Hi friends. Recently I've written a lot about my CPTSD and other injuries from dark tetrad parent abuse, neglect, enmeshment, enslavement, exploitation, endangerment, abandonment, scapegoating, invalidation, shaming, bullying and gaslighting about it all. I've shared how this damaged everything for me, including childhood and any relationship with a higher power (I call Him God). And just yesterday, God showed me (or I think He did) some shocking ways that He may be helping me heal from this. This will be my most controversial post and it might even sound like heresy. So read on if you wish but know that if you're a Christian this will probably disturb you.
Okay, first, I never like to claim divine revelation because it seems so pompous. That's why I say that God might be doing showing me these things. Because what He seems to have showed me is only for me and people like me who've experienced childhood trauma. I seem to be being offered special dispensation and a different set of rules to live by.
I know, that sounds very Jim Jones-ish. I warned you this was going to unsettle. God knows we've all had enough of self-righteous, hypocrites claiming divine messenger status plus diplomatic immunity from all all rules God is supposedly telling them to lay on others. I know I certainly lived with it. All four parents were dark tetrads, two biological and their two new partners. And all four called themselves Christians. And all four felt justified to preach against behavior that they were blatantly living.
They put restrictions on me that they did not follow. They behaved immorally, licentiously, selfishly and in complete contradiction to the very Bible they beat. They didn't parent me, but made me parent them, their new spouses and kids. They set me to inappropriate, dangerous tasks, in neglectful, risky situations with unsafe people. And told me this was God's will for me.
They told me to read my Bible but not to believe what it said. I was to pray, but not to God. It all had to go through them. I see now because if I actually read and believed the Bible or heard God in my prayers, I would likely see all the sinful things they were doing for what they were. I might tell someone or get out. And they couldn't have their nice cozy little delusional fantasies challenged.
Anytime I would see the wrong they were putting me in, or just seem to, they'd shame and shut me down, saying I was "too sensitive" or "too critical" "unforgiving" (they never apologized) and that I needed to "lighten up." If I claimed any of God's blessings, I was "showing off" or (my dad's favorite) "leaning on my own understanding" of scripture 😕
Yet my parents claimed all these things for themselves including the right to neglect me while still forcing me to do their constant bidding. This was how I was to serve God, apparently. To keep me shamed, cowed and obedient, they indoctrinated me into a very manipulated version of Christianity. They twisted themselves to be gods and hid the real God, his son and Holy Spirit from me. They put a huge millstone around my neck and forced me to the edge. I very nearly fell over many times. See past posts for details.
So, where does this leave me? Unsure of who God really is, unable to have a relationship with Him, confused by scripture and sacraments that don't seem, because I was told, to apply to me. I'm baffled by teachings on sin because everything I did, I was told, was sin. If you're told everything you do is wrong, how can you understand good vs. evil? If you are taught that right is wrong for you and wrong is right for them, you develop an ass-backwards view of right and wrong. Everything I hear and see, at church, with other Christians, in prayer, in the Bible is diametrically opposed to what I lived.
In short, they not only broke God for me, but also my entire sense of self. I'm a victim of identity theft. I was deprived of a childhood. Of innocence. I was made accountable to and and responsible for them at birth. I was a parent around the age of 4, to my parents and not cared for as a child. So,
What is it that God may or may not have revealed to me? Well, prepare yourself. I think God has shown me that because my childhood was stolen, He is giving it back to me now. Along with innocence and a return to my pre-accountability for sin self. He is giving me back the blanket state of grace that my parents took from me. He is putting the usual rules, expectations and commands that adults are held to, on hold for me because I'm not an adult. I'm a child trapped in a grownup body. Because I was forced to grow up too early, God is taking me back through the childhood I missed.
So yep, that's pretty different. And if you've not experienced what I've experienced, it may, as I said, sound heretical. Like I'm claiming freedom from original sin or that I'm sinless. But if you think about it, it makes sense, even from as human, secular perspective. I'm a teacher by trade. And we know that if a kid doesn't learn his times tables, for example, he won't be able to do higher math. He has to be taken back to the steps he missed and taught them. No matter if he's 10 or 90. Age doesn't matter. We have educate him like he's in third grade.
And developmentally, we know that a child who has not learned to walk cannot run either. She has to learn first things first. Or if her leg is broken, even if she's 55, she has to learn to walk again, as if she was 12 months old. I think that's how it is for me, right now.
So this moratorium, I think, is in place until such time as He and I can retrain me in the real ways of God. All their religious gaslighting crippled me. And I need to learn how to walk. I think this last until I can unlearn the twisted, self-serving image of God as them, my parents taught me. Because I don't understand right from wrong, because I was taught wrong ways. Am I saying I don't sin? Umm, maybe? Or at least not yet, anyway. Not until I can learn right from wrong.
Will I take advantage of this protected status? Not a chance. I've always tried to hard to be perfect. Yes you can try to hard at that and for the wrong reasons. I have a very over-developed moral compass and I take responsibility for other people's actions. I apologize and grovel all the time. for things that aren't my fault. Now what I need to learn is what is actually in my jurisdiction and what isn't. So it's not the sin that is mine that I'm being exonerated from but from all the sin of others, that I have been saddled with.
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