Fractures And Flashpoints Of An Accidental Deconstruction

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: This post is part of our Guest Writers series. At Deconstruction Doulas, we seek to present many survivor voices with many perspectives on the issues that we confront: spiritual abuse, patriarchy, high-control religion, deconstruction, deconversion, and everything that lives 'downstream' from these things.

The content found in posts made by guest writers are not the opinions of the Deconstruction Doulas. You may find some survivors’ opinions and perspectives triggering for various reasons. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Please read carefully, respecting your own nervous system, needs, and direction, and don't be afraid to discard what is unhelpful. Not everything is for everyone, nor should it be.]]

Written by Alyssa Mullett for Deconstruction Doulas (originally published Monday, June 1)

Content warning: mentions of sexual harassment and erotic literature

As I sit down to compose this piece I am forced to examine all the unintentional fractures and purposeful mending that is deconstruction. My logic demands I stitch my story with all the vital words I’ve woven over the years, the wounds I’ve suffered and ripped open publicly in hopes it might save someone, anyone just one more tear. But my heart knows some lessons must be unlearned in the solace of silent sobs. Here with this audience, who undoubtedly share some similar scars, I feel safe to reflect in hopes that my fractures and flashpoints might reveal a new seam of self understanding. 

It was an accident I swear. I didn’t set out to not believe in God anymore. In truth, I just wanted to believe in myself more. My inner voice is quiet when I want it to be louder. Maybe she’s timid after years of neglect and abuse, rightfully so. 

At the end of 2019, I began writing because it felt innate, primal to me to be able to carve, convey and contextualize my feelings into words. At forty years old I was finally able to say what I wanted even if only to myself. Memories fade and emotions cloud recall. I write my experiences so I won’t let anyone else, especially myself, gaslight me into alternative narratives. 

That quietness of our inner voice, our dimmed knowing, is a trademark of religious indoctrination in women. As I’ve lost my religion, I’ve found myself. I’ve learned my body and my writing are frightening tools of nearly psychic future-telling. Less than a month into my journey, I wrote:

I feel as if the human connection to God/Higher Power in essence, spirituality, is larger than any one book or text. Is it a conflict for me to want to believe a little of all of it? I have seen repeatedly in my professional lens the truth of any situation usually lies somewhere in the middle of his & her stories. The human perspective is flawed so by definition our truth, written or otherwise is skewed by our innate filter. A crisis of conscience- the words won’t even be written that’s how much my psyche is fear riddled to admit. If I haven’t had the ‘whole picture’ all my life…what does it actually look like and can I ever feel ‘just’ in owning it? Definition of self through a singular religious lens is a dangerous lie to keep living.

By the time I had a name for it - deconstruction; it had already happened. Every tangled truth, unraveled, the lies burned away and there I was in the ruins of self, alone. My experience as a ‘good girl’ losing her religion and fighting like hell to find herself unfolds between parallels of my own mind and the impact on relationships in my life, specifically and painfully with my parents. 

The most traumatic and tragic part of losing my faith was losing my parents. I’m ripping that angsty as fuck scar open right up front, knowing, I’m living my HEA (romance reader terminology for happily ever after) now. 

Disclaimer: Stating the obvious here, but not every deconstruction results in losing your religion and/or your community. My story does because faith was so interwoven into the fabric of my family that it could not be untangled without ripping from its seams. Rejection of my religious beliefs was not ultimately based on some theological question that I could not reconcile.  Nor was it a historical biblical debate that I had now resolved. My deconstruction was a result of the actions of those who indoctrinated me.  Their DNA unraveled the elements of faith they demanded I hold.

How it began

For those wondering the flavor of my indoctrinated Christianity, Mennonite. Maybe you’ve never heard of it. More likely that you have at least a reference to the Anabaptist origins in the Amish. Think of Mennonite as Amish Lite or a mash-up of evangelical Amish. 

Research of religious trauma affirms a childhood of indoctrination ingrains a deep disbelief in ourselves. There is no difference between impure thoughts and bone-tired body fatigue; both are human sufferings that must be offered in prayer, things to overcome, not interpret. Indoctrination tells us evaluation is above us as flawed humans. We will inevitably get it wrong if we do it ourselves. Only through God is our suffering, physical or mental, determined as a meaningful part of our journey. Our bodies are not a place of self-safety, but rather just a vessel for His will; therefore, we can not trust their messages. 

