Concerning Shiny Happy People, Two Weeks Later

I started watching the Amazon docuseries about the Duggar Family entitled Shiny Happy People two weeks ago today. 

I could not get through the second episode in one sitting, wept, and had to come bad to it the next day. I then spent the better part of the next two days bursting into tears multiple times, and I could barely function because of it. 

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The First Step Towards Understanding Jill and Jessa Duggar’s Fox Interview: Second Generation Adults in Cultic/High Demand Religion

Originally published 07Jun2015

A host of resources exist exploring the characteristics of the subculture of the Quiverfull Movement (which is often synonymous with Patriarchy within evangelical Christian homeschooling circles).  As the new generation that this movement produced finds their voice, there appears to be little information about the process of how this group in particular has affected the development of the now adult “arrows” of their parents’ quivers , especially for those who remain within their religious culture of origin.

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Trauma: Where it Begins and Where it Can End

Every few months, I read an online discussion that argues that when a person gets out of a traumatic relationship (especially a religious one), there are no guidelines on how to recover. While on one hand, that's true – because we all recover on our on timetable and in our own ways – trauma symptoms that cause problems in your life beyond about six months following the event aren't healthy.

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A Model of Self: Retracing My History and Healing

As part of my own pendulum swing of life extremes, I ended up in Quiverfull (QF) as an adult, though I never experienced the fullness of it. As Julie Anne Smith said to me recently, I didn't suffer the same kind of abuse as QF moms or their children, but I was also a victim of the system's cruelty. On top of my own natural grief and despite the experience of a degree of rejection by both peer groups of QF moms and their homeschooled kids, I did suffer my own heartache.

I participated in a panel discussing the challenges faced by Second Generation Adults (SGAs – those who are now adults but grew up in high demand religion and/or families that they perceived as spiritually abusive). I constructed a visual model to help me describe my experience. I borrowed some graphics that I used to help describe my healing experience, and I'll add a few that I didn't get to use.

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Reacting from a Place of Vulnerability: Adventures in Ambiguity IX

Before developing as fairly functional internal locus of control and as strong sense of worth, and until former members work through how to relate to others with both good internal and external boundaries, things can be very difficult for them. There's so much to do immediately.

The insecure person tries to build a network of safe friends who can relate to them and hae their best interests at heart. This is healthy in the beginning of recovery, but after some time has passed, it becomes self-defeating and inhibits recovery and growth. Some fall into the trap of surrounding themselves with people who are more comfortable for them and go to great, unhealthy lengths to isolate themselves from people who challenge them. They work hard to have as much control over their external life as they can. No conflict means no struggle which translates into peace and self-worth for them.

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Hypervigiance in the Wider World: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part VIII)

High demand groups manage tension and pain which arise from natural and healthy disagreements and differences by forcing uniformity. Again, we come back to the fact of life that we human beings are very dynamic and diverse, something that a group purports to “correct” for the member, giving the illusion that they've resolved that healthy tension. Anyone who espouses beliefs that are different from the group are discounted or demonized which further galvanizes the control that they hold over a member. In doing so, they force and reinforce the idea that the wider world outside of the group is very unsafe.

So what happens when a person exits a group? They lose their support systems (family and those associated with the group), they are in a state of hypervigilance because of the trauma of burying their identity, their critical thinking skills have been lulled to sleep in order to survive in the group which does their thinking for them, and the group has alienated them from their own autonomy. For those who have grown up in the group, they may never have experienced autonomy. There is no switch to flip that causes a person to reset and reboot. Whether they like it or not and on top of having to learn how to deal with the realities of life outside of their group, they find themselves saddled with a tremendous amount of personal development to do as they recover from their experience.

Developing Healthy Tolerance

As noted in the previous post, individuals need to find a place of dynamic balance concerning power as they learn where and how they fit into the world. High demand groups force extremism on the member, so as the individual recovers after exiting, but the unspoken rules of how to live in balance differ greatly from those that the former member lived out in the group. The group's allegedly protective rules for enforced uniformity and tightly controlled milieu of communication and experience exemplify an external locus of control.

