SHAPED BY SHUNNING
My story of complex PTSD following a stroke in 2016. My life crumbled and changed forever and my goal was to make it FIVE YEARS. I had just turned 60. I am now 65, eligible for Medicare and able to retire. Nothing in my life has been the same and a cross country move to escape the horrific rejection I experienced after my stroke was an attempt at a fresh start and a new life. Sadly, it did not happen that way. I have barely clung to life and five years later, have experienced so much that is surreal that I cannot expect anyone to believe my story. I cannot believe it myself. But I have to share it - even if no one ever reads it. And so this blog is born and will tell my story from May, 2016 to the present.
I am still trying to find a way forward, still craving answers and safety and a new beginning. I am in a wonderful church now, but know few people and no one who I feel safe enough to share my whole story with. I am encouraged and blessed by our pastoral staff, particularly our teaching pastor but I have never met him except in passing, and he is now going on sabbatical. So it seems like a good time for me to pack up and take some extended time to travel (tenting), looking for the help I have sought so desperately. I want to live. I feel like that can only happen if I find l a cave that I can crawl in with my two adorable corgis and live without fear of more pain, more rejection and more shunning.
No one, NO ONE, NO ONE has even a hint of the pain I have experienced; the intensity of it, the unrelenting nature of it and the hours, days, weeks and months I have slept in the woods where no one can hear my screams, and the tears which never, never, never end. Anyone familiar with PTSD at all has at least some grasp of the triggers that bring everything back. The recent death of a police officer who was kind and compassionate to me has thrown me into a tailspin as I am brought back to that horrible, horrible weekened when I was literally thrown out of the church of the police chaplain of his department in West Fargo, ND. He delivered the message with such tenderness, compassion, confusion and obvious pain himself that I will never forget him. I saved two brief voicemail messages that exuded compassion and have often listened to them when I just need to hear a compassionate voice. He died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 40 two weeks ago and I have been heartbroken. I never met him and only spoke with him once. But he was kind, and he told me I'd done nothing wrong and I have clung to the few people in my life who have, like him, shown grace and compassion when the evangelical church wanted nothing to do with me. I am so sad, haven't quit crying for two weeks and decided to start a blog, upong my retirement (5 weeks away) to share my story and try, once again, to impress the need for communication, compassion and grace for the broken. In two churches I experienced bullying and absolute torment, and a third "church" which is closer to a cult, never let me in the door.
I am a person of transparency and integrity and my deepest prayer is that I share my story in detail and honesty, not out of vengeful spite but as a cautionary tale of the destruction of a life that can be caused by a Church with (in some cases) just one person with too much power who is deceptive, manipulative, cunning and whose greatest need is to control.