The House That Jesus Built: a Memoir (Chapter Four)

Re-Entry

I was well into my thirties, nearly forty, when I finally felt safe enough to admit something was not right in my life. That something was not right with me.

The very act of admitting this was intensely difficult. I struggled with the feeling that up until that point, my whole life had been a gigantic waste of time and effort. The overwhelming grief and sorrow I felt is hard to adequately describe. It reached beyond depression; it was despair.

I started to realize the extent of the insanity of what my life had been, how deeply the wounds pierced, and how difficult it was for me to overcome the trauma. How difficult it was to be in control of my own life.

I understood that Mother had her own unresolved issues that no doubt stemmed from her own childhood traumas, but her bouts of depression and woeful histrionics—“I know I was a horrible Mother!”—that suddenly came on when her adult children were upset with her or weren’t being agreeable in some way, seemed more like self-pity and manipulation. She was a compulsive liar and a skilled gaslighter who refused to take responsibility for her abuse, but would instead use our pain for her ongoing pleasure by turning the brutality we suffered for years at her hands into funny little anecdotes she would repeat to others in social situations. Her violent outbursts towards her children, her partners, and her pets were well hidden behind closed doors, and she was calculatingly and superficially charming in public. But her charm could quickly evaporate and she would suddenly and without provocation turn shockingly cruel and hateful. I saw it happen over and over throughout the years that I knew, given enough time and the right circumstance, her mask would eventually shift, and people would catch a glimpse of the true Mother. But as every one of her relationships were superficial, none of them really had any idea just how cruel she actually was.

It was obvious to me that Mother suffered from some sort of mental/emotional condition that for years had gone untreated: bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder? I wasn’t sure, but although I knew that it was something, I started to realize that it wasn’t anything I could help, particularly since she had repeatedly refused therapy, expressing contempt for the very proposition.

And I started to question why her mental health issues should be an excuse for putting up with her abuse? Every attempt I made to reconcile with Mother, to try to make things better by modifying my behavior, to try to look past her abuse and her unrepentant and ongoing bad behavior, to ignore the theatrics, to set boundaries, to plead for therapeutic intervention such as counseling or pharmaceutical aids, ended up with me being gaslighted. And nothing changed.

With repeated attempts to “forgive” her and all of those who had irreparably harmed me, I saw that I had confused forgiveness with reconciliation—with putting up with continued abuse. I began to see that the issue wasn’t a matter of me forgiving Mother, of which I was most willing and capable, but of her repenting, something she repeatedly refused to do. And I realized that after years of unrelenting and inescapable abuse, I was trauma bonded to my mother, a psychological condition similar to what is known as Stockholm syndrome, leading me to enable her abuse by trying to rationalize all the reasons why she was abusive and what I could do or say to change it. I had suppressed my emotions and my very existence for the sake of trying to appease Mother (which for years had been crucial for my survival), repressed past traumas as if they’d never happened (“surely Mother couldn’t have been all that bad,” I had tried to rationalize), and pretended as if I were okay, when I actually was not okay.

The realization came long after three children and a failed first marriage to a man who had lied to me about who he was from the beginning of our relationship. I, naïve and foolishly trusting to a fault, allowed religious guilt over the act of sex outside of marriage to forge my path ahead, and I ignored all the red flags of that first serious relationship that I was allowed to have. I didn’t even see the flags, and there was no one to point them out to me.

They were stupid lies, small lies, lies that made me think he was a different person than who he actually was. Lies about his likes and dislikes. Lies about his dreams of the future. Lies about his college education that he had never finished but had said he did. Like many in Christian churches, he hid behind a religious mask, using words and deeds—those outward appearances that fool the undiscerning—as a way to conceal his true intentions.

He told me later, before we were divorced, that he had lied from the beginning because he’d wanted to have sex with me, and he’d told me what he knew I had wanted to hear so that I’d oblige him. It had been like a hunt for him, and our eventual marriage happened only because he’d felt pressured by me, not because he’d actually wanted to marry.

Considering his parents later pressured one of his brothers into a disastrous first marriage, the pressure he said he’d felt probably wasn’t just coming from me, so I imagine the truth is somewhere in the middle. But regardless, what a waste. Seven years and three children later, and I found out that he was a liar who had only wanted to put another notch in his belt, as it were, using religion as a means to that end. Who had only wanted the experience of having sex with me, preferably multiple times until he grew bored and moved on to a different experience, but nothing of what came afterwards. A selfish man-child with his own unresolved issues, who saw sex as nothing more than scratching a primal itch, rather than an intimate act of love and mutual sharing; and who didn’t really want to get married in the first place, but had somehow decided that marriage could be a convenient way to scratch those itches any time he wanted, rather than a sacred and holy union.

