As a child, I was abused by parents and others. I was bullied by peers for having red hair and for having whatever other “weakness” they could find. I was raised in an unhealthy church that denied and minimized abuse and blamed the victim, thus perpetuating abuse against women and children.

At age 18, I rebelled against my parents and the church, moved out of the house and in with a boyfriend. I was in love, of course, and was eager to get out of my parents’ house. Little did I know the nightmare that was about to unfold. This boyfriend was a drug dealer who pushed drugs on me and lived in a mildewed basement apartment. He could not manage his money, he could not keep a job, and he smoked up most of his supply of drugs. He would take my waitressing tips to pay off his dealer.

I spent most of my days in that tiny basement apartment, chain smoking cigarettes. There were many people in and out of the apartment to purchase and use drugs. Pot was being smoked all day long. It wasn’t long before I began having asthma attacks, but I continued to smoke cigarettes and pot anyway. I used other, harder drugs as well. My boyfriend would do any drug that he could get his hands on, and expected me to do the same.

Soon I was having problems focusing at my job. My short-term memory and attention span were terrible. I was having strange thoughts that seemed to overtake me. When at home, I spent a lot of time staring out into space, lost in my thoughts. I did this whether I was high or not. My boyfriend noticed my “strange” behavior and began to make fun of me in front of his friends. It wasn’t long before his friends joined in.

My boyfriend noticed every little absent-minded thing that I did, like losing a lighter. That was a big deal – losing a lighter. Once I was sorting mail and accidentally threw his paycheck in the trash. Later when he couldn’t find it, I realized what I had done and pulled it out of the trash. Of course, his friends were there at the time and he made a really big deal of it in front of them.

It got to where he was screaming at me every day about how “stupid” I was and how I was “F---ing us up.” He told me repeatedly that I was “crazy, schizo, and needed Prozac.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was developing health problems. I got to the point where I could hardly eat. The boyfriend didn’t have the patience to grocery shop, so every day while he was out making his “rounds”, he would pick me up a hamburger, fries and soda at a fast food joint. That was all I ate for months – was one fast food meal per day. I began to hate hamburgers. I tried to eat them anyway. I would have to choke them down with my soda. It became that way with all food – that I couldn’t eat it without forcing it down with a drink. I developed this odd belief that I couldn’t swallow.

I became very thin, to the point where my ribs were showing. My skin was not a good color, and my hair was falling out. I developed chronic bronchitis and sinus infections. I went to the doctor a lot back then. And the wonderful boyfriend would yell at me and call me a hypochondriac – he would say that I wasn’t really sick, I was making it up in my head.

At that point I spent a lot of time in bed. I ended up quitting my job because I wasn’t even healthy enough to work. I was sick and depressed. I never contemplated suicide but I do remember wishing I would die.

One night, a friend of the boyfriend’s gave me some crank. After I did it, the person who gave it to me told me that it had been cut with heroin. I was scared because I knew you weren’t supposed to do an upper with a downer. Later, I was awake, alone. The boyfriend was asleep. I began feeling numbness in my legs and my heart was beating fast. I thought that I was dying from the crank. But the thing was, that didn’t scare me. I wanted to die. I was ready to die. So I wrote a goodbye letter to the boyfriend, my friends and family, and went to bed, hoping that I would never wake up.

Well, guess what, I woke up the next morning and I’m glad I did! God had bigger plans for me!

After one year, I finally dumped the boyfriend. I stopped using drugs immediately. I didn’t like using them anyway, and I knew that the drugs had caused my physical and mental health problems. I began working again, and went to college and got a degree. But even these things were a struggle, because I had moved on to another abusive relationship.

I married at age 21. Two weeks after the marriage, my husband began sexually abusing me. He was a very large man who was very rough and would hurt me on purpose. Sex became something that I avoided and loathed. Shortly after our marriage, I became pregnant. I gave birth to the baby just one month after I finished my college courses. At that time, I was separated from my husband because of the abuse. He went around telling everyone that I had been cheating and the baby wasn’t his.

My divorce was final when my son was two years old. At that time, I had a job making $10/hr and could barely support myself with all the expenses, mainly childcare. My ex refused to pay child support and threatened to kill me when the judge ordered him to pay $480/month. I had a restraining order put on him. After a few months, a new judge dropped the order because my ex was a cop and needed to carry a gun for his job.

