Why I Choose to Love Me

I like who I am. I like who I have become. I like who I am still becoming. In short, I have come to a place in my life where I really, really love myself.

I hear the collective gasps out there.

One of those gasps is coming from my old self, who would be mortified. My old self would give my new self a sermon that would go something like this:

“We do not need to be taught self-confidence or self-love, because the problem with the world is that we already have too much of it. People are prideful, and meanwhile, the Bible says we are like filthy rags before God. Stop loving yourself. You’re arrogant and I don’t even want to be around people like you.”

If my old self really believed that she thought too highly of herself, why did she beat herself down constantly? Why did she starve herself, measure her value according to how productive or thin she was, frequently want to cut herself, or think about killing herself?  That is why my old self was dead wrong—she didn’t love herself too much. She didn't love herself at all. She was taught that she was worthless, she was treated as if she was worthless, and she believed that she was worthless…to her parents, to her god, and even in her own heart.

The ironic thing is that I learned these attitudes from people who still claim to value human life more than the rest of society, yet somehow, my life was not included in that equation. They used this inherently abusive teaching to trample me. The tipping point for me was when I read that there is a big difference between being unworthy and being totally worthless, similar to what is taught here.

Humans are valuable. Humans are made in the image of God. God has gifted humans. If it is important for me to protect the lives of other human beings on those premises, why shouldn’t I protect myself? I am human too, after all.

I’m learning to act according to my gifts and inherent God-given value. When I wear what I want to wear, I am pleased with what I’ve expressed. When I listen to a friend share that my story helped him in some way, I know I’m doing the right thing with my life right now. When I publish my freelance work, I feel that I am using my gifts in the way God intended. God is pleased when I'm helping others, so why shouldn't I be pleased?

So I’m here to say that I’ve become my own fan. I love myself, and I think the world would be a better place if everyone could say the same. People wouldn't look for someone to look down on so they could feel better about their own insecurities. They would place high value on rest and self-care, and then would be more ready to serve one another once their own needs were met. Self-harm and suicide rates would drop. Expressing their God-given gifts would lead to individuals reflecting God to the world in a clearer way.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’...‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Lent and Remembrance

Today I decided to get rid of a piece of clutter. It was a homeschool project from when I was 8 years old. What kinds of things should an 8 year old be learning? Not these things...

Part 15 B Unexpected Revelations--Camp Good News

I can’t even tell you how sad it makes me to write this. When I think of Camp Good News, I think of friends, tall green trees, puddle jumping, and horses. I was completely, 100% for CGN as a ministry, a place of beauty, and as a respite from my parents. But today I realized something that unnerved me. I regularly have nightmares about this place. Some of them, I don’t understand, like numerous ones where I’m being attacked (always involving the hill leading up to Bascoms pond. I don’t know why. I have no memories of trauma there). The others make perfect sense. When the dream starts, I’ve discovered that my mom wants me to be on camp staff and I’m late to training. As the dream continues, I’m filled with anxiety because I need rest but I can’t move one heavy foot in front of the other. I’m disappointing everyone for the simple reason that I’m a limited human and not the superhuman they think I am. Then, I always wake up relieved to be away from that place, and trust me, that makes me sadder than anyone out there who is a current Camp Good News fan. 

My most positive memories of camp were from being a camper. I relished it. In fact, my most vivid memories of childhood are camp memories, while many other parts of my childhood are blank question marks. I sincerely believe that this is because camp was such a light for me in comparison to my home life. I do believe I experienced some spiritual abuse there, because I remember “getting saved” repeatedly out of terror and going to sleep in my bunk bed afraid of waking up in hell. When I was 11, my parents became the camp directors. The abuse I remember most vividly was when I was a volunteer and a staff member (under their leadership for half of my summers) during my high school summer breaks. That was when I was taught how to be an abuser.

It started with being in Teen Service (cleaning bathrooms, setting tables, and washing dishes). We did huge amounts of work, and jokingly begged for naps. One day, our leader came and told us that we were to take a mandatory rest. I was confused, so I pressed for more information. Not surprisingly, someone had just added up our hours of work, and we had reached the legal limit that a minor can work. I felt quite validated because the State of New Hampshire thought I wasn’t lazy; I was just overworked and tired. But we still did the dishes for the rest of the week, and at the end of each week, we were called to the camp office and told to sign papers to say that we hadn’t gone over the legal limit. I distinctly remember thinking that I had to lie and sign those papers because I didn’t want this great ministry to be brought down over such a minor issue.

The really tragic thing about camp was how their authority structure worked. The next summer, when I became a counselor, I was trained in how to control kids using the Bible. I was given methods for spiritually abusing them just like I had been abused. Every week, I got a fresh cabin full of giggling little girls, and I taught them that Romans 13 said that obeying their camp counselor meant that they were obeying God. Likewise, I believed I was obeying the authority that had trained me in these methods, and on up the chain it went. Any time a camper even felt negative emotion, I was to try to help her see how this was a shortcoming that she needed to “be saved” from. For example, if a camper was homesick and crying for her mother, I would show her verses about how she was not trusting God with her fear and redirect her to “The Wordless Book.” If she accepted everything I said, the next morning, I would report it to the higher ups, who would put a star on the wall in the Dining Hall. The stars were the staff’s pride and joy—our salvation tallies. 

