pride.  And that was that.  I never got 100% again, even though plenty of other parents gave their children perfect grades.  I gritted my teeth every time another child got what I was sure in my youthful arrogance was an undeserved perfect score, while my own dad refused to give me the scores I felt I earned.

I’m not sure how I was supposed to reconcile Joe’s teaching that we could be and must be perfect to earn God’s approval with my dad’s insistence that I could never reach perfection.

Of course, I now realize that my dad was closer to the mark than Joe was.  We can never reach perfection on our own – but we don’t need to, because we have Jesus’ perfect score applied to us every day!  I wish I had been taught that as a child, instead of being pushed further and further into harsh perfectionism that exhausted my soul and set me up for a life of spiritual defeat.

In my quest to reach perfection, and finally feel God was pleased with me, my failures loomed far larger than my small triumphs.

There was the time that I said something wrong while working construction together with the rest of the families…I can’t even remember what it was I said.  I have a feeling I gave an adult a sarcastic answer (my gift of sarcasm was definitely not appreciated!) and I remember my parents, Joe LaQuiere, and my Aunt C discussing my crime while I sat unnoticed or ignored beside them on the floor in Joe’s office (a place I hated because it was always associated with shame and punishment).  I wasn’t spanked for being disrespectful, but Joe LaQuiere told me he was very disappointed in me, and that I had lost his respect, and my Aunt C said, not to me, but meant for me to overhear, “If I knew she was like that, I would rather have seen her dropped in the foundation we’ve been digging, and buried up to her neck.”  I’ve never forgotten those words.  I’m not entirely sure why she came up with that theoretical punishment, exactly…but she was quite fond of hyperbolic half-serious threats of things she’d “rather see” or “would do” if the occasion warranted.  She once told my sister R that if she ever caught her painting her toe-nails like worldly girls (what shameless harlotry!), she would rip her nails out by the roots!  And then she laughed, so we would know it was (at least partly) a joke.

My other failure that haunted me for a long time was of “carelessness”.  My mom’s best friend, Mrs. W, had a proof-reading business where she would scan and then proof manuscripts or articles for spelling errors.  She had the bright idea to include my sister R and me in her business.  She would send us some of the work to proof and would pay us a small amount per hour that we worked.  It was exciting!  I got to sit at a computer and read for hours – my ideal job!  I was about 12 at the time, and R was 14.  We finished our work, corrected all the spelling errors we found, and sent it back, delighted that we got to do real, grown-up work!

A few days later, Mrs. W called us in to talk to her in private.  She was frowning, and I didn’t know why.  She said she was seriously disappointed in us.  We hadn’t done a good job – they had sent the work back with spelling errors that we had missed, and she had to redo it all herself.  She told us she would pay us for what we had already done, but she was firing us for being careless.  She thought she could trust us, but she couldn’t.  She was sorry, but she no longer wanted our help.  I walked around all that day in a haze of shame and humiliation.  I felt that everyone’s eyes were on me, knowing what a disappointment and failure I was.  When we got home that night, I found a private place to go and cried there for a long time.  These moments still loom large in my memory…I can still feel the crush of humiliation, the painful knowledge that despite my constant efforts, I was a failure.

Each ugly incident seared itself into my little soul, pushing me deeper into the abyss of perfectionism and reinforcing my deep inner conviction that, hard as I tried, God would not accept me.

Part Twelve>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Ten

HA Editorial Team7 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 29, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Nine

Part Ten: Wives, Children and Dogs

After we had settled into the routine of belonging to “the group”, as we called it, it was relatively easy to know what was expected of us, as children.  I knew I needed to obey anything and everything my parents (or other adults) told me, with no questions.  I knew I wasn’t allowed to complain about things I didn’t want to do or argue with my parents about anything.

As a child, I was inherently inferior to adults.

I was not their equal.  I learned this through watching Mr. LaQuiere, my parents, and the other adults routinely put down children.  We were taught we were all full of “foolishness”.  We “needed our wills broken”.  We needed to be taught our place.  We needed to learn absolute obedience and submission to authority.