My twenties are pretty fuzzy for me. I remember being under a lot of stress and being afraid to discipline my son because I thought Child Protective Services would take him from me. I had a bad relationship with my mother. I had a few boyfriends who turned out to be no good so I dumped them. At age 25, I was drinking on a daily basis to deal with all the stress.

At the place where I worked, I endured sexual harassment and discrimination. That was the breaking point for me. I was devastated. I really loved that job and couldn’t believe the way they had treated me, after all the hard work I did and all the money I saved them. After that, I decided I didn’t want to work anymore. I was tired of people being mean to me. All I wanted to do was be able to work and get a paycheck and not have to deal with a bunch of crap, but that just wasn’t the way things were.

At that point, my ex began looking very attractive to me. He promised me that if we got back together, he would support me and I wouldn’t have to work. So I moved back in with him and we left the area. I was happy to leave this place and all the pain of the past. I was starting over.

I should have been happy but I wasn’t. We had no relationship and slept in separate rooms. We thought of each other as roommates. My depression and anxiety took a turn for the worst. I became so afraid of people because of the way I had been treated, that I developed agoraphobia and was afraid to leave the house. Months went by that I did not leave at all. My ex would do all the grocery shopping and errands. I was afraid even to go to the store because I was worried about what the store clerk might think of me.

I spent virtually all my time in front of the computer. That was my escape. I had a data entry job that I did from home, and that was my excuse for always being on the computer. But, I wasn’t always working. Sometimes I was researching stuff, sometimes chatting, sometimes writing stuff on LiveJournal. At any rate, what I was doing wasn’t productive, and I was neglecting my son. I never neglected his physical needs but I did neglect his emotional needs and I feel bad about that.

But things do get better! He is now 12 years old and he and I are very close and we have a lot of fun together. I’ve apologized for what I’ve done in the past and he said, “Mom, don’t worry about it.”

I left my ex for the final time in 2006. I was so distraught that day, that I was having constant panic attacks and could not even pack my things. My mother packed my things for me. And finally, after all these years of pain and suffering, I humbled myself and gave my life to Jesus. I made the decision to obey Him. Immediately I made some changes. I quit smoking and I threw away clothes that were too revealing. I started attending church and getting support.

Things did not improve right away – I was still very anxious and experienced some setbacks in my career. My biggest problem at the time was low self esteem. I believed the lies that abusers had told me about myself over the years.

So, I decided I would challenge these lies. So I made a list of everything that I was good at. It went something like this:

• Cooking
• Cleaning
• Organizing
• Accounting
• Data Entry
• Customer Service
• Driving

I kept reviewing the list and telling myself I was good at these things. My ex-husband and ex-boyfriend had both convinced me that I COULDN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT. But, they were wrong.

I am now 35 years old and I have a good job with great benefits. In addition, it is in a Christian environment where I am loved and respected. I no longer fear that every day I go into work I will have to deal with someone behaving abusively towards me – because that doesn’t happen here. And this is all because I turned my life and will over to Jesus Christ. I also found a church where I feel safe, that does not perpetuate abuse or blame the victim.

My life has not been perfect and I still have struggles. But I know that I am a new person in Christ.

Just six years ago, I was agoraphobic and hardly spoke at all. Now I speak to people every day at work. I can go to Wal-mart without becoming stressed out about the crowd. I am less self-conscious, and I am able to speak in front of groups. I may give a sermon soon. I find I am confronting people when needed and not feeling afraid. I don’t even know this person I am becoming, but I like her! I think that this is the “me” that always was, but was buried deep inside my fears of what people might think.

Now I get up every morning, look in the mirror, and I like what I see. I like who I am – who I am in Christ. I am working through my past issues with my life coach. I know now that the things abusers said about me were untrue and just a manipulative tactic so they could gain control over me. And they no longer have that control over me.

Finally, after all these years – I AM FREE.

I ran across this article about a month ago on a blog called “Single Dad Laughing”. It’s called “The Disease Called ‘Perfection’”.

