My Story

(Trigger Warning: Abuse, Torture, Anxiety Attacks)

The First Anxiety Attack

My first anxiety attack occurred when I was about nine years old. My adulterous, boozing father had left the family and my mother had “left the building”, and the Christian cult in which I was raised, The Jehovah’s Witnesses, had decided that it was a fine idea to publish details of how the “JW Faithful” in Malawi, Africa were undergoing religious persecution.

We were being taught that at any moment, our government could choose to do the same to us, and we’d be expected (even as children) to stay faithful to Jehovah (I hate even typing that word, gonna’ come up with a new one, let’s see, how about Sky Monster? That works.) that we were to stay faithful to Sky Monster no matter what. (See how creativity kicks in to help me even now?)

Fear and Torture

In detail, we were taught that this could mean we could be tortured ourselves or be forced to watch our families being tortured. How, you ask? Well of course they didn’t leave that part out. Let’s see—scalding by boiling water, having a brick tied to the penis, or a thorny branch crammed up the vajajay, and being forced to walk, being lit on fire, being forced to remain outside in the snow and having ice water thrown upon us until actually freezing to death, amputation of fingers, hands, feet or toes, and being left to bleed to death, having one’s throat repeatedly, and shallowly slit until dead, being raped or sodomized to death—or worse, having to watch this being done to a loved one. I won’t go on, but this was all told to us in great detail.

Demonstrations of Resistance

Not only was it told to us, but we sat through demonstrations about resistance at our Kingdom Hall. One of the “brothers” would be tied to a chair while the others pretended to be his inquisitors, insisting that if he didn’t know the JW door-to-door “offer of the month”, he was suspect, and lying and might be a spy instead of a good-hearted JW.

In one such skit, they dragged him off the stage and then from the dark played a recording of the sound of a gunshot that rang in my ears for hours afterward.

Did I say I was only nine years old? This was when the first anxiety attack happened, but this garbage had been going on for my whole life.

The Attack

So, one night, at the age of nine, I was doing my best to sleep when a feeling crept over my body. It was fear, yes, but something more. Dread. Terror, helplessness, and horrible images playing over and over in my head of my baby brother being scalded with boiling water and screaming in pain, while I was tied to a chair and meant to keep vowing my faith and allegiance to Sky Monster. If I denied my faith in Sky Monster, I could make the scalding stop, but then I’d be subject to death at the Big Sky Monster Hates Earth Party coming to a planet near you, any day now. Could be any minute.

Living with Terror

Suddenly, everything spun. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Worse, I felt that there was an imminent threat somewhere in the actual room. Somewhere in the dark “a thing” was going to get me. Or more dreadful than that, it was going to get someone I loved, and I’d have to watch. I’d have offered myself instead in a heartbeat.

No matter what I did, I could not make the feeling stop.

I began to cry and ran to my mother, who basically told me I’d had a nightmare (How, when I was still awake? But ok, sure.) and that I should go back to sleep, and (as she started to cry) how hard this all was on her, and she wasn’t going to get any sleep now, and oh the agony because it’s all her responsibility and…and I went back to bed and just cowered under my covers.

Cult Life and Chronic Anxiety

Which was worse, the imaginary horrors or the one who was raising me? Sky Monster help me, I was in some deep shit!

This certain, abiding feeling of terror stayed with me for the rest of my life in episodes that made me wonder (and still sometimes do) how other people manage to just walk through each day as if there wasn’t a boulder careening toward them.

The Sky Monster Witnesses Cult was an intense and severe contributor to my lifelong issues with anxiety. Being raised in any punishing, judgmental religion has the potential to do this to people, but being raised in an environment like the SMWC is exponentially worse.

The Impact of the Cult

People who leave this cult are diagnosed with severe CPTSD or Religious Trauma Syndrome, or both (like me), have anxiety attacks regularly, and often have no idea how to operate in the “normal” world. They have been taught that the world is a terrifying place, filled with evil people, demons and the Devil Himself (we’ll call him Earth Monster) all poised and ready to eat them alive if they put a foot outside of “Sky Monster’s Organization”. No one has favor except those who belong to Sky Monster’s Organization. No one will be allowed to live past the Sky Monster Apocalypse unless they are ensconced within the embrace of the throngs of the Sky Monster Approved.

