In conversation yesterday with a woman who currently sees a professional therapist, I learned about a reflection pathway that helps us consider the ruts into which we bog ourselves. I must emphasize 'professional therapist' because our nation more than any other I am aware of has an 'expertise problem'. Half of us believe that anyone may put out a shingle, amplify their opinions as fact, and receive compensation for their advice. From self-proclaimed 'people called by God' to online influencers and off-line snake-oil salesmen, everyone has an opinion that is of equal value to all others' opinions. Everyone is an expert. Facts exist alongside alternative facts and misinformation. Our world because of instant communication via internet is as alienating and intrusive as it has ever been. The majority of people are as ignorant as they've ever been; however, willful ignorance is the greatest flaw in the human condition right now. Today. 2025. So...every mention of seeking or using expert advice should come with a qualifier. She sees a professional therapist. Not a therapist who paid a Christian college for a certificate, not a mental-wellness influencer who built a vast following sans the years of training and mentoring under nonpartisan experts through which certified psychologists earn their right to analyze and advise.
The pathway is this: Event, Thoughts, Feelings, Behavior. Ideally, we write lists under the categories following an event. The lists help us focus, not on the event itself but on our responses to the event. To suggest that an event does not need a response (or reaction) is unworthy of a response. Every event whether joyful or traumatic or as uninspiring as my personal wardrobe will generate responses. The whole point of the reflective exercise is to understand why we repeat self-harming cycles. Although we are unlikely to seek therapy if the event was joyful, the reflection might still be fruitful. We might understand how to reproduce joyful experiences.
My dear friend says that the list under Feelings reveal why she repeatedly experiences rejections and breakups. The event was a relationship breakup of which she had highest hopes. Her feelings show that she irrationally blames and chastises herself. She wants to change those feelings, thereby changing the ensuing behaviors and breaking the cycle. Using my personal experience, I will do this exercise as both an example of the process and a determination to break a cycle.
I have not in the forty-three years since an event had a close friendship outside my immediate family of daughters and sisters. This is the problem I want to analyze. I want to have a best friend.
Event
In 1982, I was a member of The Church of Our Saviour near Philadelphia. Frederick Drummond was the pastor of the church. During the nine years (1973 through the Fall of 1982), I enjoyed close relationships with several women also in the church. I was born in 1953. This time in the church was the entirety of my young adult life. In early 1982, I expressed doubt about Drummond's behaviors and openly declared that I would leave the church and move across country to New Mexico where I had lived before marriage. I would go with my husband and two young daughters.
In September of 1982, I had not been to our church's worship or teaching services for several months. I was told via a phone call from one among Drummond's closest circle that I was not allowed on the church property or to be in contact with other members. My closest women friends, my brother and my sister-in-law obeyed Drummond's demands to ostracize me and my family. We received a phone call on a Saturday in September asking that we attend the Sunday morning service. We woke the next morning and dressed for church in our Sunday best. After enjoying the choir and song portion of the worship service, Drummond stood at the pulpit. He preached. After he began to point directly to us where we sat in a pew near the front, he created a public shaming. I cannot remember the words. The Sunday service was our public shaming. He did not have an altar call. He did not ask us to speak. He told everyone that we had shamed God and the church. He told everyone that we were no longer a part of the whole. Afterwards, Drummond abruptly prayed and dismissed everyone. I stood, turned to look at the women whom I had loved so dearly for nine years, pleaded with my tears and body for their mercy, received nothing but obstinate looks of defiance, then left the building forever. We moved two thousand miles away from them within a few weeks. My own brother did not come to our home to say goodbye.
Thoughts
(at the time) The invitation made on Saturday to return for a Sunday worship service was a lie, a pretext to get us there without revealing the church's intent. I wondered how many of our friends were aware that the public shaming would occur. This was the first public shaming in that church since 1978 when the Pastor, Frederick Drummond, was shamed and asked to step down. He had confessed to meeting a young man at a hotel and engaging in homosexual sex with the young man. Instead of leaving, Drummond stayed on as lead pastor with his wife and children. Several members including the young man chose to leave after this happened; Drummond and his close circle tightened their power. The women with whom I had grown up since joining in 1973 turned their backs on me. I did not understand the reasons.
(in the ensuring years and now as I write) The small church that began as Galilean Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri, was by definition in 1982 a religious cult. The worship, teachings, activities, plans, financial dealings, and relationships centered around Frederick Drummond. Without Frederick Drummond, The Church of Our Saviour would not have existed. (Drummond's Florida church has changed names more than once.) Each of us, outside his closest circle including one divorced woman named Grace, was merely a stone in the masonry of his personal ambitions. He had deliberately shamed me so that the other women would be unquestioning and submissive to his and their husbands' will. I did not matter in the bigger scheme, in his larger aspirations. I had never bent a knee to him, expressed appreciation for his attentions, apologized for questioning (in a private conversation with his sister-in-law who was my friend) his behaviors, or asked him for private counseling. I was not his type. More important, I was raised by a father to be curious and to keep an open mind. Accepting Drummond's claims without skepticism was not even then a possibility.