A childhood devoid of internal safety and security is abusive; I know this now. Because we are controlled by compliance, taught that we cannot trust our own sinful nature, it is our belief that safety and security are things that others give us — namely God and you guessed it, some other man.

Along with the burden of original sin, women in conservative Christianity (among other religions) bear the responsibility for men’s impure thoughts and any subsequent actions. Girlhood mandates entrance into purity culture, where we learn our full naked truth: Our bodies are not to be trusted. Our form and its skin are both divinely made and an evil temptation. Our virgin hole makes us whole. Our virtue, our value, is determined by someone, something outside of our own mind and body. 

Flashpoint - Purity Cult

On Christmas Day when I was 12, I received a gold banded ring boasting a diamond chip in a heart setting. I remember that heart shape distinctly as my dad slid the ring onto my right hand. I thought a purity ring symbolizing my promise to my parents and God that I would wait for marriage to have sex was normal. I believed as I had been taught through preaching, youth group lessons, and parental instruction, that my worth as a girl was directly tied to my sexual purity. My resources and exposure to contradict this were virtually non-existent at the time.

Three years later, I would give myself, and eventually that ring, to the first boy I ever loved. The ring was hidden in a jewelry box never to see light, like the secret, darkened country road I lost my virginity on. It wasn’t until long after my chastity was compromised, years into that marriage I was supposed to be saving myself for, that I started to understand that my experience was unique to the purity cult. 

I started to read romance books and reflect on my own experiences of love and sex. Reading fictional relationships with exposed sexual dynamics ripped open my mind and heart. I can’t understate how these “tasteless, pornographic reads,” as critics call them, allowed me the safe space to explore my sexuality, my sensuality, and my very soul. This internal dialogue sparked an inner intimacy of thought and non-judgment that I had never allowed myself previously. Slowly smut helped me shed my sex shame. I learned one strong FMC at a time that my worth is innate. I see through two strong yet, soft-only-for-each-other MMCs that gender is a performance for society and authenticity of sex is bred from self-knowledge. I found a polycule full of wisdom that true love isn’t conditional and that I am empowered to reject the shame that others assert in attempting to control me. All that by reading romance.

While my purity cult experiences left me feeling isolated, I know now through religious kink author fan pages there are plenty of us healing among the pages where priests are on their knees for us. Communities abound on nearly every social media platform and some stand-alone forums for survivors of the ‘True Love Waits’ campaign. I have found healing in spaces where the psychological connections between erotic reading and the sexual trauma that occurs when you grow up believing your virtue is your value are realized. You will pry my cliterature from my cold, dead hands, and like a fated lover, I will find it in the next lifetime.

Fracture

And as it turns out, unraveling the tie of my self-worth being linked to my sexual purity frayed the cord to my previously hard-wired belief. If this fundamental understanding of ‘who’ I was to the world was wrong, what else had I fundamentally misunderstood?

How it went

Want to know what blows my mind? Even while in organized religion, I never considered myself devout. I operated under the myth of progressiveness. I mean, I had aunts and female cousins who never cut their hair. Conservatively braided and always up in either a white bonnet covering or for the fashionably reserved, pinned below a white or black round lace doily.  So I thought my permed hair and shaved legs were scandalous.  By believing I was ‘progressive’, I could so clearly see the cage of others, so by design I couldn’t see my own. 

The professional world continued my patriarchal indoctrination. It ensured I kept shaping and defining myself by what I did. What I offered to the world, that was who I was. I wasn’t even 21 yet and 40-year-old men were already inducting me into the oldest corporate club there is — sexual harassment. Married men had wholly inappropriate conversations with me and I reveled in the attention. Two specifically, the dynamic duo we’ll call them, D&D loved to push the envelope. They most definitely had what I can now identify from reading smut, as a corruption kink. Talking dirty, guessing the color of my underwear or telling me what shape and size they envisioned my areolas to be.

At one point with the HR office door locked one of the D’s showed me the outline of his hard dick by pressing his trouser pants against his leg. And I gobbled it up (not literally) because it felt so familiar to be the center of male attention and to be wanted. It felt like home (i.e. the cage) in this big world. This was who and how I knew my role. It’s how I knew myself, defined by others wanting or needing me.

Flashpoint - Boundaries

The first major conflict I had with my mom as an adult was about purity culture and me going to therapy. In a conversation where I was sharing how I felt purity culture negatively impacted me, she responded “I disagree.”

