Evangelical Therapy, Part 11 - You Don't Own Me
A memoir about my former life as an Evangelical.
It’s hard to be a girl in Idaho.
After our visit to Dr. Gillam, during which he’d suggested the possibility of separation (Part 10), Drew found an apartment about three miles from our house, then pronounced that since this was my decision, I should be the one to tell the girls what was happening.
Somehow I summoned up the courage to refuse to do that, and the morning he was planning to move out, we sat our daughters down in the family room and told them together that temporarily, he was going to be living in a new place.
Although I remember trying to sound calm, we were unprepared and didn’t know the things you’re supposed to say, like “we’ll still be a family,” “we’ll work together to take care of you,” “Daddy has a nice apartment and you’ll have lots of fun there,” “your feelings are okay,” and “you can love us both.”
We weren’t in the frame of mind to say any of those things, and also, they weren’t really true. “Daddy” had a dim, furnished apartment, I was still sick and barely coping, Drew and I were horrendously angry at each other, we hadn’t been parenting well together before the separation, and no one had a clue what was going to happen next. (Honestly, if we had been able to say such thoughtful, mature, well-regulated, hopeful statements as those suggested in the previous paragraph, we might not have been separating.) And when Drew spoke the words, “I’m moving out,” Amy, our oldest, cried out, “No!” in a terrified and primal way that broke my heart.
The other two girls, our younger two, seemed mostly stunned and silent, but the whole thing felt like a giant shockwave had rocked through our house.
After the girls had gone to school, Drew packed up a few suitcases of clothes and other things he needed, while I squatted in the kitchen with a cardboard box, sorting through my pots and pans and dishes. I doubted he would be cooking much, but it had dawned on me that in a strange reversal, he had nothing of his own except clothes, books, and gym equipment, and I felt responsible to make sure he had a few essentials.
One night before he moved out, in a rare vulnerable moments, he’d asked me in a broken way why I wanted him to go. “What is it, really? I want to know.” He truly didn’t seem to understand.
But I didn’t know how to explain it. I could name specific events that had been painful to me, habits he had, ways of treating me that made me miserable, but he seemed to be looking for some essential thing about him that made him impossible to live with. It could have been a valuable moment of authenticity and truth-telling except for two things: I didn’t understand it totally myself, since I seemed to be the only person around who had a problem with him. In the eyes of everyone in our church and community, he was an upstanding citizen, an ethical lawyer, a member of the choir, and an athlete, who was good on the church-league basketball court.
And two, I think part of him was trying to present an argument in a roundabout way that there was nothing about him that made him impossible to live with, and therefore I was wrong to ask him to move out.
I thought hard and finally said, “when we first got together, I wasn’t sure I liked your looks.” Some things should never be spoken out loud, and I immediately wished I hadn’t said it.
His pain was expressed mostly by a tightening of his lips, and he crossed his arms. “That’s it?” He looked at me, demanding some further explanation.
I knew he would argue with anything else I came up with that had to do with my feelings about him or his actions toward me, so I said nothing.
He lay down on the bed with his arms behind his head. Eventually, he sat up. “I wish you could force people to love you,” he said, getting up to go into the bathroom.
I felt partly numb inside when he said this, but also upset, and even though it was early December and the sun had gone down, I remember putting on my coat and going for a walk around the block.
In a way, I know (and knew then) that his statement was his own primal cry of distress at the change that was about to take place, but recently, I was reminded of the fear I’d felt in that moment when a man yelled at me from where he was sitting on the corner of an LA sidewalk. “Are you the woman who’s going to love me?” When I didn’t respond, he got up and followed me down the street, muttering angrily as my heart raced and I hurried to reach my apartment.
There was something sad about both these plaintive utterances—frustration, loneliness, despair, yes, I could hear all those emotions, and of course a seemingly mentally ill person is deeply worthy of help and empathy—but also, mixed into both these situations with Drew and this unknown man on the sidewalk, there seemed an element of desire to control and possess another person—a woman—and the belief that their desire as men to be loved was a right, more important than a woman’s personal autonomy, and that idea was bothersome and frightening.
In the moment, though, with Drew, I was focused on the mundane aspect of making sure he had a can opener and a few plates and glasses to use. It’s strange how even in these most momentous of occasions, there’s not much choice but to carry on with regular actions and words, packing up boxes, sorting through mail, handing over a Tupperware of leftover meatloaf.
And then he drove away with his things, and I was left alone, sitting in the quiet of our white colonial house, the cherubs in the painting above our piano looking at me like they’d known all along this was exactly how it was going to turn out.