In the wider world, life is full of ambiguity and diversity, but the rules for coping with the natural and healthy tension that arises from these contrasts prove to be much different. Remember that groups employ control and chaos, but in the wider world, tension and diversity drive personal growth. The world is not a fair place and can be dangerous, but the ideas about it and the ways that members cope with threat while in a group don't work well in life outside of their group. Former members have been isolated from or were never taught the two primary, healthy means of coping with interpersonal diversity: boundaries and locus of control.

Protective Boundaries and Locus of Control

To give a picture to boundaries, imagine that your own sense of worth is a sphere. In a “good enough” family or group, your heart is full and you have all of the confidence and personal sense of peace that you need to live a happy, healthy adult life. Boundaries come along with that to help you weather difficulties in life over which you have no control. You have the power to choose what you leave into your heart and mind (an external boundary), and you have control over what you choose to say and do when with and communicating with other people (an internal boundary). 

Pia Mellody describes boundaries using the image of the starting posture in Tai Chi. One hand is extended forward (filtering out threats and danger), and the other hand is placed on the chest (expressing the power and discipline of self-containment) as noted on this book cover. Some of the descriptions of Tai Chi posture found here are lovely when considering the task of affirming self.

When your understand self worth and acceptance of the diversity as something good that is not an automatic threat (an element of an external boundary), and when this works in concert with balance of focus on those things which are squarely in your own power (internal locus of control), diversity no longer seems like a threat. Both of these concepts and attitudes about self create a sense of safety and strength.

Life on the Outside without Healthy Boundaries and an Internal Locus

Imagine that all you know about how to get along with others came from an unhealthy, manipulative, high demand group. The boundaries that you have are weak at best, and you've learned to earn your worth through performance. Peace and safety are vested outside of yourself, and you have no barriers to protect you from an unfamiliar world. You know conformity, and while you know how painfully difficult it feels to fit into a demeaning box that doesn't accommodate you, uniformity makes things much easier. And you need something that's a bit easy when you have so many other pressures that push and pull you. You've got plenty about which to feel angry and uncomfortable, and you are in the throws of learning what you should have learned when you were a child. You're tired, frustrated, and everything feels different to you. Diversity feels painful.

Without any protection, diversity and freedom feel good to you to experience, but when faced with the consequences or the ideas of others who are different from you as they freely express themselves, they feel like a threat. Most of what you know from your experience involves a code of conformity which served to protect you. You don't know how to filter out things that might feel painful to you. You've had little experience with thinking outside of a black and white style, though you understand all too painfully how it can hurt when directed at you. And when threatened, you will very likely go back into the default mode of experience – and that which you saw modeled for you. It takes time and energy to learn other ways of doing things, and your world was kept intentionally small.

And though you may have internal boundaries that are quite strong in terms of practice because you had to conform to a rigid standard of behavior, in other areas of life, it can be difficult to use the same constraint when you feel as though you've been targeted and attacked. Trauma, pain, and inexperience make us less resilient emotionally, especially when we are juggling so many new things and ideas, along with the struggles of life which are generally plenty. What do you do when you feel wounded and overwhelmed in your effort to regain a sense of safety and peace when you lack so much emotional self-regulation?

Read more about boundaries HERE.

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Finding a Healthy Locus of Control: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part VII)

We've already noted that a person's concept of self suffers while in a high demand group or family, since the member's sense of worth must be derived from the group. Though they may appear to have autonomy, their choices are bound and limited to that which is determined by the group.

Our sense of worth and our sense of personal power come together and support one another as we move away from following the “path of least resistance” dynamics that we lived and saw modeled in the group, but the group's way of doing things was not healthy. We want to avoid the pitfalls of power, but we also don't wish to hand our autonomy over to some new master – like switching drugs of choice.

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Building on Emotional Self-Regulation: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part VI)

In the previous post, we explored the challenge of developing a healthy sense of personal power that we encounter when we exit a high demand group. How on earth can we get through life with a faulty set of coping tools, where do we go to learn them, and how can we figure out how to be balanced when all we've seen modeled for us is extremes of power and of emotion?

