Many complex trauma survivors walk away from their religious beliefs. For example, to believe in a good and loving God who allows suffering and heinous abuse to occur can feel like the ultimate betrayal. This is something needing considerable compassion. – https://themighty.com/2017/08/life-impacting-symptoms-of-complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/
It’ strange for me think about how when I was a kid and first heard about God and Christianity I was fascinated, I fell in love with the faith and felt safe knowing there was this God up there watching over not just me, but everyone. I listened to the bible stories and the heroes who God chose, protected, saved and rewarded for their efforts and sacrifices. I wanted to be a champion of God like none other, I wanted to believe that everything had its purpose. Even as a kid, I was determined to discover my purpose, I grew up hearing how I was almost never even born, how my mother abandoned me when I was just a few months old, just to be saved by my father, who claimed God told him to go home, when he didn’t want to and only wanted to go to his mom’s to avoid having to put up with my mother, which would lead to yet another argument.
So I believed there was a reason why I was such a freak, why I was so unwanted. I grew up with warts on my left hand, buck teeth, speech problems, I wasn’t particularly coordinated, good at sports, I had no talents that I knew of. My hair never did look right until I grew older and started spiking it. I suffered horrible abuse from my mother, was often teased and made fun my older brother, some of my family members and I faced bullies every day in school. More than anything I wanted to believe there was a purpose to it all, a reason behind it all. Because it’s what Christians often told me, that I would need to give my pain to God and he would deliver me from it. But he never did. Since I was six years old, I prayed to God every day, begging him to allow my mother to love me and treat me like a son. Of course, I’ve prayed for a variety of things and for people, I prayed to God to take away my warts, to fix my speech, my teeth and when I noticed my vision was beginning to deteriorate, I prayed for God to restore my vision. I’ve already had enough issues with my appearance and didn’t want to give the bullies any more ammunition against me. As I’ve said once in an earlier post, I’ve been called names and I’ve been called them all. I heard time and again of adults and people older than me how they were bullied too and how it’s so bad. But every year, bullying gets worse I know this from experience. I never got good advice or help in any way. The schools always say you should talk to a teacher, go the principle, or even your parents, doing so however only makes things 10 times worse. Kids are often ostracized by their peers it, called and viewed as a narc. Even worse, it’s never an easy thing to talk about when you’re a victim.
I often would pray to God to move for me and those bullies who targeted me, I asked him to make them my friends, I prayed for my parents to get back together because I missed my dad, I prayed to be accepted, to feel loved. I prayed these things every day until I was thirteen years old. Then I changed, I began praying for God just to end it, to take my life, I didn’t care how. I just wanted to die. This I kept up, praying every day until I was fifteen. That’s when I finally gave on God. I gave up on Christians never wanting to listen to me, always saying the same diatribe over and over again, while I was very clearly crying out for help. I got tired of hearing Christians telling me, “God is trying to break you, he wants you to be more broken, so that he can heal you!” And a part of me always wondered,
“How much more broken do I have to be? I’m a kid, I shouldn’t have to deal with what I’ve been dealt with. I shouldn’t have heard my mother tell me that she wanted me to snap and hit her, so that she could pull some strings and have me locked up, just because she wanted to ruin my life. I shouldn’t have spent countless nights crying myself to sleep because I was so broken, so lonely and tired of feeling like I didn’t belong.”
Oh I would hear that it was God testing me, which I believed for years and after a while I began to wonder, why? What was he testing my faith for? I was a child, a kid, no kid should think the world would be better off if they died.
Other times they would blame Satan, telling me everything I was dealing with was the devil and he was trying to beat me down and I couldn’t help but wonder, why God wasn’t protecting me. I was a good kid, I always tried to be kind, generous, giving, supportive and forgiving. Granted I had a few small selfish moments as all kids do, but I was a pretty good kid. All I ever wanted was to be happy, to feel loved, wanted and needed. So, I started cutting myself, I started doing it just to give myself something else to focus on. But in truth, I was really just practicing to kill myself.
During this period of dark inflection, I adapted a mode of thinking, that maybe God was an absentee father, that he created us in a bit of a rush and once he was finished with his little science project he abandoned his creation. Thinking this, I began rebelling against God, believing if I could make him angry, make him hate me, he would finally stop and take notice, then maybe he would care. So I tore apart my bibles, tossing them in a fire. I began cussing like a sailor, mocking Christian teachings and beliefs. Then I began to study other religions and briefly practicing the other faiths I’ve read about. I became a Wiccan, for about a year, then I began reading about Pagan beliefs, I soon found myself reading more and more about philosophy and religions around the world, where I found something quite odd. They were all mostly the same, even Satanism. Compare any religion you want, don’t just go off what you think, or heard, but actually get their bible and read the tenants of other faiths, with an open mind and you’ll begin seeing similarities. Yet we build these factions, mock and make fun of, or even harass anyone who believes in something else, we wage war, kill one another over petty differences that don’t matter.
