Religious Shunning: What it’s been like for me, plus a mammoth compilation of helpful resources

Well, I must have started this post at least a year ago, but I always stop when I get too emotional. So, my apologies if it feels choppy.

I had the text conversation above with a wonderful woman who I’m in the process of befriending. She’s actually the owner of a dog-walking small business. Now, I don’t trust those apps, for a variety of reasons. For example, as one person put it, “If there’s an issue, the company makes the client sign legal docs to not discuss the issue. So if they kill your dog, you can’t tell anyone.” So I met the woman because my turtle needed a pet sitter last November when I went down to the Deep South to bring home the kitten. So one thing led to another, and I told her my life story. Thankfully, my intuition was correct that she was able to receive it.

Now, my family never officially “shunned” me, but my parents refuse to talk to me for what they claim are religious reasons. There are a few reasons my situation is unique. For one, the religious group was intertwined with the problem, but my family was much more toxic than the church. Second, my mother really was just using them. I recently put this in an online support group for adults who were raised in cults (which is already a pretty specific sub-section of the C-PTSD community):

I don’t know whether to find it surprising, but nobody else had experienced this with their own families.

Tragically, I also had to stop initiating contact with my siblings recently. I’d tried giving them space, texting occasionally, and recently love-bombing them constantly. But after more than two years of love-bombing, they still never initiate contact and rarely respond to my messages. When they do respond, it’s usually like an emoji. And I would be fine with unrequited love if it weren’t for my nieces and nephews. But my sister won’t send photos, won’t let me talk to them on the phone, and recently “forgot” to give them their Christmas present. And while she’s preventing me from contacting the kids, there’s a ton of evidence that they’re going through the same kinds of trauma that I did. And just knowing that the kids are sustaining major trauma, but being powerless to do anything, ended up destroying my mental health. So I’m no longer initiating, with the knowledge that they will never initiate, and we’re effectively No Contact now. Which hurts. And the worst part is that I’m technically free to send unlimited messages that they don’t respond to, so their narrative will be that I disowned them, which is really invalidating given how overwhelming hard I’ve tried to get them to love me.

Anyway, I’ve been compiling YouTube videos for ages now, so without further ado:

Who Practices Shunning?

I looked up some information on what groups practice shunning, and it turns out that it happens in a ton of practices. This is some of what the internet had to say:

Are there other churches that force followers to shun former members, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses do?. (nd). Quora. Retrieved September 26, 2023 from https://qr.ae/py2o4f

So, some of this obviously is really terrible. I can relate to society expecting me to not be affected by my parents choices because I’m an adult. As though absolutely anything could happen to you but when you turn 18, you’re supposed to have magically generated the equivalent of a K-12 public school education, plus social and emotional intelligence, plus whatever else “adults” have that some of us were not given in childhood.

Anyway, most of these groups didn’t really have a ton of information available on them, perhaps because they don’t have a ton of apostates who survived to tell about them. So this entry is basically going to be about the Amish, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and finally a church that was very similar to the one that I grew up in. It’s not an academic essay. I’m literally just watching these videos and sharing my reactions. Think of it as those vlogs where people watch a video and react, except I prefer writing so I’m just blogging my responses the old-fashioned way.

The Amish

I’ve watched a lot of videos by I Amish OG and I think he does a good job of making the most of his background. He’s no longer Amish, but there were components of it that he liked and appreciated. This feels like what a lot of people from healthy families are able to do when they no longer share their parents’ ideals perfectly, and it sounds like OG’s parents were indeed healthy. Shunning in his case does not sound great, but it doesn’t sound like the worst thing, either.

Which, as an aside, the fact that his community took a softer stance on shunning is probably the reason that he’s able to remember his time in the Amish as mostly positive, and he hasn’t had to go full atheist. My grandmother was born in India, the daughter of Scottish Canadian missionaries. They were Presbyterians. When I i her, Grandma insisted that she had never “gone astray,” she just viewed her faith differently as an adult. Which for her seems like it meant that she liked putting out little angel décor at Christmas next to her statue of the Buddha. I don’t have proof, but I suspect that her parents continued to love her when she became more liberal than they were, so she wasn’t forced to have apostasy as a key component of her identity. Once your group decides that you’re Satan and starts spreading malicious rumors about how you can’t even handle thinking about prayer, etc, etc, it’s a lot harder to look back fondly on being a member there.

