survivor

Mary Lambert and the Ups and Downs of Being a Survivor

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on January 18, 2016.

In the time I’ve spent around survivor communities, one thing I’ve noticed is an alternating feeling of euphoria and despair. It is not uncommon for a person to feel they can take on the world one day and to feel like all they want to do is curl up and hide the next day. I’ve watched this happen in various online communities as someone freshly liberated from an abusive home environment will post one day about how incredibly happy she is, as though she is floating, and the next day she’ll post in tears, struggling with PTSD, fear, and self-doubt and asking if it ever gets better.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself.

Anyway, I’ve never seen this up and down illustrated so clearly as in two of the songs in Mary Lambert’s 2014 album, Heart on My Sleeve. These songs, Secrets and Ribcage, present the euphoria and devil-may-care attitude, on the one hand, and the desperate lows encountered as survivors of abuse or trauma on the other. Interestingly, they were intended that way.

First, Lambert’s music video for Secrets. You can read the lyrics here:

Here’s how Lambert explains the contrast between Secrets and Ribcage:

The genesis of “Ribcage” was an interview that followed 2014 Grammy Awards, where Lambert performed her part in Macklemore‘s “Same Love.” Soon after, she was blindsided on TV: “I was asked without relevance or warning about my childhood abuse, as well as being raped in an army barracks as a teenager,” the singer tells FADER in an email. “I tried to respond as best I could, knowing that it was live television, but everything afterward was a blur. As soon as the cameras were off, I went into a full-blown panic attack. I didn’t know it then, but this same situation would happen multiple times in the year.”

“I questioned so much after that interview,” Lambert continues. “Have I done this to myself? Is this what happens when you are vulnerable and open? How do I take back control of the telling of my own story?”

“I wrote ‘Ribcage’ because I was exhausted,” she adds. “I wrote it because my truth was hungover and needed a sarcastic joke. I wrote it because ‘Secrets’ was an optimistic version of vulnerability, and because self-empowerment doesn’t always come wrapped in a bow. I will continue to talk about my own sexual trauma when I feel safe enough to, and when I’m in control. I still believe in the power of vulnerability—that openness is the key to empathy, and that empathy is the key to human connection.”

You can read the lyrics for Ribcage here and watch the music video below:

I love this contrast because you almost can’t believe the same person wrote and performed both songs. The one is so upbeat, so happy, and so peppy while the other is so sad and so dark. I find that extremely validating. In fact, I may start sending this pairing of videos to survivors I see going through this up and down. It’s powerful. It’s real. It’s what vulnerability actually feels like for so many of us.

Since I’m writing about Lambert, it’s worth mentioning her background. In a 2012 blog post, Gay Christians Are Totally Okay, Dog, Lambert wrote the following:

I grew up in a strict Pentecostal home. My parents would speak in tongues and were devout in prayer and we were at church 3-4 times a week. The church was known for ostracizing folks who were said to “go against God”. After a traumatic upbringing, and having my family shunned from the church because of my parent’s divorce, I was decidedly agnostic for many of my grade-school years.

A friend brought me to an Evangelical church in high school, known as Mars Hill, where I fell in love with the music and the bands that played on Sunday evening. The pastor was funny, charismatic, and made the bible seem simple. I was sad that my gay friends were going to hell, but the pastor said that I could still be friends with them. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” was the accepted rhetoric. When I fell in love with my first girlfriend, I recognized my sin immediately. She was also Christian. When you’re 17, and you feel like a freak already, and you’re in love with a girl, and high school is a battlefield, you can’t stand to let another part of your life down. I remember making a conscious effort to accept my sin. My recognition allowed me to repent daily. I prayed often, apologizing to God, but accepting that this is who I had always been and always would be. I still went to Mars Hill. I was never hated on, never felt rudeness from the community, but the sermons were difficult to hear.

You can read the rest of Lambert’s post here, but it shouldn’t be at all surprising that I see Lambert as a kindred spirit. By now we’re hopefully all familiar with Mars Hill, discredited evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll’s former church. I look forward to seeing where Lambert goes from here and hope she has a long, fulfilling career.

Want to Help Fight Child Abuse? Pay Attention

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Edmund Garman.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Caleigh Royer’s blog, Profligate Truth. It was originally published on April 14, 2015.

Being the survivor of childhood/adulthood abuse is not an easy place to be.

