**Lots of trigger warnings, be warned. I have a lot to get off of my chest.**
Well, I'm new to this forum and have come here in the hopes of working through some things that have been haunting me for the past five years after finally leaving years of emotional abuse, gaslighting, financial and emotional slavery, and struggling with forgiving the unforgivable and trying to move on with my life and being unable to freely do so.
So here's the back story.
I followed my parents to my current city to help a starter non-denominational Christian church get on its feet after a few years of the Pastors (husband and wife team) burning out their children and other helpers trying to get the church established and growing. It all started as a very reasonable premise, my parents moved there to be associate pastors and since the head pastor had his real estate license, used him to find their house. I became the worship leader and was tutored by the pastor's wife. Once settled in and working full-time for the church for free and tithing exactly what the pastor needed to pay his bills, we were subjected to intense micro-management, and attended constant meetings to improve our progress: constantly berated for not doing enough, what we needed to be doing to be better servants and how we could never live up to the expectations and requirements of our responsibilities. I've honestly blocked out most of the details to the point of it all being a giant freakish horrific blur of shame and fear, of not being able to make decisions for our own lives, having outside influences pushed out of our lives so we no longer had any sense of what was reasonable or normal. Pastor turns out to be a bipolar narcissistic control freak who has to publicly humiliate all who dare to not agree 100% with his deranged ramblings and who had to fight and win every conversation and argument at all costs. His wife, bitter, controlling, and a spiteful blamer who would crack her face into a fierce smile and lie through her teeth to get you to agree with her and do anything for her. Lovely people. She decided she hated people in general and couldn't stand her life so she divorced her husband and took as many people with her out of the church as she could, just to ruin him. She was so confident the church would collapse without her devotion and constant vigilance. I took up her slack in making sure everything she had taken care of for the basic weekly functions of the church were maintained, and the handful of people still attending the church still showed up regularly. My Dad became the pastor's only 'true friend and solace" in his grief from the divorce, and his engineering income financed the church to make up for the dip in tithes from those who left with the pastor's divorced wife.
My dad was completely wrapped around the pastor's little finger, even to the point of admitting to me that he was trying to get my dad to divorce my mom so that my dad would really understand his grief. There's gaps in my memory, and I'm unsure of whether this was before or after my dad had his thyroidectomy which he never properly recovered from. He was eventually found to be mentally retarded and fired from his great-paying engineering job that was financing the church. The church folded, the Pastor bled my father completely dry financially to the point of not being able to care for my ailing mother driven mad and suffering from early onset Alzheimer's.
Both my parents are still alive, but I've lost them forever and will never get them back. My dad is living in an apartment next to the facility where my mother is being cared for. They're both on disability and are essentially wards of the state of our birth, where at least they have siblings with stability to help out. I'm half a country away, still living in the town next to where this all took place, suffering from chronic pain and working daily just to pay my mortgage. Pastor's ex wife remarried and is playing a large role in the church their eldest daughter established in another town five hours away, and Pastor found himself some poor woman to marry and get his feet back under him again before skipping town. I don't know where he is, but he still owes my dad thousands of dollars he took as a personal loan.
But I've been trying to forgive and move on. Churches trigger me into panic attacks, as does driving around the small town where this all went down. I'm grateful for the disk disease and chronic pain because it cut straight through the bs and opened my eyes to just how toxic this all was and I got out. Unfortunately it took over a year before my parents finally took my warnings to heart and left the church, but wouldn't cut the Pastor out of their lives. He literally bled them dry and moved on to the next resource/victim.
To be honest I'm not sure where to go from here. I've been feasting on psychology for closure, and to better understand how a human being can blind themselves to how evil they are and do such ruinous things to so many people.
I want to heal. I want to thrive. I want to not get filled with the dread of guilt at the thought of Mother's day or my Dad's birthday and I'm so far away and at my wit's end trying to survive that I'm no help whatsoever.
