religious abuse – Page 3 – Homeschoolers Anonymous

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Eight

April 14, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team10 Comments

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

<Part Seven

Trigger Warning: Depictions of physical abuse and gaslighting

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

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

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

They were subject to the same expectations as adults.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Nine>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Six

April 10, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

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

<Part Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even dresses were not modest enough by themselves.

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

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

Part Seven>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Five

April 8, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

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

< Part Four

Part Five: A Brave New World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a brave new world.

Part Six>

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The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Four

April 6, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team9 Comments

Trigger warning: graphic depictions of infant abuse

< Part Three

Part Four: Rebellion is as the Sin of Witchcraft

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

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

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

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

My world was suddenly confusing and no longer safe.

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

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

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

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

Part Five>

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

April 4, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team12 Comments

<Part One

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Julie Anne Smith’s blog Spiritual Sounding Board. It was originally published on March 31, 2015 and has been slightly modified for HA.

The following is Part 2 of Dash sharing how the teachings of Bill Gothard influenced his parents to “spank” his siblings. Although I know Dash’s identity, he has asked to remain anonymous. Dash’s account shows that they were not spankings, but abuse:

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

I asked Dash questions about his childhood and more specifics about how he was disciplined. Again, I must issue a trigger warning to those who have experienced abuse. There may be some parents reading who used to follow Gothard’s teachings and have now left that behind. This, too, might be difficult for you to read.

In the following, Dash responds to my questions. My questions are in green:

What kinds of things did you and your sister do that resulted in “spankings?” Can you give an example of what disobedience looked like, i.e, talking back, not doing what you were told to do, etc.?

It’s hard to dredge up specific examples of behaviors that resulted in beatings (I’m going to use the term “beating” rather than “spanking,” because that’s what they were), because frankly my recollection of the events leading up to the beatings are hazy. However, punishable offenses included: Not getting a chore done on time, or to the required degree of perfection (chores included dusting, vacuuming, taking out the trash). Arguing or fighting with my siblings (to clarify, I have an older sister and younger brother), and I mean trivial things like arguing over which record we were going to listen to or who got to play with which stuffed animal. Arriving home late from a friend’s house, arriving home late after school, not getting out of bed promptly in the morning, complaining about going to church. The list is endless.

As our family began to seriously decay and slide toward doom, punishments extended to include: making a salad incorrectly, accidentally dropping a dish or a milk bottle, getting the bathroom floor wet during a bath, not setting the table for dinner quickly enough, forgetting to put clothes in the laundry basket, putting a book back on the bookshelf in the wrong place.

In other words, any trivial perceived imperfection became grounds for beatings.

One of the worst beatings of my life was administered by my mother around nine years old when we were making chocolate chip cookies. I was given the task of running the hand-held mixer, which I was happy to do because then I might get one of the detachable beaters with cookie batter on it after. I was standing on a stool, and I turned to ask my mother a question. Being an absent-minded kid, when I turned I unconsciously lifted the mixer out of the batter and cookie dough flew all over the wall. My mom went livid and slapped me full in the face, knocking me sprawling off the stool. She then dragged me bawling upstairs and beat me with the 3/4″ dowel rod for almost 30 minutes.

What made them stop the beatings after an hour or however long? Was there something you or your sister did that helped them to stop? Were your parents looking for signs of remorse? Did they finally give up?

The stipulation was that we had to hold still and submissively accept the beating, and we had to stop crying and be silent and not make a sound. This was a specific part of Gothard’s beating protocol, found in one of his pamphlets: the silent, limp submission to a beating was his metric for a “repentant spirit.”

To this day, I cannot show normal emotional responses to my environment as a result of this aversive conditioning; I reflexively suppress every emotional response.

I cannot maintain a long-term relationship with a woman because of this emotional dysfunction, which is why I am still single at 44. I have had therapists hint that I might be a sociopath because of the superficial appearance of this emotional dysfunction, which I know not to be the case. I have emotions; I just cannot show or express them properly. It makes me want to kill myself.

Did your parents talk to you while you were getting spanked? How was their tone of voice? Were they yelling or did they use a normal tone of voice? Did they use scripture while “spanking?” Did they pray with you after?