However, it’s tricky with the Amish because it’s difficult logistically to leave:

Plus, ex-Amish are obviously going to need some time to adapt to technology:

So, my point is that, if a lot of them physically can’t leave even when they want to, and those who do manage to leave aren’t immediately the most tech-savvy, it seems like a small leap that people who have been wounded by the Amish may be underrepresented on the Internet.

Anyway, it turns out that the Amish have some significant issues. The video below is rambly AF. But basically, the Amish response to some of the more severe forms of child abuse, for example, leaves a lot to be desired because they don’t involve secular authorities. And it’s hard for victims to really speak for themselves because the children only speak Pennsylvania Dutch, community members are educated within the community and their curriculum involves little to no skills that would be marketable outside the community, etc. So as much as it’s fun to imagine a tight-knit community with a very small carbon footprint, their idyllic reputation is misguided and their members are more trapped than members of perhaps any other community.

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Moving on to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it seems like a lot of apostates have taken to YouTube to describe their experiences. And despite the fact that, theologically, us 1689ers were different from the JWs, they have a lot in common when it comes to apostasy and shunning. Seems like a lot of cults do.

Ironically, a lot of apostates probably do have mental health challenges, which faith communities are quick to construe as the reason for their leaving. It’s a lot easier than dealing with the fact that the reason we have mental health challenges is because we grew up in these fringe groups, and we’ve had to leave in order for any mental health treatment to get better.

I thought it was relatable that Sonja is demonized for not caring that her parents were heartbroken. This is a pet peeve of mine, actually. My father apparently is “heartbroken” by the fact that I’m not a Christian anymore and he had to disown me. Which, it’s like… if you decide to raise a child, you decide (either consciously or unconsciously) before that child comes home what it would take for you to be “heartbroken” by them. For most parents, being heartbroken would require a major choice like joining an opposing force in a war, manipulating family members, stealing from family members, etc. If my dad is heartbroken because we have different beliefs on historical events, I am not the reason for his pain.

I also wasn’t a brat, as Lloyd Evans notes that Sonja is portrayed to be. In fact, I did nothing wrong at all. On a small handful of occasions, I’ve spoken to my parents in anger. Which, given the immense psychological damage they inflicted on me, I think was pretty justified. But my mother has managed to blow that into the idea that I’m just “truly nasty” as a person, and she’s passionately spreading the rumor that it didn’t make me sad at all for them to cut me out of their lives when I desperately needed them.

And yes, having lost my family has been by far the biggest single contributor to my experience with suicidal ideation. Humans aren’t meant to live as individuals apart from a community. More on that later.

I notice that both the Telltale Atheist and Lloyd Evans mention 1 Corinthians 5:9-11 as the passage that commands shunning. I thought there were other passages (Matthew 10:5-15 comes to mind).

But what strikes me about Telltale Atheist is the degree of emotional pain he’s clearly still going through 15 years later. This is a theme in all of the videos put out by people who have been shunned. Those who haven’t been through it give advice like “Well now you can put the past in the past and decide what you want for your future!” as though my being completely traumatized isn’t going to make it harder for me to grab the bull by the horns and go live my best life despite having no family. Other frequent advice comes from well-intentioned people who are extremely sure that I just haven’t tried hard enough to get unshunned. Which, I feel like if you have to try at all to get unshunned, the relationship is probably toxic; let alone a relationship where you put in gobs of time every single day for years and years, and expect nothing in return except for the family members to eventually decide that you’re not the incarnation of evil, and it’s somehow dangerous to their children for you (the apostate!) to know what they look like. People who either have personally been there, or who have truly listened to us and allowed themselves to feel our pain, know. They know that it’s awful and it’s unfair and sometimes you just have to feel shitty emotions. And of course at some point you pick yourself up and dust yourself off and go on, but your life will never be the same.

As the video points out, this is their expressed purpose: they traumatize the shunned so severely that we crash and burn, and then serve as an example to everyone else. As much as I’ve always done everything in my power to not crash and burn, I have lived far from an enviable life, and it sucks that that was exactly what my mother wanted.

