Volume III: The Veil Being Lifted

People are probably going to wonder why I suddenly started writing all of this down.

Why now?

Why, at 37 years old, would I decide to start pulling apart my life in public and putting words to things that happened decades ago?

The answer is that it isn’t sudden.

It isn’t random.

It is the culmination of 37 years of highs, lows, rock bottoms, recoveries, mistakes, reinventions, and then somehow discovering that sometimes there is another rock bottom underneath the one you were certain was the bottom.

Eventually, you start asking yourself how you got here.

And when you ask that question honestly enough, you have to go backward.

For me, that means going all the way back to childhood.

The World I Was Supposed to Believe In

My father was a pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Think about what that means to a child.

Your father isn’t simply your father.

He stands behind a pulpit.

People listen to him.

People trust him.

He talks about God.

He talks about right and wrong.

He talks about sin, morality, salvation, family, and the way human beings are supposed to live.

People shake his hand after church.

They respect him.

And then you go home with him.

That was the beginning of one of the most disorienting realities of my childhood.

The man other people saw and the man we experienced were not the same person.

My father sexually and physically abused me, my brother, and my sister.

There isn’t a softer sentence that makes that easier to read.

There certainly wasn’t a softer version of it to live through.

And when something like that happens inside a home that outwardly presents itself as godly, it does something particularly brutal to a child’s understanding of the world.

Because suddenly the basic rules stop making sense.

The people who are supposed to protect you can hurt you.

The people other adults trust can be dangerous.

A person can speak about God publicly and create hell privately.

Good can wear the appearance of evil.

And evil can wear a suit to church.

When Innocence Doesn’t Fade — It Gets Ripped Away

People talk about losing childhood innocence as if it happens gradually.

You get older.

You learn that adults aren’t perfect.

You discover that the world isn’t always fair.

That wasn’t my experience.

For me, the veil didn’t slowly fall away.

It was ripped off.

There is a moment in a child’s development when the world is still fundamentally safe.

Your parents know what they’re doing.

Your home is where you’re protected.

Adults understand things you don’t.

God is good.

Bad people are somewhere else.

Then suddenly you learn that none of those assumptions are guaranteed.

The monster isn’t outside the house.

He’s inside it.

And he’s your father.

Once a child learns that, you can’t really put the veil back.

You can pretend.

You can function.

You can go to school.

You can sit in church.

You can smile when you’re supposed to smile.

But something foundational has already shifted.

What Does That Do to a Kid?

I’ve thought about that question a lot.

What happens when a kid spends years experiencing danger in the same environment where he is supposed to learn safety?

Psychologists have spent decades studying childhood trauma, and one of the recurring ideas is that children don’t simply experience trauma and then neatly return to normal.

They adapt to it.

A child’s brain is learning the rules of the world while the trauma is happening.

If home is unpredictable, you learn to watch everything.

Tone of voice.

Facial expressions.

Footsteps.

Mood changes.

The energy in a room.

You learn to anticipate danger before you even have language for what you’re doing.

Those adaptations can be incredibly useful when you’re a kid trying to survive something you cannot control.

The problem is that childhood eventually ends.

The adaptations don’t always get the memo.

You can carry them with you.

Into friendships.

Into relationships.

Into work.

Into leadership.

Into the way you handle conflict.

Into the way you see yourself.

Into the way you understand God.

Into the way you understand love.

You can leave the house and still carry pieces of the house around inside you.

We Were Always Moving

My childhood also seemed to happen in motion.

I was born in North Carolina.

I don’t remember much of it.

Then Massachusetts.

I have pieces of memories from there.

Then Oklahoma, where we lived in multiple places.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, California.

Penn Valley.

Mount Shasta.

Eventually Stockton.

When I look backward, my childhood feels almost like a collection of scenes from different lives.

Different houses.

Different towns.

Different schools.

Different landscapes.

Different beginnings.

Except the things happening inside our family came with us.

That’s one of the things I’ve realized about moving.

Sometimes you can change every piece of scenery and still wake up inside the same reality.

As a kid, though, each move feels enormous.

Everything you’ve figured out socially gets reset.

