“The ax forgets; the tree remembers.” I didn’t know this old African proverb until I was much older, but it has grounded me on many occasions when I’ve been told I’m not remembering things correctly or it wasn’t that bad and I should just get over it. The abuser has the luxury of forgetting, but I still carry the ax’s scars as reminders.

I didn’t know at that time that all this craziness we had been living with for 16-plus years was typical domestic abuse. I had been in denial for a long time, but I was at the precipice of educating myself and opening my eyes to what my children and I had endured. The veil was about to be lifted as to the real Rick Sinclair and the Christian Fellowship Center cult.

Therapy has been so helpful because it has given me enough time to process and the courage to step back into these situations and say, “Okay, I don't want to be an abuser.”

I want to stop running and instead I'm going to dive back into the trauma and try to help other people. That's what I've been doing for the past year or so. I have been doing advocacy work, because the cycle stops with me.

One does not simply leave CFC. They have your number. They have your email. They have your address. They don’t just let you leave. I wasn’t left alone for nearly a month straight.

This meeting was going to be different, I was sure of it. This meeting would solve things. This meeting would restore my trust in Rick Sinclair and CFC leadership. I imagined myself laughing at the fact that I ever thought he’d lied to me. He would make sense of it all and I would apologize for ever THINKING such a thing and we could move forward with this, right?

As I reflected more, I concluded that while I was certainly responsible for the legalism and dysfunction in my life during those years, I realized that to some extent, so was my church leadership. CFC sermons started to feel more and more like conservative practical life advice and culture war tactics with a moralistic Deism twist.

There is hope after CFC, even for those of us so damaged that we felt we had no choice but to let go of our faith to keep our sanity.

I really believed that my relationship with God AND the relationship that my children had with God were tied up in my ability to make them love God. There was this weight, this huge fear of eternal damnation for me and for them, that was driving me to make my children sit still and listen.

There was also the weight that if my children didn’t obey me, then they would never obey God. Whatever had to be done, I had to break their spirit so that they would only have an obedient heart for God and not the world.

Virginity. The trophy of womanhood. The uncrumpled rose. The unchewed gum. The thing every good Christian man required and desired. Purity. A wife unspoiled.

I was the poster child for it.

As a child, I spoke in tongues frequently. I didn’t have a choice. My father would randomly tell us to start speaking in tongues in our home or on a car ride. He issued this command many times throughout our childhood. He would tell us to do it and pester us if we didn’t comply immediately: “Come on, pray now! I can’t hear all of you!”

My ex forced me to quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom and then took away my money and my phone. Abusive churches isolate people for the same reasons that abusers isolate their victims—to make vulnerable people dependent and therefore, compliant. Don't let the church be your one and only.

My parents told us that if we told the truth, social workers would take us away and we would never see our family again and end up in homes where we weren't loved.

Be aware of those who don’t want things written down, those who don’t want witnesses. Be aware of pastors and their wives who don’t want a written record or who pull you aside for private conversations. When the privacy is not about protecting you but protecting them. They will claim Matthew 18 as they pull you off out of others’ hearing.

This is not a male only/pastor thing. This is a power thing. And don’t forget for one minute that the wives are in on it.

I’m never going to forget the first time that friend got beaten while I was playing at his house. I was about ten years old. I immediately learned that this could happen to any one of us. We would be used as an example–just like that boy was–to keep everyone else in line.

Resistance seemed futile. God was a jealous God who would break my spirit and strip me of everything in order to gain my full submission. He was a sadistic, abusive being.