Westboro Baptist Church

Given that when WBC was in action, they were the closest relative to my parents’ church that the average American had heard of, it makes sense that there’s a lot in common. For example, Lauren’s family also claimed that she left of her own volition, just like my family does. And I relate to the pain she feels. It’s a sick thing when your family demonizes you so hard, that in the blink of an eye they forget that they ever loved you.

This video, from April of last year, was brand new when I started this blog entry. On the one hand, I empathize with Lauren. I do think it’s unfair that she grew up in a group that was nearly identical to mine; but her healing process hasn’t seemed to involve food scarcity or homelessness, because her book was an instant bestseller and she became famous more easily than the average American would. And why? Because the difference between her group and mine, was that they were out publicly protesting and really, really hurting people. Whereas, because I came from the non-protesting version, my blog still only gets less than one view per day. I honestly don’t think she realizes that she’s benefitting financially from the cruelty her church perpetuated. I don’t even know what to say about that, because it’s a good thing that she got public support and hasn’t had to suffer the types of social isolation and poverty that I have. At the same time, I wish that similar support could have been given to me. I bet she hasn’t had people telling her that she should just try harder to get her family back and expect less in return from them, or that she’s lying about having a trauma disorder because everyone knows white people have easy lives.

Islam

…and meanwhile, the ex-Muslims are going on YouTube in full PPE because they don’t want to literally die. I’m aware that Islam is just as diverse as Christianity or any other major religion. There are people who are currently Muslims who are also on YouTube condemning the poor treatment of apostates. There are billions of people on earth, sociology is complicated. Just saying that shunning isn’t unheard of outside of Christianity. DarkMatter2525 did a whole video on this, and concluded:

How does one survive being shunned?

Now, although there’s a lot of information on why being shunned is miserable, there’s a lot less information (at least on YouTube) on what to do once you have been shunned. I found every video I possibly could on the subject, and I’m trying to extract any useful suggestions they offer.

Video 1

This first video, I’m hesitant to watch because it’s on “building your own family.” The concept of building your own family is triggering to me, despite its being the first idea out of the mouth of most well-intentioned people. The primary source of my trauma disorder was extreme social isolation, so obviously I have thought to just make friends. When I was growing up, the only thing that kept me from killing myself was the expectation that in college and beyond, I would be free to engage in social activities. This has, however, not panned out as much as I’d hoped it would. I won’t belabor the reasons here, but it turns out that you can just walk out of a cult into mainstream society and make friends as easily as someone who grew up in mainstream society. As I have previously mentioned on a particularly bad day, telling someone who has been excommunicated from the only world they ever knew to just make friends, is “like telling someone who is about to die of starvation that they need to go out and milk a cow and prepare a fine cheese and wait several years for it to be properly aged.” (I don’t eat cheese anymore, but you get my drift.) I should have mentioned, if at any point the cheese figures out that it’s your only source of food, or that you desperately need it, or that you have a trauma history, it will run away and it will be your fault for oversharing.

It also turns out, you can’t just “build your own family” just because you want to. Forming human bonds requires happiness. Mother and baby don’t bond because the baby is crying; much more bonding occurs when they smile at one another. And I’ve been trapped in a vicious cycle for most of my adult life where I can’t bond with people because I’m reeling from the effects of C-PTSD, but the reason I’m not making more progress overcoming C-PTSD is because I’m lonely. You’re supposed to start out with a family and that stabilizes you and you can build relationships from there and avoid this cycle. Telling people who have been shunned to build our own families is just blaming the victim.

Now, ever since my 14-month hospital stay, I’m able to form secure attachments and the more secure attachments I form, the easier it is to form even more. But it took an incredibly improbable intervention for that to happen. So telling people to build our own families without giving us a massive intervention that makes it possible to do so, is just not realistic advice. And this is particularly true for those of us who come from no-name cults that don’t have support groups for escapees.