They would yell and scream and bellow. They would tell us what bad, awful, evil, horrible, sinful children we were. In the beginning, there was no pretext of spiritual context; later on as I got older and the beatings continued, my father began making attempts to pray with us after a beating, as if it was a spiritual exercise. For the most part, however, the beatings took place in an atmosphere of apoplectic, psychotic rage, especially when my mother was administering them. I use the term “psychotic” because my mother has been diagnosed as bipolar, and her fits of apoplexy were probably manic fugues. It was terrifying. To this day I have nightmares about it.

Did they realize you were bruised? Did they ever acknowledge they went overboard or apologize?

The bruising and other injuries (which at one point for me included a broken finger, and for my brother once included a broken forearm) were never acknowledged by my parents. It was implied that we deserved it.

“That’s what you get for your sinful disobedience” was the message.

My parents have never really acknowledged the specific details of what they did. Both of them have acknowledged that hitting us was wrong, but we can’t discuss details properly because they are so horrified and humiliated by the recollection of what they did to us. My mother has sobbing fits when I try to bring any of this up. Both my parents have tried to make amends through financial reparations: paying for therapists, occasionally helping with rent or medical bills. But I’m still broken, so everyday life is a constant struggle. I wake up every morning and look in the mirror, and I have to find a reason not to kill myself.

I have a cat that I adopted 13 years ago who snuggles with me and is my little buddy. Having a cat is the only thing that keeps me going; I have to take care of my cat, so I can’t kill myself. I have to focus on something other than myself in order to go on living. It’s pretty bleak.

I’d like to state again for the record that Gothard apologists are remorseless sadists, and this includes that Alfred character who comments on your blog. These people KNOW THAT THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN THE IBLP/ATI PROGRAM, AND THEY ARE FINE WITH IT. They are sociopaths.

And Gothard is a monster, because he knows about these events and he ENCOURAGES THEM.

photo credit: bark via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part One

March 30, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team8 Comments

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

Part One: The Day I Turned Bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

Part Two>

The Courtship That Wasn’t: Darcy’s Story

March 22, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team8 Comments

Nothing about my courtship or marriage was supposed to happen.

I wasn’t supposed to give my heart away, not even a piece. Especially not to an unapproved guy whose family did not share our standards. They were good enough to be our friends, but definitely not intended for future marriage prospects. And I was only 17 anyway. 17-yr-olds were supposed to be concerned with serving the Lord and their families and weren’t anywhere near mature enough to know their own minds. “The heart is deceitful”, after all, especially when you’re 17.

But there I was, fallen from grace, in love with a boy. It was completely unintentional. I never meant for it to happen. But he was my friend and suddenly he was more. This is why we weren’t supposed to be friends with boys. Falling in love was something that ungodly dating people did. We practiced courtship and emotional purity and that meant no falling in love, no giving away pieces of your heart, no emotional fornication, only parent-approved courtship to one person who would end up my husband through a means of careful formulas to be sure no mistakes were made.

But I failed. I was in love. I was no better than The World after all.

The agony of coming to grips with my failure, of pleading with God to take away this forbidden feeling, to make my heart whole again, the guilt that I had somehow let this happen and had failed myself and my parents and my entire sub-culture was more than any teenage girl could bear. I begged God for forgiveness, I tried avoiding The Boy, I tried reading my Bible more and spent hours praying and throwing myself into my schoolwork and church activities. But it was apparent that, regardless of what I had been taught and what had been drilled into me by the courtship books, love is not something you can control.

And my whole carefully constructed world came crashing down around me.

I had to come to grips with the fact that everything I had believed was a lie. That many of the teachings on purity and “guarding your heart” and courtship and relationships were not at all reality, but some grand scheme made up to try to control other people’s lives. I couldn’t even find these ideas in my well-worn Bible, nor logically work them out in my head. Yet I knew that if my parents had any inkling of what was swirling around my head, there would be hell to pay and my life would be even more miserable than it already was. I was not free to have my own beliefs on this matter, even as an adult.

I kept it from them, my budding secret relationship with The Boy, my feelings and our talks (because if feeling emotional attachment for someone was forbidden, talking about it to them was even worse). I kept it from them until the day they told me they had to, for my own good, keep me away from him because he liked me and that couldn’t be allowed. Here’s my written account of what went down that day, taken from my journal of that time:

“We need to talk,” they said. “We’ve decided that you and Sky are spending too much time together. It’s not good for either of you. He’s obviously attracted to you and we feel we need to guard your heart so you don’t end up giving it away to the wrong person at the wrong time. I know you’re good friends and we’d like to keep it that way so we feel like you shouldn’t spend so much time together.”

Dad was about to go on when I blurted out “It’s too late!”

