I grew up with born again, radically conservative, fundamentalist Christian parents. They took my sister and me to non-denominational churches, very much on the authoritarian/culty side of the Evangelical sub-culture. I suffered from my parents’ and their churches’ abuse growing up. I won’t go into details here but it was hell.
I left home to go to university and promptly lost my mind. I had already been majorly depressed and suicidal in from middle school on, but by Christmas my freshman year at university, I was in the psych ward. Somehow my parents sent me back to university after I was “better”, and I got caught up in a campus Christian ministry run by a local church.
The students and staff seemed so loving. I thought this must be what real Christianity is all about. I had powerful spiritual experiences. I believed and gave myself whole-heartedly – no reservations – to this Jesus and His church. I met my wife in this campus ministry, and we were married at 23 and 24 years old in that church.
We were so serious about our commitment to advancing God’s Kingdom that we joined the church plant team despite my traumatic brain injury (TBI) in 2003. With no neurological follow-up or treatment – just prayer and faith – we moved to Paris, France in 2004 as missionaries to plant a church for our generation. We spent 13 years in Paris before we finally recognized the spiritual abuse of this high-demands, highly controlling, closed group.
I had been struggling for years with depression and anxiety to the point of burnout at work and long-term disability due to PTSD. At my wife’s repeated suggestion, I finally did the unthinkable and started seeing a secular therapist, who recognized the complex trauma, which was causing significant distress and impairment in my daily life and functioning as a husband and father. It was that therapist who I finally trusted enough to discuss our involvement in the church and who helped me arrive at the decision to leave.
In May 2017 – after 20 years of membership, including church planting/missionary work, leading small group Bible study and large missional groups, completing seminary courses and theological training, preaching sermons, leading worship, leading children’s ministry, doing “power ministry,” essentially doing everything the pastoral team asked of us – we sent an email and ended our membership. Not one leader came after us or even asked why. Our “friends” made it about them – how hard a time what we were doing was putting them through. Most of our “brothers and sisters” have never spoken to us again, as though we died or never existed. We don’t know exactly what the pastors said about us leaving, but we have heard through the grapevine that they blamed me for being dependent on my wife, following her instead of leading, and being overly ambitious/proud and disgruntled when I didn’t achieve pastoral status as I thought I deserved. What a sick joke!
We moved to the suburbs of Paris to get away and take a breather. I had been losing big gaps of time and it was becoming dangerous. Like fires in my house, losing my daughter in the street twice, coming to while driving my son in the car kind of dangerous.
I looked for a therapist who was specialized in trauma and dissociation and found a good one. My first session with her I hard-switched to a child part and dove under a table in total panic. Over the next several weeks she confirmed her diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder. In the past two years working together, we have identified about 40 alters. I have also accepted my queer sexual orientation and identify as having multiple genders or being non-binary regarding gender.
Perhaps needless to say, my wife has suffered a lot too, with the Religious Trauma Syndrome we both recognize in ourselves and each other, but also from severe anxiety. We decided – at 40 years old with 3 young children – to move back to the States. We lived with her mother for five months, then bought a house, etc. We are slowly starting our adult lives over again.
It has been rough and we are apprehensive about how things will turn out. But at least we left the cult: we got out! Now we are looking for support and a safe community.
My faith has been utterly demolished. Ashley finds the whole faith question so painful she doesn’t know where she stands. We are just trying to survive the aftermath and get to a place where we can rebuild our lives.
As I have said before, I had a TBI in early 2003. I was in a car accident and ended up unconscious in the ER. I was discharged the same day to go home with my wife, but I had to return because I kept vomiting and hiccoughing. They still never did any neurological consult that I know of. I have little to no memory of that time, but my wife says no one ever counseled her to insist I be seen by a neurologist. Even the pastoral team of our churches, which was full of professional MDs, never did more than pray for me. That was the only thing to be done – pray and have faith that God would heal me.
So, it wasn’t until early 2018 that I finally got tested by a neuropsychologist, who confirmed certain executive functioning deficits consistent with a severe TBI. This goes a long way to explaining the trouble I have had professionally. And it makes the church leadership’s criticism of my work history that much more frustrating, especially considering that so many of them are medical doctors!
My parents and religious relatives believe everything is spiritual warfare and that we are living in the End Times. I was so convinced of the reality of the contest between God and Satan for souls that by age 5 I persuaded the pastors of the church we attended back then to “full immersion” baptize me with the church as witness. Our most recent churches believed in the current power ministry of the Holy Spirit, so there was always quite a lot of supernatural phenomena expected and experienced.
From elementary school age, I was convinced God had given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to keep me humble. I believed this demon tormented me because of our family’s faith in Christ. I believed my hallucinations of demons to be a test of my faith, that is, whether I belonged to Christ sufficiently to have the authority to bind them in Jesus’s name. When I couldn’t get them to leave after years, I came to believe there was something desperately wrong with me, something evil, something unpardonable.
I spent 39 years as a Christian weeping and worshiping and obeying all that I was commanded to do to participate with Christ in His sufferings. Nothing ever delivered me of my “dark passenger”. So many times, I dared to bare my struggles to my pastors – from suicidal desires and plans to feeling like “another person” lives in me and takes over my body. From their perspective, it was always a “spiritual issue”, a failing of my faith in Christ, evidence that I was not dependent enough on God. I was not crying out with persistence “in Jesus’ name”, meaning there must be secret sin in my life preventing me from receiving God’s healing and provision.