“You don’t get to disagree with my lived experiences,” I managed, stunned. That was when she looked me in the eyes and questioned, “Are you being guided or led by therapy?” I think I laughed at the irony of her query. She, a faithful expert at being led by the high-control Mennonite religion, questioned my version of experienced truths.

High control religion develops a keen understanding of rules and order, but not boundaries. We are conditioned to obey and loved in accordance with our compliance. Following that first adult conflict (mind-you I was 40 years old!) I had with my mom, I had to learn the forbidden boundary skillset. 

I began to articulate what I needed to do or no longer allow in my life so that my lived experience was not relegated to fantasy. My mother demanded to know “why” I no longer believed in the Mennonite faith of my childhood. On numerous occasions, I attempted to correlate the devastating effect that purity culture had on my self-esteem and how her prioritizing modesty above even personal comfort, centered the male gaze.

My religious indoctrination was amplified by my mother’s emotional immaturity. I was raised to be her emotional caretaker, and thus, codependency was the toxic tie between us. I didn’t know any other way to be in a relationship with my parents, but I needed to try. I started to see the patterns of how my constant clawing for understanding in ways large and small with my parents was eroding my mental health.

What self-advocacy looks like is different for everyone. What it feels like, perhaps, differs too. For me, it’s yucky, like this slime of uncomfortableness that threatens to envelop me. I can talk myself out of the vulnerability of establishing boundaries so quickly you would think that slime was a Formula 1 race car barreling down on me. My brain goes “it’s not worth it”. 

My heart whispers, “You are”. And then there’s that small voice that gently, persistently keeps tugging forward. 

While my worth is not wrapped in the value I bring to the table, there is a table. The table exists because I fucking built it. I invited each person, and I can remove their seat or reduce their influence because it’s my table. I have to stand at the head of that table and fling that slimy yuck of self-advocation all over the place so that the table and I will keep standing strong and safe.

Fracture

For emotionally immature people, and let’s face it, the Church loves to keep folks ignorant and feeling only through their approved lens, boundaries feel like conditions to loving you. My mom could only experience my love without boundaries, and thus her love for me was conditional. Such a simple, earth-shattering understanding that was for me. If this, this love I was told at every breath since birth was unconditional, was actually the very definition of conditional, did I know anything of the reality of life?

Years later, that wound is still weeping. I’m confident now even in estrangement, my parents believe nothing of their love has changed or ceased. They are faithful and therefore, they believe their love is unconditional simply because they still care in the only ways they know. And the love they demand of me in return is the same. It must be without conditions, which requires it to be without boundaries. That kind of love is not safe. When love demands unconditional access, it’s a disguise of control.

Flashpoint - MAGA Cult

There exists only a singular flashpoint between what I can only loosely describe as the tie that bound me to my father. He was never absent, just never present. My mother was his voice, his feelings and for a lot of years I let that be okay, because I thought it was normal. That all changed in the years that I watched my husband parent our son. I realized fathers were allowed to be more than just stoic, recliner-bound, providers. These choices my father made about who he was crashed into me almost violently when I initiated our first real conversation. It was then I first learned about my dad’s alliance to the MAGA cult. I wrote what would be my final pleas, to my dad in the wake of January 6th, 2021:

I have cried, agonized and raged (a lot of rage) about your political alignment with Trump. And while we both understand we are much, much more than our political party; I am holding myself and you accountable for our relationship. So, I have to be honest and vulnerable; this deeply matters to me. 

My bottom line is this- I can disagree with you on policies such as gun rights, abortion and immigration, but, I want, I NEED you to rebuke Trump. I could give you hundreds of illustrations as to why he doesn’t align with the conservative Republican party he belongs to however, what’s most important to me is that he, what he has said and done do NOT align with you!  You as I know you, a conservative, quiet, godly man, peaceful in word and deed. 

Everyday that goes by and your allegiance to Trump remains, the silent valley that spans the bridge of our relationship widens. The bridge is flexible but the tension I feel is real. Do you remember how I told you I didn’t feel safe in Trump’s America?  The hatred that he has cultivated is coming to harvest and my fear is real. There will be people who say it doesn’t matter after the 20th anyway - but it really does still matter to me. Those seeds of hate, anger and fear have been sown. How are we going to actively work together (you and me) to uproot them?

