Content Warning: Religious Trauma/abuse
I’ve been thinking a lot lately how my past. Mostly how I grew up and how it changed me. And maybe the kind of childhood I missed out on.
I’ll state it plainly. I grew up in a cult. I won’t say which one, as they’re still active today and look for ex-members online. So I’m going to need to be vague about some things. But it’s the kind of place where even children need to pay a tithe and are scared into doing so by basically saying that the end of the world is any day now and if you don’t pay your tithing, you’ll die a slow, painful, horrible death in the apocalypse. (Fun for the whole family!)
My parents were the sort where the religion was more important than literally anything else. I didn’t like going to meetings, they were boring and didn’t make any sense to me. But I had to. Of course everything is masked up as “but you have free will, though!” But it’s framed as “Certainly you can choose to not go, but then God will abandon you and your life will be miserable forever.”
I was frequently bullied by the other kids, but they were often the kids of higher-ranking members and so got away with everything. I was often blamed for being the victim because if I were only more faithful, I wouldn’t have these hardships. These things escalated to being tied up in a basement and having my chest kicked hard enough to crack my ribs. My parents would give some kind of passive excuse and require me to go to the next meeting.
I started seeing and hearing things when I was young, and told my parents about it. “Just your imagination,” they’d say. Sometimes the things got distressing. People stalking me at night, watching through my windows, dead bodies on the floor. There were times I didn’t dare leave my room because who knew what was waiting for me out there. My parents were never too concerned.
More and more, I wanted nothing to do with going to meetings. I used every excuse I could think of, and many times pretended to be sick. But every week I was told I needed to go.
One day when I was a young teenager, the local leader pulled me in for a one on one interview in a locked room (a 50 some guy alone with a 13 or 14 year old, how you know it’s a legitimate religion). These interviews were somewhat-common and were meant to test the faith of those interviewed. Think of it like a confessional, but you’re interrogated instead. (We were told, by the way, that leaders could sense when you were lying, and the questions could get … personal.)
The guy must have picked up on my hesitance, because the final question was simply “Do you even want to be here?”
“… No.”
As luck would have it, this guy was actually pretty decent. He dropped everything, and let me leave.
I told my dad what happened, I gave him some of the many reasons I’d given him before, and before I knew it I was seeing a psychologist.
The psychologist, by the way, very quickly sussed out “I think you have some kind of underlying disorder that’s being exacerbated by your religion.”
Driving me home from one of these appointments one day, Dad decides to blurt out “I hope you get better soon so you can go to church again!”
Yeah. Yeah thanks.
I never got to experience a ‘real’ childhood. The only birthday parties I had as a kid were to celebrate milestones in the cult and not my actual birthday. I was made to go to meetings in middle of the week. I had a few friends, but they generally just enjoyed having me as a target. Some of them would even steal from me, knowing they could get away with it. Whenever I did make a new friend at school, the first thing my dad would ask is if they were a member, and frown disapprovingly if they weren’t.
All this time, I was starting to retreat more and more online. It was the only place I’d been able to find friends that I felt like actually understood me. This lead to… another series of unfortunate events, and another (arguably worse) trauma. Meeting “Them.”
But that’s another story.