And I say ‘survivor’ not victim, because I am not the abuse I suffered, I am continually striving to rise out of the pit and to protect myself, parent myself, and heal myself. There are times when I realize just how much I’ve had to do to pick myself up and make sure I am in most ways a functioning adult and that is heavy knowledge. I wasn’t taught anything about how to be an adult. I just knew how to take care of kids, how to grocery shop for a large family, how to cook, clean, be chief book and . I didn’t know anything about money, I didn’t know anything about budgeting. I taught myself or carefully asked people I hesitantly trusted.

Child abuse is not taken seriously in this country, especially among the people where it happens the most. Child abuse is not taken seriously when it’s the adult victims/survivors of said abuse finally breaking decades of silence to speak about what they endured. Those adults, myself included, are ridiculed for making things up, for not remembering circumstances correctly, and for just being bitter, angry, depressed. Well, let me tell you something, children have the purest bullshit meter I have ever seen in any human being. A child knows when they’re being lied to, when someone is not to be trusted, but what to do we adults do? We laugh off their terror, we brush off their tears because what do children know. It makes me sick to my gut to see children dismissed especially in situations of suspected or confirmed abuse.

I learned fast to not cry when talking about the daily abuse I saw and experienced at home. Somehow my tears of absolute heartbreak were seen as a manipulative tool and were taken to mean I was trying to make my story real when it wasn’t. There’s a part of a child that simply dies when they face a constant stream of abuse. If you know what to look for, it’s visible in their empty eyes, their lack of enthusiasm for activities, it’s their acting out and bullying other children. Adults look at children who act out or who even bully and all they see are misbehaving children and they look on them with disgust. What adults and other parents don’t look for is the cause of the acting out. Yes, I’m aware that some children just act out because they can, but more often than not, there is some sort of abuse triggering their need for attention or their need to dominate other children.

I have watched my siblings be those misbehaved, acting out children that no other family wanted or wants anything to do with. I have sat by and watched as we were rejected by other kids because we were so desperate for love and attention. I have also seen people brush me off time and time again because they just saw or see rebellious kids, not the hurting, broken children I see because of the abuse they daily suffer.

My sister is one of the strongest and bravest people I know, but she is seen as a rebellious little girl who is out of control. She is seen like that by the very family who offered to help, by the parents who are friends with my parents. I understand where they are coming from with their point of view, but I see the tears, I see the brokenness she tries to hide, I see the fear and pain from years of being thrown around, emotionally and physically. The adults don’t see that, they just see what they want to see because it is too hard to face the reality of child abuse. It is too hard to dive in and try to fight something of such a strong stigma as child abuse.

I understand the fear of hardship when it comes to people who could be advocating for more awareness of what really goes on in a large percentage of homeschooling homes. Tackling such a huge problem as child abuse takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of breaking in you as you face the realities these kids, myself included, have had to face and still face on a day to day basis. I don’t know very many people, outside of the private circles I am apart of on facebook, who are willing to put in the enormous amount of effort it takes to fight those perpetuating child abuse. Reality isn’t pretty when you enter the world of child abuse, but shame on you world for not taking seriously the horrific crime of child abuse.

There is so much more I want to say, but I am running out of steam now. I am constantly amazed at the scientific studies that are starting to come out revealing the drastic effects of emotional abuse on the brains of children. I don’t understand how people can be outraged about something in the media but then completely ignore the realities of that happening in their backyard. Innocent ignorance I can tolerate, it’s the turning a blind eye upon those who are hurting I can’t.

Pay attention to what happens around you, maybe you can help a child who is broken inside.

The Day I Left

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Caleigh Royer’s blog, Profligate Truth. It was originally published on February 3, 2014.

February 6th three years ago marks the day I packed all of my meager belongings and left my family’s house.

It was almost exactly two weeks after my dad had kicked me out. He had walked into my room, told me I wasn’t worth his time anymore, he was tired of dealing with me, then proceeded to blame me for all of the issues he was having with my siblings. After his little speech, he told me I had two weeks to leave, if I needed help finding a place, I could ask, but basically I was on my own. He looked around my room and pointed out the pieces of furniture I could take or what had to stay behind. I was only allowed to take my trunk, my desk, and a dresser I had just happened to buy.

I left that house and never looked back. 

I believe my therapist was right in telling me I had cut ties with my family years ago, but leaving that day was the final string. My dad celebrated that night by taking my family out to dinner, a very rare occurrence. I was asked if I wanted to come as if I was already no longer part of the family. My siblings were confused, here was their dad telling them about how much of a rebellious and bad girl I was. I was an extremely bad example all because I had chosen the man I was going to marry and wasn’t going to back down no matter how much my dad abused me and tried to manipulate me.

