Rts...it's Becoming A Name And Attention :-)

[moanareina]

 

 

Saying that someone is trying to pathologize authoritarian religion is like saying someone pathologized eating disorders by naming them. Before that, they were healthy? No, before that we weren’t noticing. People were suffering, thought they were alone, and blamed themselves.  Professionals had no awareness or training. This is the situation of RTS today. Authoritarian religion is already pathological, and leaving a high-control group can be traumatic. People are already suffering. They need to be recognized and helped.

 

 

http://awaypoint.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/religious-trauma-syndrome-is-it-real/

 

Just read this article yesterday and I thought it would be worth sharing here.

[Guest ninurta]

She basically claims that deficiencies in evangelical christianity cause trauma. Yet her own pentacostal faith is a source of love and life? She's a quack

[moanareina]

Emm...Maybe I missed something when I read it.

Was in bed and trying spritz technology for the first time...because I am not a quick reader and I thought to read a long text like this would be a good experiment, but maybe it was too fast.

[Ellinas]

Never heard of this person before personally, but it seems she has been the subject of at least one previous thread:

 

http://www.ex-christian.net/topic/50269-dr-marlene-winell/#.U6r-ArHyQUw

[moanareina]

Thank you for the link :-).

 

Interesting thread. I did not read the whole answer Marlene Winell wrote there herself, but from what I read in that thread and from what everyone else wrote there she seems to be pretty much ok to me.

[buffettphan]

Here's an interesting article on the June 26th's Main Blog by Marlene Winell

 

Childhood Indoctrination is Serious Brainwashing

 

http://new.exchristian.net/2014/06/childhood-indoctrination-is-serious.html

 

 

Also, a list of Marlene's other articles on Ex-C's Main Blog:

 

http://new.exchristian.net/search/label/Dr.%20Marlene%20Winell

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

List of Valerie Tarico's articles:

 

http://new.exchristian.net/search/label/Dr.%20Valerie%20Tarico

 

 

Good stuff!

[moanareina]

I just read Childhood Indoctrination Is Serious Brainwashing today and I can't help myself but it felt good reading it. Like yes, someone just puts to words what made me be a total weirdo who has to sort out a lot of psychiatric issues these days.

 

The example of the wordless books also was like: Yeah, I remember those...

 

I ll check out the other links, when I get some more time to :-).

 

Thank you.

[Leo]

Thanks for the pointer to the other thread on this. I read it all the way through.

And here, I confess, while I understand and appreciate critical thinking, I'm about to be everything rationalists like myself try not to be.

I find this RTS very convincing. I'm not a psychologist, have no background in that department. And I understand the difficulties associated with moral panics.

But whatever we call it, it is out there. I was that "battered woman" who returned to faith after a brief absence, but even in returning did not fully engage for the past 15 years of it. I was more than a cafeteria Christian. I read Scripture daily, I even went to the requisite men's groups. But I suffered as a result of some physical activities inside and outside of religion as a kid. I was told during the past 15 years, that that was just the wrong Christianity. Except those who committed acts like that seemed to parallel the Biblegod.

Something I horribly regret is the raising of my own daughter around such people. I don't know whether to believe her or not when she says, rather emphatically, that she diden't have Hell drummed into her, or that she didn't experience some of the things I've asked her about. I've kept her largely ignorant of the worst parts of things I experienced growing up. No need to pass that stench around.

But, I don't always know whether to believe her or not. After all, it's typical for the abused to claim it didn't happen. We all did that. My rational self knows that she tells us everything, to proportions that surprise both of us. Stuff we never told our own parents. And I'm glad of it. I should take comfort in this, and take her word for it.

But at six, she was so bullied by another girl at the church, that she apparently told her mom / my Wife that she wanted to kill herself. I didn't know this, her mom told her not to say that anymore. I didn't find out for five years, and when I did it came as a shock. Here, I nearly had blood on my hands. Blood by paralysis: caught between what was niggling inside me, knowing this couldn't be right, and the predominant culture / meme by which I was constructed to live by and under. Even when I was a so-called backslider, I still saw the world through Christian perspective, even when doing dope, acid and uppers in college.

And later on, my Wife, who is a smart, dedicated, capable, compassionate human being, got caught in a difficult situation in ministry and relationships down there, She suffered terribly emotionally. I saw warning signs ahead of time, but listened instead to Christian men's advice, which was, listen to her. Don't tell her anything. Let the Lord tell Her what She needs to hear. Your desire to not just listen, that is your ego, your flesh. Blood on my hands, almost, again. Our daughter was having real troubles at school, with a particularly aggressive teacher. An ex-Navy-Seal who was now  a first grade teacher. No disrespect to brave Navy Seals supporting this Nation. But he was clearly egoistic and my daughter is what her mom calls sensitive. Anyway, there was a time when at church there was a traveling speaker who taught us about hearing God's voice. Well I wasn't there very often, but I did show towards the end. She taught groups to get together and tell each other what they thought God said. Anyway, the Wife got advice regarding the daughter. I had thought we had resolved to make sure she didn't get that teacher, if he was to be moving up to teach second grade. These people used an awful passage, Genesis 22, the sacrifice of Isaac by Charles Manson, er, I mean Abraham, and that we should lay the daughter on the altar for the Lord. I resisted, we didn't go through with it. And I do believe my Wife was caught in the situation.

