To Heaven Through Hell: A Book About Challenging and Changing Destructive Religious Beliefs

By Sue Wilson

Whether we're talking about eternal Heaven and Hell in Western religions or Reincarnation and Karma in religions of the East, Sue Wilson shares overwhelming evidence that what most religions teach about what happens when we die is totally wrong and fosters irrational fear and extreme codependency. She asserts that contrary to these unsubstantiated teachings, death is a positive experience for everyone!

Wilson is not an outsider looking in on this subject. She's a former minister's wife and missionary to Africa, a world traveler, and a retired world history and geography teacher. In To Heaven Through Hell, she shares an incredible journey into the invisible realm beyond the physical world through a number of spontaneous paranormal or sixth sense experiences, along with her extensive research from theologians, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, scientists and a host of others in the helping professions... all of which refute religion's erroneous teachings concerning life after death.

Among her many sixth sense experiences are a powerful near-death experience in which she cries out to the God she has learned to fear in fundamental Christianity and is assured that God's love is unconditional not only for herself, but for all of us; the appearance of her father's ghost who tells her that when he died he went to God immediately and was fully immersed in love and understanding as we'll all be when we die; and an amazing regression experience which helps her understand that the purpose of reincarnation is opportunity, not karma.

Wilson encourages readers to formulate healthy beliefs about God and the universe. She shows how embracing positive beliefs about life after death, especially, removes the fear of dying and enables us to get on with the wonderful business of living. She helps readers tap their own sixth sense and gives a problem-solving model that incorporates all the senses...the five traditional ones, the controversial sixth, and a seventh sense we often overlook in our desperate search for answers...common sense!

And though she acknowledges that religious institutions have done much good in the world, she challenges them to admit to the damage they have also done with destructive teachings about life and death, and to replace them with better ones. To acknowledge that all religions are resources, not roadmaps, including their own. And to turn their buildings into lively classrooms where their members can find solutions to the real problems they face as human beings, using good ideas from all disciplines in society and rejecting the rest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456621360

Sue Wilson

Sue Wilson has been a pastor's wife for over 50 years; she is a mother of three children and grandmother of eleven. She loves to write, but it is important to her that what she writes demonstrates her faith in God and the Biblical values that have been passed down from generation to generation in her family. She also enjoys reading books in a variety of genres. Her leisure time includes watching movies, playing video games, and singing Karaoke. She and her husband have retired from the church they founded and served in for 35 years. They now lead a non-profit organization to encourage and support pastors and their wives.

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publisher.

Introduction

Millions of us on this planet suffer relentlessly throughout our entire lifetime because we neither recognize nor know how to meet our basic human needs. Or to put it another way, we don’t know how to evaluate and solve the problems we experience because we’re human beings.

According to Dr. William Glasser in his book, Reality Therapy, our basic needs are relatively simple and they’re the same for every one of us...physiological need for food, warmth and rest…and psychological need to give and receive love and feel we are worthwhile to ourselves and others. The latter includes having and trying to live up to a reasonable set of behavior standards as we relate to ourselves and others, and utilization of our unique talents to become valuable, contributing members of society. To quote Dr. Glasser, Learning to fulfill our needs must begin early in infancy and continue all our lives. If we fail to learn we will suffer, and this suffering always drives us to try unrealistic means to fulfill our needs.¹

For some children this process does begin in early childhood, as it should. They are loved and nurtured by wise and loving parents. They value themselves and others. They acquire a healthy attitude toward life’s problems and the skills necessary to tackle and solve them.They are self-confident and loving.

But according to Dr. Charles Whitfield in Healing the Child Within, as many as eighty to ninety-five percent of us are not so lucky. ²Because our parents don’t know how to meet their needs and solve their problems effectively, they can’t teach us to do so either. We’re conditioned or programmed to think and act just like they do. We have no reasonable code to live by as Crosby, Stills and Nash lament in their song, Teach the Children. Therefore, we emerge from childhood lacking in self-esteem and self-confidence. We’re prone to depend too heavily on others for emotional support and protection from life’s problems; and we’re not capable of building loving, equal relationships or realizing our unique potential in life.We spend most of our waking hours trying to please or control those whose love we so desperately need because we cannot love ourselves, a condition modern psychologists call codependency.

