The Deconstruction Doulas Story

I am a survivor of religious trauma. 

As a child at church, I was taught women were not made in the image of God. Only men were.

I was taught that they were not only banned by God from preaching, but that we also shouldn’t speak at all within the church building in case a man could overhear a woman and possibly learn something from them. After all, this would cause both parties to sin.

My pastor was nationally well-known for advocating for parents to have the legal right to stone their disobedient children.

And that was just the beginning.

They did not believe it was possible for there to be marital rape; consent for all future sexual activity was seen as given on the wedding day. Any and all forms of birth control were considered sinful, even “natural family planning.” It was our job to have a ‘quiver full of arrows’ to aim straight at the heart of the enemy - liberals, Muslims, and Catholics. A frequent topic of conversation was the need to outbreed the Muslims.

I left all that behind at 16 when my family got excommunicated, but the physical, mental, and spiritual effects have followed me ever since.

Fast-forward about a decade. At that time, I’m a pastor’s wife, and my husband and I have found our own way of doing ministry that I am still proud of today. But the church is changing by the day. It feels like the walls are closing in on me. The same thought leaders that were present in the cult I grew up in are being listened to by many of the other elders and members at our church. The same rhetoric and ideas start growing like wildfire all around me. I can still feel the cold prickles and immediate panic when one of the elders bragged in a Sunday school class about his wife’s faithfulness and consistency in being willing to spank their child 87 times in one day. [TW on that link; it'll take you Capitol Hill Baptist's own teachings on spanking, and you'll note that CHBC is a far cry from a cult.]

Then, a new trendy doctrine swept through the evangelical church at large. ‘Eternal Subordination of the Son’, it was called. This is the idea that Jesus is ontologically subordinate to God the Father. In normal people's terms, that means that they taught that Jesus the Son, from even before Creation, has been submissive to the will of God the Father when their wills disagreed. This is a naked Trinitarian heresy - how can two members of the Trinity have differing desires, after all? - but one they were willing to hold because it gave them further grounds to demand women be submissive not only to their husbands but to ALL men. They were literally remaking Jesus to support their agenda.

That was the beginning of the end. Neither David nor I could keep our mouths shut. We were open with everyone about how evil all of it was, not just the ESS stuff. We focused on caring for the people who were also alarmed and hurt by the direction the church was going and on trying to educate and explain why all of this was so harmful and damaging. I was dismissed because they said I was just reading into things due to my previous church experience.

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In 2019, after over 5 years in that particular church, the elders fired my husband for ‘being too sick’ with his chronic illness just a day after the church body approved him for a 20% raise. Just to twist the knife, it had been recommended to the congregation as a merit-based increase.

We lost everything. Job, home, friends, access to local family and support, the future we were working towards, our voice, our dignity. In the elders’ spin of what happened, I was the scapegoat. I sat while an elder stood over me for FIVE hours, yelling at me and grilling me, trying to get me to admit to a sin I had not committed. But if they could get me to confess to it anyway, they felt it would justify some of how they treated us in the aftermath. Women I had taught in Sunday School for years, taken out to coffee and listened to and held while they cried started calling me, telling me the leadership of the church had told them I was not trustworthy, that they should forget everything I had ever said to them. That was the last time most of them ever really spoke to me again.

I lost all my hope. My confidence in the goodness of God, or His love for me. The only thing that kept me alive was the baby growing in my belly who needed me to eat, and his siblings who needed me to keep getting up each day.

Back then, we had no one who really understood what we were going through except the couple of people who left the church with us. Otherwise, people treated it like it was just another job loss. We didn’t know who we could be honest with. Everyone we knew had a vested interest in protecting the reputation of any church, even one they had no connection to. We were alone, trapped in our own hell with no recourse and no resources.

Once that was over, nobody in the SBC wanted to touch us with a ten foot pole. So it took 7 months for him to find a job. Eventually, we landed in another church - only to realize it was a place we couldn't belong either. COVID hit. Divisions intensified. And then our housing disappeared. 

In 2022, at the top of the housing bubble, our landlords decided to sell the house we were living in and gave us 41 days' notice to find somewhere else to live. Rent had doubled all around us, so we looked into buying. But there was nothing we could afford. 