I was finally standing up to his vicious anger and this was the consequences.

I fought for my siblings, it was me who held them together, only, no one saw that until I was no longer there. My siblings couldn’t see that, they couldn’t see what I had been protecting them from all of those years; the man behind the mask who grew more and more manipulative and abusive as the years passed. I have never really processed the emotions that went with this event. 

I often feel burning anger towards my dad and also great sorrow because I can see how blinded and truly sick he is.

*****

Recently my younger sister Emma has been starting to find her voice.

She is speaking out about what it was like to grow up, and I am proud of her for standing up to the man whose sperm just happened to be part of creating us kids.

She is calling the bullshit as she’s seen it and she is not skirting around the real issues.

It does my heart so good to see her taking the steps I have taken before her in what will hopefully be a healing journey for her.I am going to stand by her and lift up her words because more of us need to speak out.

It struck me the other day how often the abusers get a free pass. I see the discomfort cross faces when I bring up what my dad has done and how I’m working through it. I hear the sorrow in their voices and see it in their eyes when I say I will not allow my dad to go anywhere near this child of mine. It isn’t sorrow for me so much as it is sorrow that I don’t have the daddy-daughter relationship I’m somehow supposed to have. It’s sorrow and discomfort because my life hasn’t gone the way people would rather have seen it gone. Very very few people I have interacted with in regards to my dad’s abuse has actually had what I consider the right response. Very few people have actually gotten angry, upset because of what he has done. 

Abuse is not something to just brush over with “grace” and “pray for your persecutor.” 

Abuse in any form is worthy of anger and worthy of being stood up against.

I remember when I first started sharing my story and starting to peel back the layers of pain hardened emotions to find the wound holes. No one seemed to understand why I needed to speak. It was all “hush, hush, you shouldn’t say that, it’s slander.” By keeping silent I was allowing his abuse to continue, I, the victim, was being told my story didn’t matter, it wasn’t appropriate to share. 

“Protect the men and their egotistical reputations at all costs!” is apparently the unspoken mantra in the circles I grew up in.

Girls, families, I had spent a lot of time with no longer speak to me, I can’t stand going to reenactments because of running into those people and having to deal with the sad pitying looks they give me because I am the black sheep, I spoke out against the abuse I have suffered, I chose a good, good man to marry and all they saw was a rebellious girl thumbing her nose at the authority “God had placed over her life.”

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. – Elie Wiesel

A friend of mine wrote a post about “Rage and Grace” recently, and I really can relate to her words.

It is difficult to find the balance between not answering the abusers, the tormentors, with how they have approached us, and with being appropriately angry and upset about something we should be upset about. Abuse is never something you should brush off. Yes, the abusers are strong, they are used to getting their way and crushing us.

But just as a little flame can turn into a raging fire, so can our words and our taking stances about abuse, speaking out, and healing from our abuse make a difference.

*****

The day I left was a significant day.

That was the day I stood up and said no more. My mom kept telling me I could appeal to my dad, she seemed desperate to keep me at home. But my heart had already left, this was simply my body making it’s departure from the family I had grown up with. 

I will never stop defending my ground as a survivor and continuing to put up healthy boundaries to protect the fragile healing my heart is still undergoing.

I will never stop standing up and doing my best to aid the siblings who come to me for help. It has taken time, but I believe they are starting to see I am not the bad sister my dad has made me out to be. Not talking with my dad is my choice and it is not a sad choice. It is not something worth your sorrow. It is the choice I have made to protect myself, protect my marriage, and to protect my child. He is a dangerous man and it is not worth placing myself back until his toxicity just for the sake of making people feel like I am showing him “grace.”

I am content and very happy with my life, so please be happy for me?

My life is not about my family. My life is about me, Phil, and my little boy.

See those other survivors who are struggling with family relationships and friend relationships? Be happy for them with the life they have chosen. Be willing to set aside your preconceived ideas about what family relationships should look like, and be happy for us when we share an exciting discovery in our healing or our own personal ventures.

We need you to stand beside us and to be angry at the abuse and celebrate the good.  

In Which the Pieces Come Together: By Jeri Lofland

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Jeri’s post was originally published on her blog Heresy in the Heartland  on November 3, 2013. It is reprinted with her permission. Also by Jeri on HA: “Generational Observations”, “Of Isolation and Community”, “His Quiver Full of Them”, “David Noebel, Summit Ministries, and the Evil of Rock”, “The Political Reach of Bill Gothard”, and “Bill Gothard on Education”, and “Ken Ham: The Evolution of a Bully.”