This topic is a huge one, but a person can do a lot of good work on their own to develop healthy Emotional Self-Regulation after exiting.

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Pitfalls in Personal Power: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part V)

In the previous post, we explored a couple of ways a person can work on their own to develop better Emotional Self-Regulation after exiting or after growing up in a high demand group. Healthy internal dialogue and building self concept provide individuals with a good opportunity to do a great deal of healing and growth on their own.

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The Map is Not the Territory: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part IV)

And the territory is definitely not the map.  

This saying came from a scientist and philosopher named Alfred Korzybski who launched the study of how human understanding and the nervous system intersected, particularly concerning how language shapes our perceptions. He was a Polish-born Russian who served in World War I as an intelligence officer, but he became a citizen of the U.S. In 1940.

The original phrase that Korzybski coined in 1933 illustrates the problem of mistaking an abstraction of something for the genuine article. Another wise friend in the discussion where I first learned of this phenomenon pointed out that this is actually an informal logical fallacy called reification or concretism, a subset of fallacies in thinking that fall under ambiguity.

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Self-Regulation? What? How?: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part III)

How can I possibly know anything about emotional self-regulation? I was faced and am often still faced with the quandary of growing up without it, not really knowing that I lacked it, and then trying to figure out how to develop it. And though trauma therapy helped me make great strides to develop it, I still have my days...

The process works out differently for everyone, and some people have less difficulty than others.  This represents what I experienced in my journey thus far.

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Emotional Self-Regulation: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part II)

In the previous post, we explored the problem created by the black and white thinking that was forced upon us in a high demand religious group. This is especially difficult if we grew up in an ideological group, because we likely didn't see anyone model moderation or another way of thinking. We end up adopting the strategy that if one thing is bad and unsafe, it's extreme opposite is likely the best safe alternative.

High demand groups don't tolerate uniqueness, and they make the mistake of defining uniformity as a type of unity. They don't tolerate much of anything that falls outside whatever their group defines as appropriate under their black and white rules. When we exit such a world of black and white thinking, we can't just flip a switch to make ourselves more tolerant, putting to rest the impulse to think in black and white. We have to go through the hard work of critical thinking first as we get some experience being flexible.

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Black and White Thinking after Exiting: Adventures in Ambiguity (Part I)

I spent much time studying chemistry, thinking about the Bohr Model of the Atom, and I was so fascinated by the periodic table.  I suppose that along with math, it seemed like one of the few consistent things in my life.  Language could be misinterpreted, but chemistry presented a fixed, definitive type of truth.  And I lacked that in my life.


How can something be true and untrue at the same time?

Then I bolt off to college at sixteen, still very young and desperately searching for consistency in life.  I didn't know who I was, really, but I could learn about reality around me.  Well, imagine my dismay when my freshman chemistry professor says, "The Bohr atom isn't really real.  It's only a theory."  The nice and neat picture in my head of electron shells that encircle an atom were merely a statistical means of representing how matter behaves, but it is all theoretical.  It's based on quantum theory, yet another theoretical science.
  I want my Bohr atom dream back!

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Affects of Stress on the Body and "Multigenerational Faithfulness" in Quiverfull Families

During the interim while waiting on the continued discussion of Cynthia Jeub's blog posts about the inconsistencies she experienced in her TLC celebrity family, enjoy a graphic about how stress affects the body.
  
Let it be another good motivator to work through the negative and costly aspects of true "multigenerational faithfulness."  It might be better termed "parental convenience" for which adult children raised in the high demand system pay a terribly high price.

Idealization often occurs in families that are very religious, especially in those kinds of religious homes that draw very strict boundaries to define acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and behaviors.

The high value that is placed on family, and on respect for parents, makes it almost impossible for children to integrate their parents’ failings and weaknesses... 

Adult children who have practiced this degree of splitting and idealization tend to be driven by fear. 

Dr. David Stoop

 Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves:

Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families

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Are You a Mom Who is Triggered by Cynthia Jeub's Blog? Finding Healing Part I

(TRIGGER ALERT!)