Fracture

My father never responded. Now, we are all living, some of us dying, in the hell that is the harvest of all that hate. 

Flashpoint - Understanding is a choice

After years of white-knuckle boundary holding, and further fractures my mom called to arrange a face-to-face meeting with me. “Dad and I talked and believe for several reasons that this meeting will help us understand why you are upset and why there is this void in our relationship.”

For as many questions as the process of deconstruction brought for me, there was clarity too - I’m at a clearing I never dreamt. The view is crystalized that my parents will always choose faith over my pain. The false “need to understand”, is a wall erected to ensure my pain can not coexist with their beliefs. It is like incrementally and suddenly awakening from a closely woven knit of fog and clarity. As the mist lingers you wind your fingers around the threads of emotion that both bind and release you. Wondering, hoping, fearful that this will be the last time you feel their touch. 

I said I didn’t need or want a sit-down meeting. I had spent the last two years talking openly, providing clarity and re-opening wounds. “I now realize that there is no sequence, number, or configuration of words that I will be able to speak or write to help you understand. Understanding is a choice and it’s yours. I cannot for my own well-being keep doing this.”

In the space between chasing and feeling abandoned, where hope and expectations are buried, when I chose to stop clawing for understanding and start choosing my mental safety — that is where I found myself.

Fracture

My season of undaughtering as I term it, came astride my no-contact protocol. Understanding me was never a choice my parents were going to make. Without their God, I lose my humanity, my purpose, my meaning. My choice, my understanding is absolute and limitless. 

How it’s going

At the time of this writing, I am four years into full no-contact status with my parents. Parental estrangement, low-contact, no-contact, while being broached in 1-minute sound bites on social media, is still not widely discussed, let alone detailed. Most likely due to the immense shame experienced from both sides of this equation. Shame disables words. Shame silences and, as such, is used as a weapon. Lucky for me, deconstruction has provided me with loads of experience in dismantling ascribed shame. I don’t accept shame for loving me, choosing my mental safety, prioritizing my physical health, and breaking generational trauma. 

Religion made my world so small that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But, reading books spicy and non-spicy alike, listening to podcasts experiences diverse from my own as well as following people of the global majority on social media platforms which exposed my privileges and our shared pain, each of those blew my world right up!  I chose now for the little girl who had none. I learn to elevate away from willful ignorance. I love myself because I was taught I was unlovable as is. This is the work and wisdom.

Isn't it marvelous to look at the wasteland of what you thought you knew and discover your ignorance? It's in that reflection time marks itself, the before and after. You can't unknow what is now in your heart, your bones and you choose to understand the past versions of yourself that accepted less, that didn't dream of more are relics of their time - gone. This new knowledge permeates the wholeness of self and every vision you hold. 

One of the aspects of my deconstruction that I often overlook in retrospect is the unity of self. The wholeness of authenticity in all the spaces I choose. I no longer choose belonging with people who don’t see all aspects of me as indivisible. They can’t “love the sinner and not the sin”, “pray about” or “love me in spite of” because my wholeness won’t be divided by their ‘Christian love’. I no longer choose belonging with people who don’t see all aspects of me as one. I am whole. I am good.

I no longer perform who I am in life, no longer act for your attention or love and as a result some in the audience, no longer have seats. My losses have been significant; people, time, money, titles, but none of them matter because I found myself. I will never lose her again.

About the author:

A good girl who didn't set out not to believe in God anymore, just in herself a little more. After her accidental deconstruction, she began applying her decade of professional coaching techniques to her evolving personal beliefs. Between powerful curiosity and an expanding worldview shaped by a love of reading, she began reconstruction of the identity stolen by indoctrination. 

Alyssa’s personal journey, professional coaching, and writing culminated in the creation of The Good Girls Guidebooks. The digital guidebooks are a reclaiming from the subservient smallness of our expected roles. Helping women know authenticity and how to claim wholeness of identity is the inspiration behind her work at Good Girl Deconstructed. 

Alyssa’s writing deconstructs indoctrination, navigates parental estrangement, explores love, and finding self through never-ending curiosity. Her voice is relentlessly supportive, fiercely vulnerable, shamelessly smutty, and painfully honest. You can find more at:

Good Girl Deconstructed 

Purchase her Deconstruction Journal

@goodgirldeconstructed on Instagram and Tiktok

Her writing is on Medium https://medium.com/@alyssa_74105

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