I attended a Survivors Writing Workshop sponsored by The Vashti Initiative; it was so helpful as I process years and layers of Religious Trauma. We were given a writing prompt, and then set free to write for a set amount of time on that prompt. This is what I wrote:
I don’t remember if I was ever specifically told that I should not go to a licensed therapist, but I always imagine those specific words as slick hard marbles rolling around in your mouth. Like a raised hand before the slap, the threat of those words was always there – a hastily erected wall keeping me from getting professional help. The only “legitimate” help was, of course, yours. It came in different names from different mouths: “biblical counseling”, nouthetic counseling, deliverance ministry, “breaking free”… but in the end, it was just a man waving a battered leather-bound book. An entire downed forest worth of silly paper worksheets. And Questions – oh my god, all the questions. Only instead of taking me inward to help me unlock my own internal cages, these questions were swollen, muddy brown streams all running to the same murky pool. All leading me to a man with a book, the wizened buddha clad in a cheap brown suit, propped on a rickety pedestal of sacred authority and divine legitimacy.
Hours and weeks with this man were the bridge to nowhere – instead of providing me with the tools I could use to unlock my own inner cages, it was all a shell game chasing how his crinkled sacred pages were better than anything I was facing. As a result, my pain and trauma were buried away in a shallow unmarked grave at the back corner of the yard – sealed with the tap tap of a holy shovel, never to be disturbed again. Because I was now free! I found the divine purpose, hiding under the shell! And that book said to forget what was behind me. That book said to forgive as I have been forgiven. That book told me to keep on trucking, with a great manic WOOP WOOP of the truck’s horn as I charged blindly down the highway to a lifetime of divine purpose!
Meanwhile, the little grave in the corner of the yard started to leak. At first this was in subtle ways, the underground radiation barrel seeping into the groundwater. Little words or phrases, minor looks or glances, buzzwords and triggers, all nudging me closer to an edge of catatonic breakdown. It was a mixed bag, the pressing of the pop-a-matic bubble – would it be Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn? Or a Bonus combination of several at once? The chemical leak gradually picking up momentum, until it was affecting every aspect of my life. My relationships, my sexuality, my work, my hobbies. But there were always shiny little fish-hooks on thin nylon strands, pulling me back, pulling me back: Ultimately I could not move forward until I returned to that shallow un-marked grave in the corner of the yard.