+++
None of us knew quite how to adjust to this new situation. One morning one of the girls, Amy, I think, was deeply upset about something at school and didn’t want to go, and in my great fear that even a brief marital separation and whatever that implied would be devastating to our children, I called Drew, wanting to talk about it, but as usual I didn’t gain much emotional support from him, and I had to figure out how to deal with Amy’s distress on my own.
But surprising things were happening, too. In preparation for my field experience the following quarter, I met the teacher that would supervise it, “Mr. Phillips,” a greying man of smallish stature. He taught at Centennial, a fairly new public high school in Meridian, one town over. I don’t know what it’s like now, but back then, in the early 90s, the school seemed orderly and clean and well-lit, a feeling of professionalism in the atmosphere there I’d never experienced in the private high school I’d attended, with its dark, creaky stairwells and smell of unknown mixtures of food wafting from the cafeteria.
Somehow in my conversation with Mr. Phillips, the topic of religion came up, and he revealed that he was an atheist. My mind was completely blown. I observed his class that day and saw that to all appearances, he was kind, patient, and discerning with his students. He was a great teacher and seemed like a lovely person. Yet an atheist! I repeated the information to myself, barely able to absorb it. I had never had contact with someone who proclaimed himself as such, and it had been drilled into my head for years that people like him, nonbelievers—people of the world—were scary and evil, to be avoided at all costs. But I could see for myself that that wasn’t true, at least not in Mr. Phillips’ case. Something in my mind shifted a notch, like a gate creaking slowly open that had been rusted shut, or more likely, never opened at all.
Since my girls were all in school, I had time to go see my new therapist in Boise as well (my sister had recommended her), and I found her to be as equally unique and unfamiliar to me as Mr. Phillips. I wasn’t very psychologically astute in those days—I was just trying to survive whatever seemed to be happening in my life—but in some way I was aware that in meeting these people, I was seeing another world altogether that I hadn’t known existed until then.
“Rebecca,” my therapist, had a lovely, professional office. In the waiting room, a small fountain burbled, and peaceful music played. She wore expensive-looking dresses and with her PhD in psychology, she seemed both calm, smart, and together, as if her life was orderly and meaningful (she seemed to be in control of it and was doing what she had decided to do, a novel concept for me), but she was also feminine with long blonde hair that looked like it had been styled that very morning by a hairdresser. She didn’t have children, and her husband was also a psychotherapist, who worked down the hall from her.
She sat on the couch opposite me, and when she slipped off her shoes and folded her legs discretely under her to the side, tilted her head just slightly as she smiled, she exuded a sense of friendly, cheerful confidence, like a friend who made me feel like the difficulties of my life could be handled in some way, after all. I hadn’t felt calm for years and couldn’t imagine any solution for my problems, but in her office, new possibilities seemed to open up.
The fact is that by some fortunate turn of events, perhaps because of my continued struggle to seek help for whatever was ailing me, I was being presented with a new mirror in which to see myself, a new picture against which to measure my own life. I felt like I’d traveled to a foreign country, where things were different in ways I hadn’t expected. Sitting in her office, I was experiencing culture shock.
It was becoming clear—not exactly acceptable, in my mind, yet, but clear, that there was another way to live in the world that I’d had little idea existed until then. In pre-internet times, how would I have known? From the magazines in our house, Reader’s Digest or Good Housekeeping? From the TV shows I watched, Bewitched or Petticoat Junction? Green Acres? The books I read as a girl, Little House on the Prairie, Baby Island, Nancy Drew, Little Women—the protagonists of these books were the most adventurous females I’d heard about, other than the missionaries from our church who went to other countries to preach the gospel. The Mary Tyler Moore show came on the air when I was ten, but it was about a woman who lived in Minneapolis, a city of almost two million, far away from Idaho. Nothing in my experience had told me my life could be anything other than what it was. I wish this was an exaggeration, but it’s not.
+++
At home, though, a crusade had begun. One afternoon, an old acquaintance called me up—apparently, Drew had contacted her to discuss the situation.
“Drew still loves you,” she said, sounding distressed. “If you want to work it out, I think he cares about you.”
I’m sure she meant well, but I hadn’t talked to her since college, and it felt upsetting that this virtual stranger seemed to be taking sides. She didn’t seem terribly interested in hearing what was going on with me (admittedly, I wasn’t very good at describing it) and I felt chagrined that Drew had called her at all.
Then a woman from our church stopped by unannounced, “Debbie Teeter,” who had kids the ages of my girls, and told me flatly that I was doing something wrong by separating from Drew.
