GOD ALREADY HAS A PLAN SO WHY WOULD I MAKE ONE?
A guest post on the intentional lack of autonomy in children raised evangelical
Hello and welcome to Healing is My Special Interest. Today we have a guest post that contains a TW: regarding physical abuse of children, including infants. When Crystal submitted this guest post I couldn’t believe it—it is so similar to the information Krispin and I have been working on as we write a book on the long-term impacts of authoritarian parenting found in evangelical spaces. I’m so happy more and more people are researching, thinking and writing about these topics, and I’m so glad to share this post with you. Thank you to everyone who supports this newsletter, because of you I can pay folks like Crystal to share their knowledge with us!
GOD ALREADY HAS A PLAN SO WHY WOULD I MAKE ONE?
by Crystal Britt, LCSW
Intake for therapy is pretty standard. Therapists ask a lot of the same questions during intake, one of which is “Where do you see yourself in 5 years? What would be different? What would be the same?” I asked a client this one day and they took longer to consider it than I had anticipated, and replied they weren’t sure. When I asked what felt like a barrier to considering it, they replied, “I was taught growing up that God has a plan, so why would I have one?” While their answer caught me off guard, I wasn’t entirely surprised by it. When they’re coming to see me for religious trauma or deconstruction, a client with an evangelical background and a poorly developed sense of self usually go hand-in-hand.
If you watched “Shiny Happy People,” the documentary on the Duggar Family (and the cult to which they belong, IBLP), you’re familiar with “Blanket training.1” “Blanket training” is the name for the discipline training that starts before babies can walk in order to get them to be obedient. A mother lays out a blanket on the floor, spreads toys out around the outside of the blanket’s perimeters, and places a pre-walking baby on the blanket. As the baby eventually crawls and explores the blanket, they are hit as soon as they reach off it. By the time young children are seen in public, they have learned to sit still and obey on the blanket rather than play and explore naturally–appearing obedient and docile as toddlers and children.
When I watched this part of the documentary, I was repulsed but not surprised. This behavioral practice echoed what I understood was the purpose of children in the evangelical christian community–to be seen and rarely heard unless they were willingly parroting the ideals of their parents or upholding the good image of the church. And paying a steep price if they didn’t.
Identity development isn’t optional over the lifespan; it’s crucial. Identity development leads to successful individuation, the process by which a person develops their ways of thinking and understanding the world, (not just believing or seeing the world the way their family of origin does). And successful individuation leads to a secure, emotionally regulated adult. The problem within the evangelical church is that individuation is discouraged at best, and outright punished at worst. Identity cannot be formed under the conditions of fear and shame. Within the evangelical church, shame has historically been used as a primary motivator to incentivize cooperation; this is especially true in the case of purity culture. Researchers have pointed out that there is an intense stigma and a social price for defining yourself outside of a group: isolation. The Queer community experiences this within the evangelical church. They are told they can either identify as Queer or drop that identity in order to continue to be in the church. Their identity is undermined by the church as a whole, so it’s stigmatized with shame. The same dynamic is present in the authoritarian parenting outlined above: conform to who we say you are, or risk emotional neglect.
Researchers have shown that Christian conservatism was associated with greater use of corporal punishment, as well as a greater emphasis placed on compliance. Fear of physical punishment is certainly a motivator for compliance, although as a therapist, I can tell you that it doesn’t facilitate a secure emotional attachment between parent and child. Fear also does two additional things in this instance:
Keeps the child from exploring their own identity and needs further (like in the case of “blanket training,” children can’t learn a safe environment in which to explore)
Teaches the child that pleasing the parent is the most important goal.
I’ve seen many clients come into my office present as chronic “people pleasers,” and my next follow up in intake screenings is, “Were you raised in any particular religion?” Because when compliance and submission and obedience become the things that stand between us and a good relationship with a caregiver, kids’ brains go into survival mode, especially if a parent withdraws emotionally as a result of non-compliance or punishment.
In Tedd Tripp’s book, “Shepherding A Child’s Heart,” he posits that total obedience is what God requires of kids, and this should be clearly communicated to children from an early age. He goes so far as to play out a script of a father explaining to a son very methodically that God commands the father to spank the son, and if he doesn’t, then they’re both disobeying God. Discipline that evangelical Millennials were raised with wasn’t optional–it was considered crucial to development because it was a sin of the parent if they didn’t provide discipline. Many of the parents who practiced this backwards, “God-centered, not self-centered” parenting style are now the same parents who wonder why their kids don’t call on the weekends.
