A Note About Spiritual Abuse

Sundays are bittersweet.

While I’ve found my peace and carve the day my way now, usually at home, which is my absolute favorite place

I remember what it was like before, when I woke up, brainwashed, and just did what was expected of me,

which was to dress up and play the pretty, happy, doting, submissive church wife, and accompany my [ex] husband to the morning service, where he schmoozed and pontificated and reconfirmed his reputation as a “Godly man”

so that once again he was deemed fit by the people whose approval his ego required, by the people he fooled,

and was “forgiven” for his “sins” when all he did was show up and convince them he’d never hurt a soul, that he was so funny and smart and charming, and worthy of a blind eye,

but yet never truly humbled himself, or offered authentic repentance, or saw error and wrongdoing in his weekday ways,

or was honest about the fact that he so grossly and so consistently abused his own wife and failed as a father.

Yes, Sundays used to be tough.

Even before I woke to the abuse — then leaving the marriage and the church at the same time — I carried a deep discomfort with the way things were. I didn’t understand until some time later.

Now I see that his organized religion was perfect in its quiet commitment to look the other way, celebrate the manipulated and superficial, and enable abuse by the chameleons like him.

So now, when Sunday dawns, I relish my peace and awareness. My life as I’ve made it, in my own terms.

But I also think about the women still living the life I used to

stuck in the brainwashed and continually-excused cycle of spiritual and domestic abuse.