As I’ve had plenty of time to myself over the last couple weeks, I’ve been doing some thinking. It has almost been a year since I stopped doing family therapy and was able to make peace with the idea of probably never talking to my parents again. Prior to that moment in late January of 2023, I’d been feeling guilty for cutting them off while they were still paying lip service to the idea of fixing things. Thanks to that incredibly awful two-month period, I was able to confirm that it was just lip service and that neither of them possessed the emotional maturity to recognize their part in the travesty that was my childhood. Since I’ve had enough time to process all that, I’ve been thinking about it again, mostly by way of reviewing in my mind what we talked about and how gaining a better understanding of my parents has or has not changed the way I see some of the events of my past. As I’ve slowly worked through this process (largely deciding that not much needs to change at this time), I’ve found myself thinking that, for all their faults, at least my parents never denied me my humanity. For all they put me through, for all the horrible and wrong things they taught me, at least they never taught me that I was somehow less “human” than other people. However, the more I’ve thought this, the more I’ve started to wonder if this is actually true, or if it is only technically true because they never explicitly used those words or tried to teach that specific lesson.

The complicating factor here is the religious nature of my upbringing. I was not only raised in the Catholic church, but homeschooled by a pair of individuals who literally never suggested that I should question the teachings that they and my local church piped into my brain. To give an easy example of the kinds of gaps in my knowledge of the world and the way they warped my thinking, I was in high school before I learned that evolution was settled science and that there wasn’t actually compelling evidence for the creationist mode of thought. It wasn’t that my parents believed in creationism themselves, just that they never taught me anything else and the general religious bent of their educational practices put a lot of weight on the things I learned from the various religious knowledge sources in my life (which, for a couple years thanks to some textbook recommendations from the homeschooling group my family was a part of, included my science textbooks). This type of information gap pervaded every part of my life and sometimes reappears since I still occasionally find a gap or two that I missed during my college years of trying to fill them all in. Most of them are fairly harmless since I’ve gotten so good at realizing they’re there before I fall into them, but it really illustrates the way my view of myself and the world around me was warped by a combination of religious orthodoxy and intellectual negligience on the part of my parents.

One of the other things I did in college (a process that actually started in high school thanks to some good teachers) was learn as much as I could about the Catholic Church from people who had a broader, more academic understanding of the religion, its explicit modern teachings, and the various philosophies that it has incorporated over the years. While that still resulted in me stepping away from religion in general despite the many excellent teachers who did a lot of work to rehabilitate the warped view I’d gained from my upbringing, I learned enough to know that what my parents had taught me had less to do with official Catholic doctrine and more to do with their interpretation of it and their ideas of what it meant to live a “good” life in their faith. After all, it’s not like they set out to teach me (explicitly and implicitly; through word and deed) that I, specifically, mattered less than other people. They just wanted to teach me about selflessness, compassion, empathy, and the whole “turning the other cheek” thing. I mean, it is still absolutely their fault that I wound up as messed up as I did because they followed these lessons by elevating my siblings above me, teaching me to be silent in the face of “misfortune and adversity” (aka pretty brutal abuse from my brother and occasionally them), and constantly worked to not only isolate me from any other adults that might help, but delegitimize my feelings until I stopped believing that how I felt mattered at all.

It’s an awful way to raise a child. I still get mad at them, sometimes, when I have to fight myself to even feel my feelings inside my head. I’ve spoken about it a lot in terms of emotional neglect, abuse, and so on, but it never really occurred to me that it might be dehumanizing. Even now, as I work through this argument in my head and write it out here, I still have a hard time arguing on behalf of the idea that they dehumanized me at all, since that’s still a very different thing from neglect or abuse. After all, dehumanizing people is what people do so they can ignore their suffering. It’s what people do to make people exceptions to rules that should protect them. It’s what people do to make someone not count when it comes to their assessment of the world and what they should care about. I even picked examples just now that are things my parents actually did to me (I’m not going to get into details since I don’t want to put a content warning on this post) and I STILL have a hard time with this idea because it feels so much more blatant and radical than my childhood ever did (which says more about what I was able to normalize than what I went through).

What makes this argument too compelling to entirely ignore, though, is that the flavor of Catholic orthodoxy my parents subscribed to loves saints, especially martyrs and those whose “piety” and “goodness” are shown as a result of the suffering they endured. To hear the stories of these various saints and people my parents believed should be saints, all you had to do to become one was either get killed by some supposedly anti-Catholic asshole (who was usually branded as such for killing someone who was made a saint later on) or suffer something horrible in silence that could be interpreted as “prayer” of some kind. All of these saints or would-be-saints were turned into mythological, almost-but-never-quite-actually-godlike figures in a stunning denial of any part of this lives other than their death or their suffering by both the local branch of the Catholic Church and my parents (mostly through their selection of literature for their children and the stories they emphasized as they educated us). Their humanity was stripped away as they were turned into icons and symbols of a style of life that my parents believed should be held up as the ideal. A style of life that they–whether they will admit to it or not–forced on me. I always wondered why they believed me to be the more pious and religiously ardent of their children because, unlike all of my siblings, I never got involved in any of the youth or teen religious stuff of any kind (save the youth groups, but those were more about escaping my parents’ house and making friends than they were about religious fraternization). Some part of them must have seen my suffering and the silence they forced on me as somehow living up to this tortured, inhuman ideal.

I still need to work through this idea more and while I don’t think it is ever going to be the core of what I’m working through (since it seems to be an accidental by-product of the things my parents much more actively did to me), I think this understanding is definitely going to help me work through the religious aspects of my trauma. I mean, hell, my religious trauma is so wrapped up in the rest of my trauma that I rarely bother to separate it out or specify it. My parents’ religion was such a fundamental part of their identities and the way they raised me that it seems pointless to separate it all. It’s all the same mess of trauma, abuse, and neglect to the degree that the motivation for it doesn’t really matter (and especially doesn’t matter now that my parents are never going to be a part of my healing process). Still, though, it’s a useful line to be able to draw since part of dealing with this whole mess is untangling it and being able to draw a line or pull out a thread is always a useful step in dealing with any tangled knot.