By the time a client gets to my office, they are typically rating pretty highly on the PHQ-9 scale, a standard scale mental health professionals use to scale depression. They are adults who aren’t sure where their parent’s approval or disapproval ends, and where their individual sense of self begins. They typically find themselves overwhelmed, unable to say no, and unable to continue in this vein of behaviors. While adults are responsible for owning their own actions, I wonder if millennial exvangelicals were gaslit on a wide-spread scale by the entire generation of boomer evangelicals: taught to obey without question as children, and then accused of being “directionless” as adults. No wonder so many of us are people-pleasers (in trauma we refer to this as the fawn response). In therapy with these clients, we work on things like self-love, boundaries, and emotional regulation. I count myself among them. My first exposure to therapy was group therapy during my second fall semester in college: a support group that taught Boundaries through Cloud & Townsend’s text. Many of these skills would be considered basic in secular settings, but are essential to moving through religious trauma onto healthier adulthood rather than past it.
Blanket training isn’t just a technique for infants in the IBLC. Every millennial evangelical was raised this way and it shows up in adulthood. The metaphorical ruler smacks when we leave the “blanket” of what we were taught is acceptable and holy. Those smacks include the feeling of shame after sex, the pit in the stomach when we question the existence of heaven or hell, or the rush of rebellion at the first sip of a beer. That internal voice we were taught was divine, the holy spirit, whispering we might not ever measure up.
As an adult, how do you notice your evangelical roots contributed to a loss of a sense of self? Many people who find out later in life that they are neurodivergent (ADHD, autism, OCD, bipolar, etc) especially have a hard time developing their own identity after leaving the church. If you are ND, how has realizing this affected how you view your upbringing?
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Crystal Britt is a licensed therapist in private practice. Crystal is also an educator and advocate online, with a following of over 30k people. She works to make mental health relatable and more accessible for millennials who were raised in high control religion. She is the co-host of the podcast “Time to Lean” with content creator Laura Danger, where they discuss current events and take listener questions related to bettering relationships through sharing the mental load of domestic labor. She lives in Southern California with her partner, three children, and one goofy Sheepadoodle.
Find Crystal here:
DL here: blanket training is promoted by Michael and Debi Pearl, Bill Gothard and the IBLP, the Ezzos, and is a part of the popular Babywise philosophy. Here is an article on it: https://www.kidspot.com.au/parenting/blanket-training-the-controversial-discipline-technique-for-babies/news-story/6e81cea5e1ad8a5319ec548f062a707d. While the “modern” version doesn’t explicitly state to hit/smack your child when they leave the blanket (and instead focuses on rewarding the child for staying on the blanket), the original instructions do.
Crystal’s client’s statement that “they were told God has a plan, so why should they have one” of their own echoes something I told my partner recently: I don’t feel as though I’m allowed to desire and dream what I could be a year or five down the road. It is as though I never got the permission to envision a life for myself beyond what was prescribed (and even prophesied) for me in evangelical-land. Moreover, little auDHD me couldn’t build self-trust because the big emotions (angst, rage, grief) I felt all the time were labeled as bad and sinful if I couldn’t hand them over to God. So I grew up deeply suspicious of my longings.
I’m currently reckoning with the way I never got to explore my bi-sexuality because it really wasn’t a choice, was it? While I already knew in high school that I was attracted to women, I wouldn’t have been able to name it as such because it was outside the bounds of what was acceptable in the Christian communities that I was a part of. The depth of indoctrination was so deep that even being at a liberal New England boarding school during those years and having queer friends didn’t remove the burden of abiding to purity culture’s comphet. I may have not believed that being gay was a sin, but I didn’t believe I deserved the freedom and joy my friends experienced when being their authentic selves.
This resonates so much! I'm about to turn 27 and at a cafe journaling now, 'what do I do with my life next?' And I realize, I really never seriously thought this far. I kind of had vague ideas of marriage, kids, maybe be a missionary, maybe I'd move town...
Now I'm a queer autistic person living abroad in Berlin and going 'Ok, I actually need a next step' and have no idea how this is supposed to look? Wasn't I just supposed to just know... Hear the voice of God and do that :P