However, here is the video:

At about 2:45 in the video, Evans notes that his dad never tried to reason with him or convince him not to leave the organization. This is definitely relatable. My parents made zero attempts to avoid “having” to shun me. I feel like this mostly is just because, from the moment I got diagnosed with PTSD, they psychologically needed me out of their lives as though I had never existed, so they made up an excuse that would have looked shaky even to most hardened cult members. Much to their chagrin, I’m actually a very nice person and have never offered them any kind of legitimate reason to shun me. But, I felt that the video was validating here because a theme among people who have been shunned is that those doing the shunning seem to leap at the opportunity, rather than ever trying to convince the person to stay. Perhaps the same type of dysfunction that causes people to shun in the first place, also makes them unable or unwilling to talk to their loved ones about what they believe is essential truth.

4:07–”They have revoked their right for you to give a damn about them.” I felt this so hard. This video is going better than I’d feared.

5:35–There it is. He describes “having people in your life who you see on a daily basis and who have your back.” Well if I had that, I wouldn’t have a mental illness and I would be functioning normally in life. It’s like saying the solution to cancer is not having cancer. Let’s see if he goes on to give suggestions as to how to actually make this happen.

7:13–”Make it your life’s work to find them.” Okay, check. I’ve been working on this since I was 17. Can we please have some scaffolding and/or more specific directions

End of video: Okay, I don’t think this was this YouTuber’s best work. Most of the suggestions were pretty obvious; you want people in your life who love you and you don’t want to be defined by your trauma. I mean, it’s not like I started this blog because I was planning on not taking action toward those goals. I hate when “advice” is just someone describing what we all agree would be the desired outcome. One time my dying grandfather told me to get a job that paid more money. He was dying and I loved him, so I didn’t point out that I had already thought of that. There’s a difference between apathetically expecting others to solve the problem, and working your fingers to the bone all day every day for years on end and being mostly unsuccessful because there’s no road map for what you’re doing.

Okay, now I’m depressed. Maybe I went into that jaded and it being not very helpful was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I just decided to actually watch it because there’s not much out there on overcoming being shunned. As I mentioned, there’s no road map, because so few people have ever been forced to attempt this before, and many of the people who have, have ended up committing suicide, meaning they weren’t able to be of that much use in forging a path from shunning to a reasonably happy, boring life. I’m not asking for two point four kids and a picket fence. I’m okay with being moderately depressed for the rest of my life. I just want to be somewhere on the fucking bell curve. I want to be able to go to the cop station and be recognized as a citizen. If that ever pans out, hopefully I’ll be able to offer better advice than in this random video from nine years ago in which the maker didn’t do anything like his best work (he’s usually very inspired, actually, which is why about half my links in this entry are by him).

Video 2

This talks about how when you’re out of an organization but mentally still affected by it, it adds another layer of self-blame. It’s hard enough to be shunned by your family, but it’s harder if you think you deserved it.

So, acknowledging what a huge task it is to change your whole mindset, and accepting that it will take a lot of time.

Video 3

I love the remark, “It’s not like I can go back and ask.” I’ve felt that way so many times, that I don’t entirely remember how something went down during my life before college, but I’m being shunned by all other living humans who would remember the incident. It’s pretty isolating.

Now, the link above is for 46 minutes and 10 seconds in because before that, the guy is mostly singing the praises of Dave Ramsey. Which, if Dave’s advice worked for him, I rejoice for him. For me it’s always been less than useful because Dave’s reality is a lot easier than mine, so he’s useless in overcoming obstacles he’s never faced. And I don’t like him because he never acknowledges this, but instead blames the poor for the existence of poverty. So anyway, it’s useful after the first 46 minutes.

