This semester has been an absolute blur. I cannot believe I only have two weeks left of the class I am teaching at Northern Seminary and four weeks left of my semester of the courses I’m taking at Wheaton College Graduate School.
I felt like I was in a shut-down state for most of September. I didn’t write anything for Substack, I didn’t make Reels or TikToks (I usually try to post a short video each day), and I was struggling with my school work.
And then I found out that HALF of the dioceses in my denomination have abuse allegations, and I got angry.
Angry enough to write something.
So I wrote up my experience of joining this denomination because I thought it would be safe and quickly becoming disillusioned. It got 36k views.
That broke a dam for me.
I started making videos about emotional health again, I wrote a bunch of papers for class, and I even started a novel in October, just in time to attempt NaNoWriMo in November! And now that I feel more on top of school work, I’m catching up on Substack.
This has happened to me before—a trauma-related freeze response leading to a shut down of my ability to produce content—and it is often extreme anger that jolts me back into action. Somehow anger shifts me from freeze to fight, which I think is one of anger’s purposes in our lives. One notable experience of this before for me was feeling numb and withdrawn…until the Andy Savage abuse case news broke. I stayed up till 2 am writing this post about it for Scot McKnight’s blog. I was angry, and I wanted to say something. More than just spouting into the void, I wanted to write something that would help people. So I wrote about how churches do not understand sexual crimes. Sometimes I used to feel like I couldn’t help myself, but I could help other people by advocating and educating.
Another time I got angry enough to write about betrayal blindness to help people see how their self-protective instincts might be blinding them to abuse from leaders they trust.
Anger is an important emotion. It helps us take action toward our goals in line with our values. I’m grateful for the times anger has snapped me out of being immobilized and helped me move.
I have so many ideas brewing for this space. I’ll post a couple more times this week to share them with you.
This gives me the language to describe what contributed to me stopping my writing and podcasting about purity culture this past spring. The now infamous Beautiful Union/Butler discourse was quite traumatic for me for a whole host of reasons...as both a PC survivor and a writer/content creator: "a trauma-related freeze response leading to a shut down of my ability to produce content" deeply resonates. I've shelved those projects for now and am instead putting all of my energy behind supporting and advocating for (as an agent) the writers and creators who are doing the good work of countering/undoing these harmful messages.