Reader response

This is my story in response to the last newsletter “power and control can only be power and control if others collude with that and let that happen”.

 

I grew up in a Christian (Anglican) home, and became a “born again” Christian in 1980, eighteen years later I left the Church “system”.

 

The spiritual abuse that happened to me and led to my leaving occurred in a nice little community church, with nice, good, hard working people who knew what community was about.  Winter Sunday lunches around a pot of soup and bread rolls; artists, musicians, managers, salespeople, business coaches, furniture makers.  I was actively involved, the Church administrator and a Deacon, and my husband led the children's and youth programme.

 

When I began to do some community studies, with topics such as ‘Self Awareness' and ‘Communication Skills', my thinking about myself and the world began to change.  I recognised in myself some depression and co-dependency traits, and began to understand myself and the problems I was having in my life.  This new learning and understanding seemed to clash with what I was experiencing at Church.  Leaders who were in disarray, who seemed to want to control others - control what they said, what they wore, who they associated with, and what they did in their personal lives.  I was a ‘yes' person and there were other ‘yes' people who were also running around attending this meeting and that meeting and generally doing all of the things that good Church people do.  I began to question a lot of this and I think I began to become a threat to some in the Church community.

 

The day of reckoning came while I was undertaking my duties as Church Administrator. The Pastor called me into his office and made a statement  that  was to  change  my  life  forever.

 

He said something like, “Jennie, you seem to struggle to submit to people in authority and, that means, ultimately to God.”  His words came at me like a shotgun blast, and I was shocked.  What I heard him say, was that I was not a Christian.  If I couldn't submit to people in authority, (himself and the Church leaders), then I surely couldn't submit to God either. I left his office, picked up my bag and left, never to return to my job or the Church again; it was my community, my work, my life and the life of my husband and children.

 

What was it about me that allowed others to control and manipulate me? 

 

I believe it was a lot about the way I thought - the way my mind had been trained and developed as a child growing up in a strict family.  It was a lot about how I saw myself, what I believed about myself and my place in the world and also about how I viewed God.  I had a victim's mentality and that meant that I was scared of people in authority. Life happened to me, I had no personal power, I didn't ‘think' for myself, and I was a controller myself - desperately trying to have control over my own life, and the lives of those around me.  I had lost confidence in myself, and was isolated in my inner being. I have had to completely change my thinking.

 

As a child growing up, I was somehow different to the other siblings in my family who were compliant.  I was a rebel who was out of control, leaving school at 15, and home at 17.  A lost soul who desperately wanted to find the meaning of life.

 

No wonder that when I was ‘saved' I was so happy to be found that I gave my soul to the Church.  I told my husband that God came first in my life.  I so wanted to do the right things and fully immersed myself in my new life, much to the detriment of other important relationships.  Thus I was very susceptible to this type of control.  What a fool I was!  At the end of the day, I take responsibility for allowing myself to be controlled, and therefore to have been a colluder in a manipulative and destructive system.

 

Today, I am still struggling to find my place in the Church community - to know where and how I fit in.  The pain and loss associated with this experience has been enormous; the anger, sorrow and sadness huge. There is a line in a Don Henley song that says, “everything is different now”.  Everything is different.  It still hurts at times and I still grieve over the losses.  I feel like a displaced person.  I believe I was rejected and despised by many when I left the Church.  They did not understand.  I know that Jesus knows and understands.       

 

Jennie Irving