The Abuse of the Mind

Growing up I was taught to obey.  The limits of thinking for myself were within the context of obeying my immediate authorities.  Therefore, I learned to "think for myself" and anticipate what obedience might be required of me before asked and thus earning peace and possibly praise from achieving it.  My obedience was blind, too.  I trusted my authorities, so when they said, "because it's in the Bible," or "Because you shouldn't do that," I didn't question it.  It was comfortable for me to know what was expected of me and to do it.  My parameters were narrow and I had just enough choice within it be content.  Not happy, not fulfilled, not successful, but content.

Public school only reinforced this model.  I was the perfect student and teachers were thrilled to have me in their classrooms.  I was easy to teach, well-behaved, earned good grades, and made them look good.  My good grades and praise from the teachers led me to believe that I was of high intelligence.  The fact that I was so different from my peers by being the goody two-shoes led me to believe that I thought for myself.  Little did I know that all I was good at doing was being obedient.  I could parrot and regurgitate information.

I graduated high school 8th in my class, but with only a couple of low-fund scholarships in my pocket.  I blamed Affirmative Action when really it was the limitations of my upbringing and thought.  I brought nothing to the tables of academia but obedience.  My plan was to attend a university in Canada, staying in the strict Catholic all-girls dorm, and studying my brains out to learn and teach a foreign language.  Instead, I obeyed.  And by obey, I mean I caused my authorities no trouble at all by virtually disappearing into obedient oblivion.

This is abuse #1:  Obedience is better than thinking for yourself.  What good is thinking if you might think wrongly and end up angering God?

There were two major occurrences in my late teen years that were very profound for me, but that I did not take well.  The first was meeting my Scottish penpal and his family in Scotland.  It was very apparent very quickly that his education in Scotland was far superior to mine here in America.  He and his family were very intelligent, though in their Scottish social class, they were among peers.  I felt like a terribly unsocialized fool.  I'm sure they wondered about this lout of a lass from America.  The best I could do for myself at the time was tell myself that being intelligent and well-bred like them was useless if they didn't know Jesus like I did.  They were intelligent and well-bred, yes, but they were agnostics.

This brings about abuse #2:  Intelligence and excellent social skills do not go hand-in-hand with serving God.  Studying a variety of subjects and being among a variety of people in the world will only likely lead you astray.

The second major occurrence was in my first and only year in college.  I was excited to take English.  It was my best and favorite subject in school and I was sure to be top of the class and impress my English professor.  Instead, I barely passed.  He issued us passages of reading excellence that I simply couldn't wrap my head around.  He asked us to THINK and convey our thoughts.  I struggled.  I could not see the allegorical, the abstract, and I had virtually no experiences with which to understand what I was reading.  All I did was stick to my strict, evangelical, narrow upbringing and refused to even listen to anything outside of that parameter.  It was sin!  I couldn't!

While the professor appreciated my convictions and was sympathetic to my prison of mind, he didn't mince words.  "You write bull-sh**," he told me.  "There is nothing of your own thought or substance in your essays."  "This is how I was taught to write," I stammered my explanation.  "This is what got me A's in high school."  "This is not how you get A's in college," he said.

He tried, God bless him, he did.  Like other widely intelligent people I have met, he saw that I do have brains behind my prison bars and attempted to set me free.  He had me sign up for Psychology 102.  He was sure I could read up on 101 on my own while sitting in 102.  I left after the first day for two reasons:  1.  College psychology is tremendously secular and I couldn't stomach it.  I could not separate my belief system from other intelligences, hypotheses, and thoughts.  2.  By this time I was very sick and so deeply depressed that I slept up to 18 hours a day.  There was no time to catch up.  I barely made it though the academic year and never went back to school.

Abuse #3:  Studying, examining, exploring, or even thinking about other philosophies and such is wrong and will lead you astray.  The AG is right and nothing else matters.

Abuse #3 was reinforced when I met my husband and he explained how he (who grew up in the AG church as well) bucked the system and decided to think and study for himself.  While he ultimately decided at the time that the Christian God is the one true God, he didn't really identify himself as a Christian and certainly didn't attend church or read the Bible.

So, I in my dumbness, thought myself to be the superior.  I had the mind.  I had the answers.  I had many verses memorized.  I had my spirituality and moral character.

Abuse #4:  To show that you are truly superior you must stress about everybody else's moral inferiority.  Living in "righteous anxiety" will show God that you are serious about fixing everyone else and not letting sin win.

The problem was I didn't have the answers and I had a TON of anxiety.  Now that I was married and outside of the bubble in which I grew up I had to face big, real-world problems that I could not answer or fix.  My foundation started crumbling.  The worst was I couldn't fix anyone and in the meantime I was breaking, myself!

I'm ahead of myself just by a bit.  Before I met my husband I went through a religious spiraling where I thought my only answer was going backwards.  My AG peers had entered worldly life where their Christian upbringing was barely distinguishable anymore.  There, they succeeded.  Why?  Why were they moving forward and I nowhere?

Abuse #5:  Success (read: functioning well) in the world is failure in Christ.

Little did I know then that my backwards studying was going to eventually lead me back to Catholicism.  At the time I thought perhaps my answer was a more old-fashioned, community-oriented, isolated and insulated religious culture of Anabaptist origin.  Even so, I struggled.  It created more problems that answers for me.  And most of all, there was no peace.  Now, I was in the depths of despair.  I was so very lost.  I pretty much did nothing out of fear of doing something that might end up as outside of God's will.  This was Abuse #6.

