You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir

by Jamie Marich PHD

Overview

A courageous, vulnerable, and spellbinding memoir that explores with visceral impact what happens when harm starts at home—and is exalted as God’s will.

For readers of Unfollow and Jesus Land, You Lied to Me About God explores spiritual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and weaponized faith

At nine years old, Jamie Marich asked God to end it all.

Doing it herself would be an irrevocable sin: an affront to the church and her father’s God. She prayed instead for the rapture, an accident, a passive death—anything to stop the turmoil of feeling wrong: wrong in her body; wrong in her desires; wrong in her faith in a merciful God that could love her wholly as she was.

You Lied to Me About God explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing tyhat tells you: no matter which path you choose—no matter what you know in your heart to be true—you’re probably damned.

With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes readers through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother’s silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.

Hitting a breaking point, Marich embarks on pilgrimage: from shrines in Croatia to ashrams in Florida, she reckons with what it means to come home to a faith that heals and accepts her wholly as she is: in her queerness, in her body, and in her deep relationship to an expansive and loving God.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798889840442
Publisher:	North Atlantic Books
Publication date:	10/15/2024
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	61,585
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

JAMIE MARICH, Ph.D. (she/they) speaks internationally on EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, dissociation, expressive arts, yoga, and mindfulness, and runs a private practice and online training network in her home base of Akron, OH. Marich has written numerous books, notably Trauma and the 12 Steps: An Inclusive Guide to Recovery and Dissociation Made Simple: A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Life. She has won numerous awards for LGBT+ and mental health advocacy, specifically in reducing stigma around dissociative disorders through the sharing of her own lived experience.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

When this memoir reaches the world, some people will use the following words to describe me: bitter, unforgiving, unrepentant, hateful, manipulative, resentful, sinful, troubled, entitled, immoral, dramatic, narcissistic, self-absorbed, egotistical, ungrateful, unholy, unhinged, spiritually immature, mentally ill, backslidden, and divisive. People will say that I’m lying and making up crazy stories. They will accuse me of hurting other people’s feelings and thus inflicting trauma. They may even dredge up mistakes from my past to show the public that I cannot be trusted. In my years of studying abusive systems and healing from their impact, I’ve heard these and similar words used to chastise people who dissent. People like me are told, by our families and by other abusive systems in which we try to function, to not air the dirty laundry.

No one likes to see their skid marks hung out on a line. In my experience, the people and systems who say these things are so protective of the institutions that they represent—the family, the church or congregation, the spiritual community, the organization, the political party—because so much of their own lives’ meaning and identities are tied to those institutions. I don’t see this book as an airing of dirty laundry. It’s a story of how, metaphorically speaking, I learned to examine the filth that people and institutions asked me to wear without any questions. People who can no longer stand the stains are typically portrayed as villains for doing the laundry publicly. There is a reason that the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) publishes a legal resources list for those who are thinking of speaking out—because abusive systems tend to go on the attack with the intention of discrediting the person speaking truth to power publicly. Shame festers behind closed doors.

One of the reasons that I’ve waited until now to share my personal stories on spiritual abuse recovery is that I needed to fully prepare myself for attacks on my character. I’m ready for it. The stakes are too high for me not to speak out. At the time of this writing, the United States, the land of my birth, is a place where spiritually abusive practices within Christianity have been continuously invading a political landscape intended to be secular. Such an invasion, aptly referred to as Christosupremacy, promotes a climate where queer/LGBTQIA+ folks, women, and other marginalized people continue to experience threats to safety, just for being who we are. Although progressive types like to focus on the progress we’ve made, sadly I believe that we are more in danger today than we were ten years ago because of reactionary hate being hurled at us. And so much of this hate is rocket-fueled by people’s interpretation of religion—especially the Christian religion in the United States. 

