“Oh! That’s something my counselor told me too! She said that I was a—there’s a fancy word for it—that I had Dissociative Personality Disorder. It’s the idea that you have two selves; you’re not integrated; you’re split in two. There’s your shiny self that Jesus redeemed—that person goes to church and works with the kids—but the person you are when drinking yourself into a stupor while watching 24, that self is not in church.”
“Hmm,” I grumbled.
“What?”
“Again, that label seems to ignore context,” I said. “Hiding parts of yourself from a community that punishes people for showing those parts seems completely rational to me.”
Jo paused and thought for a moment. “I’ve never thought about the difference between thinking that the problem is something that’s innate in me versus a response to something outside of me. Even now, up until right now, I have been under the assumption that this is something that’s in me, that I have done to myself, not something that was done to me. That’s sort of mind-blowing. I really have to process that. That might change some things for me.”
* * *
Since 1992, marriage and family therapist, certified sex therapist, and professor Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers has been requiring her graduate students at the Christian institution Seattle Pacific University to write a sexual autobiography. The intention is to help her students, who are studying to become therapists, come “to terms with their own sexual story so as not to inadvertently bring the implications of their sexual pain into the therapeutic clinical setting.”9
In the early 2000s, the professor saw a shift among her students’ autobiographies: a sudden rise in religious sexual and gender-based shame.
“The symptoms I’m seeing are exactly the same symptoms I might see in someone who was sexually abused,” she told me in an interview.10 Having grown up in a very sex-positive environment herself, she couldn’t understand why so many students whose sexual autobiographies did not include sexual abuse would be experiencing symptoms traditionally associated with this form of trauma. What’s more, she didn’t understand why she saw the rise in shame when she did—in the early 2000s. (I have since learned that most of her students are in their early twenties—making her class in the early 2000s full of young people who, like me, would have been among the first to come of age under the influence of the purity industry.)
The shame spike she saw in the early 2000s became a plateau. Year after year, the stories of sexual shame came pouring in. The professor began to research religious sexual shame, and eventually authored a book for helping professionals (like therapists!) to address people’s religious sexual shame. The title of the book is Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy.III
The lack of therapeutic understanding around the damage that growing up in the purity movement can do comes up often in my interviews. Christian therapists are often too deeply embedded in their religious worldview to guide us, and secular therapists, who are generally tragically under-trained in both religion and sexuality, aren’t always much help either.
My counselor, she’s wonderful, but she doesn’t have any tools to help me. Both she and I have said that. I love her. She’s amazing. She’s been enormously positive and helpful. But she’s not equipped to help me. I’m not blaming her. She just isn’t. My whole background, being raised in the evangelical world, she will listen completely, and I can tell she’s intently trying to understand. She just has absolutely no experience at all with anything I’m saying. She’ll go into my romantic relationships; she’ll go into my relationship with my parents; she’ll go into everything except the spiritual part of it. And when I bring it up, I will talk about it in depth and she has absolutely nothing critical to open up in that vein, and that’s really hard. (Scarlet)
Some therapists have told me they believe the lack of training they receive on religion is due to a long-standing divide between religion and psychology. This divide results in some therapists being so dismissive of religion that they won’t even touch it. Others, meanwhile, are so afraid of being seen as antireligious, recognizing that religion and spirituality can also be healing tools for people, that they refuse to consider that religion can be anything other than good for a person. This is puzzling to me. It is well documented that religious communities function as extended families, and we all know every extended family looks different—from one another, and from one moment to the next. Sometimes our families affect us positively, sometimes negatively, and most often, both at the same time. Therapists don’t shy away from exploring these complex and often contradictory familial dynamics. So why shy away from exploring complex and contradictory religious dynamics? What makes us think that religious networks, unlike every other network in our lives—our families, our work communities, our friend groups—can only be either “all good” or “all bad”?
Lacking support elsewhere, those coming out of the purity movement turn to one another. Often, its informal—two friends talking, a small group of people meeting for an intimate dinner—but sometimes, these informal conversations grow. Two friends decide to launch a Purity Culture Rehab Project, blogging about experiences like losing their “kissginity”;11 a group of college women host a Shed the Shame event on their evangelical campus, encouraging students to talk more openly about shame; and several hundred evangelicals and former evangelicals gather every day in online communities, at least one of which is a women-only group centered around the topic of shame.
