Composure at any cost?
“There have been countless times my siblings and I have brought up a deep cut traumatic memory and at least a few siblings have no memory of it. Sometimes I'm the one who doesn't remember, and sometimes it's one of the other sisters.”
How much do you remember from your childhood? For many children raised at Christian Fellowship Center or other high-control churches, the answer is not much.
Suppressed or fragmented memories are typical for people who have experienced trauma, but memory gaps are also connected to another common experience in high-control contexts: emotional suppression.
Emotional suppression is a response to a strong emotion that inhibits the emotional expression in response to an emotion-eliciting event. In other words, it’s not that we don’t feel angry. We simply hide our anger and perform a more socially-acceptable emotion.
Emotional suppression is ubiquitous in our society—we learn not to show anger when lectured by a boss and to cheerfully help a customer before crying in a storage closet. We smooth over the sharp edges of emotions to make the people around us more comfortable. The fact that we label some emotions as “negative” speaks more to society’s discomfort than to the merits of a particular emotion.
Churches are no exception. Churches–especially high-control churches–implicitly and explicitly preach erroneous beliefs about emotions. If we’re sad or fearful, church leaders tell us that we lack faith. In an earlier series on emotions, Becky Castle Miller shares her realization that what she learned from the church about emotions was incorrect.
I reconsidered everything I had been taught about emotions and emotional health and realized how unhealthy it all was. I started reading more about emotional health. I started wondering, if everything I was taught about emotions was wrong, what else do I need to rethink? I started reading about spiritual abuse and realized a lot of the things I learned were actually cult-like and spiritually abusive.
Why is this important for us to understand? Because suppressing emotions rather than letting them move through our body has serious consequences. A 2022 study on emotions and health notes:
Expressive [emotional] suppression is considered to be cognitively and physiologically burdensome, having been linked with increased experience of negative emotions and depressive symptomatology, heightened sympathetic nervous system and neuroendocrine activation, and worsened physical health and mortality.
We have previously discussed how parents at Christian Fellowship Center require their children to submit their decisions, emotions, and even their personalities to parental control. Introversion was identified as selfish behavior, a sin to be confessed and replaced with others-centered attentiveness. Children with extroverted personalities who mimicked the pastors’ wives received praise. Children who grew up at CFC found their introversion was called selfishness.
Children in these communities learn over and over again that they have no power over their own bodies and that what they feel about physical abuse done to their bodies—especially healthy self-protective emotions like anger and not wanting to be near those who harm them—doesn’t matter. Instead, they learn that all such feelings should be ignored and suppressed so that the community can maintain the status quo.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in CFC’s fixation on instant and cheerful obedience. In the Blueprint Conference recordings from 2012, Rick Sinclair states: “The three critical components of true obedience: obedience must be instant, cheerful, and thorough.”
It is not enough for a child to obey commands—they must also find space in their brain to suppress negative emotions and plaster a smile on their face. That is a substantial cognitive burden for a child to bear.
In addition to triggering an avalanche of health issues, suppressing negative emotions can also impact our cognitive functioning. One study notes that emotional suppression “impaired incidental memory for information presented during the suppression period.” Essentially, our brain is too busy suppressing emotions to remember details about what happened.
It is very likely that emotional suppression is a key factor in the memory gaps and chronic health issues reported by many children raised at CFC and other high-control churches. A previous post that explores the impact of trauma quotes several CFC survivors:
“I constantly battled with nausea and cyclic vomiting. When the prayers didn’t work and only made it worse, I turned to self-harm and became suicidal because I thought there was something wrong with me and I couldn’t receive healing.”
“My symptoms were debilitating. I had unexplained stomach cramping, I was throwing up blood, and even developed a bleeding ulcer at age 8. On top of that, I had heart palpitations that sent me straight to the ER and a pediatric cardiologist.”
It’s disturbing to consider that when parents require their children to obey cheerfully they may be creating bodies vulnerable to chronic health conditions. It’s even worse to consider that these children may have very few memories of why their bodies are acting like this in the first place.
What do we do with this information? How might this impact the way that we parent, the way that we support our friends, and the way we care for our own emotions?
If you or a friend were parented in this way, you’re not alone. Learning to pay attention to your emotions can be terrifying but it’s worth it. Our series on Emotions and Abuse can be a helpful place to start.
If you are a parent with young children, now is a great time to learn new strategies. Here are some resources that can support you in healthy parenting:
If you are a parent with grown children and you want to make amends, start slowly. Your children may not feel comfortable sharing their experiences with you. Demonstrate that you will welcome their negative emotions even when it is uncomfortable for you.