He had a void inside of him that he didn’t know how to fill, and because he didn’t know how to receive, he instead took to satisfy his own desires.

I also had a void inside of me that I didn’t know how to fill. Like the woman at the well, I drew from the well of my own physicality—not just sexually, but emotionally and mentally, my time and energy and effort—and gave it away, hoping to satisfy my own desires, hoping to receive something back for all my effort. I didn’t yet know how to access or receive from the Well of Living Water, the Well that is found within and sourced from Above.

So he took and I gave until there was nothing left to give and nothing left to take. And three children and seven years later, we both remained empty.

What a waste. What a waste for me and him both.

I was devastated, but I refused to stay married to a man who didn’t want to love me. Who had never loved me. Who was incapable of loving me. More importantly, a man who didn’t want to love our children. Who probably never could, because he had never been taught how, and he was too emotionally lazy and egotistical to figure it out for himself. Who resented having children in the first place, and who resented—and refused—the responsibility that children brought, emotionally, spiritually, and financially. Who was emotionally unavailable to me, but more importantly, to our children, who were desperate for his attention.

Repeated attempts at resolution over the years had failed, and so I filed for divorce. I wasn’t going to allow my children to grow up thinking that was normal. I wouldn’t allow my daughter to grow up thinking that was the kind of man she deserved; the kind of man she would expect to put up with. I wouldn’t allow my sons growing up imitating their emotionally and sexually stunted father, not having any better example to follow.

The realization that something hadn’t been right with my life—that there were traumas that I couldn’t quite remember, memories of which usually came only in the form of recurring nightmares at night and flashbacks during the day, that I could barely keep at bay by drinking, a coping mechanism that began during my second marriage and waxed and waned in intensity for many years—also came well after my second marriage and divorce.

That disastrous and short-lived marriage was to Mother’s ex-pretend-finance, Larry, the father of her third child, a son who hadn’t lived for more than eight minutes after his birth. (And thank God for that, because my youngest brother would have had a life of Hell, a fact that I knew from personal experience.)

Larry: the most consequential and damning male relationship of my teen years. I couldn’t get away from him even when I tried.

When I was a teenager, Larry had been Mother’s on-again-off-again boyfriend. Retired Navy SEAL and CIA operative, he was often gone for weeks at a time working overseas, coming back with cryptic insinuations of jobs he’d been doing, such as infiltrating communities close to a target he was assigned to watch or to assassinate. He never went into much detail, but I wouldn’t have believed him if he had. In fact, I didn’t believe him until years later, after we were married and I saw his multiple passports and photo ID’s under various aliases, and I saw for myself his “friends” from the CIA, once having a seemingly innocuous conversation with them when they “just so happened to stop by” when Larry wasn’t home. They were Larry’s handlers, checking on him every few weeks or so, to remind him that he may have been retired, but he’d never really leave the CIA.

As a teen, I had hated having Larry around; but when he was around, Mother’s attention was occupied and she was less prone to violent outbursts, her fake mask of perfection firmly in place, and so I also liked having him around, because his presence protected me from her fury.

I had despised him, but he was also the first man I knew who took me seriously, who encouraged me to express my thoughts, who praised my intelligence and youthful beauty. And so I had despised him, yes; but I had also learned to love him in a certain undefinable and confusing way.

Larry began taking me on day trips to the more deserted sections of the beach without Mother’s permission or knowledge. I would dissociate during those trips: I remembered dressing for the trip, hating my ill-fitting, second-hand bathing suit and how it revealed aspects of my body that I didn’t feel comfortable being revealed, but not knowing how to get out of wearing it; getting into his car to leave for the trip, feeling dread over the day that loomed before me; and then the next thing I remembered, I was back home and getting out of the car, the day done and behind me. Memories of what we did at the beach were scattered, remembered only as snippets: snapshots of memories, small pieces of a puzzle that I wasn’t able to completely piece together.