This, alone, is enough of an obstacle to overcome, but when inadequate family conditioning is coupled with negative religious conditioning, the problem is compounded drastically. In the book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer shows repeatedly the tendency of fearful, frustrated, unhappy people to enter fanatical mass religious and political movements which promise all the answers to life’s problems. And these people, many of them our parents, subject us to the teachings of these movements they join.

Though many teachings within the various religions and philosophies of the world are universal laws which actually do help us meet our needs and solve our problems if we follow them, many teachings are extremely counterproductive, even devastating. They add to the problems instead of alleviating them.

For example, in Christian churches, given some denominations are more radical about it than others, we’re taught to fear a God who expects us to live righteously during this one and only lifetime we are allotted or we’ll face eternal hell when we die.Eternal. That’s forever! We’re told the Bible is the word of God, the place to look for His complete instructions on how to live our lives now and hopefully go to heaven instead of hell when we die.

Unfortunately, those of us who are the most dysfunctional already due to faulty family conditioning either find the most radical denominations of Christianity by ourselves or are sought out by conscientious members who take the Bible’s instruction to evangelize seriously. (I refer to this major branch of the Christian movement as fundamental Christianity in this book: conservative Christians who believe the whole Bible is the inspired word of God, all true, and must be taken literally for the most part. But remember, all denominations of Christianity teach the damaging, counterproductive doctrine of eternal hell, so this book is not just for those of us who find ourselves trapped on the fundamental side.)

Many of us accept our religious leaders’ interpretation of the Bible without question and don’t even try to read it for ourselves. Others study the Bible diligently but find it so confusing we finally give up and accept what our church teaches, even though a lot of it doesn’t make any sense and much of it contradicts what we have read in the Bible by ourselves.

In frustration, some of us leave our churches and try more moderate denominations of Christianity. When we see the huge discrepancies from one group to another, though they all claim their ideas stem from the same book, we can only say, I don’t understand everything in the Bible, I just accept it by faith.We finally buckle down under the religious leader whose doctrines and interpretations we like best and try to forget things in the Bible he and our church are leaving out.

Once we’ve been taught to fear God’s punishment in this life and the next if we don’t follow His instructions in the Bible, and we have allowed the church and its leaders to interpret them for us, we stop thinking for ourselves. Therefore, we can’t identify or solve our real problems. We are even more unable to love or live effectively than we were with just negative family conditioning. We are codependent beyond codependent!

The same principle holds true of four other religious groups whose roots lie in the Bible. Mormonism, Catholicism , Judaism, and Islam. Believing without question, what leaders in these groups teach, can be equally damaging. And when religion and politics are completely intertwined as in many Muslim nations, failing to adhere to destructive beliefs and behaviors can result not only in emotional and physical damage, but even loss of life!!

Some parents teach their children there is no God...that answers to life’s problems lie only in science…the systematic evaluation of all questions and answers using our five physical senses. Do human beings really have only five senses? Or is there a sixth sense, an invisible or spiritual dimension to all of us that we must not eliminate from our problem-solving resources? Once it has been eliminated as an option by early conditioning, it’s very hard to get it back as we strive to understand life’s challenges and deal with them.

A third major philosophy that is imposed on millions of children in the Eastern Hemisphere and an increasing number of children right here in America is the Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of Reincarnation and Karma or, as some New Age groups call it, Cosmic Justice…the idea that we are rewarded or punished in this life for our behavior in previous lifetimes. Talk about an obstacle to objective problem solving!

About three quarters of the world’s people subscribe to one or another of these three major philosophies, whether they are taught them as children or seek them out as troubled adults.Challenging and changing the destructive beliefs in these or any rigid philosophy is almost impossible once they have been ingrained on our subconscious minds when we’re vulnerable.