Inside the Cult

However, there’s even a larger problem with that. The Sky Monster Approved themselves, or being within the fold of them is more terrifying than actually being outside, only you don’t have any way to know that. What you have on the “in” side is constant scrutiny, judgment and the threat that you could be shunned and ousted if you put a foot, or a thought (Sky Monster can read your thoughts, you know!) wrong. (Shunning, in case anyone doesn’t know has been classified as a form of torture.)

If you “sin” even accidentally, your sins will be announced to the congregation and then you can be forced to sit out your time in a kind of social purgatory, during which you must attend all meetings and have frequent counseling with the “elders” of the congregation but no one is allowed to speak to you until they announce publicly that your punishment is over.

Public shaming, the normal world would call it.

“Oh yeah, and Skymonsterisallaboutloveandlovesyou. Got it?”

So the definition of love that you take into your tiny baby heart and soul is that there is love for you as long as you behave—perfectly. As long as you are perfect. Always. If you are not, not only is that love rescinded, but you will be killed. Now, go and be joyful because you are one of Sky Monster’s Chosen People!

Don’t you feel lucky, kid?

Childhood Memories

You probably knew some Sky Monster Cult kids when you were in school. We were the ones who couldn’t say the pledge of allegiance, or participate in any holidays. We couldn’t eat the cupcakes you brought in for your birthday. (But please tell your mom we thought they looked delicious!)

What a lovely and joyful childhood it was watching everyone else have fun, while we sat on the sidelines thinking how proud of us Sky Monster must be at that moment.

We did not eat the cupcakes of death! Yay for us! We did not receive any lovely wrapped gifts of holiday evilness. Hooray! We did not eat the Valentine chocolate hearts of heathenism! Woo-hoo! Go, you little five-year-old Sky Monster Saint, go!

Coping Through Creativity

I’ve been going at this a little tongue-in-cheek here because it helps me, but I can’t stress this enough: this was an absolutely hellish way to grow up.

My tender little mind and heart were damaged severely by this, and I was taught, purposefully to be in constant fear. The only way to survive, in fact was to be in constant fear!

The moment I let my fear subside for just a moment and maybe trusted myself or my own thoughts, I was for sure going to die. Or worse, I’d be shunned and left outside in a world that had been described to me as worse than hell, filled with hateful, horrible sinners just waiting to hurt me in any way possible.

Teenage Years and Medication

By the time I was fourteen, I had actually been diagnosed with anxiety attacks and I was prescribed Zoloft, which made me dizzy and to my recollection, did nothing to help the attacks. (Note, Zoloft is an anti-depressant which has been ‘noted’ to ‘sometimes’ reduce anxiety. Quite often, anti-depressants are prescribed to people with anxiety disorders with very little effect—oh, except to often make it worse. Look it up. You’ll be amazed.)

Struggling at Home

Missing school due to an anxiety attack was a mixed bag. If Mom wasn’t home—if it was one of the few periods during my early teens when she had a job—it was better. If she was home, I might as well have gone to school, because I was not going to be allowed to rest. She would demand that I come sit at the kitchen table and talk to her while we had tea, and all I wanted to do was wrap a blanket around myself and make everything stop for a little while—especially the sound of her voice.

Mind you, we weren’t talking about me. We weren’t soothing my anxiety or trying to make me feel better. We weren’t giving the child some tea and kindness. I would sit at that table wrapped in a blanket with my head spinning while she pretended we were at some kind of happy girl’s day tea, and it was her time to talk all about what was on her mind.

Living with a Narcissist

My mother herself, was not well. She had Borderline Personality Disorder and intense Narcissism. This combination left little space for anyone to put a foot wrong in her world. It was like having my very own live-in Sky Monster.

I was my mother’s counselor/confidant/loneliness abatement/emotional support animal for most of my life. This meant that I was really not allowed to be sick or unavailable, or have any emotions of my own at all. It was like having an adult toddler on my hands 24 hours a day.

This kind of intense pressure is part of what changes the pathways in the brain and nervous system that create chronic anxiety. Well that, and being in a Sky Monster Witness Cult with an abusive mother and an absent father—y’know, that sort of thing.

Lasting Trauma

Of course, I am talking about trauma. Lasting trauma that stays in the nervous system long after the events have ceased happening.

On the heels of that trauma, I moved through my life attempting to deal with the anxiety while I flailed about trying to find who the hell I actually am, and how to live.

Finding Refuge in Art

Art and writing were always my refuge. My first novel Leaving Walloon (hyperlink) is autobiographical fiction. It was cathartic to write about what it was like to grow up trapped with a religious maniac as my mother.