I still remember the exact place I was when Mr. LaQuiere told my parents explicitly what “complete submission” meant.

“If I told my 15-year-old daughter to take off all her clothes, and get down on her hands and knees and bark like a dog, she should obey me instantly,” he said. “That is the kind of obedience children must give their parents.

Absolute obedience, without questioning.”  This level of humiliation had never even occurred to me.  To know that it was possible was a very distressing thought.  Would my parents or Mr. LaQuiere ever order me to humiliate myself like this?  I silently decided that if my dad ever told me to strip naked and bark like a dog, I wouldn’t, no matter how much I was punished.

I didn’t mind the idea of obeying, because I was naturally obedient.  But I hated the “without question” part.  I liked to ask questions.  I liked to know the reasons behind things.  I liked to know the ‘why’, not because I wanted to “challenge my parents’ authority”, as Mr. LaQuiere called it, but because I genuinely wanted to know.  I had an active mind, and it was always probing to get to the bottom of things, to know why they worked the way they did.  I was told this was disrespectful to my authorities, and that they should never be questioned.  I didn’t need to know the reasons.  I was only a child.

I had no right to know.

This absolute, unquestioning obedience did not just apply to small children.  It applied to all children (a label determined not by maturity, but by parentage), regardless of age.  Mr. LaQuiere expected his adult sons and daughters to snap to attention and instantly obey with the same cheerful alacrity that he expected from a 5-year-old.

This system was put in place by God himself, and it was God who said that any child who did not obey was rebellious, and should be stoned to death by his parents, his siblings, his friends, and everyone else as a lesson in how seriously He viewed disobedience.

Obedience was a universally-praised virtue, with the exception of men.  Men didn’t need to obey anybody (except God, that is).  But wives, children, and dogs were all expected to obey.

Dogs and children were often trained with similar methods.

We had a small, fluffy, Maltese puppy named Sasha.  She was friendly and happy, and eager to please.  But just as my parents were told they didn’t know how to train us the right way, Mr. LaQuiere told them they were failing in training our puppy as well.  She needed to learn absolute obedience as well.  She needed to instantly come every time she was called.  She needed to be punished severely for every infraction, whether it was not coming right away, or making an accident on the rug during the process of house-training her.  Any time we found a mess she made, Mr. LaQuiere said, we needed to drag her over to it, rub her nose in the excrement, and tell her “BAD DOG!” in stern, disappointed tones.  He demonstrated this for us multiple times.  I felt bad for her…she looked so forlorn and sad, being reprimanded for making a mistake.  But Mr. LaQuiere said it was the only way to train a dog.  If she didn’t come when she was called, he demonstrated the proper punishment technique – sometimes he would drag her by her collar or the scruff of her neck.  Sometimes he would hit her, not with a rolled-up-newspaper, which he said was useless, but with his hand.  One time when he was correcting her for something, and dangling her in the air by the scruff of her neck, she yipped at him.  I imagine it hurt to be hung in the air by her skin like that.  He responded by throwing her against the wall.  Never allow a dog to challenge your authority like that, he told us.  I still remember how she yelped, and what she looked like in a frightened heap on the floor, her sides heaving in and out.  After Mr. LaQuiere “trained” her in obedience, she did learn to come when called…her tail between her legs, often slinking along the floor, looking guilty and anxious, never knowing if she was going to be smacked across the room, or welcomed.  Poor little Sasha.  She wanted so badly to please us.  I honestly think she didn’t know what she was being punished for most of the time.  My parents might have thought his techniques were more cruel, if it weren’t for the fact that there wasn’t a single one that he didn’t also use on children.

Children, dogs, and wives were taught absolute obedience. In wives, however, it was called “submission”.  Wives were to submit absolutely to their husbands, who were the heads of the family, and their authorities.

This was true not only if the husband was right in what he asked, or if was kind, but also if he was cruel or wrong.