This is why. After we become involved in a fanatical religion, we usually isolate ourselves from the rest of the world except on a superficial basis. We feel guided and protected in our group, closed to what people outside it may have to offer concerning life and how to live it successfully. We also become totally dependent on fellow believers for emotional support. We love them. They love us. But we know deep down that the love is conditional even though we won’t admit it to ourselves. We’re really only loved if we conform. So we’re afraid to question what we’re being taught. Afraid of losing our support group and facing the unknown by ourselves. Therefore, we keep trying to live our lives within the framework of faulty family and religious conditioning. And we’re miserable, suppressing our intelligence, living a lie, or attempting to escape from our frustrations through a wide variety of addictive and other irrational behaviors with all the suffering this entails.

If you are struggling to sort out problems you have acquired because of negative family or religious conditioning, or both, To Heaven Through Hell can help you. Though it is primarily my life’s story, not a how to textbook, and the details may be quite different from yours (especially in the realm of paranormal or psychic experiences, a lively topic today), in it you will clearly see the elements from family and religious conditioning that can create a dysfunctional life in any of us. You’ll be able to identify problem areas in your own life as a result of your early conditioning and see the process involved in breaking free from erroneous beliefs about yourself and the universe. Reading this story will give you the courage you need to challenge and change negative beliefs that are holding you back. And finally, you will learn many good strategies for building a happy, healthy life in spite of the obstacles. You’ll learn to look at your problems from a universal perspective, using all the resources of an abundant universe to solve them. As this occurs you’ll automatically start forgiving yourself and others and stop wasting your precious time blaming or making excuses. You’ll enjoy life and help others learn to do the same.

In addition to reading this book and some of the others referred to in my story, those of us who are trying to grow and think for ourselves can connect with one another to discuss the issues and encourage one another on the book’s companion multi-media self-help website, www.objectiveproblemsolving.com And as the story progresses, you’ll see many other options for starting or joining all kinds of valuable support groups.

PART I…TRANSFORMATION

Important Note…………….PLEASE READ

Though this is a true story, because of the controversial materials it contains, the names of most people and places have been changed. Even so, I feel the need to add that I am not speaking for any character except myself, as to motivation and conclusions relating to the story’s events. There’s always "my story, your story, and the story".

Nor can I say that any of the experts I have quoted, paraphrased or otherwise made reference to, would endorse everything I have written…and vice versa. I’ve applied my understanding of their works to my own research and observations in the story itself and commentaries after some chapters, to the best of my ability. Also, though I’ve named religious organizations, I realize that no two people think alike in any organization, and no two chapters are exactly the same. I’ve just given general observations from my experience. There’s no harm or blame intended toward anyone. This is a learning tool for exploring issues that affect all of us…a story of love and forgiveness.

There are so many people to whom I’m grateful...those who have helped me live this story, and those who have helped me present it. To name some would be to exclude too many others, or perhaps identify people who would rather remain anonymous. So, to all of you, let me just say...THANKS.

Chapter 1

Wrong Side of the Tracks

The stage was set for my extensive involvement in extreme fundamental Christianity before I was even born. There was a shortage of everything I would need to develop into a self-confident, healthy individual with no father at home and a very distraught mother who already had too many children to raise by herself.

I never knew my father except through vague memories of my earliest childhood and occasional comments from my mother and other family members. Mom said I was conceived while he left a taxicab waiting for him outside. He woke her in the middle of the night, giving her no chance to protect herself from another unwanted pregnancy. He didn’t stay around to concern himself with my birth or what might happen to me afterwards.

I was born on October 7, 1942. Mom brought me home in a taxi by herself to five young brothers and sisters...Barbara eight, Lydia seven, Norman six, Laurie four, and Paul two. There was little food in the cupboard or fuel in the coal bin. Though it was only the middle of October, the cold Canadian winter was already blowing in and the only source of heat in our drafty old rent house was a coal stove in the living room.