I get 5–10 pings from the online group a day and am getting more and more sucked in. We are going to therapists and the therapists don’t know what we’re talking about because spiritual abuse is the form of abuse that we are trying to come out of. But we go to this group and they totally get it. I wore a dress the other day and it showed a crack of cleavage. My husband’s friend was over, and I could feel my cheeks flame the whole time, like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so immodest. What if he’s looking at me and having sexual thoughts?” That’s something that I can go to the group with, and they’re like, “I totally get you.” But if I try to explain that to somebody else, they’re like, “What?!” (Muriel)
Were you to look for these groups, you may not find them. Most are closed and require you to have a trusted personal connection already in the group to be accepted in. What’s more, online group participants often use pseudonyms, sometimes even creating fake social media accounts and email addresses so they can feel safe conversing about taboo topics. In fact, pseudonyms are common throughout purity culture recovery, even among content creators. People run online platforms, host blogs, host podcasts, and even write books under fake names in order to keep the vitriol they receive for speaking out away from their professional and personal lives. But as the number of people willing to talk about religious sexual and gender-based shame grows, the desire for anonymity that has driven so many of these crucial conversations underground is beginning to dissipate.
* * *
Jo is part of two of these private online groups. “You can just go online and say something like, ‘Does anyone else have shame about having private thoughts because you were always accountable to somebody in the church?’ ” she told me across her backyard table. “I shared that recently and people were like, ‘Yeah.’ They got it. PTSD symptoms, disassociation symptoms—these are constant conversations there. Some people just claim that they have it: ‘I have PTSD; I’m having triggers everywhere today.’ They just claim it! The need for better diagnostic labels is talked about a lot too, and counselors needing to pay more attention to the religious context we’re coming from.”
But therapy, medication, and DIY support groups aren’t all Jo has tried to cure her anxiety. “I’ve tried diet changes. I’ve tried natural stuff like 5-HTP and lemon balm and Holy Basil with varying degrees of dosages. I’ve tried yoga. I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried just about everything to control whatever creates these panic attacks,” she told me. “I had a whole life; I had a church; I had
a support system; I had friends; I had a job in the embodiment of evangelical America. I had a whole life. And I gave it up. Everything. I gave it all up at the same time for the same reasons,” she explained.
“It’s been excruciatingly lonely, because where do you go with that pain? It’s been so tempting to go backward sometimes. Just to give up and go back and just say, ‘Fine, you win. Will you just love us? Can we just be part of your community again? Just whatever, you win.’ It’s too hard. It’s too exhausting to reframe your entire worldview and to heal through all the things and to get through every obstacle. It’s painful. It’s scary sometimes. Fear is everywhere. Like that scene in Jurassic Park. That part in Jurassic Park where—you’ve seen it right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“The part where the kids are in the car and then they hear the stomp. And then the water in the jar jiggles a little bit, and you know something just awful is coming. And you’re like, ‘Get out of the car now!’ The first time that I saw that movie I thought, ‘When I’m not on medication, this is how I live all the time. I’ve never told this to anybody, by the way. So now I’m telling it to somebody who’s writing a book.”
“In Jurassic Park the thumping was the dinosaur,” I said. “What’s the thumping for you? What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know,” Jo looked up, squinting into the sun. “Condemnation, shame, Hell, death, eternity, responsibility, commitment, being responsible for something I can’t handle, that I’m not ready for, not being able to receive what God’s will is, making mistakes, disappointing people, making the wrong choices, ruining my children, not being lovable, getting older, I can go on for days. The fear is palpable. Like that T. rex is just the world.”
At the beginning, often all that those of us who let go of a shaming worldview know is that we are tired. Tired of hiding ourselves, tired of hating ourselves. We yearn to be who we are, to live honestly and authentically. So we start to run. Toward what? We don’t know. And then one day—like Wile E. Coyote spinning his legs at top speed—we realize that we have run off the edge of a cliff. We had been sure there was solid ground beneath us just a moment ago. But suddenly we look down and there’s nothing. No old worldview. No new worldview. Just . . . space. But unlike Wile E. Coyote, we do not fall. We float. Because we didn’t just lose our grounding; we lost our gravity—our entire way of being, of understanding ourselves and the world around us. We have no compass, no sense of direction. We don’t know what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, or what’s back. We are confused and, all too often, we are alone. We float above an abyss and, as the Bible tells us it was before the world was created, darkness is over the surface of the deep.
This is what I call “the gap”—the expanse of space between the way in which we used to look at ourselves and the world, and the way in which we will come to see ourselves and the world once we’ve found our footing on the other side of the ravine.
I don’t know what the other side is yet, but you know it’s kind of—It’s like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He throws the pebbles down the chasm, and you see them hit something, that there is an invisible bridge. And then he can find his way across the rest of the thing. That’s where I’m at. I’m just kind of throwing the pebbles out to see the next step I can take. Then as I get more confident and realize that the world isn’t going to explode, I can visualize the other side. (Val)
On one side of the gap lies our indoctrinated brains; on the other side lies our searching spirits. And the rest of us is somewhere in the middle—sometimes stretched, other times bouncing from one gravitational pull to the other and back again, getting close to living in a way that aligns with our spirits only to have our bodies jerk us back or punish us in ways that make us feel we haven’t gotten very far after all.
