We Need To Talk About Religious Abuse


 I'm always careful about how I talk about religion. Religion can be a great source of comfort to some but for others it can be a front for abusers and a method of control. Historically some people who are religious leaders have been threatened by some scientific discoveries because it threatened their religious authority because these discoveries were not mentioned in religious texts.

The trouble with the bible is that it has had to be translated over and over again and many verses are very ambiguous. This has opened up the floodgates to misinterpretation which has been used to support bigoted agenda such as homophobia, sexism, sex negativity and some extreme prejudices. People can often be exposed to practises that are inhumane such as conversion therapy which is not only dangerous but also pointless because you can't cure someone of their sexuality nor should you.

I personally went to a fundamentalist christian school which was not only prejudiced against the usual types of things but I was often singled out for being poor. In my family however I experienced much worse abuse. My maternal grandmother would refuse to connect with me unless I considered myself christian and went to church with her. I had a spiritual awakening at this time and I decided to tell my mother’s side which they were happy to exploit.

On one Occassion my aunt brought me to Port Macquarie for 'a holiday' with the family. She claimed that we were staying at a missionaries house but that the missionary was holidaying somewhere overseas at that time. When we got there the missionary was there and she wasn't just rude, she was also pressuring me and my sisters to get baptised there. There was no escape from this woman and my aunt was supporting this behaviour and even contributed to it.

The missionary kept telling me that the devil was watching me and that the only way to stop him corrupting me was to get baptised. One night I was talking with the missionary and my aunt. My aunt said that when she was pregnant with her first child she got blessed by a priest several times because she was afraid by the demon my mother was apparently worshiping called 'the wolf'. I later found out that it wasn't a demon and that my mother took on the American Indian belief of having a spirit animal.

Anyways I remember being very afraid and not understanding why it was so easy for my aunt to brainwash me at that time. I was having a trauma response which is called fawn. This is not a very well known trauma response as it's only been recently discovered.

So I ended up giving in, in a bid to protect my other sisters from being pressured. I and one of my sisters ended up getting baptised, my other sister was still shamed by the missionary for not getting baptised and she ended up going away to cry. At the time I was scared but I was more scared for my sisters and I wasn't able to protect my sisters or myself from this woman. When I came home I was religiously obsessed. My paternal grandmother started verbally abusing me because she didn't like how religious I was being. She was disgusted by me. 

The last time I visited my aunt after this she admitted to me that she knew that this whole event would have made my grandmother angry. She also knew that my paternal grandmother was abusing me. She found the whole thing hilarious and also mistreated me for acting religiously obsessed even though she was the one that orchestrated the brainwashing of me. I was so afraid of my aunt that she deliberately orchestrated this event to cause trouble in my life that I walked a long distance home in the rain and the dark. I practically ran and even writing this up now has made me tremor a bit.

My aunt and my uncle betrayed our trust on that 'holiday' but I ended up getting the blame for walking away from my aunt because of it. My sisters and cousins were told by my aunt that I abandoned them when I was just standing up to a dangerous abuser.

Nowerdays I explore my spirituality but I don't conform to any belief system because I am wary of being exploited by religion and by some new age organisations. I trust my own intuition, I meditate and I believe in my own personal relationship with god but I also support my husbands beliefs. Sometimes I go to church with him but I've never experienced pressure from anyone in my husbands church. They do not treat me differently either and I have even had a great conversation with one of the priests at my husbands church who blessed our rings and gave us a blessing before our wedding.

It's important to note that there are religious people who actually do a lot of good and are very open minded and personable. It's an unfortunate few that use religion as a front to get away with abuse whilst be seen as 'good people' by society. Society is also slowly changing to not use religion as a definer for a persons 'niceness' and determine a persons kindness by what they do. We are trusting our moral compass more as a society and religion may be losing some followers because of this but they are more likely gaining followers who want to be there rather than feeling 'obligated'. I think this is much better because it's not about who has the most following in a belief. Spirituality is deeply personal and everyones path is different.

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