In the church, there were folks who didn’t have enough space of their own who offered to help. But we were just too many to take at once. Many of the people in this church had massive homes or even second houses. It was no secret that we were losing our housing and trying to find a place to live with no avail. But none of those two-house-owning people offered, which is, of course, their right. We weren't about to ask; we knew how they talked about the people they did help. So we, their youth pastor and his family, were effectively homeless. 

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We spent the next few months couch-surfing. David scraped together enough money to get a bed (in what was effectively a hostel) in order to be able to stay in town and keep working, but the only place we could find that would fit the rest of us and that we could afford was his grandparents, who lived in a dying town more than two hours away.

So we became nomads. I was solo-parenting four children 8 and under, with one of them experiencing suicidal ideation because of everything we had experienced. I was actively suicidal myself. I finally snapped one day after being up all night, sharing a king bed with my nursing baby and three other children, one of whom was actively trying to hurt themselves while the other children screamed and cried. In the morning I called David, who was 2.5 hours away, and told him I was done. I wouldn’t survive otherwise.

And that’s how 12 years of pastoral ministry came to an end for us.

We moved to the only place we would fit and could afford: my parents’ house in Pennsylvania.

When we got there, we had to hit the ground running and set about trying to rebuild everything that had been lost, starting with income. It took David a while to find a job that paid enough to make a dent in all that lost time spent earning near-poverty (and sometimes actual poverty) wages. The medical debt we were carrying meant we had absolutely nothing to start with. But we built up anyway. Slowly and steadily.

Meanwhile, I had built a small community on Instagram of other people who had experienced spiritual abuse. I had for a while been thinking about how to say more and help more without doing it all publicly. I didn’t want to scream into the void of the Internet, but work with real people. I had this idea for a 12-week course that would help people begin to heal from their spiritual abuse while also beginning to form new connections and rebuild safety and community. 

But I was never going to do it. Who was I to think I had anything to offer?

But our bank account was, again, at zero, David had lost out on yet another job, and my friend Erin said she would help me. So I suppressed my own sense of cringe and ridiculousness, and recorded a bunch of video lessons based on the course I had put together. I opened up enrollment in my first cohorts, on material I really thought would never see the light of day.

Within a week, I had 25 enrolled. For the first time in 12 years of ministry, I got paid for the work I was doing. And I felt immense, enormous shame around it.

I STILL struggle with it. I STILL struggle to believe I should be paid. Everything about my upbringing and the churches I have served in as an adult have left me completely unable to advocate for myself. And I have a vague, nasty feeling about the connection between commerce and this kind of spiritual and emotional labor that I could no more articulate than I could explain the principles of thermonuclear fusion.

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Meanwhile, David had found a job as a marketing director, and for the first time in our lives, we had more than a few hundred dollars in a savings account. With the money we saved up, we were able to move back to Kansas City. For the first time in my life, I no longer live at home or under the church’s authority. For the first time in my life, I feel like an adult.

So here we are. It’s been two and a half years since I started the cohorts. Almost three years since we left pastoral ministry. Six years since David was fired for being ‘too sick.’

Erin, David, and I are still working on this thing together. 144 women and a handful of men have gone through our cohorts. We’ve built a real community together. Despite being spread all over the country, the people in this community show up for each other in ways that rival even the best community support I’ve seen or heard of in local churches. I’m so, so proud of every single person represented within the Deconstruction Doulas community. They have saved me way more than I have helped them. I know Erin and David feel the same way.

But now it’s happening again. I have that "the walls are closing in" feeling again, slowly creeping up. The freedom to use my voice without cost to my family is already gone, after just three months. The thought-leaders from my cult are now on the news, in the freaking White House. They have all the power. Again. Everything the men in my cult dreamed of, every vile idea and terrifying rant that simultaneously felt insane and impossible, is now playing out on the news. In headlines. On my Instagram feed. Every single day.

They have me trapped again. And now it’s not just me, it’s all of us.

I feel like I can’t breathe. 

The people in my community have been disowned by their families, their churches, and their communities at large. For many of us, all we have is each other. Many of us have been forced to depend on government programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and public education to make up for our lack of financial stability, educational neglect, medical neglect, chronic illnesses, lack of support - all a direct result of the religious trauma we have endured our whole lives. And it has now become a religious trauma the whole country is going through.