Then he began treating Mother more as an afterthought and to increasingly lavish attention on me, sexually grooming me under Mother’s jealous eyes, sexual advances that Mother had refused to believe. Instead, when I tearfully told her that Larry had initiated an intimate encounter with me, she brought Larry into the conversation. They both said I had just confused Larry’s fatherly love with Stepdad’s sexual abuse (which was ironic, considering Mother had always refused to believe me about that, too). They demanded that I take back my accusations, telling the rest of the family that I’d been lying. When I dug my heels in and repeatedly refused, Mother became violent. Afterwards, Larry began showering me with even more attention in front of Mother—lingering hugs; kisses that came too close to the lips; stroking my hair; sitting close beside me, our thighs touching, and putting his arm around my shoulders; whispering compliments and flattery in my ear: “you look nice today” or “I like the smell of your perfume.” He would show me deference and kindness over and above Mother in hundreds of small, nearly indefinable ways, but rather than repel Mother, his increasing disregard for her only fueled a sick rivalry, an unsolicited and one-sided competition for Larry’s attention that completely baffled me. Her increasing possessiveness and desperation only amused Larry. I observed the perplexing dynamic for myself, but he also flatly stated as much to me during private conversations. Instead of slowing down, however, he increased his affection towards me, driving Mother to demand that I respond positively to Larry’s unwanted attention, insisting he was only being parental and that I was just trying to cause problems because I was perverted and sick and mentally ill, an accusation she subsequently circulated within the community for many years as part of her ongoing gaslighting and defamation campaign.

It was a confusing and frightening triangulation between the three of us that went on for years with various degrees of intensity, and I didn’t know how to fully extract myself.

Even after Mother’s baby died when I was seventeen, and after she and Larry had officially broken up for the final time, Larry kept coming around every now and again, sometimes at Mother’s invitation and sometimes not. He was like a cancerous tumor attached to Mother that she refused to eradicate, one she kept insisting I stay attached to, as well. I couldn’t get away from him no matter how I tried.

During and after my divorce from my first husband, Larry stopped trying to hide his intentions, and he began using love-bombing tactics presumably in an attempt to woo me: constant telephone calls, romantic cards, gifts, expensive flower arrangements. This hoovering was also coupled with a stealthy and dangerous campaign of harassment and underhanded manipulations, however (with the support and aid from both my Mother and my ex-husband, as I found out later), that baffled and confused me, partly because I didn’t know always know at the time where it was coming from. Such as the sabotage of my phone lines, the sabotage of my car, the sabotage of my finances. These, and more, were attempts to keep me isolated and in financial ruin.

I couldn’t get away from Larry even when I tried, and my increasingly desperate situation, along with constant harassment and undermining, was what finally what wore me down—

Maybe Mother and Larry were right and Larry didn’t really have any intentions of having sex with me when I was a teenager. Maybe they were right, and I was just confusing Stepdad’s abuse with the attention from Larry. And maybe Larry is right, and his fatherly affection for me as a child has blossomed into a different kind of love now that I’m an adult. Maybe they are right, and I just don’t know what love is. Maybe they are right and the problem isn’t Larry. Maybe they are right and the problem is me.

—so I took Larry’s suggestion of how to solve my difficulties as a newly single mother (difficulties that I didn’t fully realize at the time had been purposefully made worse), and I married him.

This is one intention of the manipulations of people with a pattern of antisocial behaviors and traits: to use every available tool to wear down their prey. I knew in my gut, with every ounce of my intuition, that Larry was a treacherous man. But a lifetime of having been manipulated, abused, and gaslighted had developed into a debilitating and chronic inability to trust my own judgement and my own thoughts. From a very young age I had been forced, as a way of survival, to accept the lies of the abusers as being the truth rather than the facts that pointed to the truth, and this mindset didn’t magically change when I became an adult. Trauma bonds run deep. I didn’t realize until later, when I began healing, that I had known the truth all along, and this is really why Mother and Larry had been so motivated to bring me back under their control. They had systematically undermined my every effort at independence, sabotaged my short-lived college education, alienated me from all relationships that they couldn’t control, financially sabotaged me at every turn, and had done everything they could to make sure I was dependent upon them alone, because they were afraid. My ex-husband’s underhanded involvement was out of anger, motivated by his pride and ego that had been bruised by the divorce, and his anger was, and is, dangerous in its own way; but Larry and Mother were afraid of not being in control over what I’d say and do, and of how it would affect them if I ever felt safe enough to finally comprehend just how dark-hearted they both were.

Thankfully, my second marriage was short-lived, but the full realization that something wasn’t right with my life came after I had been married to my third husband for several years, and my children, whom he loved—and still loves with the love their biological father refused to give—were nearly grown. My husband, my very best friend, who by his very nature created a stable environment whereby I could begin building a foundation. Building me.

And I could finally breathe.

And start to grow.

To remember where’d I’d been and to decide where I was going.

So I was almost forty before I was safe enough to face all the unresolved issues holding me back from living the life I’d wanted, the life I knew God had sent me to live.

My healing journey began with journaling, an activity that, as much as I had enjoyed writing in high school and in college, I was never able to enjoy before.

Mother had made sure of that.

Journaling quickly took a life of its own, developing into a frenetic telling of everything that was coming into my head, without any filter whatsoever. My entries were a narrative filled with frightening outbursts of emotions I had never been able to verbalize, and partially remembered memories: snippets and snapshots from the past, pieces to a puzzle still disconnected to each other. One half memory led to another half memory, and the trail of crumbs led further and further into the dense woods of my subconscious.

It wasn’t until later—days? weeks?—when I read back on everything I had written in my journals up to that point, that I had a sudden flash of memory that was so clear, I could literally hear and feel a loud click in my head, like a cell-sized explosion inside my brain, as if two dormant neurons who had been separated from one another for nearly 30 years, their spark seemingly gone, suddenly sputtered and pulsated with rekindled vigor, and with a sudden flash of energy, connected again.

And I was finally able to admit that my memories had been real; that they weren’t just awful made-up stories by a bad little girl with a wicked imagination.

I continued journaling with a wild urge: an avalanche of memories about things I had already known, but had forgotten I had known, or those memories that up until then, I hadn’t been able to recognize as being memories. I was finally making connections that I’d been unable to make before, and after having been in the dark for many years, stumbling through life like a rat trapped in a maze trying to make it to the other side—being controlled by and forced by Mother into one direction or the other against my will, obediently blind, reactionary to stimuli, rather than actively involved in my own life— I had to know everything. Understand everything.

And so I wrote and I started making connections, because Truth always triumphs over lies.

Not to say that I was able to put together every piece of the puzzle. There are still partial memories that hold deeply buried trauma that, when triggered, manifests in a sudden burst of panic that crushes my chest and squeezes the breath out of my body. Forgotten memories crawling and scratching painfully all over my body, and I feel as if I can only be safe if I can somehow crawl out of my skin and leave my body behind.

Such as when I visit Pelican Island: what happened in the room underneath the visitor center after the Freemason banquet we went to with Larry right after my high school graduation on my seventeenth birthday? I remember in snippets—walking down the wide concrete staircase that curved gently to the left, candle in hand; showing Mother how to hold her candle so the paper bobeche would better catch the wax; Mother becoming angry because Larry offered me a helping hand going down the stairs instead of her, especially considering her pregnant condition; and at the bottom of the stairs, a line of men waiting in the room, sitting down in chairs; a table and a deck of playing cards; and afterwards, when we were finished and had gone back upstairs, one of the old men quietly whispering in my ear, his left arm winding around my waist, “maybe next time I can get to know you better,” and when I gave him what-for in front of everyone including his wife, I was the one who got in trouble for being shockingly disrespectful to a man of such honorable rank, and a veteran at that, how dare I!—but I can’t remember all of it. Where’s the full memory of the lost time spent underneath the visitor center? And what about all the lost time when Larry would take me to the beach? What happened there?

There are some truths I may never be able to fully wrap my brain right now, such as what was going on in the tunnels underneath the military bases in the deserts of Southern California? What about the reptilian humanoids, those huge scary creatures that only Q17 was unafraid of, and why were the military and the CIA working with them? Working on what? And what was the extent of The Monroe Institute’s involvement in the parapsychology experiments with children?

These things, and many others, will likely not be understood this side of eternity, and although I may not have every single piece of the puzzle of my life (and who does?), journaling helped me put together enough pieces to see what the whole picture looks like, and I know enough to know what the truth is.

Early on in the middle of all the remembering, just a few months after I first started journaling, on Friday, October 18th, 2013, Jesus Christ revealed himself to me in a more powerful way than I had ever experienced before. It wasn’t a physical apparition, but it was a strong inward vision that suddenly came to me while praying.

I wrote about it in my journal the next day:

“Last night I had an image in my mind while I was talking to Jesus. He took me by my hand and opened the door to my heart. It was a large house with many rooms. Each of these rooms would have a bad memory or something else that was bothering me. He said we were going to go to each door and open each door. He would look inside and He would expose each of these rooms to His light. And it would get better. He showed me what that meant, that He was not going to each room to criticize, but to heal. He was not condemning me, but healing. He said He WANTS to go to those dark places with me—those shameful places where the hurt is—because he wants to help me. He’s already been there before, and He knows His way around.”

And so Jesus reintroduced me to my inner world and to my Others.

Navigation

Chapter One: Trevor
Chapter Two: Inner World
⇐ Chapter Three: Leaving the Inner World
Chapter Four: Re-entry
⇒ Chapter Five: George Learns About Hell
Chapter Six: The House That Jesus Built