Michael suggests acceptance, which he defines as “letting go of the hope that it could have been any different.” He also points out that people in these organizations (specifically the JWs) have to be toxic on order to exist in that environment. This feels liberating to me, that I don’t need to spend time deliberating which of my family members it’s morally acceptable to give up on convincing to love me. It’s hard to quote a podcast because you can’t copy and paste, but the host suggests that if your loved ones are in a toxic organization, instead of trying to get those individuals back, you’re “probably better served” making new relationships. They suggest a balance with the past. We all know not to dwell on it, but they suggest that you absolutely can “own your story.” Which, to me, is better advice than the conventional wisdom of denying that it happened and drowning it out with forced positivity, which I really don’t agree with at all. Michael says that if you tell your story and people don’t want to hear it, “Those aren’t your people.” Which is good to remember when I try to tell my story and I get interrupted every half sentence with clichés about how the future can be better, and a whole bunch of other things that I never denied. The past exists, and if somebody can’t handle my past because it wasn’t “positive” enough, then that is an acquaintance, not a friend. And it’s totally okay to normalize owning my life story and making references to things that happened when they come up in conversation, without being ashamed. If people are interested, it’s even okay to tell crazy stories, because some people will be very intrigued. That’s not the same as wallowing; it’s actually “empowering.” (I appreciate that other people can see that.) And, technically, if there’s some residual emotion, that’s okay, too. He closes by saying, “We weren’t allowed to dream as kids and things like that–those things were provided for us in the land of paradise we were all going to experience–so you know listen to this podcast and and learn to look forward toward better things, and and we can all have lives that we truly love and that give us what we want in life instead of just taking from us like the lives we once lived.”

This is really good not just for escaping a cult, but in terms of advice for both relationships and PTSD generally!

Video 4

This video doesn’t have specific advice, just lots of validation and empathy from someone who understands.

Video 5

Okay, I did not realize that the distinction between shunning and excommunication was that excommunication is more permanent. The church I was in growing up absolutely did excommunicate people, but I felt like that just meant they were off the member list, not that nobody could talk to them. Whereas, we didn’t use the term “shunning” growing up, but I chose it because, to me, it involves no contact and spreading horrible rumors about the person. And in my case, it’s apparently permanent.

The video does describe shunning being used to “discredit” you or “limit your influence.” Which, this is definitely what is going on in my case. When, in my case, they’re trying to “protect” the children from the skills I’ve learned in therapy, like self-love or emotional intelligence, because a lot of this is diametrically opposed to the idea that the meaning of life is to glorify my mother and prevent her from throwing a hissyfit forever.

I’ve definitely been called “angry” and “bitter” because I have trauma from being shunned. As one Christian counselor put it, “They kick their wounded.”

I liked this guy. He didn’t give a ton of advice, but his description of a cult leader described my mother really well, including the fact that cult members had to ask the leader for “permission” as to who they could spend time with.

Video 6

It’s an interesting idea that my siblings just don’t know what love actually is. That would make sense, given the home we grew up in. I’m currently in a phase where I have to actively stop seeing my siblings as victims because seeing them that way makes me feel like it’s my responsibility to save them. But it helps to think that the reason they can’t love me isn’t about me. (Although it definitely sucks for the kids who are currently growing up in that!)

Video 7

“…[ostracism] is basically a physical pain that you feel that has its roots in our evolutionary heritage because if you’re on the savannah and your tribe abandons you, the likelihood of you dying shoots up exponentially. You’re in a survival situation unless you can restore your relationship with your tribe or find a new tribe. And what is pain supposed to do? Pain, the whole point of pain–be it physical or emotional–is to prompt you to make a change to prompt you to do something to stop you from being in an even worse predicament.”

Which, yeah. This is pretty much the long and short of it. So, Video 3’s relationship advice is the best we’ve gotten so far, because basically we need a tribe. And the social skills required to build a tribe when you just got out of a cult and have no one, are hard to come by.

Video 8

I’m surprised I’ve never heard of this channel! The maker is ex-JW (a common theme here), but the behaviors he describes are super relatable to my experience. It also contained a ton of non-judgmentally insight into “complex social constructs we don’t understand” because we were in cults. Specifically, the video is about when setting boundaries is okay and we’re not doing the same thing that was done to us when we got shunned.

One thing for me from ages 9-17 was that my only social outlet was church. There was exactly one girl my age there, but she went to school. So there was this imbalance that I desperately needed her to like me, but she didn’t need me at all. Whenever I happened to encounter anyone else, it was basically the same scenario. Due to the intensity of the isolation, there was never a time when it was in my best interest to decide not to be friends with someone who I could potentially let into my life.