Meeting my husband was the serotonin boost I needed to zap myself enough out of my zombie-like depression to seem like I was functioning.  Here is where my morals, beliefs, and obedience were challenged.  I displayed myself as the moral superior while acting the moral inferior.  I was lost.  So very lost, but I played a good part.

Abuse #7:  Mindless obedience is better than coming to the conclusion of morality yourself, because once you question it and search it out, once you want to know the reason you open the door to abandoning it all together.

I had questions during this period, but my authorities did not answer with anything of intelligence and thought, but rather regurgitated the, "well, it's wrong and you just don't do that," and "the Bible says _____" statements that slammed any discussion shut before it even begins.

So, now I was married, struggling in my faith, struggling in my depression, struggling in my belief systems, struggling so very much.  While I abandoned Anabaptism, I discovered fundamentalism.  Now, if only I could arrange my life into a perfect picture of religious fundamentalism I would be in God's will and everything will be perfect.  All I wanted to be was perfectly obedient and then all would be well again, but I couldn't see past my own nose.

Abuse #8:  As AGers, our way is the only way.  I'm right, everyone else is wrong, and if they only just conform to whatever narrow model I created all would be well.  I had a pretty picture of what God's will was in my head and it was agonizing to try to make it happen.  It never happened.

Hubby and I had many friends from all walks of life.  I kept to myself, mostly.  They were too worldly and everything they did smacked of sinfulness, whether it was drinking or enjoying a cigar around a campfire or worse, philosophizing!  I couldn't relate.  I couldn't sympathize.  I couldn't contribute.  All I could do was play the protestant princess when everyone could plainly see Cinderella's rags and hypocrisy.  I honestly couldn't handle the world with any sort of strength of self.  All I could do was be anxious about it and drive everyone, including myself, nuts.  I was unhappy and lost.  My only sense of peace was a false one and that was pretending I was that perfect protestant princess in the pews.

Abuse #9:  Haughtiness is next to Godliness

Abuse #10:  Isolation is our insulation and through our isolation we are inspiration

Continuing on into my adulthood and married life NOTHING was going as I thought it ought to.  All the promises of perfection from obedience weren't coming to pass.  I gave up the world.  I gave up education.  I gave up friends.  Why was I suffering so!?

Abuse #11:  Never enough.  Never enough obedience, faith, prayer, tithing, discovering of secret sins, ministry, submission.....I wasn't receiving blessings and answers and my established ideal of God's will and perfection because I wasn't doing enough of something.

Abuse #12:  My authorities would continue to repeat the same "answers," the same "truth" over and over again.  It's a total mind-trick to try to discuss something with a Stepford robot and just get repetition.  But I questioned whether they repeated because truth is truth and there is nothing else to say or because that's all they would allow themselves to know.

Abuse #13:  Control.  Disallowing those under your authority to think for themselves and not letting them become free-thinking adults is a great neglect.

Abuse #14:  Self-perpetuating lies, despite evidence to the contrary that would hold up in the courts of law and academia, often repeated and referenced back on themselves is truth.  Any deviation is outside thinking and outside thinking is sin because it doesn't fit the worldview of the AG church, which is, after all, the truest church since Acts.

The final nail in the coffin happened recently in 3 different circumstances.  One was abuses 12 and 14 when I was trying to have a discussion about my recent studies with one of my authorities.  Another was passive-aggressive "suggestions" towards the "only" way of thinking to counter my studies outside of the AG faith.  The third was a dream I had that I needed interpretation for.  I had the dream interpreted by the AG and by a Catholic theologian and psychologist with a doctorate.  The latter walked me through the dream using psychology that is well known across the board to help people unravel their dreams in healthy, realistic ways.  It was remarkable how much my dream made sense.  The AG interpretation made no sense to me, was based on assumptions, made no attempt to ask me questions or allow me my own thoughts on the matter, and forced me into a box that was not mine to be in.  It was WAY off base.  I've had dreams interpreted by the AG before and their interpretation lead to great spiritual and marital damage.  Why?  Because the assumption falls under Abuse #11.  It is my lack of faith and my husband's apparent secret sin that this dream was apparently explaining.  As a matter of fact it had NOTHING to do with anything that was interpreted by the AG.

Through these occurrences I realized that this was grounds for divorcing myself from this faith completely.  It has damaged and if I stay in it will continue to damage my mental, emotional, and spiritual self.  My authorities don't understand why I don't just come back.  They can't see or understand the mind-mess that they have done to me!  All in good intention, I grant them that, but wrong nonetheless!  And the more I study Catholic theology, history, and philosophy, the more I see the damage done and the peace and freedom to be had!

I cannot go back.  I'm not even sure I can go back to Protestantism in any form.

I feel like I need to apologize to so many people.  I feel like I should have a do-over in life.  I am disallowing myself from feeling utterly angry about this because it would do no good, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn't angry in some way.  I'm keeping it to an appropriate dull roar and won't allow it to become resentment.  I can't let that eat away at whatever is left of me to build upon. It happened.  I learned, and I grew in ways I could have only grown by going through this.  It isn't as tragic is greater abuses people have endured, but it did totally mess up my life, my spirituality, and my psyche.

Even now, I think, "I am finally me," but in the back of my head is the abuse of the mind saying, "you're allowing Satan to lie to you in your self-centeredness and disregarding of the truth the AG church teaches.  Go back.  Go back and be safe."  But, when I think of actually going back I become agitated, anxious, angry, and disgusted.  I react not only mentally but physically and spiritually.  It sickens me!