Surviving an abusive situation is like: congratulations! You are statistically like a billion times more likely to go through this again now that you’ve survived it once, good luck out there kiddo 😘
Like, maybe you had a parent who put you through hell and you finally get out and get your own apartment and you’re working like crazy trying to get on your feet and stay on your feet in a crashing pandemic economy. Then one day you get told in therapy that actually your lovely new roommate or maybe your manager at the fast food place you work or, god forbid, your new romantic partner is actually putting you through hell too and it’s not just you being crazy or weak, it’s actually abuse and you really should have recognized it because you’ve seen this all before,.....and then you just gotta take that Terrifying information and get back out there and try again and it’s very unfair and abuse has such far reaching impact and if this happened to you like it’s happened to so many people I know, myself included, I’m sorry. 🙁
Me doing ex-cult-member interviews and watching person after person leave Christian cults and get sucked directly into culty woke groups/TERFy groups/political cults:
(Cause cults and abusive groups aren’t that way because of religion, they’re that way because of binary mindset, black and white thinking, low self worth, propaganda and brainwashing techniques, us vs. them/shunning mentality, etc. which can be found in many settings, and which setting appeals to you most is influenced by the things that hurt you or brought you fulfillment in the past. So if you were hurt by christian groups it makes a lot of sense to get recruited by these groups due to their generally opposing stance. Please please please for the love of peas go to therapy. You are good. You deserve to be free.)
I’m mad about the fact that intentions are often so out of sync with actions/results in Christianity, especially in missions.
One example, of many: when I was a missionary, I was really concerned about the fact that 99.9% of the people we were training to be missionaries were Westerners. Since I was in the position to do so, I actively recruited international kids to these programs.
I wanted to fight the racism, the lack of cross-cultural communication, the colonizer/white savior bs. At the time, I believed missionary work was spreading an important, true, urgently needed gospel of hope and healing and good things.
But, at the end of the day, my good intentions sometimes resulted in teenagers from oppressed communities sitting through ‘effective’ photojournalism classes that literally explained how to exploit their own communities for fundraising efforts.
There was an inability to see the harm in the good we thought we were doing, and that’s really fucked up and sad and frustrating to me now.