New classmates.

New rules.

New neighborhood.

New people trying to figure out who you are while you’re still trying to figure that out yourself.

And when the foundation at home is already unstable, constantly rebuilding the outside world doesn’t exactly make things easier.

Behind

I sometimes wonder how different my development might have been if those years had been different.

Not because I believe there’s some alternate perfect version of me floating around somewhere.

There isn’t.

But trauma costs something.

It costs attention.

It costs energy.

It costs trust.

It can cost pieces of childhood that should have been spent learning who you are rather than learning how to survive your environment.

And I think it put me behind in ways I wouldn’t understand until much later.

Socially.

Emotionally.

Mentally.

Spiritually.

Even in the way I understood myself and my place in the world.

When other kids were learning certain things naturally, part of me was learning an entirely different curriculum.

How do I stay safe?

What mood is he in?

Who can I trust?

What happens if I say something?

What happens if nobody believes me?

How can the things I’m being taught about God exist alongside the things happening inside my own home?

Those are incredibly heavy questions for a child.

Especially a child who doesn’t yet understand that he shouldn’t have been responsible for answering any of them.

The Spiritual Damage Was Its Own Kind of Wound

There is another piece of this that is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced religion and abuse living under the same roof.

When the person hurting you is also a spiritual authority, eventually the boundaries between those things can become distorted.

If this man represents God to other people, what does that mean about God?

If this is what a godly household looks like behind closed doors, what exactly are we doing?

If the people at church believe they know this person but don’t know what happens when we go home, then how much of anything around me is real?

That kind of contradiction doesn’t just create anger.

It creates confusion at a level deeper than anger.

Because a child’s worldview is being constructed while someone is simultaneously destroying its foundation.

I didn’t have theological language for that.

I was a kid.

I just knew something was terribly wrong.

Hell Doesn’t Always Look Like Fire

When people use the word hell, they usually mean something dramatic and distant.

Fire.

Demons.

Punishment.

Somewhere terrible you go.

But there are years of my childhood that, looking back, I can only describe as living through a kind of hell.

Not every second.

That’s actually one of the confusing things about traumatic homes.

There can still be birthdays.

Dinner.

Television.

School.

Road trips.

Laughter.

Normal conversations.

Then something happens and suddenly you’re reminded that normal isn’t really normal.

That’s what makes it so difficult to explain.

A traumatic childhood isn’t necessarily one uninterrupted horror movie.

Sometimes it’s ordinary life with terror woven through it.

And children become extraordinarily good at living inside contradictions.

You learn to function because you have no alternative.

Eventually You Realize the Veil Is Gone

There is no moment where somebody sits you down afterward and explains what everything meant.

Childhood just keeps moving.

You get older.

You accumulate experiences.

You develop habits without knowing where they came from.

You react to things without knowing why they affect you so strongly.

You make decisions.

Some good.

Some terrible.

You build a life.

Sometimes you destroy parts of it.

You rebuild.

And eventually you reach an age where you can look backward with enough distance to recognize patterns that were invisible while you were inside them.

I’m 37 now.

I can look at that child differently than I could ten years ago.

I can understand more of what happened to him.

I can see what he learned.

I can see what he never got the chance to learn.

I can see some of the ways those years echoed far beyond childhood.

And that is part of why I’m writing now.

Not because I’ve neatly resolved everything.

Not because there is a bow to put around this story.

Not because this chapter ends with some inspirational sentence about everything happening for a reason.

Some things should never happen to a child.

Full stop.

There doesn’t need to be a hidden blessing attached to them.

There doesn’t need to be a motivational quote.

Sometimes something terrible happened.

Sometimes it changed you.

Sometimes the first honest thing you can do is stop trying to make it beautiful.

So Volume III ends here.

With the veil gone.

With a child realizing far too early that the world could be dangerous, adults could lie, religion could be used as camouflage, and the people entrusted with protecting you could become the people you needed protection from.

There are many years between that child and the man writing this.

We’ll get there.

But before anything that came afterward can make sense, you have to understand where the story really began.

And it began when the veil was ripped away.