At some point in my growing up, I realized that my family was dysfunctional.

While outsiders saw us as picture-perfect and held us in regard as a model of the ideal Christian family, we knew our Sunday-best was an illusion or at best, just one facet of who and what we were. There were a lot of good times, certainly, but there was also tension. And no matter how much fun we were having, we never let our guard down.

I have spent the last year seriously unpacking what I’ve carried from my family of origin. In the process, I’ve gradually learned a new vocabulary describing the ways that dysfunction affected me:

According to a report on Developmental Trauma Disorder by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk,

When children are unable to achieve a sense of control and stability they become helpless. If they are unable to grasp what is going on and unable do anything about it to change it, they go immediately from (fearful) stimulus to (fight/flight/freeze) response without being able to learn from the experience. Subsequently, when exposed to reminders of a trauma (sensations, physiological states, images, sounds, situations) they tend to behave as if they were traumatized all over again – as a catastrophe. Many problems of traumatized children can be understood as efforts to minimize objective threat and to regulate their emotional distress. Unless caregivers understand the nature of such re-enactments they are liable to label the child as “oppositional”, ‘rebellious”, “unmotivated”, and “antisocial”.

…

When trauma emanates from within the family children experience a crisis of loyalty and organize their behavior to survive within their families. Being prevented from articulating what they observe and experience, traumatized children will organize their behavior around keeping the secret, deal with their helplessness with compliance or defiance, and accommodate in any way they can to entrapment in abusive or neglectful situations.

…

These children… tend to communicate the nature of their traumatic past by repeating it in the form of interpersonal enactments, in their play and in their fantasy lives.

So many of Dr. van der Kolk’s observations resonate with me. And in an odd way, I find it reassuring to discover that professionals can accurately describe the ways in which my siblings and I coped with our traumatic upbringing. We were not anomalies; we were not “broken”; we were not “messed up”. As children, we responded understandably–even predictably–to unsettling circumstances beyond our control.

Our parents were told by Bill Gothard and Michael Farris and Mary Pride and Doug Phillips, by Raymond Moore and Gregg Harris and even James Dobson, that God had given them (parents) responsibility for their children’s education and that by taking our education into their own hands, they could have the loving, God-fearing family they always wanted. Our parents accepted the challenge, choosing to raise us in an environment totally different from any they had known before. In a system totally different from their own experience. In a culture totally different from that of our peers. But in some cases, that system failed dismally.

My ten siblings and I are only a tiny representation of the thousands (millions?) of children who grew up in conservative religious homeschooling homes.

Many of those homes were unhealthy, and socially isolated; many were abusive. And many of us are survivors. The symptoms we have dealt with along the way are not signs that we were rebellious or lazy or crazy or influenced by demons–they are simply signs that our young brains reacted normally to the challenges our parents created for us when we were vulnerable and doing the best we could to make sense of the strange and sometimes painful world in which we found ourselves.

Now that I have children trusting me to show them the world, I am finally able to feel empathy for my younger self. I see myself at my children’s ages, and grieve the losses that little girl was not able to properly mourn at the time because she had to be strong and she had to be good. That little girl discovered early that it was safer to ally herself with her caregivers–who were bent on pleasing God–than with the rest of her culture–who were displeasing him every day. That little girl learned to cooperate with and even defend the very people who were traumatizing her, even when this only created more cognitive dissonance.

Now I find nurturing my children and tuning in to their specific needs to be healing to me. Observing them, I am better able to recognize my own likes and dislikes and fears, the things that make me feel supported, the things that make feel threatened, the things that make me feel brave.

I have carried a lot with me since leaving the home of my childhood. I felt I had to hang onto it to find out what exactly it was.

Now that I am able to label the way I felt as a girl, it is easier to let those feelings go and move on with a better, healthier life.

The Survivor

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on September 21, 2013.

It’s no secret that my life has been a little weird.

I’ve been trying to deal with my bizarre past in the last few months.  The process still feels like probing a wound, and I’m trying to figure out right now if I can afford the therapy I know I need.

Some weeks are fine.  This past week was most definitely not.  Homeschoolers Anonymous was running a series on child discipline, which was good and necessary and appropriately headed by trigger warnings.  I read the stories, I couldn’t stop reading them, and they brought back some of the most traumatic memories of my childhood.  Memories I had repressed.  An onslaught of things I hadn’t really thought about in years.