An alcoholic, my father was totally irresponsible, often leaving my mother alone for months at a time while he stayed with other women or did time in jail for vagrancy, theft or disorderly conduct. He never kept a job very long and spent most of the money he did earn on drinking and gambling. Mom’s family could offer little support and most of his relatives lived in the States, so the Welfare Department had to step in on numerous occasions with meager assistance that barely got us by.

When my father did come home for a while, he was destructive, unpredictable, strict and often cruel. On more than one occasion, he stole the Welfare check Mom was depending on; leaving her without money to buy groceries.

When my brother Tommy was born, two years after me, Mom decided she’d had enough. Daddy was supposed to be watching us while she was in the hospital. Instead, he spent most of that week in bed with the woman next door. As soon as Mom got home with Tommy, she sent Barbara to get Daddy, then told him to leave and never come back.

My father wouldn’t change, nor would he stay away. Finally, she had a peace bond put against him when I was three. He moved to another province and I never saw him again. He died of alcohol related illnesses in a shabby hotel room after I was grown.

With three young children at home and four in elementary school, Mom couldn’t go out to work and support us by herself. She had to ask the Welfare for full-time assistance. This time, they moved us into an abandoned military compound where dozens of families in circumstances similar to ours were already staying.

The barracks were very crowded with as many as ten or twelve families sharing a common bathroom. Mom tried to keep our living area and us clean, but we had to contend with rats running across our covers at night and cockroaches in all the cupboards. We got head lice, bedbugs, and many of the communicable diseases which spread rapidly throughout the compound.

Though details of my early childhood are very sketchy, I remember some things very clearly, such as an outbreak of scabies shortly after we’d moved into the barracks. Painful, itchy blisters caused by vermin covered our bodies and Laurie, Paul, Tommy and I had to be hospitalized. For several days, nurses covered us with foul smelling, blackish-brown sulfur salve and bandaged the worst patches.

Even hearing the word scabies today can evoke the discomfort of that experience and the shame I felt later as I understood the conditions under which we must have lived to acquire this and all the other afflictions associated with uncleanliness.

Cramped conditions and poverty also caused much fighting and chaos, not only in the barracks over-all, but our apartment as well. People often cursed and screamed at one another and many confrontations ended in physical violence. Several people were murdered right there in the compound during our stay. I walked and talked in my sleep and had frequent nightmares.

Children were at risk in every way, especially little girls. Two times that I remember I was sexually tampered with. Once by a young man in a soldier’s uniform who tried to molest me on a bunkbed, but was interrupted when an older sibling walked into the room. And another by a teenaged boy who coaxed me and several other little girls into a culvert and put his penis in our mouths. Again, these memories evoked fear and shame later in my childhood even though I was unaware of their significance when the events occurred.

During those three dreadful years in the barracks, we were placed in foster homes several times. I remember vividly how one experience affected me when I was five.

Though I didn’t know it, Mom was scheduled to have surgery and had no one to look after us. I don’t know where all my brothers and sisters went, but a social worker took Laurie and me to a welfare receiving home where a gruff matron scrubbed us down impersonally, then separated us. The next thing I remember, a strange woman was pulling me firmly towards a streetcar as I struggled frantically to turn around and run back to my mother, crying helplessly on the platform behind me.

When we arrived at her home, the foster mother introduced me to her two daughters, aged seven and eleven. I don’t remember when or how it started, but the younger one and I began to fight over something not long afterwards. Suddenly I yelled, You’re a cocksucker!, a phrase I’d heard people shout during fights, though I didn’t understand what it meant.

Seconds later, the foster mother charged into the room, an angry look on her face. You’re a bad, bad girl, she screamed, shaking me roughly. She didn’t punish her daughter for being unkind to me, but dragged me into the kitchen and held a bar of soap in my mouth until I gagged and cried and promised to be good.

I spent the month in that home withdrawn and disoriented. I didn’t feel welcome, nor did I know where my family was or if I’d ever see them again.