So I sit here at my computer ready to bare my soul. Recognizing that I’m going to make a lot of people angry by saying what I have to say, I take a breath. A breath of preparation. A breath of centering. A breath of courage. And each breath contains the same prayer that I pray every morning:

God, let my words and actions be your words and actions today
Attune me to the present moment
And may I respond to the challenges of today
With a fusion of my humanity and my divinity

By and large the word God still works for me in my spiritual practice because I believe in a God who does not conform to a specific gender and is inclusive of all paths that lead to goodness and compassion for others. If the word God does not work for you, I respect that. You may not believe in any god or deity or the word God may be highly activating, especially when capitalized, and that’s okay. You are welcome here, in the pages of this book, as you are. I appreciate your willingness to even pick it up and take in the perspective of my personal tangos with all things Divine.

I grew up with a Catholic mother, a father who converted to an extremely fundamentalist Evangelical worldview when I was very young, and a brother who became a Catholic priest. I also spent a good portion of my adult life studying yoga and experienced my last major bout of systemic spiritual abuse in an ashram  founded by one of the Indian yoga masters responsible for popularizing yoga in the United States. While I cannot speak to every flavor of spiritual abuse or religious trauma that exists on the planet, my triple perspective hopefully enriches the conversation around spiritual abuse because I survived it in different contexts. Erin Kelly, one of my dear friends, also a fellow spiritual seeker and therapist, calls my experience an “unholy trinity” of spiritual trauma. My field notes are various stories of trauma and recovery that I/we hope can be of some use to you on your own spiritual journey.

As a person with dissociative identities, a mental health condition that generally develops from unaddressed childhood trauma—especially of a developmental nature—it is natural for me to use the pronouns I and we interchangeably. It’s not bad grammar; it’s how we see ourselves—as a person of plurality and dimension. You can read more about these aspects of our life in our book Dissociation Made Simple: A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Daily Life (North Atlantic Books, 2023). Even though we see our condition as connected to the trauma we experienced (much of which was spiritual in nature), we no longer see our dissociative identities as something negative or to be feared. On the contrary, having a dissociative or multifaceted mind that is healing allows us to see multiple sides of a story and be drawn to various kinds of people.

In this book you’ll meet the people who compose my family of choice. Their collective humanity is integral to the healing of my soul. You’ll read about Janet Leff, a Kentucky-born social worker without a shred of Slavic ancestry who worked in humanitarian aid during and after the Bosnian War—and how the “paying it forward” of her 12-step recovery program saved my life. You’ll meet an Irish woman named Claire who remains one of my best friends. You’ll meet fellow queer misfits like Dharl, a Quaker and yogic meditation teacher who serves as my recovery sponsor, and Rev. Simon Ruth de Voil, a transgender Scottish minister and sacred musician who shares healing balm every time he sings about the loving, queer God in which he trusts.

I cannot write this memoir without sharing the wisdom of Sharon, a Lubavitcher Jewish woman from the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, site of the 2018 synagogue massacre. Sharon adopted me as one of her own. You’ll meet Christine, a third-order Benedictine abbess who healed me profoundly through the very act of blessing the marriage of two women. You’ll also get to know my best pal Allie, who studies world religions. We believe in a God with a wicked sense of humor and hope that they have mercy on us whenever we may cross a line. As two good recovering Catholic girls-turned-women, we often joke when our humor gets a bit wicked that they must be putting another floor on our condominium in purgatory. Purgatory, which comes from a Latin root meaning “to cleanse” or “to purge,” is a teaching in several Christian traditions, most notably Catholicism. According to the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, if you die in a state of friendship with God, then you are assured of your eternal salvation—although some degree of cleansing is needed before the soul can enter the kingdom of heaven. Catholics believe that the faithful who are still alive can pray for souls in purgatory. Many other Christian denominations reject this teaching outright. As a former Catholic nun once explained to me, “If you’re in purgatory, you’ve made it; you just need to get your soul cleaned up a bit.”

So, bring out the Lemon Pledge for our hearts, disinfecting Lysol for our souls, and bars of soap for our dirty mouths! At least that’s what the most devout might say. For us, celebrating our imperfection is a holy act. Laughter is healing, and it is also a spiritual practice. As a dear friend and yoga teacher once told me, “Jesus likes when you make fun of him, Jamie. That way he knows you’re still paying attention and you care.”