I have found many Christians (again not all) to be a very toxic people and I’m not saying anything against the bible or anything, granted I really don’t know what I myself believe in these days, but I do believe that the bible has some really worthwhile tenants and values. Most Christians however seem to suffer from old bigotry that pastors and leaders had used the bible to enforce their beliefs and force them on others. By this I mean when I read the bible, I read about a very loving and forgiving God, one who gave his only begotten son to die on a cross for our sins. It always felt wrong to me when I heard religious leaders speak out against homosexuals, or anyone in the LGBT community, even being an heterosexual man myself, but I know what it’s like to be an outcast, to be treated less of a human being just for being who you are. Then they always want to say “Well in the bible it says…”And I always counter with, the bible also says we shouldn’t pass judgment on others, or force our personal views, religious or otherwise on anyone else. Also the bible speaks out against gossiping. Worse is some the non-sensible things the bible also says.
Here are but a few.
Don’t have a variety of crops on the same field. (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t wear clothes made of more than one fabric. (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t cut your hair nor shave. (Leviticus 19:27)
Any person who curseth his mother or father, must be killed. (Leviticus 20:9)
If a priest’s daughter is a whore, she is to be burnt at the stake. (Leviticus 21:9)
People who have flat noses, or are blind or lame, cannot go to an altar of God. (Leviticus 21:17-18)
From the book of Deuteronomy:
If anyone, even your own family, suggests worshipping another God, kill them. (Deuteronomy 13:6-10)
Women are not allowed to wear the clothing of men and men are not allowed to wear the clothing of women (Deuteronomy 22:5)
From the New Testament:
Slaves must be submissive and obedient to their masters. (Ephesians 6:5)
Women must be submissive to their husbands. (1 Peter 3:1 and 3:5)
Women should not style or braid their hair or wear any adornments (jewelry) or fancy clothing. (I would also presume that wording to include the wearing of make-up and coloring of hair in that context. – 1 Peter 3:3, 1 Timothy 2:9)
Women should be generally submissive and should be quiet, never teach or hold any authority over men. They should just be silent. (1 Timothy 2:12)
Women must wear head coverings in any place of worship. (1 Corinthians 11:4-7)
When I attended Sunday school and I was brought up with the belief that God was supposed to be good, who wanted us to love on another. The bible in my opinion often contradicts itself, which often made me wonder, if someone didn’t add or tweak things here and there. Because the message I got from the Bible was how we should be compassionate to others, accept them for who they are, because they are created by God, love or hate them, they were created by the same God who made you, to argue against a person’s sexual preference or ideals is to say God has no idea what he’s doing.
I know my struggle with faith and religion is in part because I suffer from c-ptsd, but it’s also because when I was crying out for help. The Christian church let me down, instead of trying to dive deeper and getting me help, I got lectured, prayed to, prayed out, given quotes from the bible, or reasons and excuses about why my life is the way it is. Others felt the need to compare their lives, and problems to my own and tell me they know how I feel, or want to tell me everything Jesus went through before he died and tell me to suck it up.
But I’m broken and have been broken for a very long time. I searched for God, I worshiped him, loved him despite how much my life was falling apart. It’s hard to believe in something when you’ve felt abandoned for so long. When you’ve prayed for small, simple miracle over and over again, just be denied that small amount of love. I wasn’t even supposed to be born, I was an unwanted child, an accident, an abortion survivor and for what, why?
More than anything I wish I was normal and wasn’t such a mess and I know if I ever come face to face with my mother again, I would like to look her in the eye and just say, “You can’t just make someone and throw them away, it’s not right.”
If you’re still reading this. I’m sorry for the downer of a post, which I’m still probably made some of you very angry at me. But, if you could do me a quick favor, and go over to my friend’s pateron and donate just a dollar to her goal of becoming a writer, I would greatly appreciate it and you’d be able to make someone’s day. She’s incredibly talented, a warm and loving person and in all honesty someone who’s kept me from giving up.
https://patreon.com/ARStuff?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=tyshare2
J Cooper 