Survivor secrets: sexually responding to the abuse

To write this post I’m going to have to be blunt. More blunt than I ever have; it doesn’t work to write in vague words or suggestions. My brain is telling me this is a thing that shouldn’t be public, this is too personal, too graphic; societal standards of decency would say to keep this quiet. But I am a survivor, and I’ve fucking earned the right to talk about what happened to me. This is potentially more triggering than normal.

I think the thing that might be the most damaging about our beliefs in childhood innocence is that we survivors of child sexual abuse grow up knowing intimately what sex does to a child’s body and how a child’s body responds to it, and yet nobody talks about it and nobody thinks it’s real. We grow up thinking we are the freaks, we are the sick and twisted ones, who have horrible, monstrous bodies capable of feeling and reacting to sex in a way no other child does, because everything and everyone has taught us that children’s bodies are inherently non-sexual. That children’s bodies have no nerve endings or arousal; there is this cultural understanding and implicit teaching that before puberty our genitals are just like our hands or feet for all their capability of sexual pleasure. If other survivors think like I thought, we believe that the “good” abused children are ones who feel nothing but pain when they are being abused. And think that the abuse is tied specifically too our feelings; that somehow our abuser knew we had these terrible impure sexual feelings and capabilities inside of us. Sometimes I believe my father was punishing me for those feelings, trying to “fix” them out of me.

I wrote this in a post before, but one of the defining reasons I didn’t believe that my memories of my father abusing me were true were because the truth of them hinged on remembering , even possibly blurring into body memories, orgasm. But no kid is capable of that, right? That’s what I told myself. That’s what I believed, and it was doing active research to prove its impossibility that I found out otherwise. I can’t imagine that I am alone in this, and yet even sharing this is sometimes met with people saying, “oh but I don’t think children are capable of that.”

And what that does to me is make me think, “maybe others aren’t, but I was.”  And despite those who say they wouldn’t disbelieve survivors, there is still this implicit idea that the “experts” know more about our bodies we who lived through it ever would. If I describe what I felt, I’m the one in the wrong for not understanding how these things work.

I grew up thinking that there was something too sexual about me. I didn’t have those words, but I knew that feeling. If other kids were naturally pure and incapable of sexual feelings, what did that make me? A freak. Someone who was evil and disgusting, where other children – even those who were sexually abused as well – were pure and innocent.

Even the child-fied “it feels good” sometimes acknowledgment of children’s experiences don’t really cover it.

Here’s my secret: I got off on pain. Or rather, my father knew just how to hurt me so my body would still respond in just that way. I promised to be blunt, but I can’t say some of the things he did right now. Pain and pleasure and fear and arousal and power and orgasm are all mixed up and swirled together, the lines blurred, the feelings similar.

When I talk about my rape fantasies as a child – fantasies of knives and fingernails and blood, and well, torture – I don’t know if I’ve ever made it clear that these were my fantasies for pleasure. These were the things that made me feel aroused. In my earliest memories, I would wake up in the morning with an insatiable need to fantasize about these things and only once my arousal gave way to exhaustion could I even think of moving. I feel aroused when I read other survivors stories. I feel aroused when I talk about my own,  and I wonder every single time do I like this? Or even more scary Did this really happen to me or am I just making it up because I get off on it?

Here’s another secret about me: I’m terrified of my body. I call it a secret only because I’ve never found the words to describe how many years of my life I have spent in suicidal panic over it, only because I still feel ashamed that I can’t get over this terror. It goes far beyond the abuse, far beyond anything that I can fit into a nice neat explanation of why. I can’t even talk about what I find so terrifying because to do that would require me to name the parts of myself I have to mentally avoid at all costs. My body is a horror story to me; the kind of grotesque revulsion and shock you’d feel seeing the scariest, most disgusting, and inhuman monster jump out in front of you, that’s what my body is to me.

I write that because it is that terror, and that terror alone, that has kept me from reenacting my fantasies and my memories on myself. Oh, how I’ve wanted to. When I was younger, and thinking that all of this was just invented by me, I thought that maybe god had given me this fear to ensure that I wouldn’t sin, since obviously my disgusting nature wanted it so badly. I wanted to so badly once when I was about six or seven, I started grabbing at my genitals, and it was only that terror that stopped me.

And even with those fears, I’ve found ways to do harmful things, ways to reenact fantasies and memories out on myself in recent years. Nothing that would cause damage (the terror of my body stops me from doing that), but certainly pain. Pain is familiar, and, to be blunt, pain or at least the idea, the fantasy, of pain, is the only thing that gets me off. And up until that moment, it’s pleasurable, relieving, cathartic, for whatever reason I’m somehow able to separate myself from anything that happened to me, even if I’m replaying fantasy or memory. Until that orgasm, when body memory and current feelings blur together, when all those feelings I felt as a child being forced to experience pain as pleasure come back and I spiral down into a triggered, regressed mess.

Writing this I feel those same feelings of arousal, and body memories of pain. I am not the “good” survivor who reacts purely with disgust and revulsion at my memories and flashbacks.  There is also arousal, excitement, and anticipation. There always has been. The “games” my brother would play with me, I agreed to because I liked the feeling, even when it was painful. Maybe even especially when it was painful – the things my brother did were nothing compared to my father, by the time I was nine the pain my brother inflicted didn’t even cause me to flinch. It felt good. That’s why I said okay.