You see, She had not been raised fundagelical. Her parents are methodist, and her father didn't attend church. She had other challenges with her father anyway, which she shared with me. And you know the common fundagelical claptrap about if the father is absent from church it creates emotional and spiritual damage for the kids, tantamount to abuse. She had really had real trouble growing up. And met me, a young, admittedly confused, but sounding smart, individual who really loved Her, who still does. And in the first few years of marriage, during my fiery phase, we had found pentecostalism. She was at first resistant to the more outward showiness and kind of weirdness of it all. To me it was kind of fascinating, and had met some kind of need I have not been in touch with for years. It makes sense to me now: She'd gone to the universalists for a little while, then come to an American Baptist church where I was in the band. American baptists aren't like the Southern kind. When She first met me, I did "sound smart," when it came to conservapolitics and apologetics, but if you were one of the more hard-nosed kind of Christian, you might not have found me all that convincing. Or at least thought of me in need of maturing. Growing up? Sure. Maturing in the faith? Not so much.

Anyway, this was different from Her parents' church. When She had Her first spiritual experience, She really did surpass me in quite a few ways. There was an authenticity that I saw about it, which I can't deny to this day. Do I think it's god? No. It is Her, though.  And that authenticity will follow Her through whatever steps She takes, including deconverting if that is what ultimately happens. I was still locked inside the bubble we self-impose around ourselves. Add to that, I still didn't have access to the Internet, which for a blind person meant that I didn't have access to the free flow of information.

When I started doubting things, and didn't want anything to do with church for awhile, She was well in, and had found something that worked for Her.

When I came back to Christianity, I tried to divorce myself from my former Christian self of the fiery days. Some people didn't even know I had been like that at one time. We were across the country. She longed for some aspects of that. Praying together, stuff like that, stuff which never returned like it had once been. Even on deconversion, She expressed longing for some of this.

And, while I had not ever been raised in the type of pentecostal environment we found ourselves in in the South, I was raised with post-Fallwellian Josh McDowell Francis Schafer James Dobson Christianity. Same difference, minus the dancing bears and overt magic shows.

I was so convinced that it could be different this time, or at least trying to convince myself it could be different this time, that I wasn't listening to the warning bells that were going off. Add to this that I tend to be the more passive in the relationship, except for the couple of fiery years near the beginning of our marriage. Those years, to this day, I cannot rationally explain: they are so out of character with myself.

But that paralysis was so very much like sleep paralysis, if you have ever experenced  that. What that is, is when you are half asleep half awake, and you just can't make yourself wake up.

I owe it to Her to stand beside Her through whatever grief She may experience upon my deconversion. It's been pretty easy now for a month or so, but I opeate under no illusions.

But I can't help it: I concede openly that I am in part responsible for why She grieves to begin with. Not for my deconversion, but for having gotten Her into it to begin with, at least for having gotten Her into the depths to which we went in those couple of years.

That type of thinking in Fundagelicalism takes advantage of Her sense of orderliness, Her sense of everything in its place. For whatever reason, i was subject to glossolalia in the first fiery years. She never acquired it, and forever felt guilty for it. During the fiery time, I struggled with that, only because I thought it patently unfair that I should have it and She not. We were, after all, newlyweds. I didn't really beleive what She and others said, that She was somehow blocking it. I thought somehow, we could make sure and get it for her. Never mind the impossibilities of such a feat.

After my backsliding year or so, when we got back into church in the South, I had an experience where I had it again. But She never had it, and it was of no less a source of consternation to Her. At that point, I started secretly reading Christian apologetics against glossolalia and miracles, stuff that kind of agreed with my own parents' thinking, only using the tools of skepticism to do it. Now if only said apologists would apply the same skepticism to a couple thousand years back ...

Here I was, now again a Christian, but not that convicing to Fundagelicals, and often a project or a marked man by men in the Church on account of my unorthodox support for evolution, gay rights, and the like. And here She was, in ministry, doing all the Right things. And at home, I knew She was the "real deal" if there ever was one. But while She had some floppoflailia (slaying in the spirit), She never had glossolalia. She orchestrated meetings where women met, cried, prayed, felt refreshed, etc. And She resisted the more fuzzy stuff and tried to get them into the "meat of the Word" and stuff like that. And yet, no glossolalia. I wasn't caring about that stuff anymore personally, hadn't in years. But I cared about it for Her, because She wanted it. And, of course, in keeping with Christian teaching, She felt that it must be something that She was doing. Not that maybe it's just a phenomenon some people in those circles had and others didn't.

Even though I had my own experience with floppoflailia, I really hadn't expected it to happen, and can't say i liked it very much at all. In fact, I kind of prayed it wouldn't happen anymore. I'll probably post about it sometime. But the anti-floppoflailia Christian apologist, though rationally sound, could not rationally explain mine for when it happened and how. In other words, I secretly agreed with them about it, but couldn't explain mine according to how they claimed it had to be happening.

I guess all this rambling to say, I really do feel responsible for a lot of what's happened to my own family. I'm glad, if the Daughter's right, that she wasn't exposed to some of the things I had been. Certainly she didn't have a very convincing patriarch on the home front. Although I did always do more teaching her how to think, instead of what to think.

Anyway, is this thing we all deal with RTS? Or some other name? I don't know. I understand rationalist objections. I can prove absolutely nothing of what I said here. It's as provable as a six day Creation. I get it. It could be total hooey from a purely rational perspective. But the nightmares of me standing by while religious terrorists conduct horrific activities, and Christians are standing around justifying them, and I am doing nothing about it, do happen on a semi regular basis.

And I really do feel responsible for some of what has happened to my immediate family.

So maybe there's doubt now about the terminology. And for scientific purposes, I get that. I am torn. I am, after all, an engineer. But I cannot reasonably assert that it's all just a figment of our imaginations, any more than I could agree with the medical practitioner claiming I didn't really feel anything when they cut open my hand.

So, the label for the problem? Fair to question. But it helps human beings to have labels, that's just how our brains evolved to categorize and sort information. The problem? Definitely real. Seems obvious by reading people's stories on here.