Expert: Nafeesah - 7/29/2009

Question
I have been having horrible luck breaking free from abusive relationships. At the Age of 10, my Father started to be verbally abusive with my Mother and verbaly and physically abusive with me. At the age of 14, my Mother finally left my Father over this. for about two years I just stayed at home, had no Relationships and became rather abusive and controling myself. at the end of two years, I started going to church again and let go of most of my controlling behavior and I started to teach sunday school which I really enjoyed. After a few weeks, however, The people running the Church began telling me that I was a bad teacher every Sunday, that the parents hated me and that I should just do what they told me until I was old enough to go out in the woods to become a hermit and never have to deal with people again. This continued for three years. Once, the pastor once called me aside to his office, yelled at me for having some rather conservirive views and told me that if I didn't recant these views I would be fired! Another time, one of the Religous Ed Coordinators told me that I was not allowed to talk to anyone on parish grounds unless they said I could and I had to talk to what they wanted to talk about! At the end of the three years I quit. Then I went to youth group where one of the kids parents told me after having a converstion about a book I read on Freemasonry that I should just work on bringing people to Jesus and said he would even ask his kids to spy on me and tell him what I did! My sister is also rather controlling. I am almost 20 years old now and I do not remember very many if any at all relationships that I have had that did not involve some form of control and abuse. I have soulgt counseling in the past, (the counselor was one of the religous ed coordinators). What do I do? I don't even feel like i can go to my mother because she is often cynical about me going to church!

Answer
This is the time to seek out counseling to begin working through some of your issues because it seems like you have an extensive history of this from your childhood and then people outside your family treats you bad. You may need to cut off affiliation to this church you're a part of and make a clean start. I seriously believe that counseling will help you to resolve a lot of your issues and help you on the road to recovery.