Shortly after our family was reunited, Lydia, then almost twelve, got picked up by the police for stealing cigarettes. Though the judge promised Mom he’d have her returned to us, and he sent another girl involved in the incident back to her family, he put Lydia in reform school.

In so many instances, we seemed powerless over our circumstances. We needed help, but child protective services, the courts, and even the hospitals often treated us like third-class citizens, doing whatever they wanted with us. When we needed medical attention, we had to wait in the outpatient area of the hospital for hours after a long, tiring bus ride just to get there. Then if time ran out, we were dismissed and told to come back the next day. It was like our problems didn’t matter. Once a dentist slapped Tommy in the face when he moved his head while the dentist was using his drill. I heard the slap and Tommy’s scream as I waited with my mother in the next room. I was terrified of dentists after that.

One experience made the others more bearable. For two weeks each summer, the Welfare sent some families in the compound to camp, at a lake eighty miles from the city. The last time we went I was six.

On the train trip there, we sat several to a seat facing one another, crumpled paper bags filled with our belongings tucked behind our feet. We ate whatever food we’d brought from home and chattered excitedly or looked at comic books as the train swayed and rumbled across the prairie. When large stretches of pine trees began to roll past my window, I knew we were close to the beach. I could hardly wait.

When we arrived, camp personnel met us with waves and big smiles. As we got off the train they separated us into groups on the platform and introduced us to our respective counselors. Then they lined us up and walked us to the dormitories. Ours was a large screened in enclosure where black iron bunkbeds, made up neatly with crisp white sheets and gray woolen military blankets, lined two long walls, leaving a wide aisle in the center. We were assigned bunks and after we put our few belongings under them, our counselors showed us around the campground and went over our schedule.

Then we ate dinner in a clean, airy dining room. Everything was white...the walls, the long picnic tables, even the dishes. The food was delicious and there was lots of it!

During the next two weeks, I looked forward to those meals and enjoyed all the activities which included nature hikes, outdoor games, crafts, stories, swimming, campfires, daily naps and free time.

I loved to walk in the woods during free time, examining leaves and pinecones along the way. Lime green ferns covered the forest floor and a mixture of pines and broadleaf trees formed a canopy overhead with warm rays of sunlight filtering through the open patches. Each time I went to those woods, I followed a sandy path to a small stream where I scooped up clear, ice cold water and drank it from my hands. The beautiful surroundings and the sounds of birds singing and water trickling over the rocks made me feel safe and happy.

I even looked forward to naps at the beach. Part of each afternoon, we lay on our bunks and read our comic books while the cool breeze from the lake rustled over us.

The counselors were nice, especially Nurse Brown, a middle-aged woman with short curly gray hair and a kind smile for everyone. Just before camp ended, she asked me to come to her cottage and help her with something. I felt honored. When we got inside, I noticed a small white dress with bright blue flowers and a pale blue ribbon laid out on her bed. To my surprise, she had me remove my tattered outfit and try the dress on. It was just my size. Then she combed my hair and tied it up neatly with the ribbon. From the mirror over her dresser, a pretty little girl beamed back at me.

Though my early life was chaotic and stressful for the most part, camp gave me a glimpse of a happy, peaceful orderly life that also existed. Like the negative experiences, this positive one would also influence my life in the future.

Just before I turned seven, we moved to a Welfare housing project on the opposite side of town. Like all the others, our tiny two-bedroom house was situated on a small grassless plot. It had a long front wall with one window and a side-facing door on the enclosed porch to the right. Most families were like mine, struggling single mothers with lots of children.

Though fighting and chaos continued in both our new house and neighborhood and we were still very poor, some things improved. School, for instance. I had failed first grade in the compound because I missed so much school due to communicable diseases, but starting first grade over in a little better school that included less welfare-supported kids and more from regular low-income homes, opened a whole new world to me. School offered a safe, consistent, structured environment where I could learn and play.

We also had a nice park nearby with trees and grassy areas where we could play outdoor games after school and on weekends. During the summer months, park employees held craft classes two afternoons a week in an old green building everyone called the shack. We learned to make decorative and useful items from scraps of yarn and fabric, ice cream sticks, bottle caps, plaster, glass and paint.

