As soon as I reached the end of the narrative, Diana reached out and placed her hand on my knee. “Do you have someone at your church you can talk to? Like a women’s ministry director?”
“No,” I responded. “I don’t think so.”
“A woman at our church does lay ministry counseling. If I make an appointment for you, would you go?”
I stared at her, shocked yet hopeful at her offer. It had not occurred to me that I might need a counselor, and I wouldn’t have known where to begin looking for one. Diana understood that I wasn’t even capable of following through on contacting this woman and scheduling a time to meet. I whispered, “Yes.”
“Would you like me to pick you up and take you? Or could I babysit the boys while you go?”
I glanced over to the swings, where our sons squealed with excitement the higher they went. Diana isn’t simply suggesting I get counseling. She wants to facilitate the process. I was touched by this caring friend. “If you can babysit the boys, I’d be so grateful.”
Two days later, Diana watched my boys while I went to the morning appointment she had scheduled for me while David was at work. He was glad that I was going to talk to someone. As I drove to the church, I wondered what I would say. To this day I can’t remember the name of the lay counselor, or the name of the church for that matter, but I poured out my heart for a solid hour. I told her about my unbelievable family of origin and the vivid nightmare I had just experienced days before.
The woman wisely told me, “Anna, you need more help than what I can offer here.” She handed me the business card of a licensed therapist. “Joy, with Samaritan Pastoral Counseling Ministry, did her doctoral thesis on cults. She will not only understand what you need in order to heal, but she’ll also understand and empathize with where you’ve been.”
The counselor offered her services on a sliding scale, making them affordable, and I started meeting with her every week.
At our first appointment, she wasted no time getting to the root of the issue. “Tell me about your relationship with your dad.”
“He was never around, and we dealt with it.” Stoic Anna took over, my last-ditch effort to protect myself from baring my soul and facing my tragic past.
“Tell me more about that. What do you mean when you say, ‘we dealt with it’?”
I literally felt my defenses wavering, the walls I’d built up and hidden behind for two decades crumbling before me. I told her about being abandoned in Mexico by my mom, about Rafael’s advances and Antonia’s humiliation of us children, about working like a slave for Dan Jordan, and about not having anyone around to protect me.
Joy listened. She nodded at appropriate times. She asked probing questions to lead me further and further along the path of self-examination. I wasn’t exactly a willing participant, but I felt I didn’t have any other choice. Though I found it difficult to open up my heart about the experiences I had endured, little by little I cracked open the spaces that had been locked down tightly for decades. I felt exposed and unprotected as I allowed the emotions to surface. Oftentimes I felt like I was drowning and couldn’t breathe as I became overwhelmed by the experience of actually speaking aloud the atrocities we had endured as children.
One afternoon early in the process, Joy explained in her soft voice, “I call it peeling back the layers of an onion.” Each time we met, I progressed a little bit more. I came to understand that it wasn’t just about growing up without a dad. Yes, that was part of it. But my experiences went far beyond that. Obviously, my dad didn’t protect me. But even more than that, he didn’t care about any of his children or our well-being. He actually put us in harm’s way. He allowed others to demean and abuse me and to treat me like a slave. He gave orders to have us sent to Mexico and allowed me to be groomed for sexual abuse and for an eventual marriage. Joy helped me explore how that abandonment and lack of fatherly provision and protection still affected me.
I slowly and painfully morphed from the unemotional person I’d been trained to be my entire life into someone who knew how to shed appropriate tears about the incredible losses I had endured. Women who live in a polygamist culture can’t possibly bear up under most of what they have to endure without shutting down emotionally. What woman of sound mind can wholeheartedly deal with her husband having sex with other women on a regular basis? When a powerful, narcissistic man manipulates multiple women into marrying him and sharing him with their “sister-wives,” they learn to cope with the sheer lunacy of it by compartmentalizing their emotions. Suddenly so many aspects of my life crystallized —why my mom never cried, why she always defended my father, why she obeyed him without question. I’d been raised to act the same way.
In the beginning, I never cried during counseling. Like any good cult follower, I had learned to keep my emotions in check. I think the feelings side of me had been suppressed for so long that I didn’t know how to express emotions, especially sadness and grief. I sat in Joy’s office for months sharing only surface events and feelings. As she gently probed and chipped away at the walls I’d erected, I occasionally shed a tear or two, but that was it. As soon as a tear fell, fear or instinct kicked in. I would quickly change the subject to avoid going deeper and confronting the core issues and emotions. Bottom line: I didn’t want to go there because I feared it would be like a breaking dam —uncontrollable once the water broke through.
Over time, my defenses wore down. Joy’s insightful questions and empathetic responses helped me learn to trust her. With that trust came authenticity. I began to share more intimate parts of my journey. And with that sharing came the tears. So many tears. Once I opened those floodgates, my worst fears came true and I felt like I’d never be able to shut the gates again.
Joy and I met together for almost five years before I reached the point where I could sit in her office and grieve, freely letting the tears flow. Not the pretty, photogenic tears that a leading lady sheds when her boyfriend goes off to war, but gut-wrenching, heaving sobs that smeared my makeup and left my stomach muscles sore. David supported my efforts to deal with my past, though he couldn’t understand the depth of the anguish I faced confronting such emotional experiences.