This Is Religious Trauma
Or why I threw up on the side of the road last weekend
Last weekend, I visited extended family in Kansas City. I had a great time chatting with aunts, uncles, and cousins. I even brought home a darning basket that once belonged to my great-great grandmother.
The morning of my drive home, my aunt, uncle, and I went for a 6 mile hike through a tree-lined trail in north Kansas City. The air was cool, but muggy enough that I was wiping sweat out of my eyes and drained two water bottles.
Sweating a lot is a migraine trigger for me that I’m usually able to control if I drink something like Gatorade or Liquid I.V. As we got back in the car after our hike, I thought, I probably need some Gatorade.
I didn’t say anything. Even writing this now, it’s hard to explain why I kept quiet. My aunt and uncle are very nice people. I know they would have stopped in an instant if I had asked.
My brain did this thing where I stick the I-need-Gatorade thought in a little box in some dark corner of my mind and pretend everything is fine. I smile and chit chat and do whatever has to be done.
I learned to do this during thirty years of being told that when I felt ill, that was just “sense knowledge.” God said that “by his stripes” I had already been healed. All I had to do was believe that I had already been healed instead of what my five senses told me and God would heal me.
I wasn’t supposed to say what was wrong with me because that was confessing illness, not health. We weren’t supposed to say “I have a cold” because that was claiming the cold as ours. Every additional symptom felt like another sign of my failure. The sicker I got, the more shame I felt.
At summer camp, I watched a fellow camper get a vehement lecture about staying back from a hike due to debilitating cramps. She pulled herself out of bed and went on the hike.
Of course, there are times in real life when we have to push past pain or discomfort to get something done, but this should be a conscious choice based on evaluating available options, not a knee jerk response to a trigger from a lifetime of pressure and shame. In the cult, we got lots of practice pretending everything was fine, and now I do it mostly unconsciously.
This is religious trauma.
As I ate lunch with my aunt and uncle, my head started to pound. Unfortunately, I was out of migraine medication—a perfect storm. I knew it was too late for Gatorade to head it off, so I continued to pretend everything was fine. I loaded my suitcase in the car, hugged them goodbye, and took off for home.
The pain increased with every block I passed. Then the nausea started. This was quickly becoming the most severe migraine I’d had in a long time, and I started to wonder if I was even safe to drive.
I wondered if I should turn around and go back to my aunt’s house. But I had to get home to my kids. My husband had a jury trial the next day and couldn’t stay home with them. Still, I knew it was important to only continue to drive if I could do it safely.
Amid these swirling thoughts, a wave of nausea so strong hit me that I had to pull over. I grabbed a trashcan I keep in my van and threw up.
Fortunately, after a few minutes, the nausea mostly subsided. The pain lessened just enough that I decided to try to drive with an audiobook to distract me (from the pain, not the road) and take breaks as needed. I made it safely home.
In the post (Don’t) Do It Scared, I said:
Since I left the cult, one thing I’ve been learning is how to listen to my own inner voice, rather than what I was always told to do/think/feel.
I’ve been working for several years on identifying those moments when I tend to stuff down how I really feel (both emotionally and physically), so I felt blindsided this weekend by how I reacted (or failed to).
I certainly don’t have all the answers. This is why I’m in therapy and continue to practice mindfulness meditation. Hopefully, next time I’ll be more aware that I’m heading down the everything-is-fine road before it escalates so badly.
But just in case, I’ve vowed to never, ever travel alone without migraine meds and Liquid I.V. again.
This resonates with me a lot. In fact, I was just talking in therapy about hiding pain and dissociating from it in order to pretend I'm fine. It's difficult to ask for help for things like migraines after religious trauma. We're still learning <3
Once again you've captured an important aspect of life in the cult of The Way International, one I experienced in a similar way. It wasn't until after escaping Way HQ and getting my hair cut by a "Way outsider" woman did I do anything about a spot on my forehead that I was still waiting for God to heal after many years. The woman suggested I see a dermatologist. I did. Turned out I had basel cell carcinoma that had spread underneath the surface of my skin. I had surgery, thank goodness. One line of the scar extends across the top of my eyebrow and the other part of the scar goes from there up to my hairline. I paid a heavy cost for staying in denial about what my body needed, hoping for healing that in The Way I would've been told I "wasn't strong enough to believe to get."
I mention this incident in the Afterword of my memoir, Undertow: My Escape from the Funamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International.
Thank you for your bravery in writing these blog posts. They are very valuable in showing outsiders the damage caused by extreme beliefs and cult control.