I'm burned out and so tired of being trapped by all of this.
Well, I'm new to this forum and have come here in the hopes of working through some things that have been haunting me for the past five years after finally leaving years of emotional abuse, gaslighting, financial and emotional slavery, and struggling with forgiving the unforgivable and trying to move on with my life and being unable to freely do so.
So here's the back story.
I followed my parents to my current city to help a starter non-denominational Christian church get on its feet after a few years of the Pastors (husband and wife team) burning out their children and other helpers trying to get the church established and growing. It all started as a very reasonable premise, my parents moved there to be associate pastors and since the head pastor had his real estate license, used him to find their house. I became the worship leader and was tutored by the pastor's wife. Once settled in and working full-time for the church for free and tithing exactly what the pastor needed to pay his bills, we were subjected to intense micro-management, and attended constant meetings to improve our progress: constantly berated for not doing enough, what we needed to be doing to be better servants and how we could never live up to the expectations and requirements of our responsibilities. I've honestly blocked out most of the details to the point of it all being a giant freakish horrific blur of shame and fear, of not being able to make decisions for our own lives, having outside influences pushed out of our lives so we no longer had any sense of what was reasonable or normal. Pastor turns out to be a bipolar narcissistic control freak who has to publicly humiliate all who dare to not agree 100% with his deranged ramblings and who had to fight and win every conversation and argument at all costs. His wife, bitter, controlling, and a spiteful blamer who would crack her face into a fierce smile and lie through her teeth to get you to agree with her and do anything for her. Lovely people. She decided she hated people in general and couldn't stand her life so she divorced her husband and took as many people with her out of the church as she could, just to ruin him. She was so confident the church would collapse without her devotion and constant vigilance. I took up her slack in making sure everything she had taken care of for the basic weekly functions of the church were maintained, and the handful of people still attending the church still showed up regularly. My Dad became the pastor's only 'true friend and solace" in his grief from the divorce, and his engineering income financed the church to make up for the dip in tithes from those who left with the pastor's divorced wife.
My dad was completely wrapped around the pastor's little finger, even to the point of admitting to me that he was trying to get my dad to divorce my mom so that my dad would really understand his grief. There's gaps in my memory, and I'm unsure of whether this was before or after my dad had his thyroidectomy which he never properly recovered from. He was eventually found to be mentally retarded and fired from his great-paying engineering job that was financing the church. The church folded, the Pastor bled my father completely dry financially to the point of not being able to care for my ailing mother driven mad and suffering from early onset Alzheimer's.
Both my parents are still alive, but I've lost them forever and will never get them back. My dad is living in an apartment next to the facility where my mother is being cared for. They're both on disability and are essentially wards of the state of our birth, where at least they have siblings with stability to help out. I'm half a country away, still living in the town next to where this all took place, suffering from chronic pain and working daily just to pay my mortgage. Pastor's ex wife remarried and is playing a large role in the church their eldest daughter established in another town five hours away, and Pastor found himself some poor woman to marry and get his feet back under him again before skipping town. I don't know where he is, but he still owes my dad thousands of dollars he took as a personal loan.
But I've been trying to forgive and move on. Churches trigger me into panic attacks, as does driving around the small town where this all went down. I'm grateful for the disk disease and chronic pain because it cut straight through the bs and opened my eyes to just how toxic this all was and I got out. Unfortunately it took over a year before my parents finally took my warnings to heart and left the church, but wouldn't cut the Pastor out of their lives. He literally bled them dry and moved on to the next resource/victim.
To be honest I'm not sure where to go from here. I've been feasting on psychology for closure, and to better understand how a human being can blind themselves to how evil they are and do such ruinous things to so many people.
I want to heal. I want to thrive. I want to not get filled with the dread of guilt at the thought of Mother's day or my Dad's birthday and I'm so far away and at my wit's end trying to survive that I'm no help whatsoever.
I'm burned out and so tired of being trapped by all of this.