Hey Rach, you matter.  You can do it.  You’re capable.  Don’t believe all that old shit.  Things can change if you make them change.  When you try now, it actually makes a difference.  Effort counts, action counts; it’s different than before.

Katherine and I were chatting about how it’s easy to want that egoless, boundaryless, total fantasy-like connection with your spouse (or boyfriend or partner, whatever).  And then we followed up with reasons why this desire is absolutely impossible and unrealistic and destructively persistent. 

My therapist gave me an assignment: I'm supposed to write about all the ways my husband and my father are similar - even if only in my imagination - so I can do EMDR on the emotional "ickiness" I feel around Husband when addressing this emotional Father-Figure work* (also known as The Black Cloud).  Poor Husband, just an innocent victim of circumstance, sexually assassinated in the land of Rachel's Trauma-Brain.

Nonetheless, I still had to battle the Miniature Fundamentalist living in my head.  Instead of using the Bible to keep me boxed into a Christian model for living, my ego insisted all my problems could be arrested using the 12-Step model. 

An innocent grade-school boy was groomed into believing absurd, futuristic terrors by his cooler, wiser, 30-year-old basketball coach.  His secretive and biblically inspired ideas included computerized chips, marks of the beast, and demons infiltrating human minds. 

We develop an appetite for these feelings even though they hurt; we become addicted.  And as we enter adulthood, we seek out these intoxicating yet familiar abuses by reframing (or recreating) the content of our lives to fit a story of victumhood and self-hate.

That perfection thing is yelling at me again because I ate two cookies and two bagels.  Obviously, my life is over.   Everyone knows eating 2,700 calories in one day is against the law.

Husband and I recently adopted our 14th family member, Bart.  Basically, I am Angelina Jolie…except instead of making mental illness look cool and adopting children from foreign countries, I increase the stigma and adopt farm animals from irresponsible pet owners.

Well, I did some research on the totally evidence-based internet library of hypochondric blogs…It’s amazing how my doctor can tell me to do something, but I’m only willing to try it once thousands of unqualified women with online diaries tell me it’s Ok.

Mostly filled with remorseful testimonials of women who had experienced abortions just milliseconds before converting to Christianity, it also included the inevitable brain damaging effects of masturbation and predestined divorce of couples who co-habitate before marriage.

Kathy, the young ballerina, is being mentored by her older, wiser dance teacher about what to expect when her first period comes. Never mind where Kathy’s mother is, or if she even has a legal guardian – what’s important is her teachers’ enthusiasic interest in Kathy’s private parts.

I proudly ran 1 mile today.  No, that was not a typo for the number 11. Why workout if you’re only gonna do it for 15 minutes?  Mostly to be able to tell judgey people, “I workout,” or “I go to the gym,” without lying.

Sometimes, when I feel like a black cloud of disgust, I trick myself into dressing like an adult instead of hiding in oversized sweatshirts and pants from Walmart by asking: What would someone with an overgrown self-esteem do?  This forces me to blow dry my hair, put on mascara, and floss.  Surprisingly, when I don’t dress like person experiencing homelessness, I tend to feel a little more “sparkly.”

This post is about what happens when a Christian fundamentalist upbringing is infused into a hypersensitive brain.  Below are the four anthropomorphic versions of God I understood growing up, followed by my current conception at age 35 in another post.