Skip to main content

A letter to my children: Emma, who is 27 years old and Dustin, who is 24 years old

By Dorothy Husen, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: submitted by Karen Garst ~

Dear Emma & Dustin,

These are my greatest hopes and desires for you today as I write this letter:
             For you to love and accept yourselves;
             For you to feel comfortable with who you are; and
             For you to trust your intuition to be your inner guide through life.

            These desires are quite different from when I was a Christian.
           
When I was your Christian mom, my greatest desires for you were:
                          For you to recognize your need for God;
                          For you to believe in Jesus to save you from hell; and
                          For you to find your purpose and guidance through faith in Christ.

I don’t think that any of these desires has anything to do with my love for you. I love you now and I loved you then. What HAS changed is my love for myself.

Over the last six years, I’ve been healing in therapy from my childhood trauma of emotional and sexual abuse and at the same time I’ve been deconverting from Christianity to Atheism.

I know you’ve felt the change. Both of you have mentioned it to me. 😉

Remember in the movie, The Matrix, when Neo was given a choice to either take the red pill and awaken to the reality of how his brain was being hijacked? Or he could take the blue pill to remain in the fake dream world of the matrix?

Six years ago my therapist held out a red pill to me. If I chose to take it, I would awaken to the reality of my childhood experiences and face my fears. If I choose the blue pill, I would retreat back to where I had been living for the past 25 years…into the Jesus Wonderland Matrix.

I chose the red pill. Guess what I found? …the truth has set me free. [ok I’ll concede the bible has some gems of wisdom].

So you might be asking why this is important for you? I hope that when you read some of my story, you will come to understand yourselves better.

I know that you both struggle with hearing critical and insecure voices in your head.  Let me tell you where those voices come from. Those critical voices come from me [and your traumatized dad]. We put those in your head when you were little because at that time we believed that at your core, you were sinful, bad, and rebellious. We were so WRONG.  You were normal good kids.

Where did this wrong belief come from you might ask. Well, partly these critical voices were put into our heads from our parents. And partly from our Christian belief in original sin. Here’s a little formula to remember…

Childhood Trauma + Christian Faith = Parents who pass on their trauma unto their children, from generation to generation to generation. [From grandma and grandpa to mom and dad to Emma and Dustin].

You see, that shame that I felt from my childhood, I misunderstood as sin. For most of my life I felt bad, perverted, sinful, scared, anxious, empty and unworthy of love because of the shame that I carried within me from sexual abuse when I was a child.

Christianity taught me how to manage those bad feelings through spiritual practices like praying and reading my bible. The bible taught me to deny myself [and my past], pick up my cross, and follow Jesus. I also prayed A LOT as a way to escape the pain of inadequacy that I felt. Remember how I used to sleep a lot and take a lot of naps? Yup, I know we reframed it as a family quirk, but this was another way I escaped.

These icky feelings increased over time so that by the time you were children, I was expending alot of energy managing these yucky feelings. I had PTSD but misdiagnosed it and misinterpreted it as my wicked, sinful, warped, evil nature.

The only coping tools I had were my spiritual practices of prayer, bible study, and church which at least helped me feel good about myself some of the time. As you can see, this didn’t leave much energy for being your mom. So you naturally felt insecure, confused, and alone.

The ONLY solution that I knew of was for you to take the blue pill. Your dad and I were both living in the Jesus wonderland of the matrix desperately pulling at you and screaming at you, “Take the blue pill!, PLEASE take the blue pill!”

You forced us to step out of the matrix once in a while [just by being normal kids], but we really did not like stepping out.  So we yelled at you and argued with you and became very angry with you. We felt hurt that you didn’t want to join us. This was not your fault even though we made you feel like it was your fault. It wasn’t.

But because we had the advantage of being your parents, we used every parental trick we could think of to get you to join us into the Jesus Wonderland matrix.

We used our whole arsenal of spiritual weapons…

 We prayed, we recruited our family’s prayers, we dragged you to church, we forced you to go to Christian youth camp,  we sent you to Christian counselors, we sent you to Christian behavioral modification programs, we shamed you, we sent you into therapy [not us, just you]…

Emma and Dustin, I am so so sorry. It was I who was broken and needed help, not you. I know your dad feels the same. Does this help you to understand yourselves better? I hope so.

I can see you clearly now the pain of the past is gone.

I can love you for who you are because I can love myself.

I can accept you because I can accept myself.

I’d like to leave you with some things I know for sure…(yeah, I know this is an Oprah interview question)…

~Love covers over a multitude of fear.
~You and I are good enough just the way we are.
~All life here on earth IS the miracle, so Live YOUR Life and BE the miracle.
~Human beings are born good.
~Choosing the red pill was not easy, but it DEFINITELY was worth it!
I love you,
Mom


Dorothy Husen, Guest Author
October 13, 2017
www.dorothyhusen.com and youtube channel
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our
Post a Comment
Read more

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette
Post a Comment
Read more

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo
Post a Comment
Read more

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we
Post a Comment
Read more

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not
Post a Comment
Read more

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro
Post a Comment
Read more