Growing Up With Religious, Emotional and Physical Abuse (Part 2): The Xtian ‘Inherent Shame’ of Being Human

In Part 1 I discussed some early memories, impressions, and muscle memory-deep feelings I still carry with me regarding the effects of rigid religion, namely Christianity, on a growing baby.

In this section, I’d like to talk about how Christianity and my parents taught me very emphatically that the body is evil, and so is sex, and so is simply being born a human being on planet earth. If your caregivers were rigidly religious like mine, you received these messages both explicitly and implicitly time and time again, likely from before you can even remember. Being left alone, without the support of your parents, that is (thankfully there are numerous resources and people who have made the exit themselves that can love, help, and support us), to deprogram yourself out of this shit is a nightmare, but it must be done if we are to live happy, free and healthy lives as much as possible.

The Jesus character in the Bible taught that to merely look at a woman with desire (a natural biological reaction) was exactly the same as adultery, if that woman was not your wife. Message: Natural, biological proclivities are evil. He also taught that cutting off body parts was acceptable if they caused you to “sin.” Read your Bibles, people, and stop adding the extra-biblical, apologetic spin to such problematic verses, which even your Bible itself prohibits you from doing (e.g. “lean not on your own understanding”).

The Hebrew Huckster Paul in the same book emphasized: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other…”

Christianity is all about setting the body and mind/spirit at enmity with one another. Not integrating them harmoniously as is nature’s way. This is, of course, a recipe for shame, self-hate, sexual dysfunction, abuse, and disaster. Of course it’s not a good thing to sit in the park with binoculars watching a mother breastfeed and getting off to it. That’s sociopathic. But doing a double-take when a beautiful girl walks by is simple biology and even appreciation of beauty. Without this wonderful proclivity, the earth would not be populated. Surely the fucking so-called creator of everything would know that! Hah! Anyway. Back to my childhood memories.

The anti-life, and very prudish and fearful Christian rejection of the human body, nakedness, and sexuality was something I internalized very early on, maybe even as a toddler. One of my parents, who has since apologized, even admitted to once hitting/spanking me because I had an accident when toilet training. This is of course absurd and terrible, and drills home the message via painful, corporal punishment that the body and its natural processes are evil. Meanwhile, life here in Japan over the past almost 16 years has shown me in practice, and not just theoretically, that there are indeed other, much more healthy cultural ways to view the body. Ones that are positive, in line with nature, and beautiful. But more on that later.

I remember my mom coming out of her bedroom once after a shower, and I must have been three or four (as I can see the door and hallway of the house I lived in at that age) and shouting loudly and quickly rushing to cover herself up when she saw me. I was just tiny, so nakedness to me was just nakedness, but I distinctly remember her reaction shocking me more than the nakedness itself, and I felt kind of ashamed somehow.

I remember my friend from two houses down, J., coming over and slyly showing him my sister’s Barbie doll at the door. I pulled down the doll’s shirt to reveal her two nipple-less plastic breasts, laughing and trying to impress my older friend. He snickered, but my mom was just around the corner and had seen what was going on. She reprimanded me or rolled her eyes or sighed or all three. I just remember the feeling. It wasn’t a fun-spirited “you silly boys” kind of thing, but a reaction that told me I’d done something bad. Looking back now, I see how normal and silly the moment was. There was no need for any shame whatsoever to have been attached to it.

This same friend would later draw a giant penis on He-Man on our driveway in sidewalk chalk one day. Ahhh man it is making me laugh now. He was slightly “perv-y” at times, according to some people’s estimates, maybe, but this was probably due to similar suppression of sexuality at his own household. Anyway, I remember we were all going out to eat that summer evening, and my dad backing out of the driveway as I sat in the backseat, when he noticed the giant cock on He-Man pissing proudly for all the neighborhood to see. “Who drew that!?” he shot out in a shocked pissed off voice through his clenched jaw, at once scandalized, enraged, and embarrassed. I said J. did. He shook his head with intense disapproval and sighed. I think I may have tried to laugh at it but it wasn’t received. I felt a kind of sting of shame myself. To this day I love that giant in-their-faces reminder that the human body is the human body.

