Julie Padgett’s Reviews > I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma > Status Update

“Taking care of other people’s feelings isn’t for me, and I know that because I lived that way for most of my life, and it’s an impossible way to live.”

“According to the survivors of quiverful parentification, older daughters’ personal needs are neglected as they’re subjugated into caring for siblings and supporting their parents’ decisions as mini-adults and domestic enslaved people, including truncated educations, and as unpaid labor for home-based industry.” I can attest to the truth of that statement. 😮‍💨

“The problem isn’t that religion uses stories to teach a moral lesson, even in a simplified good-versus-evil way; it’s that the stories are contorted to emotionally manipulate and groom believers into accepting abusive behaviors and then to gaslight them that this is “God’s will rather than the manipulators’.

“Duggar was the fruit of a high control system that taught children from infancy to suppress their needs and conform or be beaten. This system taught that firstborn sons would eventually become patriarchs. It gave young children a premature and inappropriate amount of authority over their younger siblings. Patriarchy taught that males are entitled to gratification and servitude from females.”

“As someone who was word-policed and tone-policed every which way to Sunday, it’s been redemptive in recovery to discover my ability to speak, write, and use langauge as my strength, talent, and power. Listening to other survivors, I don’t think my experience is unique—it seems the ones of us with something to say from the start are the ones authoritarians worked hardest to press down and silence.”

“The road you choose makes a difference. If you were forced onto one road as a child, it doesn’t mean you must stay there as an adult. It doesn’t mean your personality is who they said you had to be. It’s never too late to grow.”

“Cultures of silence continue the false narrative that the powerful have the only viewpoint worth sharing. Only the powerful carry dignity. Only the powerful carry autonomy. And so, the powerful continue doing what it is they’re doing, perpetuating generational, institutional, and systemic traumas on the powerless beneath their authority, who have embodied the ability to push down the past and move on.”