That winter, we skated for hours on the park’s outdoor rink, changing our skates and warming ourselves around the pot-bellied stove in the same green building.

Our city was full of immigrants, mainly Europeans who migrated there during and after World War II. In spring, we joined in the fun as people from different ethnic groups met in the park to celebrate their heritage, singing and dancing in bright colored costumes.

Tommy started school the next year. With all the kids taken care of during the day, Mom went to work cleaning houses and was able to get off Welfare. We moved into a larger house in the low-income area of the same neighborhood. But she also began seeing Ron, a tailor who lived with his elderly mother. He made Mom lovely clothes, bought her nice gifts and took her places she could never have afforded to go by herself, but their activities did not include us kids. Between working and dating, she was seldom at home after that. Barbara married and moved out and Lydia was still in reform school so this left Norman, fourteen, and Laurie, twelve, in charge most of the time.

Things were stressful with them trying to run things. Norman was either outside taking care of pigeons he was raising in a dilapidated building behind the house or off in the neighborhood doing odd jobs for money, leaving Laurie to do most of the supervising. She tried to keep things in the house running smoothly, but overwhelmed by so much responsibility for her age, she used whatever tactics she could muster to control Paul, Tommy and me, including swearing at us, calling us humiliating names and hitting us. And we all fought amongst ourselves frequently. I hated the fighting and meanness and avoided confrontations whenever I could, but sometimes it was impossible.

Then Lydia, now sixteen, returned from reform school. Unstructured time with older, more experienced girls had changed her personality. She didn’t seem to care about anything. She drank constantly and got into fights wherever she went. She often came home with cuts and bruises, sometimes a tooth knocked out or plugs of hair pulled out of her scalp.

Like my father had done, she stayed gone for days at a time and caused trouble whenever she returned. One night she came in really drunk while Norman was making us pancakes for supper. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating them as they came off the griddle, when she and Norman got into it. They were yelling and cursing and Lydia tried to grab the pitcher away from Norman. Suddenly, it smashed against the wall behind us, splattering pottery pieces and pancake batter everywhere. I dreaded it every time Lydia came home drunk.

Lydia didn’t stay free very long. A few months after her return, she was sent to a prison for women. About the same time, Norman got into some trouble and the authorities assigned him to a foster home on a farm. Now it was just Laurie, Paul, Tommy and me with little adult supervision except when we were at school.

Before long, Laurie was gone most of the time, doing things with her friends and I went wherever Paul and Tommy went. We began to walk, ride buses or hop boxcars all over the city.

This freedom was exhilarating sometimes. We swam in the stock ponds and raided the gardens of nearby truck farms. We rode horses in temporary corrals at the railroad stockyards. We crashed weddings and stuffed ourselves with good food, stole candy and small items from neighborhood stores and rummaged through trash bins behind factories. We roamed the streets, begging money off drunks as they staggered from beer parlors of crumbling hotels.

But more often than not, unsupervised time by ourselves was frightening. One time a man shot at us as we ran away with apples we’d stolen from his trees. Another time, a security guard chased us a long way down the tracks after he caught us riding the horses. And Paul could be mean if we made him angry. Like the time at the zoo in City Park when I chased a peacock away from the fence as he tried to pull out some feathers. He chased me away and I had to find my way home by myself. That incident and what happened afterwards, stands out in my memories.

It was already dusk. I hurried as I approached the large patch of woods between the animal enclosures and the bus stop. Though I was scared to go through them alone, there was no other way to get home. After a few minutes, I saw a man on the path ahead, walking slowly with his head down. Branches scratched my legs painfully as I crowded the bushes, trying not to get near him while I went around. Just as I passed him I heard him say softly, You know what?

Taken off guard, I turned around. He was wagging his penis in his hand, leering at me. I took off running, my heart pounding in my ears. As I burst into a clearing, I ran right into a policeman. Afraid of him, too, I just kept on running. Instinctively, I knew not to get involved with the police.

