Pain isn’t at all like pie. Unfortunately, there’s more than enough to go around. - Kati Morton, Pod Meets World (paraphrased)
You know
that I’ve always love the 90s sitcom Boy Meets World. Before doing my homework in high school, I’d come home and watch a few episodes with a big ol’ bag of Doritos.
Now you’ll find me equally as obsessed with the podcast hosted by - at the time, kid actors - Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle. (Or as we know them - Topanga, Shawn, and Eric.) Pod Meets World has grown into much more than just a rewatch show, but seems to be some kind of group therapy for an entire generation as they talk about what it was like to make the show and the cultural phenomena of the 1990s that shaped so many of us.
You don’t know
that my high school years spent zoning out in front of 90s sitcom reruns was also the years that I was confused, grieving, and disoriented by our church falling apart and our pastor suddenly leaving.
I didn’t know
that those years leading up to the church falling apart and the pastor leaving were years that I was groomed by the pastor.
I didn’t know until a couple of years ago when a safe counsellor helped me untangle the mess of confusion in my memory and in my dreams.
And I didn’t know how to talk about it until Pod Meets World released an episode discussing the exact thing happening in Hollywood around the same time.
It came out in my dreams
for many years. Trent has explained to me that he has a “dream city” where his dreams take place. This city is made up of components of each place where he’s lived - and there’s even a special and specific “dream airport” that is unique to his subconscious.
But my dream world was limited to one place: the church I’d grown up in. Every dream took place in that one building.
During the first five years, I wrote down many of these dreams. I can probably go back and track how my subconscious was processing - even when my conscious self had no words to speak or understanding to share. Our church community had fallen apart and suddenly the people I knew and relied on were gone from my life. The pastor I loved and admired, who’d written my college recommendation letters and encouraged me in my pursuit of becoming a youth pastor (my early college dream) - was erased from my life.
In one dream he was in a casket.
I started therapy
during the pandemic. I’d been to counselling before and even have my Masters degree in the subject. But it was during the days of lock downs and vaccine fears that Aliyah had her first seizure and was diagnosed with epilepsy. My own mortality came into full view along with my vulnerability as a mother and I started having panic attacks.
Sick of Zoom meetings and screen time, I connected with an American counsellor who lived a short drive away from me in Antalya, and we met to unpack and process not just my journey into the life of an epilepsy mom, but also my own childhood and multiple cultural transitions.
Once the immediacy of the fears settled down, I drove to her house for our weekly session with a church-dream lingering in my subconscious. “It’s time to tell her,” an inner voice whispered.
For the first time in a therapy setting I felt safe enough to unpack the full story of what had happened. I felt like my confusion and questions and “I’m not even sure what I’m saying or what’s haunting me” would be held and heard and I was ready to speak it.
“He was your first love,”
she said to me as soon as I finished telling her about my dreams, about this church, about this pastor.
I recoiled at her suggestion. “He’s way older than me. He’s married. Ew, no way.”
She softened, “Consider it."
Ever the self-compassion advocate my counsellor added, “Write your story. Write it in the third person, as if it happened to someone else. Pick a moment in time from one memory and write the smells of the room and the sounds you hear. See what happens.”
So I wrote
a document that still sits in my Google drive. I started with just one moment and then another and then another. Seven pages in total titled “Walking through the fog.”
She got me out of my head and not only helped me to start putting words to my story, but she gave me the space to examine it from the outside where it felt a little safer.
As I wrote and processed and felt and cried I already knew what was coming and that my counsellor had been right.
They sat on the first pew on the left, just beneath the worship leader’s pulpit. He sat on the right and she sat near him. His wife was standing, just to the girl’s left. She had just turned 17 and he was just about to leave.
“We can write. I’ll email you and we can write letters, we will keep in touch.”
She nodded, knowing that this had been coming. Holding her head high and her tears in because to cry as deeply as she felt could be her giveaway that she loved him far more than was appropriate.
But instead of feel powerless or like a victim, feelings that had held me captive in my memory for decades, now standing outside of the story and writing as if it were happening to someone else, I felt validated. I felt empowered. I felt like this was my story. And instead of waiting for someone else to tell me what happened, I was finally telling it to myself.
In the next session
I read to her most of what I’d written. When I finished, I think she could already feel the shift in me. Now with more specifics she said definitively, “He groomed you.” I had never considered that term before. In fact, I had wished that something concrete had happened so that I could have a name for my mess of feelings. She gave me a word to name the fall out from the fog.
“This is your story to tell and you need to tell it. But it isn’t just your story, it’s the story of so many women over time - it’s the story of power and spiritual manipulation. And it still happens every day.”
I have a new dream world
now. It appeared suddenly one night while I slept and it’s grown over time and in my imagination. There’s a book store and a coffee shop where I seem to only order iced lattes. My house has a sunroom that’s filled with plants and there’s white cushions on the couch where I like to imagine myself napping when it rains. There’s more to learn about it to discover, more of the story to tell, but this seems like a pretty good start.
Until next week,
cer
Thank you for sharing this. ❤️🩹