At the age of forty eight, I find myself in an interesting place concerning the discussion of the Evangelical Christian homeschooling movement. While I'm roughly the same age of the first generation parents in the movement's spotlight, I identify most strongly with the Second Generation Adults (SGAs) – the adults who grew up in the quiverfull homeschooling world. Through my childbearing years, I found my social niche with moms who were a decade older than me, and their babies that I once carried around on my hip are now adults. Because I never managed to carry a pregnancy very far before miscarrying, most moms in the movement who were my age held me at arms length, and I was treated as a pariah. Though my experiences classify me as an SGA, because I was neither homeschooled nor had the experience of parenting, I often stand on the outside looking into both groups. My perspective has advantages and disadvantages, but I've been determined to make the best out of both.

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The Smoke and Ash of Melting Memories

What are your earliest memories like? 

I remember some events as what seem like still photographs from when I was very young – like the yellow diaper service pail on the front porch with an embossed stork on it, though the pigment in the pattern had faded. I remember my mother sitting beside my white crib, reading different books to me. Though I could not have had a visit with him after I was three years old, I remember my orthopedist. He had jet black hair and wore a smock like doctors wore in black and white movies. I remember really liking him, but I don't remember talking to him or why I saw him. I remember my grand geek fascination with the magiciadias when Brood X made their seventeen year appearance, just before my fourth birthday. They are pictures in the album of my mind, accompanied only by the sense of joy, excitement, or curiosity that I feel when they're called back into my consciousness. I have to rely on the history that I learned from my family to put those pictures into perspective.

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The Ugly Underbelly of Racism in the Fringe End of Christian Homeschooling: A Call for Personal Accounts

12Feb19 Addendum:  while a good bit of this blog is currently sitting in draft while I wait on a new computer, I’ve restored this post.  Because the Botkin daughters are subject to bounded choice as SGAs, and because they allege that they don’t understand what I’ve termed “Botkin Syndrome” and believe that I’ve exploited their name while accusing their family of a felony, in the spirit of compassion, I wish to edit to remove the moniker.  I claimed it initially as a theological term which their tradition is known to have a terrible habit of themselves, and they claim that it is a diagnosis (that might be found in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual).  An in-depth, four part description of Second Generation Adults (SGA) and bounded choice can be read at Spiritual Sounding Board. 
https://spiritualsoundingboard.com/2014/04/30/lourdes-torres-bounded-choice-pt1/
Though I understand that Homeschoolers Anonymous is now inactive, the cult education effort defines them as SGAs of the Christian homeschooling movement.

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Be a Weed!

Courtesy of Planet Natural, with a hat tip to Gina Catena, a successful, accomplished SGA Extraordinare!

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The New Patriarchs Abandon Patriarchy? Scapegoats and Other Drama

Dangerdust @ Twitter and Etsy

In the wake of the Vision Forum scandal, HSLDA and others abandon the appearance of patriarchy in high demand Christian homeschooling while ignoring the problems in the culture.

Not long after Doug Phillips “resigned” from the now defunct Vision Forum, his cohorts were quick to abandon him. Scott Brown who heads up the Family Integrated Church group quickly denounced Phillips. One almost imagines that some of the big names in this group were thrilled to hear of his failure.

On the heels of Phillips' resignation, Bill Gothard resigned because of more than thirty reports of sexual misconduct as reported by the Recovering Grace community. An article popped up about the poor handling of sex abuse at Patrick Henry College. Other articles (here and here) noted the same issues at Pensacola Christian College. All this took place while GRACE investigated Bob Jones University, was fired, and then was reengaged to complete their review of the claims that the university did not properly handle reports of sexual and physical abuse.  Patriarchy's having one rough year!

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Visit Spiritual Sounding Board for the Latest Discussion of Bounded Choice and the Second Generation Adult

Drop on by at Spiritual Sounding Board for more discussion on the Second Generation Adult (SGA -- the adult child who grew up under a high demand ideological system) and explore the problems that they face when attempting to exit the mindset.  

The adult who signs up for a system or follows a strict paradigm has the benefit of remembering what life outside the group was like for them and can rely on that to help them exit.  The SGA doesn't have that luxury, but they can certainly make up for lost time!

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