They just looked at me while I gathered all the courage I had and declared, “I’m in love with him.”

They looked at each other and my mom sighed dramatically. “This is exactly what we were trying to avoid. It’s OK,” my mom patted my lap. “We’re in this together and we’ll help you get through this.”

“I don’t want to get through this” I said quietly. They looked at me in silent shock.

Then I told them all…But I knew they didn’t understand. “Don’t you think,” my dad said, “that if this were God’s will for you, that He would tell me?”

“Maybe, maybe not”, I replied. “Maybe He wants you to hear it from me. Maybe part of growing up is learning to listen to God on my own.”

“You know,” Mom tried, “sometimes we can want something so badly that we think God is telling us something that He’s not. This could all be coming from your own heart. Our hearts are deceitful, after all.”

“Mom,” I said, “do you believe that I have a strong relationship with the Lord?”

“Well, yes,” she replied.

“So why is it so hard to believe that He would speak to me and show me the direction He wants me to go in my life?” I asked earnestly.

The answer was pretty much what I thought it would be: because the direction God was supposedly showing me was not the direction they had planned. I came away from that talk with the impression that they thought this was just a phase that would run its course. Once again they proved how little they knew me and how little they really wanted to.

It all went downhill from there. I documented the entire story on my blog, in 12 parts. It’s painful to read, difficult even now to relive the agony of the girl I was, the girl who had to fight, to be strong, the girl whose heart was ripped out again and again by the very people who claimed to protect it, all in the name of God. The girl who wanted nothing more than to please God, who had to use spiritual-sounding language and justifications to do what should’ve been a normal part of growing up. But that’s what happens when you’re raised to be, not yourself, not an autonomous person, but an asset to be controlled.

I read my journals and even the story I wrote out 6 years ago, and I am angered. I should not have had to use God to justify my choices. I should not have had to invoke His will for my life, to try to convince my parents that I knew my own mind and could “hear God for myself”. I should not have had to field emotional abuse and manipulation and spiritual control of my mind and heart and body. I should not have had to flee home just to get away from them and find peace. I was an adult, that should have been enough to make my own choices.

But in our world, it was not. In the world for which courtship was invented, the ultimate sin was rebellion against God’s order of authority, against what your parents wanted for you, and choosing to walk on your own amid cries of “rebellion”. In this world, men could not be trusted and women were assets to be controlled, and the two could only meet under many layers of rules meant to keep us dependent on our authorities, despising of our own desires, and mistrusting of our own hearts and minds. It has always amazed me how two people who were declared not mature enough to conduct a relationship without supervision and under extreme outside constraint could somehow be mature enough to begin a marriage.

It took me until about 4 years ago to finally stop making spiritual-sounding excuses for why we conducted a secret relationship, why we rejected courtship, why we did everything “wrong” and against my parents’ will, to stop trying to get anyone listening to acknowledge the legitimacy of our choices by invoking God’s will.

To finally simply declare, “Because it was what we wanted and we had that right”.

Such a basic idea yet so foreign to those of us who are refugees from the homeschooling movement. We have that right….the right to love, to choose, to live. To not have our adult choices dictated by another, our autonomy robbed in the name of “because God says so”, coerced by ideologies that left us no real choice because “do this or suffer hell” is not a real choice.

It was what we wanted. And that should have been enough.

Hurts Me More Than You: A Poem by Jessica

November 19, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial TeamLeave a comment

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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 content warning for Jessica’s poem: intense descriptions of emotional and verbal abuse towards a child.

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“Daddy Loves You,” a poem by Jessica

“Bless us, Oh Lord…” we all sit to pray,
But you neglected to do it well.
She scratched her nose and you opened your eyes.
Children like you two are going to hell.

Now you may eat, but just as I say.
Don’t take a bite so big!
If you stuff your face you’ll end up like mommy,
A nasty, big, fat pig.

Don’t clack your fork. Don’t smack your lips.
Don’t finish your dinner too fast.
But don’t still be eating by the time I am through!
You’re a fat, ugly cow if you’re last.

You are mean. You are nasty. And so full of hate.
You are retarded and dumb.
None of your friends actually wants to be near you.
Nope. Not a single one.

You make stupid choices, and I know you’ll end up,
Marrying a loser who will bail.
Oh, you’re going to be a horrible mother,
And your children will end up in jail.

You are rude. You are mean, and a horrible person.
So full of anger and hate.
You should be ashamed of all that you are.
I don’t care that you’re only just eight.

You’re retarded.
You’re lazy.
You’re going to hell.
You’re a liar.
You’re a loser.
You’re going to fail.

You just disappoint me and make me recoil.
I don’t even want you in sight.
Now come here and give me a kiss on the cheek.
Remember, Daddy loves you.
Goodnight.

Hurts Me More Than You: A Poem by Merritt

November 18, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team1 Comment

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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.

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“Disagreement,” a poem by Merritt

Our eyes do not meet
As eyes seldom do in disagreement
You choose to revisit an old argument
I merely listen

There can be no discussion
Since you start out by ending it
“We have to stand on the Bible,” you said.
And that, as they say, is that.

Frustration wraps its strangle hold around my tongue
As words like “context,” “history” and “interpretation”
Die before they can be spoken
Because I know they cannot be heard.

“We have to stand on the Bible,” you said,
And nothing I can say will convince you
That the words you stand by were penned by an evil king
Whose wisdom turned to rot.

“If you beat them with a rod, they will not die,” said the king.
I wonder what the dying thought of that.

And I wonder why we revere this king
Whose evil counsel would have us beat our children
Until their skin splits and their spirits crumble
This is not the voice of God.

But,
“We have to stand on the Bible,” you said.
And there is nothing more to say.

Hurts Me More Than You: Charis’s Story

November 17, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team3 Comments

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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.

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Charis’s Story

Our physical abuse was defined as love.

I used to think that there was only one thing that was not ideal during my childhood. What I remember as isolated incidents, the times that my mom was not ok with my dad’s behavior. I’m now seeing with different eyes the methods of ‘discipline’ and ‘training’ that my parents used. Realizing that what was abusive, I considered normal.

When it came to “training” or “discipline” there was no doubt my parents believed it was for our ultimate good. That it was an expression of their love for us. They “chastised” us because they wanted to keep our souls out of an “eternal lake of fire.” We were told many things about how this abuse was actually love, and demanded by God:

“I do this because I love you.” “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” “God disciplines those he loves.” “Parents who don’t discipline their children hate them.”

When I was younger, spankings and time alone were the main methods of “discipline” that I remember. It didn’t really matter how old you were. A first time for one of us, I remember my sibling being around maybe eighteen months. My mom and I came home from the grocery store and my younger sibling was very… subdued? Dad said they had had their first training session, or something like that. No idea what, if anything, had been done wrong.

I know there was some statement by dad on how he had done it while my mom was gone because she would have been too soft.

I don’t even know how to describe what they used to strike us with. It was made of something like leather, very thick and smooth, too big to be from a belt.

There was always a pronouncement of how many times we would be hit. “That’s eight!” or the like. My mom had a penchant for counting, like some parents do when they want you to do something “one, two, three…” In our case each count represented another “spanking”. Before you could be punished, or “chastised”, you had to express absolute submission. This meant not crying, removing your pants and underwear, and bending over the bed.

Afterwards you had to hug them, and usually there was a drawn out discussion about what you had done wrong.

I remember being maybe five years old. It was after my dad had spanked me, and I was crying. I didn’t want to touch him, so I was backed up towards the wall away from him, and really didn’t want to hug. He was explaining to me that just like I was backing away from him, my sin separates me from him, and hurts our relationship.

Conditional affection, love defined as chastisement, and the blame laid to me for problems in our relationship.

I distinctly remember a “training” moment when I was a small person, at whatever potty training age was. I remember being given specific instruction to go in the toilet and not my underwear, or else. It seems like mom and dad left me alone to play for awhile, because I remember the moment when they came to my door and discovered I had gone in my pants. It seems like the reasoning was that I was rebellious or lazy, but I couldn’t say. “Sins of omission” and all that. I was in big trouble, was given a lecture and spanked. I also remember that I was wearing orange.

I have a memory of playing in my room with a doll that cried if you turned it over. I was spanking the doll with the leather instrument my parents used on me and making my doll cry. My parents discovered me and I was in big trouble. To this day I have no idea what was so wrong, I was a child emulating my parents.

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There is one term my dad uses to this day that concisely defines the picture of God I was painted.

“God’ll help you with that.”

Seemingly sanguine, it was used as a threat or condemnation. It meant something along the lines of: “If you don’t get your act together God will make your life living hell until you shape up.”

Similarly, if dad said “I can help you with that” it was meant as a threat. Figure out how to obey on your own, or the consequences would be severe.