Speaking of peeing, and that really shame-inducing disapproval sigh with a clenched jaw my dad would do, I used to pee on the side of the same house often at 4 and 5 years old, because at my grandma and granddad’s farm in Kentucky, me and all my cousins were allowed to do this as it was in the middle of nowhere and could be a real pain to run a mile back to the house just to take a leak. I didn’t really differentiate Kentucky farmland from my residential neighborhood too much I guess. Or, maybe I knew and just didn’t care? I’m not really sure. The point is, it wasn’t really something that needed feelings of shame attached to it. A laugh and simple correction would have done. But that’s not the Christian way.

I really began to cerebrally/intellectually abandon the idea that the human body was somehow inherently shameful or evil in university. This after frustratingly “saving myself for marriage” with past serious high school girlfriends who loved me, and wanted to sleep with me, and amidst the promiscuous blowouts and literal physical problems in college that resulted from all these toxic Christian ideas about chastity, so-called, and sexual desire being evil.

I also was subjected to two really intrusive, disgusting, and tasteless “sex talks” from my dad when I was 17 and 18, right in front of my then girlfriends. These separate half-hour-to-an-hour-long diatribes were foisted on me and these poor girls apropos of nothing, and sporadically. I remember being so embarrassed and just sitting there with my head down. I was also enraged at my father for doing this. It was a real violation of boundaries and slap in the face, because I was following all his advice already. Me and these girls weren’t even having sex because my parents had so successfully beaten the Christian bullshit into me that I was on “good kid” autopilot. At this time their marriage was full of major problems, too, but my dad still felt the need to embarrass me in my relationships because he just knew me and these women were, or were going to, sleep together. I realize he may have meant well, but intentions don’t justify crossing lines like this. Yuck. One of these girls even apologized to me after the talk. They saw clearly the type of thing I had to deal with at home and felt sorry for me.

But back to the bucking of the bullshit. What sparked my internal renaissance of fully rejecting the toxic Christian view of the body and sex was finding a copy of A.S. Neill’s “Summerhill” in my university library. This discovery itself was prompted by another book — which referenced Neill’s seminal work on unschooling and dropping religious shame — called “Awareness,” which is a collection of talks given by the late Anthony DeMello. I love “Awareness” to this day.

Still, while I rejected the religious body shame on a cerebral level, it was yet poisoning my bones. Muscle-deep. The shame, as I mentioned in part one, was beaten into my little body with a leather strap. You gotta heal from this shit and cannot exactly just read or think yourself out of it, though reason and logic and knowledge have been ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to my escape. As I mentioned earlier, the healthy way most folks view the human body in Japan has been a major medicine in my recovery.

Here, there are children’s books on pooping that are mainstream, not sarcastic or demeaning to the body’s natural processes, and are not met with those uncomfortable prudish and immature laughs so common in the West. People laugh about such things here, but it’s just in a fun spirit, and there’s no shame displayed by adult caregivers teaching their kids about these things.

While there is an infamous element of cultural perversion in Japan by way of Hentai comics and the like, and there are arguably unhealthy and/or abusive niche fetishes in the realm of pornography (this is also found all over the world, to be fair), the actual everyday perception of sex is very balanced and wholesome.

One key example of this is how, unlike general American culture, and global Zionist culture, most Japanese do not have an ingrained, knee-jerk shame impulse about the body or need to sexualize everything. Kids can run around naked at the beach. Nobody freaks out. It’s wonderful and natural. A father can be shown bathing with his small daughter in an animated kids movie (as in the movie “My Neighbor Totoro,” which scene American censors cut out of the film because it was too “controversial”). Mothers are not shamed for breastfeeding. It is highly encouraged. I go to hot springs here, fully nude, with a bunch of other fully nude people I don’t even know, and enjoy letting my body relax in the hot, sulfur-smelling water while rain or snow falls on my face outside and I enjoy the beautiful scenery of mountains, forests, and rice fields stretching out interminably before me. There’s a real feeling of wholesomeness and wholeness in this, and acceptance of one’s body, and more than that, a reveling in and cherishing of one’s body. After all, it’s our precious vehicle here, and part and parcel of our spiritual being and inner world’s expression. We are a natural, unified whole, and not at war with ourselves. I love this aspect of the culture.

I’ll get more into how the toxic Christian view of the body fucked me up in my teenage years and twenties and thirties later, maybe, but I think this entry is good enough for today.