I would be physically shaking by the end of each story, and yet I had to read more, to try and process the fact that yes, I had been abused as a child.

Just when you think you have a handle on your life, and then it spins completely out of control and you’re dumped into a jungle of memories and problems without a clue where to begin looking for a way out.  That’s one of the reasons I’m looking for a therapist, because hopefully she’ll at least have a compass.

I tried to go out last night with my friends.  I said I was out of money so I couldn’t drink at the bars, which was true, but I turned down a free shot too, because the truth is, as badly as I wanted to block out this past week, I didn’t trust myself to.  I was already being super weird and swinging like a pendulum between talking about myself too much and being weirdly quiet.

If I got drunk, I’m pretty sure I would have started babbling about what was actually bothering me, and “Hey guess what I just realized I was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused as a child by loving, well-meaning parents” isn’t exactly acceptable party talk.

So I went home early, leaving without saying good-bye, walking alone several blocks to my truck and driving home stone-cold sober.  I got home, tried to start writing about the memories I’d been rehashing this week, and was so upset I just curled up in a blanket and stared at the wall until I fell asleep.

That scared me, when I woke up this morning.  Is my grip on a normal life really that fragile?  I got up and started my day, but when I was flat on my back during my yoga routine, I remembered the thought that has gotten me through other difficult situations:

You are you.

I’m still me.  I am the same person I have always been.  Yes I’ve grown and learned and developed as a person through things I’ve done and things I’ve experienced and things that have been done to me.  But I’m still me.  That used to be a horrifying thought, back when I hated myself and believed that my natural self uninfluenced by God was purely evil.  But I’ve learned to love myself and so now that thought’s a comfort.

I am strong and I am a survivor.

If I could handle everything that has happened to me, I sure as hell can handle dealing with what those memories mean to me now. 

My will, my personality, my spirit was never fully broken.  I’m the same person who faced down near-daily spankings and dealt with it partly by creating imaginary adventures about escaping dungeons and forced servitude and unreasonable authority figures.  I’m the same person who was unbearably weird and unbelievably unsocialized and managed to purposefully, intentionally, painfully catch up on most of that missed socialization (though I’ll be the first to admit I’m still pretty weird).  By now I have done and lived through enough that I look back at points in my life and can say, “Yeah, I did that.  Yeah, I survived that.”

Whatever happens, I will always be me.

Hopefully I’ll continue to strive upward and continue to turn into improved versions of me.  One of the ways I can do that is by dealing with shit from the past, with help of course.  But there’s that core, that consciousness, that continuous self, and somehow that knowledge gives me the courage to move forward.

A Week of Joy: Call for Contributions to HA’s Upcoming Positives Series

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By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

*****

I have a very complicated relationship with homeschooling.

In many ways I have significant problems with the Christian homeschool movement; in many other ways, however, I appreciate my homeschool education. My education was lacking in some areas, particularly science, but it was also exceptionally above average in other areas, such as language arts and communication. I have suffered emotional and verbal abuse in homeschooling contexts. But this was at the hands of other homeschooling parents, not my own parents. My parents have been extraordinarily supportive of Homeschoolers Anonymous, for which I am deeply grateful. Also, while I experienced emotional and verbal abuse in homeschooling contexts, I have also experienced sexual abuse in a public school context.

I am under no delusion about the universality of abuse.

It is for these reasons that I do not primarily see my identity as a survivor of homeschooling. In many ways I am a survivor: I am a survivor of abuse, sometimes from abuse in homeschooling and sometimes not. But my experiences are too mixed to be able to fairly isolate only one community from which I am a survivor. I have instead channeled that complex pain into wanting to make the world a better place in whatever context I can. Since homeschooling was my life for so many years, I see myself as an advocate for other homeschoolers who have had far worse experiences than I have.

Honestly, most of my experiences growing up in SELAH and CHEA, my California homeschool groups, were positive. It was while traveling around the country with Communicators for Christ that my eyes were opened to all the different subcultures and ideologies that can create real and serious damage to children. Growing up, I only had an inkling about some of these phenomena. I did not begin to connect the dots until I came into contact with thousands of other homeschoolers and began observing patterns.

Much of my life has revolved around this sort of tension, or dialectic: there is so much good, and there is much bad; there is so much pain, and there is so much joy.

