nausea. Bile rose in my throat. Just thinking about church makes me want to puke. As my friend wrote, “…the narcissist’s use of God…[is almost] enough to make you an atheist.”
Darn straight! And yet, even though narcissists have created a hateful, judgmental idol of God in their image, many of us, by some miracle, still cling to it, the rock of the ages, like a free climber clinging to a bruised and bruised cliff. Bloody nails.
We lost everything and said goodbye to everyone. For many of us, despite everything, it is our last and best hope.
#Evil Network
This article has been a long time coming. I brought this up a year ago in a very popular article, When a Narcissist “Gets Debt,” You Fail!
As you may recall, my recent studies have convinced me that narcissistic dynamics and cult dynamics are largely identical. Scratch a cult and you will find a narcissistic leader.
So, at 1 a.m. this morning, I lay in bed with a snoring husband, two dogs, buttered toast, and the book, Web of Evil: A True Story of Cult Abuse and Courage by Mary Rich and Carol José. I spent the next three hours reading, crying, and physically bashing back and forth in an agonizing tug of war between shock (“Oh my God! Some of that mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse in the Evil Web was committed in my own home… to me!”) and denial (“No. Alice!” This is normal!? It seems normal to me. This is just a normal Christian family, right!?
Related: 8 Tiny Signs A Narcissist Has You In Their Deadly Grips
#backstory
I was born into a very religious, insular, orthodox Protestant home, as you already know. I got my first (light) spanking at six months old. After all, as they were fond of snarling, “You were a sinner from birth.”
Just like the abused children in the movie Evil Web, when I was three years old, I was “perfect,” sitting still and quiet in public while other children ran and screamed and played. At the age of three, I also prayed to invite Jesus into my heart, whatever adults meant by that. It’s one of my only early memories.
At the age of six, I entered a strict Baptist school that practiced corporal punishment.
Visiting preachers were dripping in sweat, pounding the pulpit, yelling, and screaming at students at weekly church services. Bible studies were daily (and boring!) and Bible assignments were plentiful (and boring!).
Writing biblical verses was used fifty or a hundred times as punishment. Chastity was taught, while, behind the scenes, the fact that some teachers were raping students was swept under the rug.
#At 14, I wondered “why”
Why was the family Protestant Christian rather than Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, or one of the many other religions?
It was an honest and innocent question. It was also the day that devastated me by saying, “We knew this day would come.” When I had an innocent question, they injected doubt. Suddenly, the sky became unreachable.
From then on, I felt like the infidel Lenora, the hell-bound Lenora. They condescended to me by euphemistically describing my “spiritual condition,” preaching, lecturing, and talking to me for hours, sometimes with tears, sometimes with anger. They preached: “All your good deeds are as dirty as used menstrual clothes.” (Isaiah 64:6)
They gave me reading assignments during the summer vacation: the Bible and books on apologetics. During six hours of daily secluded study, which they called “home school,” I had to memorize long passages of Scripture and many hymn passages in addition to studying Greek and Hebrew.
They gave me a two-page list of things I had to believe to sincerely pray the prayer of salvation to be born again. It was overwhelming.
Since then, they have aggressively tried to save my eternal soul while also accusing me of being obsessed with witches and subjecting them to demonic attacks. They picture me guilty of every vice from disrespect and rebelling against them (never!) to porn addiction (um, no!) to “buying sex” (what?!?).
Sunday church always brought on tension headaches, and they refused to relieve them with any medication until I was in pain. And I believed them, and I felt myself as the worst of all, knowing that I was destined to spend eternity in hell.
Related: 11 Ways Narcissists Use Shame To Control You
#She tried and tried and tried and then she died
Believing that guilt would lead me to repent of my sins (and the pride of which I was often accused), I mentally tortured myself, ruining years of my life by mentally beating myself up. It has become a mental habit from dawn to dusk. Oh, how desperately and unsuccessfully I tried to feel the “divine sorrow that leads to repentance” and the faith to pray that prayer.
I attended churches. Boy, did I attend, participate, serve, and even sing in church choirs! Free Evangelicalism. Baptist (where she was baptized by a creepy maid after another desperate prayer of salvation, providing a cover for the Bible). Catholic. Messianic Pentecostal Jews (they had the best music!). I remember running out of the Anglican service and bursting into tears in my car. I read the Bhagavad Gita and the Quran.
It was all in vain. I could not reach this feverish degree of religiosity to push me into the kingdom. At twenty-five, the same family member who had destroyed me at fourteen took me aside and said, “A Christian cannot act the way you act.”
My crime: ballroom dancing lessons with an instructor who was good at getting over the feeling now and then. My attackers said I was “buying sex.”
That’s when I gave up.
correct. I gave up, accepting that a fiery eternity in hell was my final destination. While others, like my family, succeeded in reaching heaven, I failed. My strength has been drained. I could not repent my sin enough. And I couldn’t feel enough faith (or love or joy or much of anything except sadness and fatigue, thanks to PTSD).
I gave up. But I was hoping against hope that God had not abandoned me. I clung to my faith in him. I prayed often and spoke to Him as if He were a Father, a Father who despised my sinful and unrepentant inward parts.
I have been told that God hears, but He does not listen to those who are not His children. All I know is that he was deaf to my cries.
Except for one thing. All my prayers were answered, even the silly ones.
#When the family is a cult
I don’t usually cry when I write Narcissism Meets Normalcy, but I did today. Guttural sobs because I suddenly saw that! The Big Picture.
Just a few weeks ago, in a moment of pure agony, I cried out, “God hates my guts!” My boastful husband replied, “No, he doesn’t!” But, but, but… They pointed, taught, preached, and shouted that God hates proud sinners like me. Of course, he hates me too! Or is it?
The narcissist who rattles off the Bible (or any other religious book) uses it as a weapon to destroy others so he can climb on their corpses to lift themselves. Oh, what could be better? Surely the best, coolest, brightest boost to their ego is to be bound to heaven while convincing and judging others that they are bound to hell.
What could be more ego-boosting than to be the one who speaks for God, who wears His mantle and exercises His judgment? A nice side benefit to religious narcissism is that you can get these persecuted sinners to do anything and everything for you by citing “the will of God” and being “servant-hearted.”
