Yes, I am calling it a robbery. There was not any material possessions taken at the time, but something that was more precious to me than anything that I owned was taken. I am talking about relationships. The relationships that I had with friends and family. Of those relationships, only the family ones have really hurt, because I have always figured that I could and would make new friends anytime I lost old ones.
This all happened in the 1990's when some Seminary graduates came into our lives. Before then, we had lived 20+ years married. Oh we had our faults and were working through baggage that we had brought into the marriage, but we were committed to each other and would work through anything that came up and as it came up. The Seminary graduates however started exploiting those faults in order to gain control and to authenticate their position within the church. ( I often refer to these people as Jim Jones wannabes, because that is just what I think of them). To summarize what I have already blogged about, they used their influence to make sure that everyone gave me the cold shoulder, including my family. They even told my wife and kids that they should only talk to and heed the Seminary Graduates and only listen and heed me when I am saying what they wanted to hear. That has continued through today.
I want to make it clear before I go any further, that I am very proud of my family and that in no way are they bad people. I am dealing with the relationship between me and them and nothing else.
That has been over 12 years since those events culminated. I am still married to the same woman. I still love her and all my family, although I usually feel like their feelings toward me are no different than a tick's feeling for a dog. There is not a day that goes by even now that at some point I still feel the pain and hurt of what I have lost. This has affected me in other areas as well.
Whenever I am in a position of being with families (who are enjoying being together with other families) tends to remind me of what I no longer have. A real problem for me is the hurt and the feeling that I do not belong, because my family will not come with me. This first showed up in church. Most churches are established for people in come in wearing masks of being ok. You ask someone how they are doing there and they will say something along the lines of I'm ok. Most churches can't handle people not being ok, especially those with long term problems. So, if and when I show up, it is obvious that I'm not ok. This causes me to be shunned or they feel the need to lecture and come down on me, because since I'm a man, it must be my fault and I should be condemned.
That feeling of not belonging is not limited to church though. There have been times when even within the alumni group where people have been harsh with their words, because they can't understand why my family does not want to have a relationship with them (even though there are some who know both me and my wife and she has no problem with the relationship with them apart from me).
I still feel it at other times also. I felt it Saturday at the Cedar Creek Lake. I did really enjoy being with and getting to know new friends better as well as meeting people that I had never met before. As the day wore on though, I was really feeling it. It was a full day of families being together and enjoying other families. In middle of that, I was there alone, knowing that my family wanted to avoid the group as well as any mention of the group or my friends within the group. So I ended up leaving the restaurant where the festivities came to a climax early, not because of the heat, but because of the isolated feeling that ate at me & was really hurting within me.
I write this for two reasons, first as therapy for me. When I am hurting, it helps me to write about it. The second would be that if me expressing these thoughts can help someone else, than I am all for it. We all have grown up in a society that doesn't know how to handle pain and disappointments. We have all shunned people from time to time, not because we don't like them, but because we are put into situations where we don't how to handle the experiences that they are going through. So I hope that this helps.
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