As we begin our next “week series,” I am hoping that as a community we can explore this sense of tension and the reality of dialectic in our experiences.

On July 15, we asked you as a community to pick the next topic you’d like to see us address as a community. We received votes via Facebook comments, private messages, emails, and Tweets. Honestly, there was a good number of votes for all four of the options: (1) Mental health, mental illness week, (2) Abusive relationships week, (3) Grandparent(s) appreciation week, and (4) Positives (what you liked about homeschooling) week.

No one topic won by a landslide.

So obviously we need to cover all of these at some point in the near future. Mental health came in second, with a lot of vocal support for it. So it seems that would be the most appropriate topic for the series after this next one.

For the immediate next series, the winning topic was positives.

While this topic was the winner, it also received a lot of pushback — which, frankly, I understand. If you have suffered neglect or abuse in homeschooling, you’ve probably spent the majority of your life wearing a “I love homeschooling and nothing is wrong with it” mask. This might be the first time in your entire life that you’ve felt the freedom to talk about the negatives. You might be thinking, “I don’t want to talk about positives. I’ve done nothing but talk about the positives since I was a kid.”

Honestly, I personally relate to that sentiment.

At the same time that every fiber of my being wants to finally talk about the negatives, there is a place for the positives in our community. Not everyone in our community has had a bad experience. Not every ally here has experienced our pain. But they are here, supporting us, and listening to us.

I want to give people with positive experiences a place to be heard, too.

Our allies’ positive experiences are fundamentally vital to making homeschooling better for future generations. Those of us with good stories are examples of how homeschooling can be done well.

For every story that says, “This was a problem,” the question is raised: “What is the solution?” Sharing positive experiences is crucial to teaching current and future homeschooling parents the difference between those environments that led to pain and those environments that led to joy.

We need to hear those.

So those of you in our community that have had positive experiences, this is your time to speak up.

And to those of you in our community that have had negative experiences, this is actually also your time.

A week of positives does not mean we are just talking about generally positive homeschooling experiences. Yes, it means that we are taking a week to celebrate the good things. But it also means we are dedicating time to celebrate those moments of joy that contrasted with those moments of pain. This is a week of joy for everyone: to share in others’ good experiences, and also to celebrate those people or those moments that gave us a hope to carry on, that gave us maybe a unique experience of unconditional love.

I have moments like that. I remember when a horde of parents surrounded me and yelled at me (no exaggeration), and one parent silently pulled me out of that crowd and went for a walk with me. That one parent in a very real sense rescued me. He told me that, regardless of what the other parents might say, I was valuable. I was a human being and I was to be unconditionally loved.

I learned that lesson from a conservative Christian homeschooling father. So I celebrate him.

I remember that moment because moments like that, though maybe few and far between, are some of my favorite memories to this day.

Our upcoming positives week is an official celebration —

Of parents that succeeded in giving their kids a good education, of those adults or peers that showed you real compassion, love, or respect, of those moments that gave you hope and healing amidst not-so-positive experiences.

Let’s celebrate all of those things together.

*****

To contribute:

If you are interested in contributing, here are some ideas for what you could write about:

  1. Your personal story of a positive homeschool education
  2. Your personal story of positive aspects of your homeschool education
  3. An experience you had where another person in your homeschool life (one of your parents, another homeschooling parent, a friend, a tutor, etc.) showed you love or respect that maybe you had not experienced before
  4. An experience you had where another person in your homeschool life taught you something that gave you hope about the future, or maybe a personal struggle you had

You do not have to pick just one topic. You could combine several of these ideas, or bring your own ideas to the table, or — if you have a lot to say — contribute several pieces on a variety of these topics.

The deadline for submission is August 23, 2013.

As always, you can contribute anonymously or publicly.

If you interested in participating in this, please email us at homeschoolersanonymous@gmail.com.

I Am Not A Victim, I Am A Survivor

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Sheldon, who blogs at Ramblings of Sheldon. It was originally published on Confessions of a Heretic Husband on June 21, 2013.

“Where are you going?” she kept asking over and over again, with defiance and a hint of amused contempt as she stood in the middle of the only doorway out of the room. I had told her just minutes before that I was leaving, and she immediately blocked the door. I had some of my stuff packed, and I was desperate to leave her home for good, but she just stood there and said I had “no right” to leave.

Was I some pouting 12 year old kid at the time? No, I was 21 years old. I was desperate enough that I was willing to leave the home of my Mom and Dad with just a few hundred dollars to my name and an old van.