I have struggled even to think straight for the last two months. Instead, I’ve just let myself feel. I am grieving so deeply that I struggle to even show up relationally with anyone but my husband and kids, at least since the Inauguration.

The women (and men) in my community lost EVERYTHING getting away from this religious, pseudo-Christian, patriarchal abuse. They ran so hard and so bravely. They chose to think for themselves and do the right thing, despite having no allies. They sacrificed absolutely all of their security for what was right.

They started businesses and went to school, they got therapy and made healing a full-time job. Many escaped violent and abusive marriages safely and started rebuilding as single parents. And all of them with more love, grace, and beauty than I even knew was possible. 

But now, all of the bootstraps they were pulling themselves up by have been cut off. Women who were doing night school now can’t complete their degree programs. Women who started businesses for themselves or who found work now can’t get childcare. Dads have been laid off, or their wages aren't enough to cover their bills in light of inflation and rising costs. Access to food and healthcare is threatened. Attacks and accusations against their character have started up again or redoubled. 

And those of us who volunteer and work here at Deconstruction Doulas are in the same boat. We have run this community on a mostly volunteer basis, despite it being a full-time job. And up until now, it's been enough. We’ve been the recipients of this community’s generosity when it wasn’t.

But there are so many people being hurt by this administration. Too many people still suffering in the ways they have been in evangelicalism since long before I was born. The fear and desperation in the air are deafening. It’s like all the feelings I’ve held inside my body for most of my life are now swirling around outside my body and in the bodies of everyone I come in contact with. 

In the face of all that is happening out there and what’s happened to me personally, I don’t know how to convince people that this community is worthy of care and protection. Why would strangers care for and protect this community when the people who know us and ought to love us have so consistently abused, rejected, and abandoned us? 

I can’t promise a return on investment.

I can’t tell you what great things we’ll go on to do.

I have no idea what the future holds, but I do know there are precious people who have given every single ounce of their heart, strength, and attention to healing and building stability for themselves, their families, and everyone they come in contact with.

And it’s about to be not enough.

I can tell you they are precious humans who deserve stable access to food, income, housing, education, and healthcare, and the little stability they have right now is being intensely threatened by the same people who have deprived them of it their whole lives. 

I never set out to form a non-profit. I never set out to do any of this. If I had it my way, my family and I would be living off the grid in the woods somewhere, frolicking and living like hobbits. But that’s just not the road we’ve been put on. 

And so, I’m asking for help. I’m asking for help to not only keep this thing going but also to build it. We want to create jobs for this community from within it, to fight back against this administration from within it, to connect with and support more people hurt by this faux-religious evil. We want to keep helping women safely escape abusive marriages, we want to keep helping people in ministry who have lost everything to abusive church situations. We want to keep helping people with chronic illnesses secondary to abuse.

I went to start applying for grants, and do you know what I learned? If I want to even be considered, I cannot use the words “women”, “disabled”, “equality,” “female,” “justice,” “backgrounds,” “increase” (?!?), “trauma,” “underserved,” “political” (!), “underrepresented,” “trauma,” “victim,” to name a few. 

For an organization run by two women and a disabled man, all with religious trauma, the writing is on the wall. We’re not going to get any help there. And churches seem to see us as a direct threat to their existence instead of a support to their mission, which means they identify with our abusers rather than us. That's in spite of the hard fact that many of us are desperately trying to cling to our faith despite persecution most people sitting in pews could never imagine. So we haven’t had any success there either.

And so, yet again, I’m turning to strangers. I’m once again debasing myself to scream into the void of the internet and hoping for a miracle.

Please, please help us keep helping this community.

We’re nearly through the process of becoming a 501c3, which will come with a board and public financial statements. I'm absolutely overjoyed about that, but to even get to that stage, we’ve got to be able to keep doing this on at least a part-time basis if we’re going to be able to hold our community together. The needs within are growing, and we’re getting bigger every day as more and more folks find us. 

If you want to donate, check out the rest of the website. Visit our Patreon and GoFundMe to read more about what we’re up to. 

If you find your story represented in this, please reach out. We exist out of the sheer necessity of it, no more or less. There’s a place for you.