I realized in a rush that Drew had been telling everyone he could think of, including people at our church, that our separation had been at my insistence. I hadn’t intended to tell anyone about our separation besides my family, but apparently that was no longer a choice. I guess Drew wanted to look like the injured party, or maybe more accurately, like the virtuous party, and he was doing a good job of convincing people.
Who asked you? I wanted to say to Debbie, as she sat on one of the blue wingback chairs in my living room. I no longer had the graciousness to imagine she meant well, as I’d had in the phone call with my old friend.
“I felt directed to say this to you. Divorce is terrible for children,” she said, naming one of my worst fears. “There’s a reason the Bible says it’s a sin.”
Anger flooded through me. “You don’t anything about what I’ve been through,” I said to her, in an emotional voice. “You don’t know how depressed I’ve been or what my marriage has been like. You have no idea.” I found myself trying to justify my decision, even though my marriage was none of her business.
When she saw how upset I was, she hesitated. “I guess I don’t, but divorce is never right. I’ll be praying for you,” she said (a way of saying—I’m judging you, and I think you should repent of your sins) as she gathered her things and left.
I stood at the window watching her drive away, sweating with the exertion it had taken to go against my people-pleasing nature and stand up to her.
The following week, a letter came in the mail from Drew’s older brother Layne, the one with four kids. It went on for several pages, but these words are burned into my memory.
Does Drew beat you? Has he cheated on you? Does he drink? If not, then you have no reason to end your marriage.
At that time, in Nampa, Idaho, there was no Cheryl Strayed to say to me, “wanting to leave is enough.” That was the opposite of what I’d been told. And I cannot emphasize enough how much the conditioning I’d been subject to left no space in my brain for other thoughts. In fact, it was the opposite. I believed what I’d been conditioned to think and do was correct and that anything other than that was a sin. And when you’ve only heard one thing all your life, the ideas you’ve heard and the voices you internalize begin to seem like your own.
As Erich Fromm explains in his essay, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” “authoritarian conscience is the internalized voice of authority whom we are eager to please and afraid of displeasing… and internalized authority is so much more effective than authority which is clearly experienced as not being part of us.”
The fact that I was able to hold my ground with Debbie and assert my own experience as something that mattered, in the wake of a lifetime of programming, was miraculous all on its own.
+++
I’d had to get comfortable with driving to Boise to go to my appointments with Rebecca (or at least be willing to do it, even if I wasn’t comfortable.) With no internet, no GPS, if l didn’t know how to get somewhere, l had to ask directions, figure it out on my own, or look at a map, and I wasn’t familiar with doing any of those things, since my life mostly took place in my own home, or at various places around Nampa.
Boise was only twenty miles away, but we only rarely went there when I was growing up, except for a few visits to Vic’s Café—my mom loved their chocolate cream pie—a couple afternoons at the Fun Spot in Julia Davis Park, where there was a merry-go-round, a very small roller coaster and a tilt-a-whirl, and the occasional trip to the Boise airport. My mom had never learned to drive, didn’t have her license, and didn’t want to, and she was my main female role model.
One of my best friends in high school (Lori, who was asked out on a date by our math teacher) lived in Boise, but I didn’t have a car as a teenager (we had one car for our family, as was the norm), and in the summer when school was out, when Lori and I didn’t see each other, we wrote letters to each other, as if we lived on opposite sides of the country.
Our lives were much quieter and slower-paced and existed in smaller circles than they do now, by far, at least in Idaho. Long-distance phone calls were considered an extravagance.
So the physical act of driving to Boise was a big deal for me, and part of the beginnings of the expansion of my life and world at that time.
For human beings on earth, physical movements, physicality, our bodies (the cars our spirits are housed in), have an enormous effect on well-being as a whole.
This was brought home to me as I talked with Rebecca about my relationship with Drew and one of the things that was most bothersome, my continuing aversion to having sex with him.
I didn’t feel neutral about it or just lacking in energy—I actively did not want him to touch me, a feeling I had often castigated myself for. Women in our church were supposed to be happy that our husbands found us pleasing, as objects of their desire.
“Tell me about what it was like in the beginning for you, in the early part of your relationship,” she said.
“Making out was fun. Before we got married.” Then I repeated to her the story of how much I’d bled after we finally had sex, the unfortunate trip to the doctor. “And then it got okay for a while, as long as I did it as often as he wanted to. Except it was uncomfortable. It always hurt.”
“How so?”
“It just did.” I swallowed. I hadn’t ever told anyone that before.
“Because of something he did?” Her expression was concerned.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” I squeezed my hands between my thighs, panic rising at the thought of it. “I thought that’s the way sex was.”