Ultimately, we left the church in May 2017 and I have left faith/religion altogether. I got secular psychotherapy. I came to understand my depression and anxiety, my traumatic brain injury and my PTSD, the complex-developmental trauma I carry from childhood sexual abuse and my parents’ narcissistic abuse, 39 years-worth of spiritual abuse in one cult-like, highly controlling, high-demands, closed “Christian” group after another.
Two years ago, I got the Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis that is the best fit yet for what I have lived with since I was a little child. It is significantly distressing and impairs my adulting on a daily basis. But I am progressing. I can understand my life as something other than demons and my failure as a “Christian”. Dare I say, I am finally “healing”?
I feel guilty a lot of times because I haven’t been able to work professionally since July 22nd, 2019, and before that gig since October 2015. I’ve cared for our children and home to some degree, but my mental and physical health has made that very difficult, at times dangerous. Our family moved back to the U.S. during the summer of 2018, and we’ve been doing better on the whole. We still survive day-by-day, but we are doing better than 6 months ago, than a year ago, than two years ago.
Even though I don’t believe as I used to, I still wrestle with the old rhetoric, which at various times comes flooding back: I need to pray, fast and cry out for God to intervene for my family’s needs. I have to do whatever I can to get whatever kind of job possible to provide for my family. It’s all my fault as the spiritual head of my household that we are in such a precarious position anyway. It’s because of my spiritual problems, my sins. Because I’ve left God, He’s taken His favor off of us to discipline me. How could I be ok at any rate with my wife looking for work and providing for me? It’s a shame on me and unfair to her, asking too much of the weaker vessel to support what she was not made to handle.
I do of course realize the misogynistic and patriarchal basis of that argument. Nonetheless, I cannot help grappling with those thoughts, especially now again since I lost yet another job. It’s like I should’ve known it’d go this way. God (or the Universe or Fate) is telling me that my desire for a writing career is a pipe-dream, frivolous and ludicrous. When will I grow up and be a man, put childish things behind me? Am I really that selfish and self-centered that I’d put my wife and children through all this difficulty because I am not willing to sacrifice myself? So that’s been my headspace. It’s really hard to believe in myself and take a long view on all of it.
As a pastoral intern and church plant team member/missionary, we had Sunday worship celebration – which between set-up, intercessory prayer, the service itself and break-down was routinely a 12-hour day; Tuesday night worship and pastoral teaching; at least one small group Bible study another evening – depending on how many small groups I was leading at the time; worship team rehearsal at another point during the week – often Saturday morning; missional group meetings another evening; regular outreach events generally at the weekends; and to top it all off morning prayer meetings, which went down from daily to three mornings a week before I left the church. This does not include all the special projects or exceptional reasons to meet up. Essentially any moment that was not spent working to earn a living – so as not to be a burden on the church and to have funds for regular tithes and offerings – any other time was fair game for the church leaders to claim at a moment’s notice.
It was considered – by the senior pastor’s own admission – that a routine 5 hours of sleep a night was sufficient, so tiredness was no excuse. At one point we had babysitters 6 of 7 nights of the week plus a full-time nanny while we were working. We also had babysitting during Sunday worship as our children were not welcome to attend, since their presence would interfere with people meeting God and our own availability to fully engage in ministry.
Actually, our children were one of the major reasons for our decision to finally leave. When we decided to have our third child – not by accident but because we were “happy” and wanted to share that abundant joy – the church leadership made us understand that we were in fact choosing to further divide our scarce resources among our own children instead of dedicating ourselves to furthering God’s Kingdom. In other words, having a third child was selfish on our part because we would have that much less time, energy and money to give to the church. Basically, we were allowed to work and barely sleep – for His glory in our generation.
What’s more, the church was so highly controlling, the demands were so high, that it was routine practice for the husbands of the church to get vasectomies following the birth of their second children. I have nothing against any man who has freely chosen to undergo a vasectomy, but that was not the case in our church. I learned that the head pastor’s wife scheduled church-funded vasectomies for two of my fellow church plant team husbands. It is outrageous to me that the church would meddle in our lives to the most intimate degree and to top it off use the money we gave in tithes and offerings to pay for coerced sterilization, such that the couples would have further resources to dedicate to the causes the church deemed appropriate for members, namely the church’s own growth and development.
This makes it all the more sinister then when I remember my pastor’s overt relief when I spoke to him – rather in anguish – of losing one of the two babies my wife had been carrying during her fourth pregnancy. We had already had to endure the miscarriage of her first pregnancy. And now only one baby had survived. What was my pastor’s counsel? I should think about a more “permanent” solution to the problem of contraception, so we wouldn’t have these problems to deal with in the future. And it was on my shoulders as the husband to carry that burden.
In the news recently I learned another pastor – roughly my own age – of a mega-church has died by suicide. As a suicide attempt survivor, I know intimately the pain and despair he was going through to reach such an end. My deepest condolences go out to all those who loved him and are mourning his passing. He spoke out often about his own mental health struggles and advocated for those who suffer with mental illness in the church. Now that he is dead, he has been roughly criticized by many Christians as having been unfit for ministry, insufficient for the task of pastoring the church, wrongly allowed a place of authority and responsibility that he manifestly was unable to fulfill. He cannot defend himself, and those who believe this rhetoric would not listen to me either.
So for anyone out there who is struggling just to live day to day like I do, like this pastor did, may I suggest that you seek competent professional mental health care? If you can, surround yourself with chosen family and friends and share with them the burden of your despair. I have had to dig around and advocate for myself. I went some ways with one therapist and later had to find another. I have only a handful of friends and loved ones whom I trust. But it has been worth it to continue living, continue the struggle even though I’m so tired. Courage, dear hearts! You matter to me. I see you. Courage!