Several of those women who had been my closest friends did leave that church in the following decades. Some of them escaped in secrecy because they left their husbands and took their children with them. Some of them waited until 2004 when Frederick Drummond announced their move to Florida. I see on Facebook that some of these women who stayed in Pennsylvania after 2004 are just as cult-minded as ever. They believe in Donald J Trump. However, a few women including my sister-in-law and Grace followed Drummond to Florida where he still leads with his eldest son a church-cult. Only one of my friends before the 1982 event who later left Drummond's cult and remarried made a genuine effort to connect with me in the last twenty years. We tried to rebuild a friendship. It has not worked out.
Feelings
I came through a traumatic event. Until recently, even though I am now 71 years old, I did not realize that it was trauma. The sudden death of my son-in-law was trauma. Divorce, my sister's short illness and death in 2021, my parents' deaths since 2011...all these events and a few others were traumatic. Like events, I was hurt to my core. I was thrown from my saddle; I needed to start over; I felt physical pain equal to the mental pain. Although slow to acknowledge the losses and pain, I look back and see the signs.
At first and for decades thereafter, I felt I caused the suffering and the shaming. The church and my friends would not choose to harm me unless I had somehow hurt them. Had to be true. Everything in my life before 1982 taught me that I got what I deserved. If they despised me, they despised something I did or said. If they despised me, God was teaching me a valuable lesson. I was unworthy of their trust in 1982; I had become the woman who others despise.
I was not a good person afterall. I was cursed. The feelings of shame and loss and betrayal and sinning against God who had blessed that church ran so deep in my psyche that I became that woman. The bad woman. Desperate to build a new life and atone my relationship with God, I worked outside the home to make us financially stable, I tried to be a preacher's wife, I started university to pursue a career, I continued teaching subservience to my daughters, I gave priority to my husband's ambitions. All the while, doing things that would damage me and my aspirations. I began after 1982 to hate myself.
I dreamed constantly of being someone else. Starting over in another place and time. Wishing for a different husband, wishing for this and that, losing reality and clawing my way back to it, over and over again, until by 1988 I thought about suicide. I hated who I was, and I had no girlfriend to talk to. None. When you are the preacher's wife, no one in the church wants to be your dear friend. They want to see you be the perfect traditional woman. If you fall short, the church women have someone to pity, someone who forces them to feel greater sympathy for the preacher.
That public shaming and ostracization in The Church of Our Saviour instilled within me a fear of close relationships on which I would need to build trust. Although I felt betrayed by the church and my friends, I also felt betrayed by my husband who did not stand up in that church to speak out against what they were doing to me and his daughters. He simply accepted it, and we were supposed to move on from there. Every time that we started over -- moving to a new house, going to a new church, finding new jobs -- we were carrying the baggage from that event. We did not even change our religious beliefs.
It hurt that we lost dear friends, my brother and sister-in-law, our faith in the church's calling to serve. We could not express that pain to our families or to each other. My husband lost me in 1982 though we stayed together off and on for another twenty years. I lost faith in my faith, in marriage, in women...most of all, in me.
Behaviors
I hit rock bottom in 1990. The long journey toward atonement and learning to love myself began from there. In 1991, I vowed to live a clean life, one of integrity, honest, true to myself. I needed to be the model of a strong woman for my daughters. I could no longer be the preacher's wife but, I would decide on my own terms whether religion and Christianity were worth saving.
I eschewed forever any ties to church and Christianity. If God exists, I would have no part in deity's failures. From the time I started work as a teacher in public schools, I made friends among teachers instead of among church women. I did not go to church services.
However, I held women at arm's length. I did not confess who I had been or what I had lived. I kept most of my young adult life a secret. Explaining it all would be as impossible for me as it would be boring or unbelievable for anyone else. I accepted invitations to lunch or to drinks. I went to education conferences and enjoyed the company of men and women who knew how to have fun. Other than hiking and spending time with my daughters, I did not pursue fun. I pursued very serious things -- writing, designing curriculum. People would not like me if they knew me -- or so I believed.
Later after my divorce, I had a long relationship with a man. We often had fun. But he was fragile. He was an alcoholic and suffered deep depression. He was not good for me. I needed to make women friends but the women in his family had their own lives, and my fears of being ostricized held me to a relationship that I should have let go much earlier. At the same time, one sister had moved to the east coast, another sister was increasingly toxic in her behaviors, the youngest sister had her own set of difficulties. Our parents were aging. I was unhappy with teaching in the classroom because I felt like a failure most of the time.
Although I was for three decades learning to forgive myself, living an honest life, and pursuing higher aspirations, I fell short almost every time that I was given a chance to trust someone else. I tried to do it all on my own. Many women perform successfully and achieve their highest goals while alone. I could not. The pattern -- dream it, visualize it, prepare, learn, jump in, fall back, blame myself -- was set on repeat. The needle was not lifted.
Conclusion
Until a few years ago. After I retired, I began in earnest to write the stories I had always believed I could write. I have completed and published two novels. I am writing a third one. I did join a local public library and a senior community center, but I rarely go. I still do not give it a chance: finding a close friend. Perhaps that will happen next. I am trust my daughters, with my whole heart. I could learn to trust another woman.