Perfection infects society on all levels. Just about every group has their own ideas about what is acceptable and what isn’t. Unfortunately, this is prevalent in a lot of Christian communities as well.

I grew up in a non-denominational charismatic church. I went to a Christian school that was affiliated with that church as well. This particular community was afflicted with “Perfection”. Here are some examples:

There was a girl a few grades ahead of me who became pregnant while still in high school and had an abortion. No one knew about it until a few years later when her boyfriend finally told his parents. The reason I know about this is because his parents were upset after hearing the news and shared about it at a prayer meeting. The people at the prayer meeting then spread the news all over the church. Now everyone looks down on this girl for having an abortion. But the reason she had it was because she was afraid of what people would think of her for getting pregnant.

Another girl became pregnant after graduation but told no one, and hid the pregnancy well because no one knew she was pregnant until she was seven months along and went into premature labor. I felt bad for her that she had no one to talk to and had to go through the pregnancy alone, because a pregnancy is a hard thing for a woman to go through. Also, because she was hiding her pregnancy, she didn’t go to a doctor and receive prenatal care. Perhaps if she had, her baby would have not been born prematurely.

Many other girls who I went to school with got pregnant out of wedlock. I was actually one of the few who didn’t. But, I did do other things when I was younger that I shouldn’t have. In that church, there is a certain stigma attached to people who aren’t perfect. People openly share private information about others at prayer meetings. It’s gossip in the form of “prayer requests”.  And then people go tell their friends and family everything that was shared at the prayer meeting. That’s how the gossip spreads. And everyone thinks it’s okay because they’re praying for the people they’re talking about.

Some teenage girls who became pregnant out of wedlock felt compelled to stand in front of the entire church and confess their sin. They were extremely emotional, crying and apologizing to the congregation. I was always uncomfortable with this because I wondered why they were doing it. Did they really choose to stand in front of several hundred people and humiliate themselves, or did someone make them do it?

Others hide their sins from the church, because they’ve witnessed the gossip and the way members treat those who have committed, in their opinion, “major sins”. They don’t want to experience rejection. So it’s easier to lie about it and be left alone.

So they go to prayer meetings, and pray for other people, and share the problems of OTHERS, and confess the sins of OTHERS, but not THEIR OWN! And they do this because they’re in pain. But instead of facing their demons, they cover up their pain by judging others.

And I do this too.

Because it’s easier to talk about someone else’s problems than my own. And it makes me feel better about myself if I criticize someone else. “I’m better than them because I don’t do what they do.” I was married when I had my baby, so that makes me better than my classmates who had babies out of wedlock. I didn’t have an abortion like that girl in high school, so I’m better than her.

But I’ve done bad stuff too. And I’ve experienced the same kind of stigma and humiliation that these young mothers experienced. So I should be the last one to judge them. And yet, I do. But it has to stop.

Single Dad Laughing says that the cure to perfection is to be real. He says, “Be bold about your weaknesses and you will change people's lives. Be honest about who you actually are, and others will begin to be their actual selves around you.”

That’s a great idea, but before we do that we have to make sure we are in a safe environment. If we find ourselves in an emotionally unsafe environment like the above-mentioned church, openly sharing our problems can set us up for the kind of bullying experienced by those unwed mothers.

I would say find a safe environment where you can be real. Because really, what is the point of hanging around people you don’t trust and acting like something you’re not? To get approval? True friends will accept you no matter what you’re suffering through or what you’ve done in the past. So find people who accept you, people who you can be real with.

And each of us should work on CREATING a safe environment so others can be real with us. I really like Ghandi’s quote “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” I believe if we want to change the world, we must start with ourselves.

Instead of passing judgment on others when they make mistakes, we need to show forgiveness and compassion. And we also need to look at the sins in our own lives and repent of those as well, instead of throwing stones at others.

John 8:1-7: “Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. ‘Teacher,’ they said to Jesus, ‘this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?’

“They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!”

Building trust is key to creating a safe environment.  If someone shares something personal with you, keep it confidential. Watch how much information you give out when requesting prayer for someone. In small group settings, it needs to be a policy that whatever is said does not leave the group. If people think that they’re going to be judged, they won’t share their struggles. But if they feel safe, then they can be real.