‘Unfollowing’ Trauma

 

Our membership had been “revoked”, that’s how the church elders had phrased it in a letter to me and my husband. But just days after, those same leaders held an emergency meeting for their church members, encouraging them to cut ties with our family. 

 

When I found this out, shock stalled the realization that we would not be able to keep the majority of our relationships. The empty nesters who doted on our little boys like grandparents, the couple who helped us buy our first house, the family we vacationed with, and the friends who held the most intimate details of my life for the past ten years were all among the ones we would lose, but adjusting my life to that reality took time.

 

For months, I had still been receiving regular church updates. They went out like clockwork, celebrating their Vacation Bible School accomplishments and gearing up for their Bible study programs for the season ahead. Each announcement came straight to my email inbox. It felt like we were on a banished island, receiving paper airplanes containing positive updates from the mainland. 

 

Each one was a poke and a prod. We did not belong, anymore. My soul could not recover from the ache of loss before another paper airplane would come flying in. This time it was an email, from the newly hired youth pastor. He started his greeting with, “Hey! Forge family…” Forge was the name of the youth group, but that’s not what got me. “Family”….family? Family! I couldn’t hold the word in my head, or my heart, and I never wanted to hold it in my email again. I was just a mere fly on the wall. Watching from afar in one of the deepest griefs I’ve ever known.

 

In Necessary Endings, author Dr. Henry Cloud explains this grief process, “There are also the endings that are forced upon us, endings we do not choose but that we cannot work through very well either. As a result, we remain in pain or stuck, unable to pursue a new phase in life. These endings include divorce, being fired or laid off, death of a loved one, disintegration of a friendship, chronic illness, and so on. We do not choose these endings; they are thrust upon us by people we have trusted or sometimes by truly horrible events in life. If we are not prepared or have had too many losses before, these endings can render us broken, depressed, and floundering, sometimes for years.”    

            

Something had to change. As the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences compounded, revealing just how devastating spiritual abuse was, I knew I needed to start making intentional decisions for my health. I can recall a dear friend’s words, who is also well acquainted with spiritual abuse and needing to create boundaries, she said she came to the point where, “I had to stop crying.” 

 

The pain required me to assess where the damage continued to trickle in. We had built so much of our lives around this community, which meant we had so much to dismantle. If I was going to survive this I had no choice but to begin the untangling process of separating our lives from the life we once knew. 

 

At the outset, it became very clear that I had to make some adjustments to my social media accounts. These platforms had become such an unsafe place for me, but unfriending and unfollowing my former “church family” seemed so sad and I feared it would probably be perceived as unkind. I didn’t know what to do with all of the “friends” and “followers” that remained from our old church, but I knew my mind could not be healthy if I continued to look back at the lives I was not allowed to be a part of. 

 

I was stuck.

 

The advancement of technology has given us an unnatural amount of information about everyone’s daily lives. If I had been born before the tech boom, I think we could agree that it would not make sense for me to be following around a community I was shunned from. In the book Boundaries, the authors Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend relay a simple truth, “You can’t miss what you don’t know about”, and I needed to not know about a lot. I needed to not know about everything that was happening without our family. 

 

About six months after our excommunication, I decided to disable my social media accounts. During that time, I prayed a ton and got used to my world being even more quiet than usual. There were limited distractions from reality. I had no temptation to stay informed with everyone’s life updates. Baby announcements, engagements, new jobs, parenting milestones, and the random questions and thoughts of hundreds of people thrown into my vision field were shut down. 

 

I coached myself to be at peace with the littleness of my safe circle. I had to accept the idea that a former friend/church member not unfriending me was not a signal for true care. If anyone wanted to contact me or tell me something important, they’d have to call or text me. If they wanted to know anything about my life, they would need to reach out in a more personal way. Shutting my social media down forced me to come to terms with the new life I was thrust into. If I didn’t have a Facebook or Instagram account, who would still choose to be an active witness to my life? And who would want me to be an active witness of theirs?

 

During this time, I sifted through what real friendship and care is and what it is not. Care is not stalking someone’s social media account to see if they’ve survived what’s happened to them. It’s not asking a friend of a friend who knows them if they are doing okay. It is not liking pictures of their children or “hearting” one of their social media stories. Those relational breadcrumbs only served as reminders that I was starving for more from all the wrong people.

 

Authentic care came in the form of people showing up on our doorstep, sharing tears and hugs, “Just checking in” phone calls, and organizing a meal train sign-up for after our baby was born. Offers to pray with and over my family. When I thought I had lost “the church”, the church, sans the institution, was still there. The care didn’t come through big public announcements or even through small group texts. There was no large community communication system to support us in our suffering. Just the still small voice of the Holy Spirit, prompting a minimal group of individuals to be the hands and feet of Jesus to our little family. 

 

As the weeks went by, I regained confidence in who the Lord had given me to walk within this valley. They were not a big group of people, but they were individuals who were committed to seeing us through and weren’t afraid to witness the messiness of our story. 

 

I waited until the day after my birthday, and with clarity and confidence, I had the courage to remove the people from my social media accounts who had dismissed me from their real lives. I unsubscribed from all church email announcements and unfollowed all of my former church’s social media accounts.

 

I was intentionally moving forward. 

 

“Life is composed of life cycles and seasons. Nothing lasts forever. Even the ceremonial liturgy of marriage, a lifelong commitment, acknowledges an end on its first day, “till death do us part.” Life cycles and seasons are built into the nature of everything. When we accept that as a fundamental truth, we can align our actions with our feelings, our beliefs with our behaviors, to accept how things are, even when they die,” another quote that resonates with me from Cloud’s book Necessary Endings. 

 

When my online world became congruent with reality, I had much more peace and could begin to focus my efforts on what God had for me, instead of meditating on what He hadn’t.

 

What are some changes you have had to make in your life to be healthy? Have you ever had to create boundaries with your social media platforms? Who are the people in your life who provide genuine care for you?