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Originally Posted by ISeeCrazyPeople
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( I am starting to feel guilt just writing all of this down.. as if admitting I was unhappy is sinful. I know there are people who had it much worse-abuse, poverty, etc.)
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Continued from my previous response to your initial post......
Hold the presses! Take your guilt, box it up, and throw it in the trash can. You are sharing your honest feelings as well as your literal experience growing up. Those are absolutely critical to be able to voice and explain.
I remember one of the young people I knew growing up had to get rid of their "National Geographic World - Kids" magazines because they had the word "World" on the cover and their parents told them "the world is evil". And no......that type of thinking of "throw out that evil scientific/geographic magazine" is not normal Christian....it's fundamentalist, legalist Christian and is damaging to kids. Another poster here has said it well that the local churches take what is lawful and make it sinful. In other words, they take things are are NOT sins....movies, books, sports, smiling, laughter, fun, friends.....and make them sins. But they're not sins at all. And just so ya know -- Jesus got very angry in His day at the people who did that kind of thing. He hates it when people put rules and regulations and commandments and CHAINS on other people in His name that He never put there Himself. But the local church does this all over the place, and causes a lot of damage in the young people that stays with them through adulthood if they don't get help identifying it and discarding it.
I remember going to my first movie as a teenager, one of the most innocuous you could ever hope for, a cartoon I think, and sitting in the theater with my heart pounding out of my chest for how "sinful" it was. Come to find out as an adult that other church kids I grew up with had that same experience, but none of us could talk about it until decades later.
I remember being at a friends house in high school, and these were all the good kids, straight As, honor roll, volunteering, in the band, etc....and it was a group of mixed girls and guys. The parents were around and we were all in the living room just hanging out. Nothing squirrelly was going on.....except for me who was huddled in the corner on the couch worried that I was with a mixed group of friends and getting contaminated by their "worldly" happiness and fun. Yeah, I still get mad about those kinds of things to this day. I feel cheated of a childhood where normal, happy, healthy, non-sinful things were always weighed down and coated with a heavy layer of guilt and accusation.
That's not God, for the record.
And also for the record, this does count as abuse. You said other people had it worse in that they were abused. Well....the local churches fully count as what is known as "an abusive church". There is such a thing called "spiritual abuse", and that's what goes on in the local church. For church kids who grew up in it and didn't know any different, the chances are pretty good that you had repeated spiritually abusive experiences.
So give yourself a break. Not everyone grows up in a group that can pretty reasonably be called a cult. You have some healing to do, and that's very normal.