Mr. LaQuiere said God instructed wives to submit, and men to love their wives: and one way to love wives was to teach them to submit.  One Wednesday night, he described how he taught his own wife absolute submission.  He called it “The Story of 11 Mile”.  He and Mrs. LaQuiere were driving somewhere one day, and it was a place they hadn’t been before, so Mrs. LaQuiere was trying to help him find the way there.  They needed to turn on 11 Mile, so as they were driving, she saw it, too late, and said, “Dear, we’ve passed 11 Mile!”  He said she was wrong, he was sure they hadn’t passed it yet.  She disagreed.  He was displeased by her lack of submission.  As they drove on, it quickly became clear to him that they had, in fact, passed 11 Mile.  But this was not important compared to the fact that Mrs. LaQuiere had insisted on contradicting him, showing him disrespect, and refusing to submit to him and agree that he was right.  So to teach her a lesson, he refused to turn around, until she showed submission by saying “You’re right, dear, we didn’t pass 11 Mile.”  Apparently she didn’t want to do this for a while, and he kept right on driving.  Finally she told him, “You’re right, dear.  We haven’t passed 11 Mile.”  Once she submitted to him by accepting that he was right, no matter what, he turned the car around, and they drove on to their destination.

Today I think of this, and I HAVE. NO. WORDS.  What the heck?!  He was wrong, and she merely pointed out that he passed a street, but he couldn’t even allow her to think he might have made a mistake.  His pride, his sense of absolute authority and need for submission was so great that he actually forced his wife to lie to him and tell him he was right, before he would make a simple U-turn.  Poor Mrs. LaQuiere.  I sometimes wonder how she stood it.

Mr. LaQuiere’s worldview was simple: wives, children and dogs were all divinely ordained to be submissive and obedient to him.  He wasn’t being revolutionary – he was just following God’s plan.  It wasn’t his fault that God had made him male, human, and given him offspring.

He knew his place in God’s design, and no one was going to shove him out of his rightful position of superiority.

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Nine

HA Editorial Team4 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 21, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Eight

Part Nine: Smile

I was reading an article about the Duggars this morning.  People were commenting about how “happy” the children were and how that was evidence of a healthy, well-balanced upbringing.  It reminded me of my own upbringing and how “happy” we always looked…to outsiders.

This was because we followed one of the cardinal rules of Godly Christians (as defined by Mr. LaQuiere).  You may not know this rule, because, poor you, you probably grew up without the benefit of Mr. LaQuiere’s Super-Christianity, so I’ll just tell you right now what it is: ALWAYS SMILE!  This is because the only godly facial expression is a smile.  It’s true that there are multiple godly emotions… happiness… gratefulness… sorrow over your sin… but they can pretty much be covered with the one facial expression (some lenience can be given for the “sorrow” category, but only if it’s the right kind of sorrow).

Not only is a smile important because it portrays our proper gratefulness to God for all our blessings, and because it provides a “good witness” for God, and our parents, and godly large families, and homeschoolers, all of whom we represent…but it’s a way to change how you feel on the inside!

I’ll show you what I mean.  The following was written by the mom of the K family I mentioned earlier, who has her own website (www.raisinggodlytomatoes.com) and book about raising godly children (it’s not a gardening book, though gardening can also be a godly activity, if done correctly):

THE OUTSIDE REFLECTS THE INSIDE

One cherished, but highly erroneous belief is that a parent should not correct a child for displaying a wrong emotion, because the child will “suppress” the emotion rather than change it. Experience convinces me otherwise. Require young children to display the right emotions outwardly and their hearts will change, producing the right attitudes and emotions inwardly as well.

Of course you can’t simply order your children to “be happy”. If the child is small, it works much better to tell him to “smile” or “straighten up your face.” If the child is very young, I’ll cheerfully say, “Let’s see a smile now”, or “Where is your smile?”

The child may initially resist, but when he finally obeys, the resulting smile will often break into a radiant grin, accompanied by sincere laughter and other expressions of genuine joy. It is hard for a small child to hide his true feelings. It is equally difficult for him to display an emotion that he does not really feel. Get him to smile on the outside and invariably he will smile on the inside.