This pattern continues now, even when I don’t need it to. For example, I’ve been going crazy trying to get my siblings to let me back into their lives, and it feels like I’m the one shunning them if I give up and stop initiating. But even if I were the one setting a boundary, it would be appropriate because they consistently are terrible for my mental health on the rare occasions that they actually talk to me. Meanwhile, a huge concern for me in ceasing to initiate is what if it hurts them? What if they actually need me to love them even if they can’t acknowledge it?

However, as terrified as I’ve always been of hurting them, this may not be reciprocated. Because although they didn’t have the “advantage” of having been kicked out, they’re not entirely victims; they’re middle-aged adults who have chosen to conform to group norms. And those group norms (ie smear campaigns) are almost identical to the unhealthy ones described by the YouTuber. In fact, he shows these reasons for setting boundaries:

Obviously, my mother is solidly in the “unhealthy” category.

Anyway, he also says that when making friends, look for people who share your core values, interests, and sense of humor. And it’s okay if that’s not everyone!

Video 9

The premise of this video is that, “There might not be a lot known by the normies about cult recovery, but BOY HOWDY do they know a lot about abusive, narcissistic relationships. And you know what? They’re kinda the same thing.”

Now, somehow I’m actually getting tired so despite the fact that I really, really like this guy, I’m not going to dive too deeply into analysis. I did take these notes of his 10 points:

Under point #8 (Relapse), I started wondering if that’s what I do when I idly wonder if I would have been happier if I’d stayed in the Deep South and remained a super hard core Evangelical. So, I drew this diagram of my cult of origin:

Mom (and by extension, my dad, siblings, nieces, nephews, and probably now my brother-in-law) are in the center in the cult that is my family in which my mother is the cult leader. As the rings get bigger, they decrease in the level of 🤬ed that they are, but they’re all pretty dysfunctional.

Video 10

De5o54. (2012, June 28). Ostracism; A Scientific look at shunning & the effects on those ostracised. ‘The Silent Treatment’ [YouTube video]. Retrieved May 12, 2024 from https://youtu.be/x__UISHl9MU?si=UwHGTSqqLC5s9BER

This video looked like it was going to be really long, but only 0:41 to 12:40 were actually on ostracism. I attempted to embed it that way here. It’s a link to a BBC podcast that the maker cited in the description:

The video validated that our response to being ostracized is primal rather than logical, implying that we can’t reason our way out of it. I felt like although I was ostracized by my family, this was only after my mother caused me to feel ostracized by the public school system and society in general (aka “The World”). The researcher’s advice was to “Concentrate on forming a few good friendships,” because you don’t need that many people in your corner to lessen the emotional toll of being ostracized by others.

Video 11

This video also is also a re-run of another program, rather than having been produced by the YouTuber themselves. I’m not 100% sure how to cite it, but I took these screenshots:

Turns out that the ex-JWs do not have a total monopoly, as the video centers on Scientology. They validate that there’s nothing you can do to get people back, and it’s agonizing. The speakers fight emotion even years later. They mentioned that their families were “forced to decide” between them and their families, and I wonder what that was like for my siblings when they went through the same thing. The speakers also describe being portrayed as evil and dangerous to their families when the children were too young to understand, although they disagree on whether the now-adult church members are brainwashed, or responsible for their own actions.

It SUCKS that these guys love their kids and would give anything to have them back in their lives, and I don’t understand why my parents couldn’t handle having me in theirs. Like, this is a normal parental reaction to estrangement. I notice that it doesn’t involve smear campaigns. They love their kids and want them back; they aren’t coming up with excuses that they can’t do that. I would have had such less pain in my life if I’d had healthy parents who actually wanted me in their lives.

Now, it was 2003 so they’re a bit homophobic, unfortunately. But they’re just so warm to their children and I really, really wish I had that. And I wish their claim that “Parents really love their children” were universally true.

I was thirteen years old when this video was made. There were warm, kind people out there who would have helped me. Which, although it might be counterintuitive, that is a relief and feels extremely comforting to me.

