Torah Bontrager's Blog: Amish Insider Weekly | Amish life, culture, and education

“Ugh! I’m so tired of New Year’s resolutions and words for the year,” my friend Lisa said when I asked her what her 2022 word or phrase is.

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The coach in the curriculum design and development class we were taking had asked all of us, on January 1, to come up with a word to set the tone for our life over the next 12 months. Supposedly picking a word helps you focus on the positive things you want to take place in the upcoming year, such ...

“I don’t believe the superstition that it brings good luck, but I eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. It’s tradition for my family,” my yoga instructor said. “What do you eat?”

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I’d been balancing on one leg but her question took me by surprise and I landed on the floor. “Food for good luck? People do that?”

Needless to say, my Amish family and community didn’t celebrate New Year’s Day with . . .

. . . special di...

The gentle breeze wafting through my hair. The warm rays of the sun flitting through a canopy of trees. Butterflies dancing from flower bush to rose trellis. Birds chirping all around me. Bees buzzing about. A salad of thick red juicy slices of flavor-exploding tomatoes, chunks of jalapeno peppers, and ripe strawberries sitting next to me. This is nirvana. This is where I can relax.

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While it might sound like I was at a 5-star spa reso...

If you’ve read my memoir, Amish Girl in Manhattan, saw one of my posts on social media, or heard me speak, you might not be surprised by what I’m about to say: I didn’t know what my period was the first time I had it.

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I’m not the only fundamentalist-raised girl who didn’t know what her period was. This isn’t unique to Amish girls, but what is more unique is that we don’t have access to the internet to teach ourselves when our mothers a...

In light that so many of us deal with childhood trauma, especially trauma connected to sexual abuse or religious abuse, I thought I’d share some of my experiences with PTS (post-traumatic stress, also known as PTSD) and subsequent depression���and the various tools I use to manage my triggers. One of those tools is writing. I hope that what I’m sharing today will help you in your life, too, whether you’re a trauma survivor, reader, or writer.

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In a previous post, “How Parentification Disrupts Your Development and Holds You Back as an Adult”, I mentioned that I’d discuss emotional incest, which falls under the umbrella of parentification. Or at least in my view it’s a part of parentification.

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When I looked up the clinical definition of emotional incest, it turns out that the childhood experiences I had had in mind fall under both covert incest and emotional incest. As a child...

This is an excerpt of an upcoming post, “Did Your Parent Crave Your Attention? You Might Suffer From Emotional Incest.”. This post introduces the definitions of emotional incest and covert incest, 31 signs of emotional incest, and a resource for safe, secular (i.e., not religious) licensed therapists and mental health professionals.

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As a child, I was a victim of emotional incest by my now-no-longer-practicing Amish birth father and cov...

Progressive activists and social scientists talk constantly about advocating for and working with communities in a way that neither demonizes them nor romanticizes them, that neither fetishizes them nor mocks them (check out UC Berkeley’s resource list on critical theory and social welfare). A solid rule of thumb is that if you feel like another way of life is idyllic or hellish, you���re not acknowledging the complexity and you’re missing the nuance. Humans are neither inherently good nor inher...

The Taliban’s return on the heels of America’s exit from Afghanistan last month nails the coffin for Afghan women’s rights. Watching the news as a young woman in New York City is agonizing due to feelings of powerlessness and sympathy. The dichotomy of life in America and the reality in Afghanistan is glaring to me, and resentment for Afghan women’s barriers to opportunity swells up in me. We have to understand that women are highly important––both within the family unit and in society as a whol...

A few months ago, a friend and colleague brought up the word parentification in our weekly accountability meeting. “What’s that?” I asked.

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When he explained what it is and how he experienced it as a child, I said, “That sounds like emotional incest and how my childhood was like, too.”

I’ll talk more about emotional incest later but in this post, I wanted to go into parentification. In a nutshell, it’s having been forced to be an adul...