In the book, the main character is quite sick with anxiety, though I never really labeled it as such in the actual novel. The symptoms she has are most definitely symptoms of anxiety. At the time I wrote the book, I really did not know this.

I had no idea just how sick anxiety could make a person, and no idea how sick I really was until in September of 2020 I literally collapsed.

The Collapse

I had been unable to eat, or sleep, or even drink much water for months. My body and mind were in such a state of overwhelm and constant, constant anxiety that the only thing that gave me a moment’s peace and even allowed me to function was alcohol. A little diluted in water, a little over ice, a little to help me sleep.

Little did I know, but alcohol is just about the WORST thing a person with anxiety can put into their body. It creates anxiety all by itself, and after the nullifying properties wear off, it intensifies anxiety—makes it exponentially worse … and worse.

I was desperately trying to live my life this way, and keep up with my responsibilities, which I took so seriously, you’d think I was actually performing brain surgery, not just cooking keto for my husband, or trying to help people with their book manuscripts. It was life and death. Everything was life or death.

Breaking Point

Add to this a pandemic, and the government being taken over by a total Earth Monster, set on controlling and punishing women, and now we have a recipe for certain collapse.

And I did.

Just trying to open my front door one day, it rather felt like the door was pushing back. I stumbled backward and then felt the oddest sensation—my legs actually just giving out from under me. I crumpled to the ground and landed on the pavers outside my front door. It is only by the grace of the universe that my head fell onto the grass and not on the pavers or the cement bricks around the flowerbed only inches away.

Hospitalization

I tried to crawl into the house, scraped the flesh off my knee and my hand in the process and only managed to get a few feet into the living room when even crawling became impossible. I couldn’t even get my feet all the way inside the door.

This is how my husband found me. I could not get up. I couldn’t even crawl over to a chair and pull myself up. I absolutely could not move one more inch.

It’s an incredibly strange sensation to hear sirens start up in the distance and know they are coming for you.

Diagnosis and Healing

It took five days in the hospital for dehydration, malnutrition and exhaustion, (for two days the doctor came in to see me and could not even wake me enough to examine me… Oh the glory of sleeping at last.) and yes, by that time alcohol dependency, before I emerged, found a trauma therapist, the proper diagnosis (Complex PTSD, Religious Trauma Syndrome, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder) the proper medications and a new dedication to discovering the best way to deal with these conditions.

Go figure, but one of the biggest and most important ways to do that is by cultivating self-love. Enough to keep me from ever believing all the lies and intensity of my upbringing had anything to do with me. Enough to remind me that I don’t owe anything to anyone, especially a supposedly loving “god” who would put me through so much agony, the total loss of my sense of self, and the constant feeling that I would never, ever be good enough. A “god” and congregation that would know my brothers and I were being abused and do nothing about it.

A New Mission

It was finally time for me to heal the traumas that have had me battling this anxiety for so many years. I was finally alive and aware enough to begin.

So, now it is my mission, at sixty (my second act as I keep calling it) to take this message of awareness, healing and self-love out into the world!

Embracing Creativity and Self-Love

I couldn’t be more excited about it, either!

“In place of judgment, I invite myself to creativity. In place of anxiously waiting for the bad thing to happen, I paint little colorful birds until waiting for the bad is replaced by seeing the good of the colors on the page. In place of perfectionism, I watch the paint run and follow it.”

In place of knowing I am garbage, I love myself as best I can, count my qualities, and remind myself that I was just a little baby when this stuff was put into my head.

I put on comfortable clothes and quiet music, and wrap myself in the love I was not offered from the outside. I bring that love to myself from the inside instead.

I eat something hot, and let the warmth remind me I am alive and whole, and worthy—that my worth does not have to come at the price of human sacrifice, or at the price of the sacrifice of my self-agency, or my self-love.

Cultivating Self-Love

When I talk about cultivating self-love, this is what I mean. And it must be cultivated, tended and cared for. I must think it consciously, feel it consciously as much as I possibly can.

Chronic Anxiety disorders are just that—chronic—and I must pay attention to what I need every day. The only way to keep the monsters (Sky or otherwise) at bay is by loving myself enough to take care of myself.

The only way to properly take care of myself is to know myself. And that is my mission; to know myself, love myself and take the message of the importance self-love out into the world.

A Message of Healing

It starts right now, with me—and with you.

Thanks for being here.

Love, Cheri