What drove me to this point? It was many different things, and I should start from the beginning. Just two years earlier, I had come back from a prominent Southern Baptist college after a nervous breakdown that included severe depression with constant fatigue, muscle pain/weakness, and some bizarre panic attacks. Needless to say, I couldn’t keep it together, and had to return home.

When I did return home, I explained what had happened, and all of it was dismissed as “guilt” and “not having a right relationship with god”. You see, in her mind, my struggles with mental illness were not an illness, they showed a lack of character. Her attitude reflected much of what what can be seen in fundamentalism: that true happiness can only come from serving god, and if you aren’t happy, then that must be a sign that your relationship isn’t right.

The real kicker is that I actually believed for this for two years, and generated a lot of self hatred and frustration. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. I begged god for “forgiveness”, I doubled down on my dedication to my faith, but it wasn’t working. I was beginning to realize that the relationship with god had little to nothing to do with it, and that I had a real disorder. The problem was that my mother was never going to see it that way, and dealing with her ignorance left me feeling trapped in this situation.

It was pushing me to the point that I was starting to become suicidal. For a while I pondered jumping off a local bridge during the winter, but then I started to think that if I did, I would be giving my mother exactly what she wanted: control over me for my entire life. That thought bothered me more than the thought of ending my life. I knew I had to do something, anything, to break away, but I was stuck.

At the time, I was in a local college, and I was starting to realize that they were a scam, but of course, she didn’t see it that way. I proved it to her in so many different ways, I even told her what some people in the field that my major was in told me at a summer job (that the college was a scam), but all to no avail. It didn’t work.

She told me the only acceptable plan for my life was to go to college, and she kept pontificating about how supposedly I would never make it financially without that piece of worthless paper from the scam of a college I was in at the time.

Allegedly, I would be working 3 minimum wage jobs, have no time for anything, and would be starving. She called me “lazy” because I would rather work (I still haven’t figured out the logic behind that argument). She tried to make me feel without hope, that I would never leave, and that I couldn’t make it without her. I knew that was a lie, and meant to keep me defeated and powerless. I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere while trying to reason with her. I knew that if I stayed, it would be many more years suffering under her rule, and it might just lead me to finally end my life.

So I packed some things, and was going to leave that morning, but there she was, standing in the doorway to barricade me in the room. “Where are you going?” It’s not as though she didn’t know, I explained it to her just minutes before. It was more of a challenge than a question. I had a phone sitting out, because as angry as I knew she would get, she hadn’t become violent with me since I was 11 years old. But she loved to threaten it when nothing else worked, and I couldn’t be too sure. 

She noticed the phone sitting out, and insisted to know why it was laying on a desk. She figured it out, and told me (keep in mind I was 21 years old at the time), that if she were to hit me, I would deserve it. I pointed out to her how hypocritical her statement was, due to the fact that she was always ranting about how bad her childhood was with a physically abusive father (and rightfully so). She had nothing to say for once, she simply walked away.

I realized that if I was to ever reclaim my life, and get back any sense of hope, I had to push back, and resist in any way possible. Eventually I would wear her out, reasoning sure wouldn’t work. I refused to go along with her plans, and finally won on the college front. I got a job (not three minimum wage jobs), and saved my money, paycheck by paycheck

She tried to slow me down by making pay “rent” for living in her home (the home “I had no right to leave”),  which I payed, but I kept pressing on anyway. The muscle pain and weakness came back, but I fought through it, sometimes working up to 64 hours a week, despite the pain and stiffness. She told me that I was so lazy, that even if I did get a job, I wouldn’t stay at it very long.

Guess what? I have not only been at the same company since September 2011, I have moved up within the company (thankfully to a job that is no longer physically demanding). I saved up enough money over the last 2 years to buy a foreclosure house, and closing procedures will take place next week (the week of June 10, 2013) [Note: this has happened!]. I paid cash for it, and won’t ever have to worry about house payments. My finances will be a little stretched to say the least while rebuilding it, but I never would have thought I would have gotten this far only 3 years after that day that I was barricaded in that room.

There are times, like when I’m writing a post like this, that I feel much the same way I did that day: defeated, humiliated, like a victim, but then I remember, I’m a survivor. I fought, and clawed my way towards finally getting the right to start my own life, and won. I survived the toxic self hatred and ignorance of fundamentalism, and cast it aside.  I have a long way to go to rebuild my life, financially, emotionally, and in so many different ways, but I won the fight for my freedom.