I didn’t always want to go places with Tommy and Paul, but I was more afraid to stay by myself than take my chances with them. I knew from numerous experiences like this one in the park that men and older boys were always ready to take advantage of a young girl by herself and you never knew when you might get beat up by more aggressive kids if you went walking around the neighborhood alone.

So I kept going with them to dangerous places where children shouldn’t be and risked getting hurt, or picked up by the police. I had so many fears, trying to sort things out for myself at such a young age.

COMMENTARY…..

Unmet needs and the potential for problems are pretty evident in this chapter. Although my family had moved from extreme poverty with all the misery that involves, lack of supervision became a major problem in our home as my mother struggled to make a better living for us and meet her needs for love and companionship. Left to our own devices as children, the world became an unsafe and often unloving place again.

The late prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Abraham Maslow, did extensive research on man’s needs, ranking them in order of importance. In Chapter 2 of his book, Motivation and Personality, he labels his theory The Basic Need Hierarchy and explains it.³ He gives five categories, beginning with the most fundamental: Physiological Needs, Safety Needs, Belongingness and Love Needs, Esteem Needs, and Self-Actualization Needs. Maslow says that until needs on the lower levels are satisfied, a person will not be free to pursue his needs on the higher levels.

Notice that safety is ranked second, even more fundamental than psychological and self-actualization needs. If a person does not feel secure, safe, out of danger he or she will not take consistent forward steps toward self-development and healthy relationships. In another of his books, Toward a Psychology of Being, Dr. Maslow says children learn to make good decisions for themselves automatically, thus becoming self-confident and independent by the pain or pleasure they receive as they experiment with various behaviors within the safety net of a loving, well supervised environment. A key line in his explanation of this theory is in the chapter, Defense and Growth. In general, only a child who feels safe dares to grow forward healthily.⁴

A major aspect of codependency is the unequal condition that exists in unhealthy relationships where individuals let others make decisions for them. The degree to which a safe, loving environment is provided in our homes and communities when we are children may be the most important factor that determines how dependent on others we become as we grow up and how difficult it will be to undo the damage.

Adding fear of God to our agenda when we are already afraid of life’s dangers in an unsafe environment, greatly compounds the problem as you will see in the next two chapters.

Chapter 2

A New Danger...the God of Fundamental Christianity

I was nine when I met the people from the Church of Christ. Mr. Horn, the minister, went to visit Lydia in prison. She showed no interest in religion, but through her, he contacted our family. Mom, Barbara, her husband, Lee, Laurie, Paul, Tommy, and I started going to church. Though Mom, Barbara, and Barbara’s husband were baptized, before long they were attending church only sporadically, but church members picked us kids up every Sunday.

I didn’t pay much attention to what the leaders taught at first, but I liked the people and the church activities. In addition to Sunday school and weekly Friday night craft and Bible story classes, they had an annual Christmas party with presents, decorations, and lots of good holiday dishes, and a spring picnic at City Park with games and prizes and all the ice cream you could eat.

The next summer, church members also took most of the kids in the congregation to summer Bible camp at a farming community sixty miles from the city. After the activities each day, we went home with local Church of Christ families. Staying on a farm for a week was a new and exciting adventure. I watched a litter of pigs being born, helped milk the cows, slept in a hayloft, and rode to and from the activities in the back of the farmer’s pickup, my pony tail whipping around in the breeze. I loved the country…the animals, fresh air, planted fields, wild tiger lilies that grew in abundance beside the roads, and the pitch darkness that made the stars so bright at night.

They held daily Bible classes in a huge barn near the church building. Sitting on hay bales, we sang songs, listened to Bible stories, and earned prizes for memorizing verses from the Bible.

At lunch and suppertime we all gathered in the church basement for wonderful home-cooked meals the farmers’ wives had prepared.

