Again, wow! Thank you all for your kind words you sent me after I shared about losing my horse in the last email, “Saying Goodbye”. I am truly thankful for this community. To share these raw unfiltered moments has been scary, but so good. It feels odd to share and actually be heard by people. So thank you again!

I've had so many people ask me to keep sharing my story and I've been trying to figure out how to share in a way that can fit in an email. Maybe that book will come someday :).

I said I would probably share more on spiritual abuse this month, since January is Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month.

I don't post of FaceBook anymore, but I've kept Instagram, because I'm following some really great people and hashtags that have been sharing some great information on abuse, recovering from abuse, boundaries, and tips on moving forward in life after abuse.

It's made this journey so much less lonely and given me so many resources to help me keep moving forward on my path of healing from all the harm.

As I was writing this post today and trying to describe spiritual abuse, I stumbled on another great post and it resonated so much with my own story, so I thought I'd just share it (click the link):

DEFINING SPIRITUAL ABUSE

“It took me a lot of years (and counseling) to untangle who God actually is from who I'd been told He is. It's been an exhausting process of deconstructing lies and reconstructing with truth.” ~ Micah Renck

This excerpt from it really helps explain why this is such a damaging form of abuse. People that tell me, “Just read the Bible. Just drown yourself in the Word.” More than likely have no idea how the Bible was used as a weapon to harm me and control me.

I didn't trust reading the bible again for years, after starting to take steps away from the lies I had been indoctrinated with for so much of my life. Those verses had all been weaponized to control me, using shame, guilt, fear, condemnation, and more as the motivations to keep me operating a certain way.

I couldn't read the Bible without feeling all of that come flooding back and go back to struggling with the lies I had been raised to believe.

Those daily evening bible readings as a family were the dreaded moments of my day as a child…bracing through the whole time and waiting to hear how those verses would be used to fear, shame, or guilt me into the next way I was expected to operate.

I wasn't taught to study the Bible. I learned to read the Bible through a filter of the ideology I was raised in and operated under. An ideology that used fear and shame as the primary motivation for change. To question that ideology was to be “lacking in faith” or “to have a spirit of rebellion”.

People that say, “Only read the Bible! I don't think it's wise to read any other books, go to counseling, or to listen to anyone else outside of the Bible.” Don't understand that they are unknowingly telling someone who has been spiritual abused to NOT seek help and Truth. The Bible was twisted for years to push an ideology.

A person that is being spiritually abused, or trying to get out, only gets more harm from reading the Bible, so if that's the only option, many will walk away entirely and miss out on who God really is.

It took some really good people in my life (Caleb is one of them) to help me start separating the lies from the truth. It took some really good books in my life, to help me understand what was really going on and how unhealthy and dangerous it really was. To show me that:

God is a God that exhibits the Fruits of the Spirit and if something doesn't align to the Fruits of the Spirit, it doesn't align to God.

I am forever thankful for those good people to speak up or write on this. I know far too many people that have been broken and hurt by religion. It is horribly ignored by far too many people who claim to be “following Christ”.

To stay silent over this is to side with the abuse. Jesus certainly wasn't silent when He flipped the tables on those exploiting His people.

This is why I speak up. This is why I share my story and the story of Micah. I want to give hope to the hopeless. I want to be the person that I needed when I was still operating under the heavy bondage of fear and shame.

On a final note, I have been using Instagram as a place to journal through video clips here and there, since email still doesn't have that option. I posted the below video with a song that most wouldn't have picked, but if you listen to it with this email in mind…it'll make sense. :)