This following is not to “shame” anyone, but just to tell my story in the name of accountability (which I don’t really expect to receive) and hopefully helping others who may be struggling. In writing this I am not trying to say the abuse I faced is “worse” or “better” than that which others have experienced. I also will not try to paint anyone in an overly rosy or negative light, but just to relate the realities as I remember them. There were good memories, too. But I need to focus on exposing the evils of religious abuse.
At age three or four I was told that if I told a lie, I should pray and ask Jesus for forgiveness. However, I was also told around the same time that I needed to “ask Jesus into my heart” in order to be forgiven for my sins forever. I did this, and still remember laying on my top bunk on a sunny afternoon, staring at the ceiling, feeling weird and somewhere inside not really buying the whole story, and asking Jesus (aka the ceiling) into my heart.
But wait a minute. Why did I need to pray for forgiveness after each subsequent sin, if Jesus had “washed me clean forever”? I couldn’t articulate this question at the time, but it vexed me. And “vexed,” there, is a massive understatement. Most Christians, full-on adults, still live in this absurdist dichotomy. They are “washed clean” by the blood of Jesus for eternity and “sealed” for heaven, but also need to pray for forgiveness after each perceived “sin.” The schizophrenic message of the Bible can be thanked for this.
But I wanna keep this more personal and real and not dive into too much theological shit. Basically, I was terrified (every single, solitary day) as a kid of making “God” mad and subsequently being rejected for eternity and burned. It was bad enough that my parents were emotionally volatile and young and seemed to oscillate rapidly between really emphatic acceptance of me, and then rage and beating me with a belt. Now I had three giants to fear. My mom, my dad, and a fucking loud-ass old man in the sky who could control everything and who my parents represented on earth.
Combine this fear with being beaten consistently with a leather strap by an enraged giant who said he loved me, given the silent treatment and ignored, and then also shown really overt gestures of affection at times, and I soon retreated far back into my own mental world and adopted lots of acting skills. Life and this trio of gods were too unpredictable and volatile to risk being genuine.
Even before this, there was some terrible abuse that to this day is still somewhat common it seems, but is foreign to most healthy human civilizations or tribes across the millennia, historically and contemporarily speaking. Specifically, letting newborns and infants and toddlers “cry it out” when they are put in a crib in a dark room away from their mommy and daddy for the night. When I talked to my folks about this as an adult, my dad thought I was being over the top, and said in an irritated tone: “You had everything you needed!” This is just such nonsense that it’s hard for me to even formulate a response.
I’ll just say that healthy, well-adjusted parents and societies have co-slept with their babies for hundreds of thousands of years, and picked them up when they were crying, more or less. They still do. I mention this because I think my experience of perceived absolute terrifying isolation in the dark, the complete absence of breastfeeding, having my dick’s protective skin chopped off, and not being consistently emotionally mirrored in a stable environment all before I could articulate the evil of any of this, is a large part of what shaped me into the person I am today, who can ignore even extreme mental and physical discomfort and “get on with the show.” But that comes with an extreme cost, too.
In writing this, I hope to re-enter that dark room, pick the baby up in my arms, soothe him, and take him out of that stupid fucking house.
(More in Part 2)
Voluntary Japan 
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