And every night we sat in the auditorium of the white frame church building, windows wide open, fanning ourselves as the preacher presented lengthy gospel sermons and the congregation sang hymns late into the evening.

Those first two years I ate their food, enjoyed their activities, and took their gifts and prizes, but away from them I was still in charge of my own life, learning to survive in my environment no matter how unnerving it was at times. Paul had been sent to reform school for stealing during that period and though it had scared us because we relied on Paul for leadership and protection, it turned out to be somewhat of a good thing for Tommy and me. We began to stay in our own neighborhood most of the time, reducing the risks and some of the fear that running with Paul had created. Older boys and men still posed a danger to me and aggressive kids continued to pick fights, but I gradually gained confidence I could take care of myself by staying wary of all men and standing my ground with aggressive kids.

I remember the day I learned to fight. I was eleven. Scared, but tired of constant threats and insults from one particular girl, I agreed to fight her in the park after school. Surrounded by a mob of restless kids, who wagered and argued about which of us would win, we made our way to the park after the four o’clock bell.

I knew there was no turning back when we got to the park and kids formed a circle around us, shouting and chanting. Within a few minutes we were hitting and scratching and pulling each other’s hair. I finally got her down on the ground, pinning one arm under her, the other behind her back. Cursing and crying, she gave up.

A few days later, she came looking for me with her cousin, a seventh grader from another school. I never backed down, and they left me alone. It felt great!

But as I became more confident that I could handle difficult situations where I lived, teachings from the Bible began to sink in. Although I had learned positive scriptures like John 3:16,

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.,⁵

some Bible verses about what God expected of his followers and what he would do to wicked people were beginning to implicate my family and me.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:39)

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

(I Corinthians 6:9-10)

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. (Revelation 21:8)

I began to wrestle with these threatening ideas. How could I survive in my environment with no fighting back, no intimidating language? I’d get killed if I started living like that! And what about my father and Lydia? They were both drunkards. Would God really send them to hell when they died? Or my mother? Was she a fornicator because she was having a relationship with a man she wasn’t married to? Would she burn forever in a lake of fire when she died? And what about stealing? Though Lydia and Paul had gone to reform school for stealing, I knew most of the kids in my family had done it at one time or another.

I hadn’t thought of myself or my family as wicked before, just at a frustrating disadvantage. But now, according to the book they said was God’s word, we were all sinners and eternal hell loomed straight ahead for every one of us unless we changed our lives to conform with the teachings of this book! But how could we all do that? Along with the dangers I already knew existed in my environment, I was afraid what the Bible said about this punishing God might also be true. I tried not to think about it.

That spring, then twelve, I encountered the first boy for whom I felt an attraction. We were racing up telephone poles in the alley and when we climbed down, he kissed me passionately. His behavior and my response confused and upset me. What if I ever wanted to give myself willingly to one of these boys? I might end up like so many women and girls I knew, pregnant with no husband and no money. Or what if I got into trouble with the law and ended up in a foster home like Norman or reform school or prison like Paul and Lydia? I knew I had to find another alternative for my life, but what?

Though I longed for a safe, loving place like the Horn’s home where everyone treated one another with such love and kindness, and I knew some of what they taught from the Bible about how to live a good life was helpful, I wanted to stay with my family. How could I get the guidance I needed from people like the Horns without believing in this unreasonable, punishing God also found in their Bible?

That summer at Bible camp, I tried to listen more carefully while the minister presented man’s problem and the solution from the scriptures during the evening gospel sermons.

Each night as he stood before the congregation, he paraphrased the story of Christ and his gospel. You are lost, separated from God by your sins. Jesus Christ, God’s Son, came to earth and died for you. He instituted baptism by immersion in water for you to contact his shed blood and wash away your sins, IF you repent and start living a life of righteousness. He quoted Mark 16:15-16 and Matthew 7:21.

And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

He always reminded us that becoming righteous was the goal of the Christian life and the Bible was God’s guide for the Church concerning all aspects of righteousness. He admonished us to study and follow it carefully, quoting more scriptures to make his point.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)

"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good