Silence: due to guilt, shame, or fear

By Brien Pittman

In my last post, two major barriers to the recognition of spiritual abuse were presented. I’d like to expand on these barriers in two separate posts and I invite everyone to share his or her experiences, starting with the first barrier: Silence.

Stepping up and sharing; being one of the first to bring up a topic such as religious abuse, falls under the category of what I call being courageously fearful — being scared shitless, but still facing whatever the challenge may be.

Many times when we share our experiences it is not only cathartic for us, it brings other people out of their isolation and begins a healing process for everyone.  However, the simple fact is, nothing will ever change until we start speaking up.

The popular alternative is to simply dismiss our experiences, but the reality is that abuse, if left unresolved, the feelings surrounding the abuse can persist, impairing our judgment and effectively “freezing” us into harmful patterns of behavior.

Or, we could simply be unable to imagine some enlarging purpose from our suffering, even though it certainly doesn’t feel like it at the time, life sometimes brings us to difficult places in order to enlarge us, to ask more of us than we originally intended on giving.

In an effort to break the silence I’ve decided to share part of my own personal experience with the hope that others will join me. Part of my sharing also involves my positive outcome; which of course is the ultimate goal of making us more fully and richly human.

I can vividly recall a time in my life where after coming to terms with many of the aspects of my abusive religious experience’s there was still one that I could never place any positive significance upon.

Since childhood I have always valued the admonition of 2 Corinthians 6:13 “to widen out your hearts.” (New World Translation) Many years later I still appreciate the advice. But after being “disfellowshipped” (proclaimed dead) from the Christian organization I was raised in, widening my heart has not always been easy.

Twenty-five years ago I lost my entire family; my mother and father, my three brothers, as well their families, all of my nephews and nieces, my wife and my one-year-old daughter. My son was old enough at the time so, the courts awarded me full custody.

Here I was, a single father dealing with more grief than I previously thought possible. Fortunately, my daughter and I have been reunited, but the rest of my family and friends still view me as dead. For years I could not find any positive meaning for such a terribly traumatic experience. It was unjustifiable, vicious and criminal, nothing good could possibly come from it, or so I thought.

Years ago, when I was working in neurophysiology, my days were spent either in surgery or the clinical setting, it was a great opportunity to be a small part of many life stories but one day, an unscheduled add-on patient, unknowingly, became a part of mine.

She was from India, so I couldn’t resist asking her how she ended up in the States.

Her reply went like this:

I am actually third generation. My great grandparents immigrated when they were in their early twenties for a fascinating reason.

You see, my great grandfather secretly fell madly in love with my great grandmother. After dating for a while they wanted to get married. When my great grandfather’s parents found out, they were furious, for they were Hindu and my great grandmother and her family was Catholic.

My great grandfather’s family forbade him from marrying, or ever seeing my great grandmother again, and if he didn’t obey them, they would disown him. He would be forever dead to them.

Anyway, they got married but because they were shunned in India they decided to move to America, and you know what! My great grandfathers family never spoke to him again, they treated him as if he was dead for the rest of his life.

Can you imagine such a thing?

Wow right? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That day something dawned on me; if her great grandfather was still alive, and he and I met and started talking; we would be able to connect on a level few people could possibly imagine. Here was a man, three, almost four generation removed from my own, from a totally different continent, century and culture. Astonishingly, he and I would have had a most improbable connection.

Maybe the point is this: Whatever wondrously good experiences happen to us — whatever atrociously traumatic experiences happens to us; they serve to widening out our hearts —the opportunity to connect and have empathy and understanding for countless others; affinity.