The Importance Of Telling Your Own Story: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

The Importance Of Telling Your Own Story: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

The following piece was originally published by Faith Beauchemin on her blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It is reprinted with her permission.

"Story-telling is empowerment."
“Story-telling is empowerment.”

Story-telling is one of the most powerful forms of sharing truth known to humankind. A story can contain so many different kinds of truth.  A story sticks in the mind longer than a syllogism or a propositional truth claim. And the thing about stories is, we all have one.

Sometimes it takes courage to tell your own story. But it is necessary. If you don’t tell your story, chances are someone else will. And whoever tells the story gains power over it. Do you want someone else’s words expressing your personal experiences, or do you want to choose the words of your story yourself?

A couple of months ago, I came across a blog called Homeschoolers Anonymous.  It’s a forum for homeschoolers to tell their own stories.  I began reading story after story, constantly finding mirrored there many of my own experiences.  The stories told tales of spiritual, psychological and physical abuse.  They spoke about the harm of authoritarian parenting, the fact that lack of socialization really is a huge problem for homeschooled children, the pain and regret and family rifts that result from many doctrines pushed by the radical right-wing arm of the homeschooling movement.  Reading these stories I felt angry.  I cried for all of us, for the suffering and for the fact that so many of us were moving on and finding healing and somehow building lives for ourselves.  And most of all, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief.  I am not alone.  We are not alone.  We speak of our personal experiences and find common ground in the very wounds and burned-over fields we had thought no one would be able to relate to.

It was so comforting to find others telling stories similar to my own because I find that I have trouble taking control of my story, even in my own head.  You see, when you grow up in a hierarchical, authoritarian Christian fundamentalist environment, you have a single narrative which your interpretation of your experiences must fit into.  That narrative is reinforced over and over again, especially since many fundamentalists are very quick to talk about other people’s lives or tell you about your own life using these terms.  “Sin,” “rebellion,” “pride,” “selfishness,” “ungodliness,” “worldliness,” “backsliding”…these are the categories I had to fit everything into if it was not in line with my parent’s ideals for the perfect Christian life.

In an authoritarian home, you’re not allowed power over your own story.  You are handed the words of an authority on all matters and you must accept them as true.  Thinking for yourself is sinful.  This is why it has taken me a long time to start framing my story in my own words.  I can see the transition in my diaries, from stilted descriptions of spiritual things which sound like they are just someone else’s words parroted back to convince myself,  or endless agonizing about why I was so sinful, to finally taking my own thoughts seriously and using words that came from my own head to describe my life.

A diary is one thing.  The residual voice in my head narrating my life in Christian fundamentalist terms can be ignored, or argued with, or told to shut up.  But sharing your story out loud is an entirely different matter.  Because when you finally do gather the courage to share your story out loud, most people want to tell you that you’re wrong, and that their interpretation of your life is truer than your own.

These homeschool alumni who bravely shared their stories are being criticized.  Homeschool advocates are trying to negate the stories collected at Homeschoolers Anonymous by claiming “My homeschool is never like that!” or “Your parents didn’t homeschool the right way.” or “Your current viewpoints are proof that your parents never taught you the things I’m teaching my kids.”  Even well-documented claims that the Home School Legal Defense Association is fighting for a parent’s-rights agenda that will be extremely conducive to child abuse are written off by a simple assertion that it’s just not true.

It’s incredibly frustrating seeing this happen. I am willing to hear parents tell stories of how great homeschooling is for their kids (though I’d be much happier to hear young adults who grew up homeschooled tell stories of how great it was, since the players in the conversation are mostly not parents and we’ve already heard from our parents countless times how good they believe homeschooling is). But I am not willing to hear anyone try to negate these stories of how bad homeschooling has been for so many people. I’m especially not willing to hear stories of outright abuse be dismissed with basically a pat on the head and an assertion that the survivor’s experience is totally unique.  If we want to dialogue constructively on a topic, we need to first allow one another the basic respect of listening to each other’s stories and believing them.

One more thought on story-telling. I don’t like hearing an authority figure telling a story about or on behalf of those they have authority over.  I don’t care what the authorities think, I want to hear the people’s stories from their own mouths.  Because story-telling is empowerment.  You want to empower yourself, of course, but you need to empower others as well.  If we all bravely commit to telling our own stories and listening to other people’s stories, we might together be able to find the next steps in human progress.  Whatever our past, there’s something in each of our life stories that can make the world a better place if we speak it and collaboratively explore what it is we have to tell.