Disconnect: Who She Was and Who She Became
Any skills I had, I had to label all that as bad.
…In college, I felt like all of me was all ok. But after the discipleship program experience I had no permission or freedom within myself…It was something that for me caused a lot of problems in my emotions and psyche.
My friend Elaine (not her real name) enrolled in our church’s discipleship program on the suggestion of a friend who thought it would help her. Elaine’s broken state made her susceptible to pastors who extended cult offerings. She thought maybe they would help her find healing and wholeness.
Elaine’s first and truest love was her soulmate. They were at university together and he was a track and field athlete. Their three-year relationship joined them as if in a marriage. They had connection and chemistry and their relationship taught Elaine how to express herself and be intimate. He made her feel comfortable and beautiful. She could be completely herself.
He wanted to marry her.
She enlisted in the discipleship program just after the abortion. Unwed and pregnant wasn’t something she could be in college, as a Christian, or as the good and pleasing daughter of her parents. The only way to not be a Christian girl who gets pregnant was to not be pregnant and she made the painful choice against her pro-life values to abort. The event crushed her heart and fragmented her relationship with her best friend, the love of her life.
Healing from her pain would require time and support, but she couldn’t find support with her parents, and it seemed the quickest way to healing might be through the discipleship program her friend told her about, especially since one of the pastors was particularly compelling. The trauma of Elaine’s sort is the gold leaders fashion their crowns with. Her shining transformation by their hands looked good on them. It was good for everyone but Elaine and the man she loved.
At Christmas break, Elaine’s boyfriend did his best to reach her and convince her to move forward in their relationship. He wanted to marry her. She stonewalled him. Marriage was no longer an option for her. She was already a melding crown inside the discipleship program.
Regardless of whether he was the love of my life or not, he needed to be cut off.
She couldn’t accept him for two reasons:
Sex before marriage cut off her senses and depraved her mind
Her boyfriend was black.
What would have been better would be if we were allowed to marry. But that’s not what happened. We were forced to cut off. I destroyed our pictures, all CD’s with black people on them.
The program leaders required her to go through a purging of all things black. She was taught that it would be almost impossible for a white girl to be together with a black man without bad motivation. It would always be about lust.
It makes me cry and breaks my heart now because in our culture we deal with so much racism.
Elaine was sent home mid-program for an undefined period of purging and repentance. She returned to the program when she reached appropriate repentance, even if she didn’t know what she’d done to achieve it. Leaders granted her a new ministry and sent people to her who also experienced sexual depravity. Any relationship that involved sex before marriage made it null and void of meaning or potential. Sexual depravity excluded a couple from ever being together again. Thus she witnessed the ripping apart of another relationship similar to hers, and each person from that relationship married someone else.
Elaine was 33 years old before she went on her first date after repenting from her relationship with the man she loved. She felt like she was going to throw up and had to go into the bathroom and breathe.
I was so sick of the process - dating made me sick, being single made me sick.
Sexuality and dating weren’t things she knew anymore because she shut them down, but she thought that if she ever wanted to marry and have children, she’d have to meet a boy.
She met someone with whom she dove directly into marriage after three months because she didn’t know how to negotiate male-female relationships.
He seemed compatible, said the right things, and I was ready to be a wife, mom, and have kids. I had no ability to know anyone before marriage, so I figured I had to get married in order to get to know someone. My pastors (at her home church) had no system for dating and courtship, but I was still held to that system (discipleship program). I married someone I didn’t know, from a culture I didn’t understand, and our marriage was a combo of heaven and hell all in one package. It’s been a whole lot of work. It’s just bad that I wasn’t allowed to be natural and free to let things build how they should have. I had no skills. I literally had to watch a bunch of porn, because I didn’t know what to do, but I realized that wasn’t real.
When Elaine told me she had to watch porn to know what to do, I stopped her.
Wait, what? You’ve gotta explain that one to me because you were in a three year relationship where you got pregnant. I’m the one who had to buy a Sex for Dummies book, but you knew how to do it.
The Disconnect
Who she was and who she became
Before the discipleship program, Elaine was in a relationship with someone she knew, trusted, and loved. He made her feel confident. How to do sex and intimacy wasn’t a struggle. It was a journey of learning and it was natural. She and he figured it out together in their own time and inside a relationship as healthy as it can be when two young people are in school with extracurricular commitments. Marriage wasn’t a practical option for them at that point in their lives, but they were committed to their love for each other.
And then Religious Shame entered when she got pregnant, had an abortion, and tried to fix it all with even deeper and more devastating Religious Shame. It took her so far away from what she knew and who she was that it made her incapable of understanding relationships or how to be inside them.
One thing Elaine did know how to do was how to get help when she needed it. A lady in her home church helped her unpack the control she lived under inside the discipleship program, enabling her to build a family. Elaine’s relationship dysfunction affected her new husband as much as it did her. He didn’t understand her responses and thought there was something wrong with her. He didn’t know what to do with her discomfort with her own body and her lack of confidence with intimacy. All her learned insecurities with relationship and sex played out with someone she didn’t have the same chemistry as her first love.
With my husband, I never had the opportunity to explore relationships. If I had had the experience and freedom to explore relationships, I could have known how to explore relationships before marriage. For us it was just friendship or marriage, no in between. How do you even know what a spouse looks like before you jump? I just wanted a family, so just having jumped because of that. Not having the freedom or skills to look for what a marriage looks like from outside of marriage.
It's been a sad truth in my life that my marriage isn't my primary love relationship. I love my husband but it's all work. We've just really had to work through, and I've put up with things that I had no skills for. I had no permission or freedom within myself.
The discipleship program leaders prided themselves in the crown they fashioned from Elaine’s broken heart. But she has taken that crown and poured it out molten on the head of shame like Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones. The two things she was forced to repent were the very things she had to deconstruct to build a new relationship:
Sexual depravity - the kind borne from Religious Shame.
The purge from all things black - her husband is African American and they have two children together.
Elaine is connecting to herself again and her beautiful children are being raised by a woman who understands how to help them live in their freedom, encourages them to be fully themselves, and lets them know that all of them is all ok.