Around eight I have fewer and fewer memories. The bottom dropped out of life and everything was hard, for all of us. Never got easier after that. From age eight until I moved out life was a constant stress. You never knew when something was going to happen, when someone was going to get hurt. Sundays were the worst because dad was home all day. There was plenty of ‘discipline’. I have no idea what was deserved and what wasn’t.

Something must have happened to the leather thing, because my mom adopted a sturdy wooden spoon. She broke a few of those with use. Dad, I think, used his hand for a bit because I remember his graduation to a board due to the strain on his hand.

I was around ten or eleven years old when dad made a board with a handle and put work into sanding and finishing it. I remember it being 2+ feet long and five or six inches wide. I only have the memory, nothing exact, and of course everything is bigger when you’re a child.

There was a big to-do about the whole thing. Dad talked about a board from his childhood that had holes in it and two separate layers along with a handle. One of those -you’re so lucky I had to walk to school uphill both ways- kind of things. I don’t even know if the story was true.

The existence of this new form of punishment was a big threat. I had no doubt dad would use it on us. At this point I was already afraid of hearing his truck in the driveway. I remember cleaning my section of the room immaculately. The hangers in our closet were so straight that looking at then made me dizzy.

The very first time dad pronounced punishment with the new board it was for me. We were getting groceries as a family. My younger sibling started to walk away to go be with dad. We got in trouble for being between parents alone in the store, so I grabbed my sibling’s sweatshirt and told him to stay. He went to dad and told him what I had done. Dad got in my face and said he was going to punish me with the board. I fell apart right there in the grocery store, absolutely hysterical. My parents herded us out of the store, I was screaming and crying the whole way home. My dad told me to shut up, no more noise on the way home. I couldn’t stop crying. Mom suggested to my sibling that we take the punishment together, split it or something. He would have been around five ears old. To this day I don’t understand why she said that. I don’t remember any more of what happened. It seems like mom and dad started dickering (maybe about her suggestion that I get less) and then dad left angry, for a long time. I don’t know for sure.

I figured out that if something mattered to you, they’d use it to punish you. If you did something wrong, they’d take it away. If you didn’t do something right, they’d tell you that you might have gotten what you wanted back, but now you wouldn’t.

I made it my mission in life to care about absolutely nothing.

If I didn’t want it they couldn’t use it against me. I didn’t care about eating. I didn’t care about spending time with them. I didn’t care about being alone. I had no friends after eleven, so they couldn’t keep me from seeing anyone. One sibling was particularly hard to use the method of removing “privileges” on. I remember my mom saying in exasperation that there was nothing that mattered to him, how was she going to take it away? Removing meals or no food for a day was an oft used punishment.

I remember distinctly the moment when I realized I could never be good enough. It was never going to stop.

I had made dinner for the entire family, cleared up and was just finishing washing every dish. My dad came into the kitchen and screamed at me. I remember dad saying that if I thought that was good enough I was crazy. I don’t remember anything after that.

I figured out there was nothing I could do to protect myself or my siblings. All I wanted was to find a way to prove that we didn’t deserve it. That we had done the right thing. We had obeyed even if dad didn’t think so. I became increasingly depressed and suicidal as I faced the reality that there wasn’t a standard of perfect that christians agreed to. Even if I were capable of perfection, we couldn’t even decide what it was.

The years from early grade school and all through my teens are a blur. I have very few isolated incidents that I remember. Screaming and cursing, unpredictable enough to completely catch you off guard.

My brothers definitely got the worst of the punishments. I don’t know why this is. Maybe they thought boys were sturdier or more rebellious and needed more force to make an impression. Maybe my parents had a harder time breaking their spirit. Maybe because they were younger than me and got the worst of my dad’s anger as his stability waned.

My dad beat my brothers. I have no difficulty calling it a beating. If you hit your child with a board using all your force countless times on a regular basis, that is a beating.

I know there was punishment that I never knew of, and sometimes there were things I heard about later. Dad would go into a room with one of us and I had no idea what happened. Most of the time I would intentionally go outside in the yard so I didn’t have to hear the screaming of my sibling.

Every day it shatters my heart to know that I was there, and there was nothing I could do about any of this. I wanted to do something, I wanted to protect my siblings. But I was helpless. I wished I could take it all for them, find a way to teach them how to avoid all of it, to be good enough. In hindsight I know it was fruitless.

This ‘training’ is not what love is, but I was raised to believe that it was.