The Wordless Book

Female counselors were asked to enforce rigid modesty checks that, at times, really alienated us from campers, and I think I followed those rules more obediently than any other staff member. I remember feeling culture shock one weekend when I went out to eat and saw, of all things, girls wearing short shorts and spaghetti straps openly! In public! These women didn’t even have a human element in my eyes because all I could see were sinners in need of a Saviour.

My final summer at camp was incredibly difficult. I had just moved out of my parents house, was experiencing culture shock (having come from South Africa), was dealing with a roller coaster of a college application (which camp didn’t have the internet for me to keep up on), and was dealing with some personal issues. It was the first summer that I didn’t fit the mold of the perfect counselor, and I felt guilty for being exhausted. I know that this is where my most of my anxious, over-achiever camp dreams come from, because I felt utterly alone and like a total failure. I had been taught by my abusers to give 200%, to always sacrifice myself for others whenever possible, and that taking anything for myself was sinful, so I kept at it.

I’m replenishing from this season even now, almost 6 years after I left camp for the final time. I’ve often wondered if I would ever introduce my family to this place that has meant so much to me. Every time I play out the scene in my mind, though, I feel like a spiritual pariah entering the camp grounds. I am not the missionary they raised me to be. I wear clothes they shame women for wearing. I would never let my children be campers there. In fact, what I’d really want my family to see isn’t the camp programs at all, but the woods, the beaver ponds, the dirt roads, and the mountain streams I came to know so well. I wouldn’t be allowed to explore those again by myself, so I have no reason to return.

I have no reason to ever return to any institution that made me afraid of the God I’ve learned to love. 

My final week at CGN

Part 15 A Unexpected Revelations--Claremont Christian Academy

It’s incredibly odd to think that I haven’t woken up to what I’m about to write until today. My husband thinks my brain couldn’t handle all the memories at once, so the realizations of abuse come in pieces. I think it’s because I really was brainwashed and this was all “my normal.” It’s probably a mix of both. I’m discouraged to say that there’s two more organizations that I still haven’t identified as systematically abusive I’m afraid I will draw the most criticism in my personal life for these two posts, but I carry on wearily anyway, because I need this for myself.

My cult church in NH ran a school called CCA. In our early years in the church, those in the school ostracized the church kids who did not attend. I would get wind of things that parents would say about public school kids, like, “What I want to know is how [a public school student] passed his science tests,” implying that the student must have been compromising his faith. I do remember a little criticism about homeschooled kids like me as well, and up to a certain point, we weren’t part of the “in crowd.” That faded with time, though, particularly when the principal of CCA was found to be sexually abusive and a lot of his minions had graduated and moved to college. To my cult's credit, he was kicked out of the church because he refused to apologize for his actions, but some outraged families even left with him and started another short-lived school. While he was in leadership at CCA, I heard all sorts of stories of abuse, ranging from him raping and molesting teenage girls to obese teachers sitting on elementary school students until they cried. I sit in grief for the children who were entrusted to his and his staff’s care.

Personally, I was always perfectly happy not attending CCA. The curriculum, called Accelerated Christian Education meant that everyone had to sit facing the wall, without talking, for most of the day. Instead of engaging with other people, it required students to read lessons alone. I knew that wasn’t my learning style, but in high school, my parents informed me that someone in the church had anonymously paid for me and 3 of my siblings to attend.

The curriculum reflected the school’s spiritually abusive messages that we heard from everyone in our church. It was filled with cartoons containing formulas for living the Christian life (This action + This thought = Pleasing God). The idea that hurt me the most was one I heard from all sides in my life and it went as follows:

·         God is the absolute authority. God has set me up as your leader. Therefore, God wants you to obey me and obeying me means obeying God.

As you can see, this was brainwashing at its finest. I wouldn’t dare step outside of their ideals for my life.

One teacher stands out as particularly abusive. He was also the leader of our youth group (the man who told me that I had to submit to my parents even if they weren’t good parents). While funny and easy-going, he made me feel shame like no one else at the school. His constant group talks about modesty made me feel like it was my fault when I caught him checking me out (and I realize a lot of people will be angry and accuse me of lying, but curvy girls would probably understand right away what kind of looks I’m talking about). The thing is, when I caught his eyes as he stared up my shorts one day, I only remember halfway feeling like he was wrong. The other half of me felt like I was wrong and that I should have done something differently, even though I lived and breathed strict modesty standards for myself and others. It was something I rigorously policed myself on on an hourly basis thanks to the teachings of my father and this man.

Another way he made me feel shame was for my physical disability. The staff, when I attended, was dismally disqualified to be teaching (something that goes along with ACE curriculum; the staff are considered “supervisors,” not “teachers.”), and this youth pastor was our gym teacher. There were certain types of exercise I enjoyed, and certain ones that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I honestly just thought I was out of shape and that running was more rigorous than anything else I did (snowboarding, swimming, horseback riding, rock climbing). My throat quickly became raw, my face turned beet red (and remained so for the rest of the day), and I would suck in huge amounts of air, but I always felt like I was suffocating. For the rest of the day after I was forced to run, I would hold back vomit and feel like a pillow was being stuffed over my mouth so I couldn’t breathe. I tried to alternate running and walking in gym class, for which the teacher accused me of being lazy. I found out as an adult that I have exercise-induced asthma, which is aggravated more by certain activities, including running. If I hadn’t snuck in walking when the teacher wasn’t looking, I could have died. A qualified PE teacher would have recognized the symptoms of asthma, but instead, he made me feel like a less-than-worthy human being. I felt sinful for having asthma.

Not coincidentally, this man was also the camp pastor for the camp in Part B of this blog post...