How dark tetrad parents sabotage a child's relationship with God

Hello my friends. In a series of dark posts about dark things that dark tetrad parents do to their kids, this might be the darkest. Dark Tetrad parents sabotage a child's relationship with God. I know because it's happened to me. Here's how. 

So to begin with, in order to understand my situation and experience, you're going to have to put on a shelf everything you know, think, think you know, believe or feel about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Bible. If you really want to walk a few minutes in my shoes, you have to pretend that everything about God was not as it was told to you. That it was all a hoax. 

This won't be easy, especially if you're a Christian. Because I'm going to tell you some things that will sound very wrong or even heretical. No one to date has been able to fully understand. Anyone I've told, husband, family,  kids, friends, fellow church members, no one gets it. Bless their hearts, some like my husband, have tried really hard to. But even he can't help faulting (gently) and disparaging. 

But he and everyone else didn't live it like I did. Their experiences of church, God, prayer were as different than mine as red and green. They can only speak from those. And I can only speak from mine. So I make no apology. These are my experiences. I don't control them.  

So if you can't read this without condescending platitudes, shaming or false positivity, please, do us both a favor and move on. I'm full up and don't need anymore of that, thanks. Now, if you think you're up for reading this with an open, caring mind, let's begin. And you'd better buckle up because my story is one bumpy MFer of a ride. And lets get the worst out there first. 

None of the Bible applies to me, in the same way it does to other people who've not lived what I lived.  Not the rules, commandments, beatitudes, none of it. God was not there for me, as a child. At various times, I was periodically abandoned, endangered, left  on my own by every adult. I had no one with me through the most traumatic experiences you can imagine. I told you this would be bad. It gets worse. 

At 4, I was left to wander in busy streets. I was sent to play alone in a park with a pedophile, At 6, I was abandoned to strangers 1,800 miles from my parents and 4,000 miles from any  family. There was no way to contact anyone. I was not give a bed or home, much of the time. My parents did not care for me or provide medical care. We moved almost weekly and squatted with other people. My parents were never around, but they were not working nor providing either. 

When they divorced and remarried and had new families, I wasn't welcome to be part. I was made to serve, wait and care for them all. I was hit, screamed at and humiliated routinely. I was set up and lied about. I was exploited, parentified and scapegoated constantly. And the most damaging thing of all is that they did all this in the name of God. And they terrorized me with all the anger God had for me. 

They read the Bible and quoted from it. They prayed and said they were missionaries. They hopped churches as often as they moved. But the God they presented to me was themselves. They were the Holy Trinity. They also lived very immoral lives, completely contrary to the Bible. Divorcing wasn't bad enough, they ran around on each other. My mom moved a boyfriend into our house and made me sleep with all the foster care kids. She gave my room to her unmarried brother and his girlfriend. She let all her boyfriends mock, abuse and punish me. And she marched us all to church and played the organ. 

But for me, it was all fire and brimstone. That's why I shudder when I hear someone say they like a good fire and brimstone preacher. My parents, especially my mom, did too. That's because they liked hearing about how God would punish others. They have never applied it to themselves. Every rule was rigidly and harshly forces on others but they  have never followed any way but their own. 

My rightwinger pro--life mom took a girl to have an abortion with me in the car. She has never confessed that to me. She may have had an abortion, while married to me dad, which is why she left me alone on an island. I cannot make this up. At 8, I watched her boyfriend's wife knock my mom down our steps and felt guilty for not being able to stop her. I was a latchkey kid (illegally it appears) at 8. She and her abusive husband kicked me out of their house because I came home an hour late. Turns out this was illegal. I didn't know. I didn't know it was sexual harassment when he made fun of the size of my "tits" when I was 12. 

These are only random samples of the abuse. I wish I'd been raised in a cult. At least there might have been someone who cared. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, no one reached out to help. I guess they didn't know. But it would have been damned hard to miss. 

Now, you would think with that I would have run screaming from religion of any kind. But I didn't. I went to church gladly. I sang in the choir. I read the Bible faithfully and prayed daily. I even led a little youth group and was a Christian camp counselor.  I really believed it all. And I still do, just  differently. What I believed then, because I was told, is that there was no God but my parents. Pleasing them by doing all their work, dancing attendance and being ridiculously obedient,  was pleasing God. But because they were impossible to please so was God. 

I hated myself all my life. I would have committed suicide many times over but I didn't want to hurt my grandparents. My dad threatened regularly to kill himself and then just scoffed when I cried. So I missed the message that this was sinful despair. Yet another way I screwed up. I guess it's fine to be forced to live in desperate situations but don't admit you are. God's only interested in the letter of the law, not your personal experience, was what I was taught. 

Now, you might also think I'd be tempted to ask where God was when all this shit was happening to me. Would you believe, I never did? It's weird, but I believed there was a God who loved but just not me. I can't explain it well. But I think that what they did was to well and truly superimpose themselves on my understanding of Him. Like a filter. 

I read all about God but I never saw anything like what I read about. I felt guilty for not seeing God in my life, only in others. When it was time to share how God worked in our lives at youth group, I'd hear everyone so joyful. I'd feel so miserable, knowing I couldn't honestly say those things. I determined to make myself smile if it killed me. It's hard to smile through constant inward crying but I must have managed. Because no one picked up on all I was going through. They didn't seem to see how different my life was from theirs. Well, I never told anyone. And my parents thoroughly gaslit me that I was just showing off and too sensitive. All kids slept in a cupboard with babies, did all the heavy housework and never had friends over, right. I worked so hard to bury all the abuse. To keep quiet. And I succeeded, sort of. It only came out in the nightmares.  

So I made up my mind that all I read and heard about God's love must have been withheld from me because I was such a terrible daughter. Such a failure. Bible verse after Bible verse, I memorized but they never hit home. I just quietly hid the sickening realizations that washed over me, that I was somehow so very broken that I'd even managed to break off any relationship with God. Shame was my gospel.

So now, with all that being said, I'll repeat. The rules don't apply to me because they didn't apply to me. I don't know God's love because the gods who posed as God didn't love me. If I want to continue in this Christian path, I now have the exhausting job of sorting out where it went wrong, dismantling and rebuilding this relationship along healthier lines. I know, you who haven't lived this will say, just pray, let go and let God, love Him. Well, my friends that's what  I've been trying to tell you. I have always done those things. However the God of my understanding was flawed for me. I prayed to and trusted the wrong gods. I don't know if it's safe to believe. It's a choice I'll have to make or not. 

I have to make my own way and if God is who he says in his word He is, He'll help me. But He too has a lot of work to do to undo that which was done wrong.