Video 12

Okay. ApparentLY, there are four basic psychological needs:

• Belonging
• Self-esteem
• Control
• The belief that one’s existence matters

I almost wonder if my mother knew this because she definitely went after all four of these in a major way. Belonging obviously was out. She said I would go to hell if I didn’t fully believe that absolutely everything about me was 100% evil and also infinitely evil, as in “…every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5b). Hell was supposed to be very bad, so I made sure to hate myself accordingly. There was zero control or ability to make choices because I was being homeschooled in a cult. And I definitely had a ton of extremely emotional (for me) conversations with my mother about “Why are we here? What is the purpose of this?” Which, looking back, I’m pretty sure her goal even then was for me to commit suicide because she just blew this off, unless she was making herself the victim of having such a terribly disordered daughter. I remember there was a sermon at church by our well-intentioned pastor called “Whose Oasis Are You?” and I went home and cried because I was nobody’s oasis; nobody’s life was because my life mattered to nobody and nobody’s life was better because I existed.

A few years ago, I was freaking out for my sister’s entire pregnancy because she had floated the possibility of naming the baby Boaz, so I had been sending her endless baby names better than Boaz (which, for reference, is almost all of them). So one day I sent this:

She actually was responsive and ended up sending this disturbing YouTube video that pretty much perfectly summarizes our native “holy hand of restraint” theory that I’ve written about before:

Dad, of course, went along with all of this, but he’s got zero clues what’s going on in the environment or inside of him, what his behavior is, why he does it, how it affects other people, or literally any other information about the rest of our communal reality because he can only think about the fact that he claims he got snubbed by his youth pastor back in the 1980s. So it’s not like he’s a nice guy, but he’s not calculating.

Anyway, all that to say, I didn’t get the four basic psychological needs so I should probably start working on them.

I notice that tons of these videos talk about people “unaliving” themselves (as they’re saying on TikTok these days). Which, I don’t remember if I’ve written about this before and probably should write more about it sometime, but I’m pretty sure my mother’s objective was for me to commit suicide. I base this on the fact that it was originally her idea. I was emotionally destroyed when I was nine and we moved and I was now in a US state where the laws were really lenient and my mother was able to put her developing child into solitary confinement, which I had figured out was going to last until college. So, Mom of course told me that this was genetic and just part of who I was, and of course I got it from my father. Who she claimed had attempted suicide when he was in high school (although this was not fully corroborated by my grandmother’s version of the story and it’s extremely possible that my mother embellished things a bit) and she told her nine-year-old daughter who was in active trauma being actively inflicted by her, that I would probably do the same someday. So, while ostracism is often seen as causing suicide almost as a side effect… for my mother, I think it was one of her primary desired outcomes.

The speakers in the video go on to discuss what it’s like to be the one doing the ostracing and what makes them do it, then they go on to discuss why it might actually be better to be ostracized. Lloyd notes,

“I just can’t help but think that in in a way, especially when it comes to religious ostracism, in a way it’s kind of worse if if you’re the one that’s doing the shunning [if] it’s not for a good reason… you’re just doing this shunning because you’re told to do this shunning, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, even if say you know that deep down that the one that you’re shunning is basically a good person, and… you’re basically just following orders. I think that what happens then is you kind of take a hit with your humanity and and you have to live with the fact that you you’re just, again, following orders rather than being ethical. Whereas the one who’s being shunned under those circumstances gets to kind of in a way keep the moral high ground, and even though it’s painful, they at least know that it’s it’s out of their control.”

I mean, I definitely didn’t get that. They just stopped ever initiating or really even responding to my correspondence. But then when I don’t initiate, they claim that this proves that I’m the one shunning them. It’s hard to disagree with your family, so I always feel like this is somehow my fault and I’m “choosing” not to have them in my lives. When I’ve been trying every strategy I can think of trying to “choose” get them back until it’s overwhelmingly obvious from a logical/rational perspective that this is their choice and not mine. But cognitive dissonance is a bitch and I can’t even get peace that the ball is in their court.

Things that are supposed to help, according to the video include:

• “Self affirmation, where you sort of reflect on other areas of your life that that are meaningful and positive to you”
• Get (healthy) religion
• Distraction
• Time, “because eventually you form other social bonds”
• Meaning and purpose

Conclusion

Well, meaning and purpose seems like a good note to end this on. I’ve been wanting to finish this post so it makes me happy for it to be done. To make it totally complete:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost