By Ryan Stollar
“You best learn to live while you’re alive.” — Cloud Cult
Healing from any trauma, but especially religious trauma, is like an onion: many-layered and often tear-inducing. Tear-inducing comes with the territory of trauma. But the many-layered aspect is the tricky and often surprising part. You find that healing comes in waves, but those waves also bring new, suppressed memories to the surface. Or you find yourself telling someone a story from your childhood and they look at you, horrified, when you thought it was just normal. Every day can surprise you and make you begin the healing process afresh.
I recently recounted on Facebook a story about the purity culture I grew up in while being homeschooled in white evangelicalism. As I was typing up the story about being placed as a teenager in the middle of a semicircle by other homeschooling families and interrogated about my relationship with another teenager, the absurdity of the situation arose anew. It was as if an old wound never healed—because it hadn’t. It never had the chance. I had buried that memory along with many other similar memories.
Therapy has been so helpful in my own healing journey. It is in therapy where I can verify that a lot of the things I grew up with as normal and healthy are in fact absurd and harmful. When I told my therapist about my being interrogated by parents like that, seeing her reaction provides me with a reality check—yes, yes I do have a right to my emotions about a given situation. I am not just making trauma up where there is no trauma.
Therapy has helped a lot with getting me back in touch with my own will and voice—those very things our evangelical parents and leaders said needed to be beat out of us and crushed. Therapy has helped me regain a sense of selfhood, that I belong to myself, and that I have a right to speak up when others’ actions harm me.
Evangelicalism taught me a lie: that I am not my own, that I owe myself to God through spiritual slavery because I was “bought with a price.” The very premise of this equation is religious abuse. It baptizes manipulation and enslavement as holy and redemptive.
Learning that I actually am my own, and that being my own is a good thing, was a difficult but liberating process. I spent years studying different religions (as well as atheism) to find meaning in life, but ultimately felt dissatisfied until I realized that life is what we make of our time here. Even Jesus said the Kingdom of God was at hand. It’s what we make of now.
“Where we are,” writes Phillip Pullman, “is always the most important place.”
These days I find a lot of meaning and healing in liberation theology. I like how liberation theologians talk about the Kingdom of God being something tangible we fight for in the here and now: a better, more just world for those who are marginalized and oppressed by the powers-that-be. That’s something concrete that I can cling to. Even as my values and worldview shifted, even as I deconstructed and reconstructed and then deconstructed again, I found I couldn’t shake this core principle: look to the margins and listen to the prophets.
The prophets I listen to today are different than the ones I listened to as a child. Today the prophets I listen to are diverse: they include people of different faiths, people who question faith, people of no faith, and even people who say faith is bad. I am not afraid to learn from those who think differently from me because I have given up fear of the other. I have learned to see beauty and wisdom in every person—that’s how I interpret imago Dei these days. For me, this is part of leaving the fundamentalism of evangelicalism. I don’t want to live an insular life anymore, so surrounding myself with voices unlike mine is important to my growth as both a person and a member of humanity.
Some days are better than others. Some days you really see the progress. Something that used to trigger a full-blown panic attack—being in church, for example—suddenly, one day you realize only gives you moderate anxiety. It may not be a lot, but it’s progress, and as all we trauma survivors know: progress is progress.
But there are still other days. The days where it feels like you don’t even know what CBT or DBT stand for, you can’t remember your coping skills, all you can think about are your bad coping skills, you realize you are spiraling—and all of this simply because someone shared an image of You Are Not Your Own by Alan Noble and the language triggers the hell out of you.
As you get further along on your healing journey, you gradually make peace with the fact that you might always have those days. But slowly, sometimes really slowly, those days become less destabilizing. They don’t hurt less, but you become more skilled at managing the pain. You develop new, more effective skills for coping.
You make peace with your old coping skills: they weren’t “bad.” They literally kept you alive. You start to remember what all you survived, and you become more comfortable with the idea that you are, in fact, pretty fucking brave and strong.
Something that happens when you feel more brave and strong is you start talking about those dark places of trauma more. And as you talk more, you realize—you are not alone. There are others of us out here, too, who also carry very similar scars. I cannot stress enough the power of realizing that you are not alone. You are not crazy for thinking that aspect of church or God or the Bible hurt you so much. There is a reason it hurts—because it hurts other people, too. And once those floodgates open, it is difficult to close them.
This is why evangelicals fear the #exvangelical movement so deeply. Former evangelicals are realizing those aspects of church or God or the Bible traumatized lots of people, in fact. Because they were legitimately traumatizing. The more evangelicals avoid looking at how their theology itself is actively damaging to many people, the stronger the #exvangelical movement will become. Because people are calling the evangelical lies—and now those people have the Internet and social media. You no longer need to pin Ninety-five Theses on a church door to launch a reformation; you can make a Facebook post that launches a Facebook group filled with thousands of others who experienced the same traumatic injustices.
You are not alone. This truth has helped me through a lot. Evangelicals say you are alone. You are alone before the throne of God and all that matters is if you, like Abraham, will raise a knife and kill that which you care about most. Would you give up your very self for God? Would you go against every fiber of your moral and intellectual commitments because you love God more than you value being a good person?
When you realize you are not alone, you realize: being a good person actually matters. A god that asks you to do something evil is not a god worthy of any worship. Realizing you are free to speak back to God, to say No to even the Alpha and Omega when you think that being is asking you to do wrong, is the very heart of being human.
We have a choice. We have always had a choice since the evangelical Garden of Eden. We chose freedom and truth.
We still do.
If the Bible is really true—if, for example, we are truly made in the image of God—then our perpetual choice for freedom and truth—even when it leads us away from God—must be godlike in some way. There must be something that God deeply yearns for that even God Almighty, Creator of the Universe, cannot get from Godself: relationship. But true relationships are about freedom and choice. You cannot compel love—even if you are God. You can drown everyone but Noah and his family and start all over, but you will get the same result. The story of the evangelical god is the story of humanity perpetually foiling that god’s best-laid plans with our choices.
We humans are tricky and often surprising, just like our healing processes. This seems to come with the “human” territory. Even God Almighty cannot get us to behave. We are willful and we have voices and we have a sense of right and wrong and justice and injustice. Vast numbers of us will willingly march into Hell if God is not good. But if God is good, and if we are made in God’s image, tricky and surprising must be holy attributes.
I no longer see holiness in my healing journey. It’s ok if you do. If you see God’s fingerprints on your healing journey as comforting, I am glad for you. For me, it helps to see God less and see me more. I spent years “denying myself” and “picking up my cross,” so what I struggle with is my own agency. In my healing journey, it helps to see how my own efforts have made real and concrete improvements in my life.
I see myself in my healing journey—and that is what most comforts me.
R.L. Stollar is a child liberation theologian and an advocate for children and abuse survivors. The author of an upcoming book on child liberation theology, The Kingdom of Children, Ryan has an M.H.S. in Child Protection from Nova Southeastern University and an M.A. in Eastern Classics from St. John’s College. Co-founder of the viral website Homeschoolers Anonymous, his advocacy work on behalf of homeschooled children and alumni has been featured in national and international media. You can follow him at rlstollar.com and on Twitter at @RLStollar.
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