I’m writing this because I thought I was alone for the longest time. I told no one about my fantasies or the way rape and violence made my body respond. When I started talking about the sexual abuse, I never told anyone that it made me feel these complicated feelings of arousal and pleasure with the pain and the fear. I thought I was alone, I thought I was a freak, I thought that there was something strange and evil about my body that a child could have such sexual thoughts and feelings, that I as a teenager and then adult could not be “good” enough to not feel these kinds of things over my memories of sexual abuse. I kept my fantasies to myself for the longest time, I saw myself as dark and evil and sinful and inhuman that I obsessed and found pleasure over these things. I thought, and still sometimes think, that my father knew about his sexually deviant child and the sexual abuse was his way of punishing and correcting me for being so fucked up that I liked pain. I thought that I was an abuser, just as bad as my father and brother who hurt me, because I had these thoughts and desires.

But now I am less sure that I am alone, and more sure that this is one of those things that many survivors like me keep inside as their shameful secret, as their thing that they don’t talk about for fear of being discredited, or worse, the fear that we really are these sick and perverted people, that if we tell this, everyone will be able to say that we are just like the people who hurt us. I’m writing this because I still have my own shameful secrets that I never see survivors talk about, and I feel freakish and alone for them. I’m writing this because if someone could have told younger me that children’s bodies are normal for and capable of sexually responding to sexual abuse, that my feelings of arousal and my fantasies are a common aspect of being a survivor whose abuser inflicted both pain and pleasure, a common thing considering the power dynamics and emotional experience of sexual abuse, maybe I would have felt less terrified of myself and the inside of my head.

I’m writing to other survivors like me to say – I don’t know if I believe it myself yet, but you’re not evil and wrong and gross for these feelings. You have a body, you’ve always had a body, this is how bodies are. Even our bodies when we were children, even our bodies if our sexual abuse was painful or not, even if our sexual abusers used fear and power and control or if they used love and coercion and “doesn’t this feel good?” manipulation to get us to comply. Pleasure with sex is a thing that happens, whether we wanted it or not, whether we had a choice or not to consent. It’s the evil of others, our abusers (well, at the very least mine) who used our pleasure and orgasm to shame us into silence, a failure of a society that pretends away the sex that’s involved with sexual abuse, and ignores and disbelieves that a child’s body is capable of sexual responses in favor of “innocence.”

At the very least, you’re not alone.

Choose your feelings: conservative Christianity and self-deception

Growing up conservative Christian, emotions were bad. Well, maybe never said to be out and out bad, but they were lesser, they were of the flesh, they were not to be trusted. We were to find ways to control them, bring them in line, make them submit to our will that was submitted to God’s will.

I was good at this. This was perfect for both abuser and abuse victim alike. How easy to hit or fuck a kid who doesn’t feel. How easy to empty yourself of emotions and not have to deal with the complicated and scary understanding and feelings that someone who is supposed to love you is treating you like this. Because you’re in the wrong if you “let” the abuse hurt you. You can choose to love your abusers, to smile through the pain, to do the righteous thing and forgive. It’s all just a matter of choice, of making yourself. What you feel should never have any bearing on the right or wrong of that choice, on whether you should or shouldn’t.

Take the lessons on love. I was told that there was no such thing as falling out of love; that was a belief of people who only listened to their flesh. Love is a choice. Just wake up every day and choose to love, and there you go. No divorce, just marriage happily ever after because you understand that love is a choice. Because feelings are a choice.

This is where I think the “choice” of sexuality that conservative Christians often emphasize is misunderstood by people who don’t understand these ideas of emotions-as-choice. Because from what I was raised to believe, it didn’t matter that you couldn’t change how you felt, you could still bring you emotions under your will. When my mother had a concerned conversation with me at fourteen because I didn’t express proper levels of interest in boys, it wasn’t because she thought I felt wrong things. It was because she thought I wasn’t making the right emotional choices. “You do like boys though, really, right?” she said to me. “You want to marry one one day, right?” And I said yes, and gave some unemotional “mature” response of “focusing on other things” that I’ve given every time I’ve gotten that question all my life. According to my mother, I don’t have a sexuality, or sexual feelings at all, since I’m not in a relationship. Those things are choices of feeling that only exist in a relationship.

So from what I was taught, you can make yourself straight, because you can choose to love anyone. It doesn’t matter what you feel, or whether you can change that. Your love is a choice. It doesn’t matter what you feel, you can choose what you feel.

And that’s where this breaks down and stops making sense to me. Because what is love, if it’s separated from feeling? Hearing all the “forgiveness is a choice, it doesn’t matter if you don’t feel forgiving you can choose to let go of your anger and bitterness” except that that is an emotion. Or at least an emotional process. And I wonder if perhaps the power of the Christian rhetoric lies in the contradiction of “it doesn’t matter what you feel, you can choose what you feel.”

Because you know what this really did to me, and what I think it doesn’t to others? It doesn’t make you in control of your emotions, or change what you feel. It makes you incredibly good at self-deception. You become so hung up on making sure that you feel the right things, regardless of what you actually feel, that as long as you’re calling it by the right names, and it looks like you’re doing the right things, it doesn’t matter what you actually feel or whether your actions are manipulative or passive aggressively motivated by hate-called-love.

I was a good Christian, so I was the master at self-deception. I did what was asked of me. I’d forgiven my family, I smiled and hugged my brother and father. I could never bring myself to love my father, so when my mother sat me down and told me how wrong it was that I didn’t tell him I loved him, and I could just make the choice to love him, I told her, “fine, I will tell him I love him every time he calls if you take the guilt and responsibility for the lie.”

But even after that, I convinced myself that yes, I loved him, even though I choked out the words. I convinced myself I was healed, and perfectly fine, and happy, and content, and that all I wanted out of life was to grow up and be the wife to some Christian man and have lots of children. That the idea filled me with such sickening dread didn’t matter, I’d made the emotional choice. That all the crushes I had felt exactly the same as the terrifying feelings I felt toward my father and brother didn’t matter, that was totally attraction, not fear. (I shoved down the terrifying idea that I was sexually attracted to my father and brother as  hard as I could.)

My best friend when I was a Christian once snuggled against me – a platonic gesture she does with all her friends – and I immediately stiffened and scooted away, citing my dislike of touch when she complained. But in truth, my first thought had been, “In all the times a boy I’d liked had brushed against me/touched me, it had never felt like that.” But then, my good Christian training kicked in, and the logical in-control-of-emotions said, “No, no, silly Toranse, you’re just always afraid. How often are you afraid you’re attracted to women? A lot, right? Not because there’s a chance you are, but because you’re just always afraid you’re every sinful thing. That was fear you felt just then.” And then I was okay. I had convinced myself fear was attraction, and attraction was fear, and that’s how I navigated my emotions.

And see, by conservative Christian standards, that was good. That was me being in charge of my emotions. That was making a choice, regardless of feelings, in action. I was above my feelings, my will was greater, and I was entirely and completely disconnected from letting them influence any decision I made, anything about myself.

That everyone saw me as happy and content was the proof of this. That I saw myself as happy and content proved it to. I was terrified, death-wishing, in pain, lonely, hurt, and so disconnected from myself and body that I saw those things as how you feel when you are happy and content. But that’s what self-deception does, that’s what making the choice of emotions did – it twisted my understanding of what emotions are and made me able to assert lies as truth because I believed them.

People who knew me back then knew me as “the logical one.” The biting one, the sarcastic one, the one who didn’t give a damn about whatever pathetic feelings you had that clouded your decisions. I had no sympathy for myself and no sympathy for anyone, and the more I was like that, the more approval I got for being a “strong Christian.” You know those dudebro white guys who play “devil’s advocate” and think that they’re so brilliant because their privilege gives them no personal stake in anything so they think they’re just above all your emotions? That was me. I was self-righteous and above the world and their petty emotions. You fuck something up in your life? Well that’s your problem, you person who let their emotions – and therefore sin – run their life. And then I would get all the praise for what a wise, strong Christian I was as a teenager.

So when I was told to forgive, I forgave. When I was told to love and honor my family, I did. When I was told to express proper interest in boys, I did. When my mother told me I was being rude for being upset and that I was required to be happy for others, I spent all my time with a smile on my face and a cheerful voice. When I was told my girlness was “debatable” by friend’s boyfriend, I molded myself into proper feminine girl. That I eventually was starving myself just to numb my feelings so I could be these things didn’t matter. I wanted to be a good Christian, and a good Christian was someone who didn’t let things like their flesh and emotion dictate their belief, actions, and faith.

Conservative Christianity needs it to be this way. Its dependence on capital T Truth says “don’t let your feelings dictate the Bible, let the Bible dictate how you feel.” Conservative Christianity needs their beliefs broken off from emotion, because if they aren’t, then you get into the murky waters of morality. Then life stops being simple absolutes. Then people start questioning. Once you’ve repressed and ignored your emotions, and have been taught that they are unimportant, it becomes very easy to accept whatever people in authority tell you. Because they’re right, and if your feelings tell you otherwise, you’re wrong.

In writing this, I thought of a time I was relating some memory to my platonic soulmate – something my father did, that in any other family probably would be meaningless. “But it didn’t feel right,” I told her. And my platonic soulmate said, “Then it probably wasn’t.”

And it’s something so simple – something that outside of conservative Christian contexts children are taught to pay attention to about themselves, (if something doesn’t feel right, tell someone) that I wonder if this plays into the numerous ways that conservative Christianity enables abuse. Like I said at the beginning, how perfect for abuser and abuse victim alike. No complicated emotions. And without the emotions, when you teach a child that what they feel doesn’t matter, well then, whatever happens to them is okay. “Honor your father and mother” is the Truth that comes before “this hurts” the sinful emotion.

But what is “Truth” when it makes you lie to yourself? I can see the end result of this in my mother. She is almost always perfectly in control of her emotions. She has forgiven my father, she is healed from her childhood, she is everything conservative Christianity says a person should be in their emotions. And she is manipulative, passive aggressive, capable of slanted insults and cruelty. But as long as she’s not bitter, as long as she keeps the scariness of abuse under a wide smile, everyone believes in her healing. But she is the master at looking the other way, and lying to herself about who she is, and about who her children are. She believes she has “Truth” but she could lie through her teeth and the scariness of that lie is in her not even knowing it. How can self-deception ever make anyone honest? And if you’re capable of lying to yourself, how do you know that anything you believe is really true? How do you know if it’s just not more self-deception?

And this is why I can’t get behind “emotions are a choice you can choose what you feel” lines of reasoning anymore. Not as a way of healthily managing your emotions, not as any kind of honest way of living your life. When I hear the words “love is a choice” or most especially, since it seems most frequent, “forgiveness is a choice, choose to forgive” what I hear is “dishonest your feelings away.” Lie to yourself. What I hear is that who I am, and what I feel, is of so little importance and value that the only thing that matters is that I express proper behavior and feelings for everyone else, regardless what it does to me.  I refuse to live like that anymore.

Being worthless

My recurring nightmare is of being raped, either by my brother or a stranger, and then afterward, going to my mother to tell her. She’s always doing something of little importance, reading or the like. Once she was playing ping pong – whatever represents an activity that doesn’t really matter. And I tell her, and she doesn’t stop what she’s doing, doesn’t look at me, only sighs like I’m inconveniencing her and says “I know. It doesn’t matter.”

I don’t think the feeling of being worthless, of being nothing, would be quite so strong if it wasn’t for my mother. She was the one to tell me that I provoked the abuse. When my father or brothers hurt me, she’d be there to tell me how I should understand their behavior. More often than not, whatever they did to me, she would say, “you know, they probably already forgot, anyway.”

What do you hurt and then forget about? A bug maybe. Or grass. Nobody mourns mowing grass blades. Nobody cares about the destruction of objects. And this is what I am to my family – this small thing, this nonhuman body that can be trampled over and then forgotten because it never really mattered in the first place. I never ranked high enough as a person for my pain to register.

For me, feeling is even worse than feeling evil. At least evil means I have some kind of power; the power to hurt, the power to be something, whether that something is human or not. Being evil means a justified cause to be abused. But to be worthless is to be nothing. It’s to count as nothing. It’s too not even deserve the abuse, but rather that it didn’t even matter one way or another that you are abused. I don’t count enough as a person to count in the debate of “deserved vs. undeserved.” If you smash a glass, nobody debates whether the glass deserved it enough. It’s not life. I’m not a life.

I spent three years with my mother knowing my brother had raped me – or at least knowing enough that he did something incredibly terrible – and it didn’t even matter. I was terrible and cruel for not forgiving, for not wearing a smile and engaging with the family. I was cruel enough that my mother decided I was no longer allowed to hide in my room, but instead couldn’t even be in the house while he was there. The one time she made an exception to this, she said to me, “I told him that you were really exhausted from work, so you would be in your room the whole time, so it’s okay, you can stay.” Because his feelings mattered, but mine didn’t. She had to make sure that he was protected from the knowledge (that he already knew) that he had done something horrible enough to warrant this reaction. He needed protection from me because he was a person, and what I went through didn’t matter.

Her first reaction to me moving and now knowing that not only did my brother rape me, but also my father, was to tell me, “can you ever forgive me?” Because what I went through doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m not talking to her. The first pain she wants to deal with is her own. She wants me to let her play family to both of us – wants to have a relationship with me, while all holidays belong to my brother and my family.

This is what my extended family wants, too. After me telling them what he did – they want me to spend time with them on other days, because holidays will still be my brother. They want to tell me they’re there for me and still be there for him. What I went through is just a frustrating little bump they have to deal with, nothing more. Not enough to get them to stop making rape jokes on facebook.

I used to be presentlyhuman until my cousin found my blog. The last post I’d written had been about my mother and how she’d told me to forgive, and reconcile with my brother, and that it didn’t matter if he’d raped me. The next time I saw my cousin, she spent the whole day emphasizing how wonderful my mother was. More than she ever normally would. She knew how my mother treated me, and decided that the problem was that I didn’t realize how wonderful my mother really was.

A few weeks after I moved out of my mother’s, I went to see her. When I walked in the house, there were brand new pictures of my brother and his family up. It was so soon, it felt connected. “My response to you telling me he raped you is to make sure to put new pictures of him up.”

This is what I sometimes mean when I say I deserved it. It’s not always that I think that I’m that evil (though many times it is) it’s that someone as nothing as me doesn’t have a right to get upset. A nothing thing is already asking too much, taking up too much space, requiring too much of others by feeling anything but calmly accepting the knowledge that it happened and it doesn’t matter.

My pain has never been important enough to register. When I was 12 or so, my brother walked into my room while I was changing. And while I wrapped my arms around my body and screamed at him to get out, he simply stared at me. Not with a lewd grin, not like he was getting anything out of it, but like he couldn’t even hear me. Like he was looking at my body and hearing my voice and all of that didn’t matter.

But what really tells me it’s so is the time I was sick and feeling on the verge of blacking out, and no matter how many times I told this to my mother, she continued to pester and be annoyed with me that I wouldn’t help her with some computer problem she was having. It’s that small moment, on top of all the similar small moments, on top of the big ones, on top of everything else that reminds me you are not a person enough to count.

Oh silly Toranse, haven’t you figured it out yet? You are worthless, non-human, unimportant junkyard garbage.

It feels like that’s the most logical conclusion to make.

The benevolent abuser: submitting to God’s will

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is –his good, pleasing and perfect will” Romans 12:1-2, NIV

Among the artist-type Christians there was always a very common narrative: at some point in the artist’s life, they gave up their art for God. Put down their instrument, their paintbrush, their pen, etc. Sometimes they burned their past work. If it was said that God required it, comparisons to Isaac were sometimes made. Or, if it was them, they compared it to an idol, or a desire on their part to really give everything up to God.

I’ve never heard one of these stories that didn’t end with God giving the artist back their craft, only now they would use it entirely for God. Now it belonged completely to God, and they were just the vessel for God to use His talent.

These, of course, were always the strong Christians, the ones that really loved God and really had a relationship with Him. Who else but a Real True Christian would give up something they love so much unless they’d really heard from God and wanted to please Him?

I didn’t have a story like this, but I believed in the rightness of these things. I’d already dedicated my writing to God. I wrote Romans 12:1-2 down as a “life verse” I based my life around this idea that I would give, and give, and give everything I was to God, I would do only what He wanted, be only what He created me to be, that my life would be completely at His will.

And I remember the feeling when people would talk about this, when I would hear these sermons about how your life and body isn’t yours, how you belong to God; utter submission to Him, to your future husband, to whatever things happened to you because clearly they came from God—either as a blessing, a trial, or discipline, either way, you didn’t fight, you just accepted.

I remember that panicked, clawing feeling in my stomach, the way my hands would shake and I’d feel that same I want to die feeling I’d always get in my family. And I remember looking around church sometimes and wondering if people really understood what it felt like. Did anyone else know the feeling of being at the mercy of someone else, of knowing that someone else can do whatever they want to your body, and you can’t stop it? To be completely out of control of what happens to you because someone else is? When others said they were absolutely surrendered to God, were they really, enough to know what it felt like?

There are no words to describe that feeling. There is no way to tell you what absolute powerlessness feels like unless you’ve felt it.

And I used to cry and beg forgiveness and understanding from God. Probably others were really giving up their will to God and it was good for them. Obviously, I was the messed up one; the abuse screwed up my understanding of how wonderful total surrender to a loving God really was. Obviously, I was just seeing God as I saw my abusers, and if I could just heal from the abuse, then I would be able to be that living sacrifice. I can’t even handle lying down if people are standing above me, and that’s my brokenness of course, and I should know that lying down on the altar as a sacrifice for God is the best for me.

So I tried, and tried, and tried. Whenever I started fighting, I stopped. I started the habit of dedicating my life every day to God. I prayed, and I worshipped, and I read my Bible, reminded myself of the words “less of me, more of You.”

But when it came down to it, I couldn’t let myself die, not completely. Sometimes I still think that perhaps a stronger Christian could have, could have found a way to give themselves up to God without being driven to the point of suicide, perhaps when faced with the choice of giving up the last scrap of their soul to God or killing themselves, they would have been strong enough to not reject the ultimatum entirely and walk away.

My platonic soulmate was the first person who ever loved me without it costing me anything. It stunned me, I didn’t understand how that was, how someone could care about me so much without me feeling like I was losing pieces of myself to them (you can insert connections to purity messages here.) How did that work, that someone could love me without making me feel powerless and at their mercy?

But what loving person requires everything from you? Maybe it’s not that my being abused messed me up to the healthy nature of submitting to a loving God – maybe it’s that that is not love. No matter which way you frame it, asking someone you love to give up everything they are just for you is not a loving thing to ask. Even if the asking is “submit to me and I’ll only do what’s best for you.”

There’s no such thing as a benevolent rapist.

Maybe love shouldn’t come at the cost of yourself. Maybe someone saying, “I love you and I did all these things for you, so that means you have to submit to me entirely because I’m what’s best for you” does not come close to equaling love. Does not even exist in the realm of love, or caring, or even neutral acceptance. Maybe the reason I get sick at the thought isn’t because I just need to submit to perfect love, but that there’s no such thing as love that requires submission.

Maybe that’s why purity culture is terrified of “giving away pieces of your heart” – they only believe in a kind of love that comes with a price tag.

I don’t know right now. Rejecting Christianity has left me unsure as to what love really is. I’ve always been afraid that I am not capable of loving others, and I still feel that way – my feelings of love are fickle and arbitrary, there are too many times that I find myself numb and hollow, or even angry and loathing. I have been trained to believe that love is disconnected from emotions and now I don’t even know how to name emotions, or what the experience of them means. I want people to love me and I want them to love this – this broken, fucked up, emotionally bleeding mess, with no expectations for me to be different and no requirement that I hand over pieces of myself. That feels selfish.

I still don’t know if most Christians actually give up themselves to God, or if they say they do, but still know what it feels like to possess their body, to own their own rights, to have a say over their life. Or if maybe they really did die to self and I never fully grasped the joy that comes from being utterly possessed by God.

Many times I still think about how nice it would be, if I could just lose myself completely. I think about how much pain comes from trying to fight for your power. I think that maybe the pain would go away, maybe the pain would’ve never existed, if it had been something I could do. If I could have given the last scrap of myself to God, maybe that would have been the point that I finally would be okay. Maybe the sermons were right, and the pain I’ve felt comes from trying to go on my own, from refusing to die to self, from the belief that I can be in control of my life and not God.

Then again, of course nobody feels pain when they’re dead. That doesn’t make it love and goodness for God to ask it of you.

Living for my abusers

I can’t tell you if hiding behind a chair when I was three was voluntary, or a punishment of my father’s. I can’t tell you if I learned how to walk silently and quickly (no small feat in a mobile home, I might add) past my parents’ bedroom to get to the bathroom simply because I was afraid of him seeing me, or if I was afraid of him seeing me because I wasn’t supposed to leave behind that chair. The same for when I would open the cupboard door silently, find the quietest food I could, and make a dash for my room, hiding the evidence – wrappers or dishes, etc. – under the bed, so he wouldn’t know I’d done this. I can’t tell if you if I wasn’t even supposed to eat or go to the bathroom – if these were restricted from me, or if it was just part of the punishment of being behind the chair.

But these are my first memories. Hiding, sneaking around, learning to live your life within the very small confines of your abusers moods and preferences in the hope that you become less noticeable—this is the first lesson that I learned.

The second was to accept who you are told you are. You’re not allowed to talk about what’s happening to you, you’re not even allowed to understand it. So when people tell you who you are based on how they see your behavior, you nod along. You take it, because you are not allowed to be honest – you haven’t even been given the words to be honest. What other people see is just as good of a cover story for the abuse as anything you could think up, and since you don’t trust that you know anything about yourself anyway, it’s easy to accept. It’s easy for you not to even see it as a lie anymore. You believe it just as much as they do, you learn the words they use for you and you spit them back out to define yourself.

Hiding and lying has been my entire life. It’s been my survival. How I was able to create a person from inside that – this person Toranse – I’m not sure. It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve done. But when I started becoming one; when talking about the abuse became constructing my own thoughts, opinions, and a relationship with myself, I still had to hide. Because it still wasn’t safe.

When people tell me that my writing is brave, or that they’re so glad I found my voice, I feel strange. Because I really haven’t. Toranse is just as much a made up name intended to keep myself hidden as it is a name I created for myself because of my dislike of my own.  My self exists almost entirely within the confines of the internet – within the confines of words. It’s actually how I make it work without going crazy with the lies; Toranse is disassociated from my body. When my hands are talking, they are Toranse. When I am speaking, I am exactly what I have always been. When this body is moving, going through life, I lose Toranse almost entirely – sometimes I’ve even gone into a numb panic (this is a thing I can’t explain) unsure of who I am, or where I am, or what exactly is controlling me, if it is even me. My voice, my actual ability to talk, doesn’t know all the words that my hands do. Doesn’t know how to be anything but the conservative Christian girl I’m supposed to be.

The only reason I even told my mother about the abuse when I moved was because the rage of Toranse overrode all the barriers intended to keep myself safe. I had originally planned give her some vague reason and run away. The same goes for telling my extended family. But I still had to write it, because Toranse could only get their rage out through the written word. And in everything else I am is still locked down inside, still finding every way that I can to make sure that I keep up the hiding and lying to keep myself safe.

It is still necessary. I am all alone here, and whatever risk, however slight, that being a fucked up abuse survivor who isn’t straight, might mean problems where I work, or where I live – I can’t afford to take that risk. And even if the problem is “only” an emotional recourse – I don’t have the emotional support here for that either. I am all alone, and whatever consequences would come from being myself I would only have me to deal with them.

But while that’s true, that’s not entirely why I continue like this. I continue like this because it’s all I know. Because hiding and lying is safety, and always has been for me. No matter who you are – even my platonic soulmate – I will spend more time thinking about all the things that need to be hidden from you than what I can share with you. My platonic soulmate doesn’t read my blog and she does not know everything that I write on here for no other reason that the very act of hiding makes me feel better, whether necessary or not.

We all do it, to some extent – nobody shares everything that they are with everyone that they met – but for survivors, it’s not just the personal details of our lives. It’s who we are. A lot of times because who we are is so tied up the abuse, and society tells that the abuse is our shameful, personal secret that is wrong to share with others – except among personal friends, or a blog specifically sectioned off for it.

Other people may show different sides of themselves, or different levels – I show different selves, because I have learned it is dangerous to do anything else. I can’t risk the hurt and pain and abuse that I fear comes with that. I can’t risk being seen, being known, the power that that gives other people over me.

I am terrified that I am not real, none of this is. Toranse was built on what I  imagine feels right, on the kinds of dreams and feelings and opinions that I fantasize about, that make me feel good, that make me feel more solid – but I’ve never worn that skin outside of the inside of my head. At most I’ve done the equivalent of play dress-up in secret in my room, but that person always goes back into the closet (heh) before I walk out the door. I don’t know if I am them. I have been hiding and lying for so long, that I’m not sure which is the constructed front anymore. If or when I ever get the chance, will Toranse really be me? Or will I find that I’ve been lying all this time, to everyone, even myself?

I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how they let the world know who they am – how they express interests, thoughts, beliefs, etc. with the assumption that they exist, are allowed to exist, and that it’s safe to exist. The thought leaves me feeling dizzy and scared. The times that Toranse crosses the line into my constructed front, my brain screams at me; I am losing my safety, I am losing the walls that ensure you don’t know too much about me. I am afraid that breaking down the lies that have kept me safe will prove to everyone thateverything I am is a liar – as much as I can’t have people know that I’m Toranse, the idea of having friends I’ve met online know that I have an entire self that contradicts the one I’ve told them terrifies me. What if you know better than me, what if you realize that Toranse is actually the lie?

But mostly, I am afraid of walking too loudly, of needing to be human, of letting my existence be known. To do so would be to make others see that I’ve left the confines I’m supposed to stay in, that long ago I abandoned the chair I was told to stay behind. That I have actually spent the last few years walking tiptoe in wild with no rock to hide me, hoping that if I move silently, no one will see that I’ve left.  Because if I let anyone know, if I announce my presence like that, the eyes of my abusers – of any abusers, really; the abusers of the world looking for victims, will get me, and hurt me for breaking their rules.

What I’m learning after Christianity

So after I wrote that post about what Christian fiction taught me, I realized I haven’t written much about what I’ve been learning – and unlearning, I suppose – ever since I stopped being a Christian. So I wanted to write a little about that. I’ve been working on this for nearly two weeks, and I can’t seem to get my thoughts clear and cohesive, but I suppose that’s also what has happened without the rigidity and simplicity of conservative Christian thinking. So it’s just going to start wherever it starts.

Without God, I’m learning to learn to think outside of the Christian rhetoric and phrases I’d been taught. I’m learning that my body is mine, and this life is mine, and other people’s bodies and lives are theirs. I’m learning that there is no “sin” boogeyman that will destroy me for choices I make that harm no one. I was taught that regardless of whether “sin” was bad, there was no point in doing those things in the first place, so why even tempt it? Why watch that R rated movie, why swear, why masturbate or have unmarried sex, etc., when it wasn’t even necessary to survival, when it was frivolous anyway, and would poison your soul? Why? Because pleasure is good, and freeing. Because “fuck” expresses an emotion that cannot be conveyed with any other word.

I’m learning the freedom of sin. And I know that that’s a scary thing to say; I know that’s the rhetoric that I was taught those God-hating atheists would say, and that it’s a lie from the devil. I hear it in my head still. But there is freedom in knowing that I can figure out what works for me.

I’m learning that pleasure isn’t the enemy just because it feels good. That I can trust my pleasure and my pain to tell me what’s good and bad for me. I’m learning that  a good story is wonderful and freeing and lifesaving, and exists outside of the narrow “correct morals” that conservative Christianity lives in.

I’m learning that the Bible is not “the greatest story ever told.” That starting the day with picture books and tea is a far better experience than reading the Bible ever was for me. That I don’t have to limit myself to one narrative, I don’t have to fit myself into this abstinence-marriage-submission-children model, or the sinner-in-need-of-a-savior model. That if something isn’t working, maybe it’s the model that’s wrong, not me. I don’t have to break myself to fit into something no matter who claims that it is the right way to be.

I’m learning that spending my entire life being protected in an already protected bubble does not make me an expert on anything. That a lifetime of reading the Bible has taught me nothing about myself or anyone else. My ignorance astounds me. I’m learning that separating out people into “Christian like me”, “weak Christian with differing opinions than me” and “unsaved sinner” are meaningless categories. That I can’t know anything about another person’s life just because of what my conservative Christian upbringing said they were like. I’m learning that sympathy and caring isn’t the ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes; it’s trusting that another person knows what it’s like to walk in their own shoes, and knowing you could never know what that’s like. I’m learning that listening does not involve filtering everyone someone says through Christian rhetoric to find the right catchphrase, scripture, and talking point, to get them to see your way.

I’m learning that bodies are no less important than souls. I’m learning that flesh is good, that bodies are good. That sex is something to make silly jokes over, fantasize about, take only as seriously as I want to. I’m learning that I can decide when and how much sex I want, and whether I do or don’t and with whom has no bearing on my worth or my ability to be loved. That these are good things, especially in light of how much of my life has been spent revolving around rape. I’m learning that bodies aren’t shameful, and I don’t have to carry on with the Christian illusion that I don’t have one.

I learned that the intangible love of god is no substitute for the love of people, and it’s not wrong to need that, and be contented with that, more than I ever could from a god. I’m learning that some of the most wonderful, kindest, loving, heroic, selfless people are people who have no god telling them to do those things. In fact, that feels more loving to me; when someone tells me they’ve helped me because of me, because I am a human being that they wanted to help, rather than telling me that they’re helping me because of Jesus.

I learned, probably the first thing I learned upon stepping away from Christianity, that there is no light. I’d been taught that Real True Christians had the light of Jesus inside of them; that was our “peculiar.” I was taught that this was detectable by other Real True Christians, and that non-Christians would be curious and questioning over what we had that they didn’t. And you know what? It doesn’t exist. I’ve met incredible people all the time, and the ones I met while a Christian never were Christians themselves. There is no distinctive light that Christians have that the rest of the world doesn’t. It’s not there.

I’m learning that one corner of American Evangelical Christianity cannot claim to know anything about “Truth.” I learned that their steadfast faith in this “Truth” and telling me to pursue said “Truth” so certain that my honest journey would lead me to their conclusions, was exactly what started this whole thing.

I was taught that if I was truly seeking Truth, God was not so cruel and devious as to lead me astray. And that was just enough room to lead me here. I was truly seeking. And this is what I’m finding.

Sometimes I feel like when conservative Christianity said they were light and the rest of the world was dark blindness, they were burning my eyes with light to the point that I couldn’t see. Yes, the “darkness” is more comfortable. Your eyes adjust, your pupils widen, and the world is no longer two-tone, it’s not even the monochrome they told me to fear. It’s every shade of every color. And I am learning.

What Christian fiction taught me

When I was eight, after my mother asked my father to leave, she got rid of the television set. She said it was an addiction and distracting her from god. My book choices were, for the most part, monitored by her as much as she could. I can’t say that Christian fiction was the only form of media I had, but it was considered the best and safest. If I checked out a book from the library and on its spine it said either “Bethany House” or “Zondervan” as the publisher, there was no need for my mother to question its moral safety.

There were a lot of messages I got from these books – I mean, that’s basically their purpose for existing, to make some moral or theological point about God and Godly Living. Most books are just pure moral and theological points wrapped up in bad allegories and character dialogue.

And so I learned from them. I learned that marriage for convenience was a godly choice. Forced marriages, or marriages done because of breaking some social rule (Oh no, through strange circumstances we accidentally spent the night in the same house; we must marry now because it is the proper thing to do, or else we’ll face social ostracism!) could turn into romance and love and happiness. Same with traumatic circumstances (you were raped but that’s okay, I’ll be an honorable man and marry your damaged goods self anyway). Love was an entirely unnecessary, and maybe even a damaging, reason to marry – a good marriage only cares about commitment for commitments sake, love is just an extra possibility, but should never be considered. And this wasn’t even just the historical fiction, either. The secret to those lifelong marriages were the ones where love is just an extra bonus; all that matters to a successful marriage is the proper body parts to produce children.

I learned the proper etiquette of Yes You’re Obligated to Have Sex with Your Stranger Husband (you might be allowed to reschedule sex if you have a really really good reason but then you better make sure you hold your promise of the rescheduling no matter what). I learned that cold, distant, abusive husbands could be won over with your sweetness and Godly love and commitment.

If your husband is alcoholic and abusing both you and the kids, well, God hates divorce, and if you stick it out, let yourself and your kids get smacked around a little more, eventually he’ll get saved, quit drinking, and we all know it’s only drinking that causes someone to be abusive. I learned that rape and sexual abuse is a thing that Good Godly Christian Men get accused of by troubled young girls – or worse, it’s false memories put into a girls head because of demons. I learned that rapists are just innocent men controlled by the Demon of Lust – rebuke the demon, and it’ll be fine. And that you can ‘cure’ a rape victim as long as you find the Ultimate Christian man who tells you that it’s okay, he doesn’t see you as damaged because he’s just so rare and wonderful.

I learned that being kidnapped could be a legitimate way to find a husband. I learned that Stockholm Syndrome was love. I learned that love was what happened for only those godly women who trusted God no matter how terrifying was the circumstances of their wedding.

I learned that a gender swapped version of the Prodigal Son means she “wildly” marries an abusive man who kills their son but it’s All Her Fault for leaving. Not only leaving, but nastily, evilly breaking her family’s heart by calmly telling them she wants to see the world and she broke it off with her boyfriend by (gasp, shock, horror, so evil) telling him that they were going in different directions and so their relationship couldn’t work.

I learned that a father being disgusted and rejecting his daughter because she was raped can be understood because of his poor tragic life, and is perfectly okay by the end when he becomes a Real True Christian.  I learned that a rape victim suffering depression and unable handle the child that came of that and runs away is a sinner, because she really should have gotten over that for the sake of her child.

I learned that True Feminism happened a long time ago, with the letting women vote, and work, and occasionally break some small aspect of rigid gender roles. That was gender equality and after that feminism become the angry, man hating, power-hungry females that we see today. I learned that the only racism was slavery, and for all the absolutes of Christianity and Christian fiction, was a topic of some moral ambiguity because Look at Those Kind White Slave Owners. I learned that slavery was brought to an end by those good white Christians who had the courtesy to say “wow, you’re people too!” and the end of slavery meant the end of racism. I learned that the problems that look like misogyny and racism today are actually caused by those evil feminists and entitled minorities and that Christianity is the anti-thesis to that.

I learned in all those historical fiction books with the woman on the cover gazing off into the distance that the past was a time with lots more Real True Christians, and the non-Christians could be identified by their drinking, and abuse, and non-nuclear family. Non-Christian women were ugly and badly dressed, but even the most plain Christian woman had beauty to her because of the love God shining through. I learned that grief, and pain, and trauma all had a time limit where it became acceptable for someone to sit down and tell you you’re sinning unless you get over it.

I learned that forgiveness, letting go, giving over to God, sitting back and letting things unfold, were all Godly ways to handle life. I learned that it was good to suffer, to be in pain, because God would reward you for it. I learned that a good God can test you with horrible cruelty and if you’re being tested, well, that’s love, and that the evil, torturing villain can represent God’s perfect nature and justified response to sin. I learned that a submissive wife can fix everything and that cruel men always have a justification for their cruelty and they’ll be okay once they understand God’s love.  

I learned that in life, there are precious few in number of True Believers, and they are persecuted and ridiculed and mocked and shamed by a society that refuses to accept the truth. I learned liberal atheism controls our world, and it is controlled by demons and the occult. I learned that if more people would just be True Believers like they should be, the world would be, well, not perfect, because perfect is the anti-Christ, but there would be the nice wonderful simple sides of Right and Wrong, and all the non-True Believers would get the justice they deserve (in love, of course!)

I also learned that salvation grants a person the ability to instant spout scripture quotes at everyone and be a condescending, self-righteous asshole, while all the other Christians smile in pure delight at this “new creation.” I learned that “you need to forgive me because Jesus has” is considered a morally right thing to say to someone because it’s perfectly reasonable and holy for your abuser to tell you where you’re sinning as long as your abuser is now a Christian. I learned that bitterness is the ultimate sin, greater than rape, murder, torture, etc. – and that “letting go” of that bitterness will fix everything else. I learned that the most important message of life – besides salvation – is having the Proper Emotional Reaction to everything, because that separates the Truly Saved from The Lost.

I could go on, and on, and on. I’m not sure whether Christian fiction is widely read by most Christians – certainly my family was one of the only families among those that I knew to read it so avidly – so I guess the claim can be made that it’s not a reflection of real Christian morality and culture. Except that, there was nothing in church or among fellow Christians, to ever contradict these harmful ideas. The most critique I ever see of Christian fiction is it’s bad writing, and watered down, generic salvation and theology messages, but not the morals themselves. What I read in these books, I heard in church. Maybe not as explicitly, but then, these messages weren’t always the most explicit either.

These were the ideas that I swallowed down, what I learned was good, holy, Truth, and absolute right. And it wasn’t just one or two authors – the books I’m recalling in this post come from Frank Peretti, Ted Dekker, Terri Blackstock, Tracie Peterson, Angela Elwell Hunt, to name a few. Others I can’t recall the authors, and some just blur under the “Jeanette Oke-type”. I’ve read the big names (Karen Kingsbury, for example) and then the ones no one would know (Nancy Moser), I’ve even read the borderline-Christian romance novels, where God is barely mentioned, but there’s no sex, so it gets a pass. By no means have I read through the entire genre; I don’t buy books and it doesn’t have the readership for the library to purchase a plethora of Christian fiction, but I have read quite a lot.

And this is what is scary about Christian culture. Because these ideas aren’t just a little ridiculous, or just a matter of a difference of opinion. These ideas are fucked up. They hurt people. They are not radical, rare ideas, they perpetuate the same harmful oppressions that “the world” engages in; they wear the same clothing. The only difference is that one is filled with a lot crappier writing, purports itself to be “love,” and is so steadfastedly certain of its “Biblical worldview” rightness that not even Jesus himself could tell its followers they’re wrong – they’d just label him the anti-Christ and wait for the one that confirms their ideas of Truth.

These are the messages that I believed, the ones that almost killed me. And it’s easy to dismiss, especially since a lot of the Christian dismissal is rooted in misogyny (it’s just mostly silly women writing their silly little women ideas right? Like their “soft” womanly theology has any bearing on “real” Christianity). But in all my reading, all I saw was a mirror of the messages I was receiving from the pulpit and other Christians. And if media reflects a culture, as it does, then American Christian culture is fucked up, and actively, intentionally harmful (hurting people is still intentionally hurting them, regardless if you say it’s being done in love). The “but that’s just the fringe and not a reflection of “real” Christianity!” doesn’t hold water when the state of your media says otherwise. If the fringe controls the media than I expect that there’s next to nothing of white dudes writing their stories, and we all know that’s not true. If your media is fucked up, your culture, your ideas, your morality, is fucked up, and I want nothing to do with any version of your God.