I Need Therapy

When people say they need therapy its probably the case. As it is in mine, family therapy has actually been recommended from social services.

You see, this is a very long story. Its longer than my life span - believe it or not. I blame the Australian guy who thought it was a genius idea to move to Chicago. I'm not bothered to remember his name, but he's the origin of the occult "Christian church" I was raised in.

This so called church was responsible for being one of two churches who acted as super spreaders during the 1990-91 measles pandemic in Philadelphia. Of the 9 children who died, their siblings became my school teachers, my pastors, and even best friends to my parents. When I tell people I'm from a cult, I usually tell them to google Faith Tabernacle Church and the Measles Pandemic. And then they get it.

You see, my parent's church believes in Divine Healing. Basically, God will fix it if you pray. So I've never been to a hospital. Never had a doctor's appointment. The only physical I've ever had was for my permit. The only vaccination I have is the Covid vaccine. I don't have medical insurance.

They also have very conservative views in other aspects, women should get married and make christian babies. You don't need higher education, especially not a woman. You aren't gay, you've been in a heterosexual relationship.

Something I'll never forget is the sunny Sunday morning the presiding elder said, "Rape is a 2-way street." In direct reference to a woman who'd been assaulted while jogging through Central Park. It had been all over the news that year.

There were 7 services a week and I was expected to attend 6 of them. Weekly. (one service was during school hours.) I wasn't allowed to listen to non-christian artists. I didn't own a pair of pants until I was 18. And I went to an entirely private, members only school where they had special exemptions so they didn't have to teach things like biology or sex education to the students because God took care of our bodies for us and we weren't having sex until we married a man anyway so why tell you how it works or the safe and healthy way to have intercourse.

My dad was a pastor.

So that sort of sums up the religious trauma.

My Home Life is another brand of screwed up entirely.

My mom grew up in the mountainous areas of Pennsylvania called Wimber, sort of near the Johnstown area. She always had two sides to what she told me and my 12 (yes 12 - 3 brothers and 9 sisters) siblings. One side held the good stories: I was my dad's girl, I gave him his tools and went to school like a good daughter and I cleaned the whole house for my mom so she'd talk about me. The other side held the scare tactics. The stories she'd use to scare us into thinking the entire world outside our little church circle was evil and dangerous. 'My dad was a drunk and my mom hid the rent from him so he wouldn't spend it on booze. I was in the system for 6 months because I ran away from home, someone assaulted their own girlfriend in the stairwell of a public school.

She married my dad when she was 16 and he was 19. He used to tell me he was going to go to college to be an architect, but he didn't want to do his homework, so he called my mom up and asked her to marry him. Which was pretty close to the truth.

They started having kids almost right away. They lost their first child when she was 12 from a cancerous brain tumor and her name is on a list of children who lost their lives from being religiously deprived of medical care. We share the same middle name.

When I was little it felt like Mom was always pregnant, even though I'm the fourth from the youngest. And it was during that time that she was sick. Maybe it was a nervous thing. Maybe it was stress. But whenever she got upset, she'd have these attacks. My siblings agree now that these attacks were probably seizures.

But when my mom got upset, no one was exempt from being yelled at or getting in trouble. I myself developed a defensive sort of quiet mode. When I can't gage a person's mood I get terribly quiet, scared to make the wrong noise, scared to move the wrong way. And while I was rarely the victim of her physical abuse, I watched her abuse my siblings. My sister was hit with a frying pan, went to school with nail marks in her cheeks, and handprints across her face. But the adults in our lives never spoke up about it, I guess they either didn't notice, or... they left it up to prayer. And I say that with the utmost bitterness.

That's how the adults and parents pushed off their emotional responsibilities of being parents and guardians. They heard you out to a point, but instead of offering any advice or real support, they would send you off with a sympathetic smile and the encouragement to 'pray about it.'

My mom used to lock the cabinets and refrigerator to keep us from getting into things and when we got home from school we needed special permission to eat a snack. Its still common for her to call out to someone in the kitchen with 'who's in the kitchen and what are you getting into.' As a result me and my sisters don't have the best relationship with food.

My dad was not unaffected by her mental abuse either. In the year leading up to his passing (a premature death at age 58 of very treatable liver cerosis), we were in the kitchen with him when one of my sisters was coming down the steps, thinking it was my mom, Dad dropped the pretzels he was holding back into the bucket, screwed it shut and put it on top of the fridge before positioning himself at the sink to look out over the alley. After we realized it wasn't my mom, he got the pretzels back down.

My dad was very busy through most of my childhood. Obviously, providing for 12 kids was no easy task and he gained the title of master carpenter during his 35 years of being in the industry. So he was often away on business trips or napping in the big brown recliner. But he had a fierce, loud voice when my mom would push him to yell at us and he was pretty emotionally distant otherwise. For a summer I worked with him at my school on weekends changing the lightbulbs through the whole building to LED and we talked a lot about higher education.

He told me he didn't think furthering your education was a bad thing when it was for work, but the people would pressure you into differing beliefs.

If one is so easily swayed, is their belief really a belief to begin with?