*TW* understanding the role religious trauma played in our trauma as a whole

[asdis]

Trigger Warning: religious trauma/abuse, mentions of physical/sexual abuse (no details), mention of suicide, fragmented memories

It's getting too hard to ignore the role that religious trauma has played in our trauma as a whole. Specifically, how tied it is to our scattered memories of being trafficked.

This will probably be mostly word vomit. Apologies in advance. We would also like to apologize in advance in case  our story doesn't belong in this sub-board, we know it could have been much worse.

It's always struck us as odd that our family considers themselves christian despite only about a quarter of them engaging in religion. Also that the quarter or so of them that engage in religion are seen as "less safe" for doing so.

It first began bothering us between 8 and 10. At that point we had been through catholic preschool, a baptist headstart, a lutheran pre-k, had been shipped to church with an older neighbor child on a bus (that child's older sibling was involved in our abuse), had been put into the bible trailer/school church program, and had been put into a weekly children's bible study at a baptist church, all due to our parents wanting that for us. They would discourage us from talking to them about religion, we were punished very harshly for doing anything more than practicing assigned bible verses, and at some points for just doing that. We vividly remember how bad the punishment started for accidentally hearing our father pray, though we have no recollection of the punishment itself or what he was saying beforehand. We were maybe 6 or 7. Our sibling was never treated the same way regarding religion, and was involved in significantly less religious things until they chose to be involved. Our mother was also the only parent who would engage with the adults in religious places, although significantly less involved with religion.

We also had consistently negative experiences in religious settings. Authority figures constantly bullying us, physical abuse, being punished for memorizing assigned verses, being used as the "sinners" example constantly despite constant fawning (to be seen as "good/obedient"), generally being held to an impossibly higher standard than our peers.. Then there's the black building. We only really have one memory of it, being taken there by bus for food(?), seeing all the food and being told wee wouldn't get it anymore, and then it stops. We can't remember the other children with us, but it was a small group. We can't remember if it was during preschool or kindergarten/first grade, but the building was about a 5 minute bus-ride from both our preschool and our k/1 elementary school.

We also can't remember more than the bus rides in regard to going to church with a neighbor. We know we went more than once, but our younger sibling was only ever allowed to join us once. Our sibling was allowed to go without us once or twice, after we were stopped from continuing, but it was a different bus and with a different neighbor child and their parent. We don't remember much about the bible trailers other than them being generally awful to us, just a lot of memories of the issues from the "authority figures" sentence. By the age of 6 we were convinced g-d "hated" us; maybe three months after our 6th birthday we began praying to g-d begging to be "buried" or "returned". We never prayed aloud, either. Even when completely alone. We continued to pray about similar things until 13 when we fully gave up.

By the time we were started in the children's bible study, we were extremely distressed by religion yet continued to attend, still fawning. The fawning plus the fear made others see us as both extremely devout and extremely "dirty". Again, we have very limited memories of this time outside of the common themes we experienced in religious spaces. We stayed at the same church for youth group once we got to middle school, and then got shuffled around between 5-6 other youth groups in the area until we finally were allowed to stop attending religious things at 16. We were kicked out of the first youth group after our first suicide attempt and our refusal to "let them mold us" afterwards. We were kicked from every youth group after that as well for various reasons, mostly relating to our mental health history or personal style. We were kicked from one for helping our friend through a panic attack.

We were always able to remember the things that happened during high school time, however, as we've gotten older and stayed away from religion we've been able to remember more. Especially once we left our parents house and were able to stay out of it. Some of the first things we remembered were what we talked about above, but we also started to remember "baptisms" that we never agreed to. There were at least three, two at the same church, and all were violent. One was done by other children/teens that were related to the pastor and owners and at the command of the pastor. We were also sexually harassed by those same peers, some others, and two of them got us a specific "job" in a church play so that they could SA us. There were instances of SA at school that were loosely related to the bible trailers. Around the same time, we had also started to ask our parents about the array of preschool/headstarts we attended, and like they had been doing since kindergarten, the story changed every time we asked. According to them, we either only went to catholic preschool and no other programs or we went to preschool and headstart but none of the other programs were church related. We also began to remember that adults had been involved in our SA, as up to that point we were only aware of cocsa and internet grooming. One of the adults was the older sibling (and his friends) of the neighbor we had gone to church with. Another was father of our other neighbor/childhood friend, who we had already been aware of being involved in/started the cocsa. Our father slipped up once and asked if our grandfather (who lived with us our whole life there) had ever SAed us. And admitted to catching some of the cocsa. And then last year, when we finally escaped our hometown and got a place of our own, memories started coming back that overwhelmingly point to our father and grandfather. There is no doubt that our father was involved, just no way to know how involved. Our mother and grandmother were aware to a degree as well. We don't think we can say anything more about the trafficking memories beyond that police were involved, but never to help.

Add all that in to medical and emotional neglect and constant gaslighting, the rapid switching between absent-parenting and helicopter-parenting, straight-up missing records, and knowledge from recently awakened/returned alters, and the picture is the closest to put-together that it's ever been. The bits of knowledge that we have from these "new" alters gives us some insight as to why our father was so angry at us for hearing him pray and why our family treated us the way they did around/about religion. Since 2017, our hometown has been arresting more and more predators. Multiple distributors have been caught and arrested. Teachers across multiple schools and levels have been fired, as well as certain teachers that moved from our county. The sheriff was raided. The bible trailer no longer exists.

And yet, we still don't really know what happened, what was actually connected, when the abuse shifted to mostly online.. We don't know how much we'll ever be able to handle knowing or get to know. It's hard to heal from something we can't fully understand. All of these pieces individually, we can hold. We don't go straight into denial. We can do some work on them, but it always hits a wall. But when they start fitting themselves together, even loosely, it becomes a struggle to not be consumed by denial. There are some that don't untangle anymore, even when the denial starts to pass. It's confusing. But we can't deny the role that the religious trauma and abuse played, and we can't ignore it anymore. It's lead to some terrifying questions, especially about the nature of our diagnosis, certain alters, and some of the ways our headspace works. The most we can do right now is acknowledge it, but we're hoping that it's enough for a little bit. Because we really don't know what to do with any of this.