A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, but when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken.  Proverbs 15:13

(excerpt from http://www.raisinggodlytomatoes.com/ch09.php)

So, to recap, in order to avoid showing the “wrong” emotions, if you require your small children (and the rest of them too) to “smile on the outside”, you will change their hearts and get them to have the “right” emotions and attitudes instead.  Also notice the verse at the bottom, which clinches it: if you have a joyful heart, you’ll have a joyful face! (This may sound somewhat different from the lesson “if you have a joyful face, you’ll have a joyful heart”, but that’s just semantics.  Don’t be so nit-picky, for gosh sakes!)

You can easily see that smiling is the first line of defense against all attitude problems.

Smiling will change your heart – smiling will make you happy – smiling will help you be godly!

This necessity to smile was tacked on to most requirements: instant obedience…with a smile!  Do your chores… with a smile!  Finish being spanked… now smile!

You can see how “smiling” and “looking happy” becomes the necessary mask that all children raised in this belief system must wear.  (The Duggars also follow this, by the way – read up on Bill Gothard’s ATI character-training program, which they are a part of, and you’ll find plenty about having a “bright countenance”, and how looking unhappy is publicly shaming your parents/authorities.)  It’s not a choice, and it has nothing to do with how ‘happy’ they really are or aren’t.

The main problem I have with this type of training is that it not only separates all emotion into two categories of “good” or “bad” – but it also teaches children from the earliest possible ages to stuff their emotions.

This happened to me (to be fair, it was already happening to me to some extent before I met Mr. LaQuiere, because my dad was very anti-emotion…but it was reinforced and drilled home by the training I received from Mr. LaQuiere all through my formative years).  I learned that not only should I not ever express negative emotions like anger, or disappointment, or unhappiness, because they were sinful (unless it was, say, “righteous anger” – but somehow only our dads ever managed to feel this one, while disciplining us, go figure), but I learned how not to feel those negative emotions, disassociating myself from them for years.  This latter part wasn’t expressly taught to me, but being a smart kid, I figured it out on my own.  I taught myself to “think my way out of feeling”.  Any bad feeling I had, I thought through logically, analyzing it, until the feeling faded, and only the analysis remained.  I also discovered that if I held my breath, the overwhelming emotion would fade.  I trained myself to stay calm and not cry, or get angry this way.  I got so good at this that it became second-nature. 

Anytime something bad happened that would trigger a negative emotion, part of me would just “shut down” all by itself, and I felt…nothing.

Not happiness, not sadness, not anger…nothing at all.  It was like being in an alternate reality where no emotions existed.

I’ll touch more on this later, specifically on the journey God had to bring me through to learn to feel things again, but I’ll just say now that living emotion-free is not healthy for anyone, and especially for a child.  Emotions are sign-posts of what is going on beneath the surface.  Emotions tell us to look deeper and see what need is being missed.  Telling a child who you’ve just severely punished to smile…as tears stream down his face…does not teach him to have a joyful heart.

It teaches him to hide, even from himself, what he really feels, and who he really is.

If you don’t know what you really feel anymore, you lose your God-given signposts meant to alert you to danger.  Instead of a built-in-warning-system for unmet needs, or dangers to be avoided, you learn rigid control over your outward expressions, and you start to live on the surface only, without even realizing it.  But it makes it easier for parents to avoid difficult situations with their children…to avoid dealing with difficult emotions their children are experiencing…it makes parenting easy, because you only have to enforce a one-size-fits-all set of rules, not deal with the complexities of childhood and individual needs.  This is why I was told there was “nothing to be sad about” when I watched my brother being severely beaten, and told not to cry when Baby J was being suffocated in couch cushions.  I was taught to ignore my strong emotions that told me this was bad and wrong, and to put blind trust in my authorities instead, who told me it was right and good.  In retrospect, it’s little wonder I learned it was safer to divorce myself from emotions entirely.

I don’t smile as much today as I did back then, but when I do, at least it’s genuine!  And my children?  They cry, or feel grumpy, or are happy, without having their emotions prescribed for them and enforced through threats and punishment.

We’re working on learning parenting techniques together that affirm them for who they are, and address their needs, instead of placing their only value in being a “happy” advertisement for me or God.

I love when they smile!  But I will never tell them to.

Part Ten>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc