Wounds run deep from the manipulation and shame used by high-control religions - Megan Von Fricken
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- čas přidán 8. 09. 2024
- Today I spoke with Megan Von Fricken, a religious harm recovery coach who grew up believing in Jesus but ultimately deconverted as she examined the truth claims of Christianity and the Bible.
We touched on many topics, including:
• Growing up in a very structured version of Christianity where there were extensive rules to keep everyone thinking and doing the "right" things.
• Seeing her parents get strongly connected to a small fundamentalist church for a few years and then switching to another small fundamentalist church, repeatedly.
• Being taught that there is just one "black and white" way to think and live, and everything that went against that was unacceptable and seen as sinful or worldly.
• Facing lots of modest rules to ensure she stayed pure and was not a stumbling block to men.
• Being told that the only reason for any relationships with a man was to see if he was "marriage material."
• Placing her faith in Jesus at a young age, with a special focus on escaping hell.
• Rededicating her life to Christ in her teen years as she got exposed to the Left Behind / Rapture concept.
• Going through salvation anxiety as she wondered over the years, many times, if she were truly saved.
• Seeing missionaries being elevated to celebrity status in church and being urged to share the Gospel with others herself, yet not feeling comfortable pushing her faith on others.
• Feeling extreme guilt over pursuing love and affection in her teenage years.
• Having her faith significantly shaken up when she heard Christian professors indicate that there were several legitimate interpretations of Genesis 1, especially in light of evolution and the science around the age of the earth and the universe.
• Realizing over the years that many other Christians have a vastly different perspective on the Bible
• Starting to physically and emotionally separate from the church community.
• Understanding the generational trauma and attachment issues that had been woven into her family dynamics.
• Fully deconverting as the truth claims of Biblical inerrancy and Christianity fell apart.
• Doing the hard work of recovering from religious trauma and making peace with the harm that Christianity caused us and our families.
Many thanks to Megan for sharing her story and insights!
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Connect with Megan!
Her website:
meganvonfricke...
IG:
@reclaimingself.therapy
FB page:
www.facebook.c...
FB Group, Religious Harm Recovery:
/ 798964911760568
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Please subscribe to my other channels (many more channels and videos coming soon!)
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Tim may be reached on FB at: harmonictim
Or by email at: harmonicatheist@yahoo.com
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--Tim
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Ending music by Kazuya / Eyal Raz, "Friends"
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• Friends
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Tim is one of the best interviewers in CZcams history. Always let's his guests talk and say what they want to say without interrupting. Great job Tim! I wish your channel had more subs.
Thank you for your encouraging words!
Please reach out if you want to consider your own interview someday:
facebook.com/harmonictim
As an atheist and ex-Catholic I might just do that one day. I do watch your channel the most now as you have such a wide variety of guests on from various backgrounds and religious belief systems .Such an insightful channel. @icAtheist
Excellent, preying for more subz
@stormchaser419 I was an 8th Day Independent Fundamental Baptist. I escaped The Candycoated Blood Guilt Cult about 12years ago
As virtually a lifelong scientific atheist, I am heartened that there exists some people who are able to navigate themselves out of the death that is fundamentalist religion!!
Ironically it was christian geology professor that made me doubt the young earth folks. He also believed in evolution. Gave me a lot to think about. My catholic high school geology teacher believed the same. They had zero issues with the bible as they felt it should not to be taken too seriously, and had nothing to do wi5h science.
Tim, something you said @ an hour into the show, is interesting. The sheltering is bad and causes distrust of parents and the church, but so many people do not convert. You said, "People don't understand ....." But I think they do. It works out for them in so many cases. It's people like us that want the truth more than anything. A lot of people don't care about the truth. They just want to be comfortable.
❤I totally resonate with her story. We were MKUltrad to the max. I remember our Family Devotion at night after dinner... Dad reading the BuyBull, then all 7 of us had to remember a verse😱. A nerve wrecking business for any child. So rude❤
Yep. We had to take turns finding a scripture and leading in prayer.
@@UrbanERecyclingWe had to remember from the beginning of the "reading"... A freecking verse .... You were not allowed to read the thing!!!! 😭
As an administrator in an evangelical survivor's group, looking over Megan's website shows great promise as a helpful resource who understands the dynamics at hand.
If you think you'd like to consider sharing your story sometime, please feel free to reach out!
facebook.com/harmonictim/
I can tell just by listening to this conversation that Megan is a good therapist.
As a fellow homeschooler isolated for fundamentalist religious reasons, I'm impressed Megan can trace a memory back to age 5.
I remember things, but my family was so disconnected from "the world" that I skipped most of the good and bad milestones that mark time in childhood. The mix of people and places that I did encounter changed at such a slow pace that I can only tag four memories with specific ages.
For example, I definitely became a Christian, but at best I can say it was somewhere between ages 4-11.
I'm jealous of all you cool kids with your shared pop culture events and the ability to date memories by deducing "it happened in Ms. Johnson's class, so I must've been in 3rd grade."
It is so cruel that these fundies insist on isolating their children with home school. So many seem to have suffered from very poor education at best to physical and emotional abuse. There is no oversight or anyone overseeing these homeschool children. Nobody is there to make sure they are getting at least a basic education and nobody to watch and see what if any abuse is going on. Then these children grow up only to find out that everything they were told about the world is a lie and they have almost no skills to make it in the real world. It is so sad but yet there are people like you that somehow find the strength and courage to get out. My hat goes off to you
"Healing is a journey, not a destination." Love listening to all these different stories.❤
Many things resonate with my experience. The idea that family trauma and religious trauma are interwoven is amazing. Those forces are co-morbid in my family. My dad was a preacher in the church of the nazerene for a few years. I stopped believing years ago. But it's only in the last few years I've actively started deconstructing my childhood experiences. By transitioning, I've given myself permission to reassess all the things. Shedding the fear has been so liberating.
Thanks for sharing your story!
Aww. I am so glad you mentioned Nazarene. That is where I came from. I see a lot of ex-Baptist and ex-Catholic, but the Nazarene church is so small compared to other denominations I seldom see the church mentioned. I wish there were an ex-nazarene group I could talk to. I wonder if any of my friends from those youth groups are atheist now.
A friend of mine left Australia to go to South America as an exchange student for one year
She grew up in a really full on Christian home and her parents were loving people but they were really really really into Christianity
She didn't realise, until she left home to go overseas, how much pressure that had put on her
When she was overseas she could just be herself without having to be the daughter of wonderful Christian parents
When she returned to Australia she became depressed to the point of being suicidal
She loved her family deeply but once again felt the pressure to be the wonderful daughter of such wonderful Christian parents
She talked to them about it and they were very mature and understanding
Hello Tim! Have you seen the video about Bobby Leonard of Baptist Bible Tabernacle? He is a pastor who said the unthinkable about women, His terrible sermon show the rot of the religious system towards women.
I have not heard of him, but I'll look him up. Sad to think that those perspectives still exist in this day and age.
Great interview! I have fully deconstructed my christian beliefs and my husband is still very much a pentecostal christian, this makes me hesitate having kids because i dont want them to grow up in any religion nor have any trauma from it but my husband and his family are very much about being involved in church and serving in the worship team its a hard balance to manage even more thinking about kids in the picture hard to navigate it
That's a tough situation. If/when you feel like you'd like to share your story, please feel free to add me on FB and reach out there.
facebook.com/harmonictim
I came to the same conclusions except at a much younger age. Having so many kids means none of them get what they need, giving all responsibility to something outside of oneself means no personal accountability and having complete and utter faith in a book when we have no idea if: it has been altered, when it was written or if it was devised as a way to keep the masses subjugated. The nuns spent many hours punishing me for my questions.
Im 8 minutes in…wow! Our family backgrounds are so similar. My parents (converted as adults) would also make us change churches every 2 years. I never would’ve thought it was due to attachment issues, but I can 100% see that being the case. A great observation 👍 excited to hear the rest of the interview.
This was a wonderful interview.
Great articulate interview…. I appreciate all that was shared…it really resonated with me..
Really interesting to hear this perspective. My journey was marked by early skepticism, likely first grade or so, then having to live undercover for more than 10 years. I had nobody I could talk to about my questions and kept everything inside. I became extremely reserved. Stuck! I tried to run away when I was about 13.
I was a teen prayer journaler here too! Your experience, Megan, was very relatable. Thank you for your authenticity!
She mentions body based somatic therapy at the end .
I urge anyone in talk therapy to explore them. They can really turbocharge the journey. 👍
Thank you Megan and Tim for this interview. I could relate to much of your story because I too healed my religious trauma and deconverted when training to become a trauma therapist.
1:18 - Christianity destroys families. I hear this over and over with people who get out of these high demand religions. Their families seem to abandon them after they leave the cult. It is so sad
This was a great interview! My background is very similar to Megan’s. I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical family and was homeschooled K-12 with primarily Bob Jones University curriculum, so I ended up with a good bit of religious trauma and also some gaps in my education (especially science). Thanks for sharing your story Megan, and keep up the good work!
Speaking as someone from r
the UK, two hundred people regularly attending service and volunteering to clean and maintain the church is in no way a "tiny little church"! Three figure weekly attendance is a healthy congregation in most parts of England and many parts of Scotland and Wales. Ken Ham didn't have to look far to find all those examples of British church buildings converted into cafés, book shops and (gasp) places of worship of other faiths that he uses to scare his audience.
1:06 - you nailed that one! These parents can try to isolate the hell out of these children but once they get out of the isolation and actually learn they will question everything they were raised to believe as true. It must feel like you have been lied to your whole life,e life
Wow Megan’s comments at the 41 minute mark about the need to paint her dad as the villain HITS HOME!
I thought I was the only one who went through that experience.
Another home run interview.
Great video my man...again. You and I have about the same amount of freedom from religion (in years away from it)......I catch myself all the time thinking about how masterful they were from childhood on to ingrain in us all the absolute lie of their "faith"... When I listen to guests such as today and they talk the same thing it just floods memory after memory after memory of how they manipulated me personally through all those years. It's obvious now of course but at the time I was clueless and I followed blindly. Now I cringe every time I think about every time they manipulated me on all levels. Most want to lash out at them. I just call 'em out and still Love them 'cuz like I used to be...they don't know any better. They still suffer from Generational Ignorance. If guys like you and me woke up anyone can and I know many will in today's world. Kudos.
Great interview. Thanks
What if babies were considered to have been born as blessings or inherently good or without sin? Would Jesus' death and resurrection had even been necessary? It would undercut the whole New Testament and probably all of Christianity.
I mean, the whole Jesus thing is unnecessary from the outset.
Bible god invented sin. Bible god can presumably then undo the sin. Some random dude in the Levant shouldn't need to die for that.
The entire scenario is nonsensical before you ever even need to consider changing things about it.
What if superstitious nonsense was given an early bedtime ?
And the next morning was sent
out to learn how logic works .
Once you ditch all this crap about original sin and hell and damnation the gospel makes no sence anymore. The New Testament is basicly just an instruction in how to avoid Gods punishment.
The maine core of christianity is fear. Its a fear based religion.
@@grimlundIt can also be fear based on sadomasochist unrest.
Oh boy john MacArthur really messed me up his books made me judgemental and fear my salvation wasn't certain.
100-200 people is a tiny church?!
In all the places I've lived in 42 years, that would be a rather large church. Perceptions are fascinating.
Tim, could you please give me the source of the information you came across that started your deconversion and that pointed out how the new testament was replete with quotes from the book of Enoch.I've had a hard time finding the information.Thanks.
There's a bit of related info on the most popular web encyclopedia. You know the one everyone uses but can't be mentioned here ,
or will be deleted by censor bots.
It's specifically under the "Canonicity" heading of the book in question's page.
@@FoursWithin Thanks!
Yes, I would love to see Tim expound on this. The book Enoch: Believed by the Apostles, Banned by the Church (December 2022) looks interesting. Your comment prompted me to look, so thanks.
Hmmm…read a sample. The book is targeted to Christians. The authors say that Enoch was considered Scripture by Jesus and the apostles, that it should be added back to the Bible, that it was written before Moses and that Moses would not bother duplicating it. It is really cheap on Kindle so I might buy it, but….
Perhaps this is my phone set up but in case it will help, although I have the "bell" clicked for HA, I am not being notified. Just in case this could be an alert and help with revenue.
It's interesting what she noted about her parents going around between different small, fundie churches. I've experienced this myself and seen it with others. It's looking for the perfect church with perfect doctrine, the one church that gets it all right. But it's also, as she said, attachment issues. It's codependency. I think that people like this, as she said, bring their unmet needs to church with them. They may fear confrontation or disagreement, or maybe they just bring their issues with them and things blow up in some way. Which results in changing churches. Then move on to new "Supply" or new place to find the nurturance that you're looking for.
I've also seen, as you said, these smaller churches condemning the more mainstream or mainline churches as being "lukewarm" and not "on fire" enough. But really, it's those more mainstream churches that help people live their lives in a healthier, more balanced way, in a way that is sustainable. Rather than smaller churches, that force people to live on an extreme, but then blow up and burn out.
I've also seen people join the Mennonites. They see the Mennonites or the Amish, and it seems like the perfect Christian life. The closest to what they can get to what it means to live Biblically. But often, that doesn't work either. There are lots of problems in Plain Communities that they like to hide. But also, if you weren't raised Plain, then it's really hard to fit into that world from the outside.
You dont realize it but growing up even when you leave after high school the programing you got in the early yesrs hangs with you. You have to over ride it and make a better choice.
Thanks!
A+++
👍
I've always wondered how he'll can be completely dark and burning with fire at the same time. Lol When people used to tell me I was going to hell I use to joke and tell them that after te 1st few weeks of burning i'll get used to it and then I'd pick on the newcomers.
Does Megan counsel ppl who went through SRA in the church? So many ppl need help with this very dark part of the church that a lot arent aware of.
I don't think she does, but feel free to reach out to her -- her links are below the video -- and she can clarify if she touches on that arena in counseling.
Whats SRA?
*is that really your last name?*
Correct, that is her real last name.
@@HarmonicAtheist OMFG IM WHEEZING