Thoughts After Restore 2022

A couple weekends ago, I attended the second day of the Restore Conference outside of Chicago. I hadn’t really planned to go until I heard that some friends from Tears of Eden were attending, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see them as they’ve been an important part of my healing this past year.

I will be honest: I was nervous about the conference though. I recognized many of the names on the speaker list, which told me that the conference would address spiritual abuse and other abuse in the Christian church, topics I’ve been researching and writing about for a few years now. But the tagline—“A Conference Restoring Faith in God and the Church”—didn’t quite resonate with me and my own journey after abuse…

Spiritual Abuse in the Christian Patriarchy Movement

When I was asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say, “I’m going to be a stay-at-home wife and mother.” This wasn’t what I really wanted to be, but I believed that it was my destiny and that I had no other option.

As I got older, I was trained for this future, and I was told that after I graduated high school, I would stay in my parents’ home as a stay-at-home daughter until I got married. All my friends from church were given the same expectations. This was the norm in the Christian patriarchy movement.

Daughters were treated differently from sons because we were helpers in training. We were supposed to be dependent on men, protected by men. Any independence of thought or action was shut down . . .

November Update

When I was little, I used to fold pieces of printer paper, staple them together, and write “nature books” in the pages. I loved watching Reading Rainbow because I could learn about new books to borrow from the library. I couldn’t wait till bedtime when my mom read me stories before I fell asleep. In short, I’ve always been obsessed about reading and writing and stories, so it’s probably no surprise that I now work in publishing and spend much of my spare time reading and writing.

For the past few years, I’ve been working on creative nonfiction essays, threads of my life in the Christian patriarchy movement as a stay-at-home daughter. And now I’m starting to weave these threads together into a memoir. It’s not finished quite yet, but I’m getting close. I can feel it coming together. Finally.

Which brings me to some exciting news . . .