“But I’m not hiding my face from any of it anymore,” Jo said, turning back to me. “Okay,” she smiled. “So I don’t know who I am or where I’m going or what my identity is. So I might regret my entire life’s choices up until this period.” She laughed under her breath, and shrugged lightly. “It is what it is.”
* * *
I. Specific reports vary.
II. Jimmy Carter also famously left the Convention because of their views on women a few years later.
III. Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers and several of her former students also launched an online platform to disseminate and address stories of sexual shame called Thank God for Sex (thankgodforsex.org). There you can see, among other things, videos of real people sharing real stories—a big leap within a space known for secrecy and anonymity. “The big thing we hear over and over is thank you,” one of the volunteers who runs Thank God for Sex told me. “ ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is so needed. I didn’t know anyone was talking about this. Thank you.’ ”
* * *
MOVEMENT III
* * *
Stumbling Out of Church
10
* * *
Trapped
“Before we do the X-ray, is there any chance you might be pregnant?” the nurse asked as she entered the examination room.
I looked up from where I had been squatting in the corner of the room, caught in the act—burying my panties between my T-shirt and my jeans so the medical staff wouldn’t know the color or quality of my undergarments. I straightened abruptly, flattening the front of my paper dress with my hand.
“Uh,” I hesitated.
The college nurse lowered her chin, a look of concern coming upon her face. We sat in silence for a moment. Then she tilted her head and raised her brows as though to say, Well?
“What would happen if I were?” I asked.
“Your child could have severe birth defects,” she answered matter-of-factly.
When I didn’t respond, she added more gently: “A pregnancy test only costs five dollars.”
Just talking about the possibility of pregnancy was enough to make my eczema flare. I crossed my arms over my chest and rubbed hard at my itching biceps before forcing my hands to meet one another in front of my body so I wouldn’t keep scratching at the rising red skin.
“Maybe you should do the test,” I gave in, wrapping my hands even more tightly together. “Just to be safe.”
I decided I would not mention to the nurse that I already gave myself pregnancy tests regularly. That I was on birth control. That my boyfriend and I often used condoms, even when we were just fooling around. Oh and, right, that I was technically still a virgin.
* * *
By now, I was a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, where there were so many love-your-body naked parades that it felt as though there was sperm floating in the air just waiting to impregnate my innocent egg at a moment’s notice. I’d show up to dances feeling risqué for showing cleavage and notice two people wearing nothing but body paint before even getting in the door. I’d sit outside the school’s sadomasochism-themed dance with my mouth gaping open, watching my classmates stand in line to be whipped by fellow classmates wearing shiny black leather bodysuits. And I’d listen, wide-eyed, as my roommate regaled my friends and me about the campus workshop she’d attended where students were instructed on how to find a woman’s G-spot on themselves and others, after which the facilitator invited those who were interested to put on a plastic glove, insert a finger into her vagina and locate her G-spot as an illustration. One thing was clear: I may not be an evangelical anymore, but I was still a serious square here at one of the most experimental colleges in the nation.
One day, a classmate who, for a short period of time, asked people to please refer to him as The Empress from now on, lounged on my dorm room bed flipping through an old copy of Martha Stewart Living.
“You have got to be the only one on campus with a monthly subscription to this magazine,” The Empress said, looking up me.
“Well that’s crazy,” I answered, flopping down next to him. “Because it’s amazing. Did you see my Ode to Fall?” I gestured to the bowl full of cinnamon sticks, leav
es, and apples artfully displayed on my dresser. “Very Martha,” I informed him.
“Linda,” The Empress laughed. “Seriously. How in the hell did you end up at this school?” Then he sat up straight. “So!” he announced excitedly. “I wrote a role for you.”
“Really?”
“You said you used to do improv comedy, right?”
“For a while after high school.”
“Perfect. I want you to play Martha Stewart.”
“You don’t want me to audition or anything?”
“Honey, you don’t need to. No offense, but you already are Martha. You kind of even dress like her.”
“Hold on—” I protested.
“Not every day,” he assured me.
“I do not dress like Martha Stewart.”
The Empress held the magazine up. Martha was on the cover wearing a taupe button-down collared shirt and a pair of white jeans.
“Really?” he said, directing his eyes to my own outfit.
“Shut up,” I said, throwing a blanket over myself. “Anyway,” I poked my head out from under the blanket, “my shirt is blue.”I
Soon afterward, I found myself onstage in front of half the school performing a very dirty version of Martha Stewart, in which Martha taught her TV viewers how to use household items for sexual purposes. For instance, Saran wrap as a dental dam. It was a decade before Ana Gasteyer essentially did the same thing on Saturday Night Live. Performing my most salacious role before hundreds of my classmates, I remember staring out at them as they almost fell out of their chairs with bawdy laughter and asking myself, Can they tell I had to ask my roommate what a dental dam was the first time I read the script?
Pure Page 18