“We can explore that more, but I’m wondering—what happened if you didn’t have sex when he wanted to?”
“He pressured me until I did, or else—it was just clear that he wasn’t happy. He’d act grumpy and silent, like after one night when I didn’t want to, my parents came over the next afternoon to see the girls, and he sat in the recliner and fell asleep, refused to talk to them, either.”
“He’d punish you, essentially. It wasn’t okay for you to say no.”
No one had expressed it that way to me before, and I felt like I’d been seen and heard for the first time. “No, it wasn’t okay. And then later—” I felt embarrassed talking about this, but I didn’t know how else to explain it. “I’d wake up and he’d be trying to force himself on me. In the middle of the night. I hardly got any sleep anyway when the kids were small, and I’d finally be asleep sometimes, and then I’d wake up and find him touching me, shoving himself inside me.”
“So he raped you.”
I didn’t know what to say. My first reaction was to reject this idea. I only had the most cliched ideas about rape, something that happened to a woman in a dark alley, a violent act committed by a stranger. “He wasn’t holding a gun to my head. Or a knife.” My throat felt thick, and l felt almost defensive. “I tried to tell him that it wasn’t okay when he did that, but he said I was making a big deal out of nothing, that he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“If a person forces himself on you, penetrates you when you haven’t agreed to have sex, that’s the definition of rape, whether there are weapons or ropes or drugs involved or not.”
I felt like I was crumbling inside.
“Listen.” She scooted forward on the couch, both feet on the floor now. “The fact is that marital rape is still basically legal in the state of Idaho, and as a lawyer, he may know that. And certainly, everything you’ve said are things that can be worked on, talked about in therapy. But I want you to understand something. You can also get a divorce. That’s a possibility. It’s a real, genuine possibility. It’s a choice. You do not have to stay married to this man.”
I started crying for real, then, at the enormous load that had just been lifted from my shoulders.
I don’t remember what was said in the rest of the session, but as I drove home, speeding along more confidently than I normally did, I felt freer than I’d ever felt in my life. I found myself crying again and opened my window to let the December air whip through my hair, feeling like the top of my head was going to fly off from the sheer idea that someone had finally stated that I didn’t have to stay with Drew if I didn’t want to. A few years later, when I read Kate Chopin’s, “Story of An Hour,” I felt like the protagonist was me, as she stood by her window whispering, “Free! Body and soul free!”
I wasn’t free yet. But as I drove home, I had a glimpse that a day might come when I would be.
Note: The Idaho House did not vote to roll back Idaho spousal rape exceptions, making marital rape illegal, until three years ago, in April, 2021.
This is the same man, when he later got divorced by his second wife because he “wasn’t a good problem solver” told her parents it was my fault and they came and repeated that to me and shamed me for my behavior as a child, I think because I was finicky about food and didn’t give my stepmom and step brothers “enough hugs”. Sorry if this spoils what comes next, but he weaponized our community against you to the extent that I had a teacher at school tell me, at age 9, that no one would play with me since my parents were divorcing, and she said it was your fault. When this happened to him again with my first stepmom, I was still a child but he preferred to blame me for his bad behavior with women rather than take responsibility for it himself, and then he took the money my grandparents had given me for college and used it to pay off debts from his divorce since it was my responsibility. You are sure painting a kind picture of this entitled abuser. The only other father I ever heard blame a child for his failures was the witnesses who testified against Adam Montgomery saying he blamed Harmony for why he killed her. I do think men are victims of patriarchy too because the system of social power structure teaches them to abuse to enforce their will rather than take responsibility or be empathetic and it makes a lot of men who subscribe too much to this flawed ideology very sick people who don’t have the tools to cope with their humanity or the humanity of others and see everyone else around them as objects who must bend to their will. I think you’re doing an important thing articulating all of this, and I know this is sort of far away, but I kept thinking as I was reading this, this is the culture in which the university of Idaho murders happened, and I feel like the patriarchal attitudes that still have such a hold on this world still today are badly skewing the truth there in that case, and I can see the disrespect for women impacting the ability of the defense lawyers to do their jobs with fair treatment in the court. I know that’s far from your story but you are illuminating something that feels like a dire emergency to this day for many people who get caught up under this broken system of social structure and order. Thank you for writing this I know it can’t be easy to talk about it. I think you told me martial rape was finally outlawed in Idaho only two years ago?
A heart is the wrong emoji for this. It makes me sad and angry for that younger version of you. The way you were conditioned. And as I may have mentioned before, I think Drew is a prick.