In my experience, finding such a spiritual family of choice is essential to the healing process, and I’m grateful that mine found me. As I write about them in this book, please be advised that the teachings from their spiritual traditions that they’ve shared with me are presented as I have received them and interpreted them. For instance, I am not a scholar on the Quaker tradition or on Judaism, yet I do feel it’s important to share with you how people who practice in these traditions have helped me heal. We provide a resources list in the back of the book if you wish to learn more about the various traditions and practices that we reference throughout our stories. I also make some references to various historical events and religious figures in my writing as they are relevant to my own stories. My intention is to provide you with enough context in these stories for you to absorb the significance. I also use footnotes to assist. Moreover, it does not offend me if you look up certain references that I make on the “University of Wikipedia” as you read. I certainly don’t know how to watch a movie or read a book without Wikipedia anymore.

I no longer wish to teach or to write in spaces where I am not allowed to be candid. So, I write You Lied to Me about God from that place of fully honoring my truth. What you will read on these pages are my stories as I remember them and reflections on how they shaped my life. I have changed or omitted some names and identifying details of certain people for privacy, although exercising such an option is difficult in writing about my family because I write under my legal name. I am still taking the risk to share what I need to share. Unfortunately, there is no camera footage available of how things went down in the twenty years that I lived on Hartford Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio. Even if there was, people would be likely to interpret events through their own lenses of belief about family, God, and reality. As my stories progress from where I grew up in Youngstown, to the various corners of the world where I lived and the halls of institutions in which I studied, the same dynamic applies. My stories, my memories, and my interpretations are my own. Others are free to write and to share theirs if they are so called.

I’ve also made the choice to organize this memoir along thematic lines instead of as a chronology, so the chapters will cover topics such as spiritual warfare, family roots, moral development, sex, love, family, dark nights of the soul, deconstruction and reconstruction, trauma recovery, healthy spirituality, the Divine feminine, and the queer experience. For many survivors of complex trauma, it’s difficult or even impossible to store our memories in a chronological fashion. The memories are there and they are valid. Yet because of activation in what is generally referred to as the limbic area of the brain—which does not operate on the same chronological time scale as the neocortex (responsible for executive functioning, speech, and language)—there can be a level of disorganization in one’s recounting of memories. While tremendous amounts of therapy over the years have allowed me to be more organized and less tangential when I tell stories, it still makes a great deal of sense to me to think in theme. As a reader, you may find yourself drawn to one chapter more than others, which could be an indicator for you of what most needs your attention.

Please take care of yourselves while reading. Any reading about trauma or abuse can be activating. This potential for activation is high if spiritual or religious trauma was a part of your own story. As an additional content alert, this memoir contains discussion of suicide, self-injury, disordered eating, addiction, violence, and sexual abuse throughout its pages. You can always put the book down if the content becomes too heavy or if your body sends you a message like, “Best not to read this today.” Step outside if possible and take a walk or engage in any other type of sensory practice to find a moment of grounding or anchoring (e.g., showering/bathing, sipping cool or warm water, wrapping yourselves in a blanket, playing with a pet, listening to music, making spontaneous movement, or stretching). Keep a journal nearby to write or to draw any reflections that might feel relevant or that you may want to share later with a trusted other. If praying or meditating works for you, those can also be options for care as you read. Perhaps the most sacred, nourishing thing you can do for yourself is to binge-watch a few episodes of Schitt’s Creek or any favorite show or movie that makes you laugh and drapes you in comfort. On any path of trauma healing there can be a tendency to push away what you are feeling. If that’s where you’re at in your healing process right now, no judgment here. Although please consider how these supportive practices may help you to fully embrace what you are feeling, or at least to manage the feelings until you believe you have more time, space, or even professional assistance to do this work.

In every chapter of this book, I include an invitation for reflection that you may find useful in helping you engage in your own work related to spirituality. For me, memoir is working at its best when it inspires readers to tap into their own stories and unearth something in themselves that may need to be more fully explored. Your story never has to be shared publicly—crafting it can be something that you do for yourself and your healing only. Please consider completing these exercises with the guidance of a helping professional if you are under their care. If, by engaging in some of this self-inquiry, you believe that you do need to seek professional services, please visit the resources section at the back of the book for some ideas.