Boy Erased (9 page)

“It feels like that's all I've been doing,” I said. “Doubting.”

“So many people, when they first get here, they don't really let themselves doubt,” J said, his voice lowering to a whisper. Most of the other group members were still inside, so it felt safe to talk. Only T remained, hunched on a bench with a package of unopened peanut-butter crackers in his hands, the sleeves of his black cardigans still rolled down despite the heat of the afternoon. It didn't look like he was going to open the package anytime soon, much less engage in conversation. “Doubt isn't
all that encouraged here. People here are too desperate for an answer. But you seem to be all about it.”

I liked being analyzed this way, like a character in a book, like someone with a rich inner life. The only therapy I'd experienced was the ex-gay therapy I'd had during the few intro sessions I'd taken before coming to LIA, and most of those sessions had been conducted under the assumption that the therapist already knew what was wrong with me, a process that felt like the opposite of how I felt when reading a book. Regular therapy was discouraged in our family's church, our pastor believing that prayer was all you needed to dispel any mental and moral confusion. But J seemed to be a natural at this. He seemed to believe that people could also be understood by their complexities. I wanted to ask him what books he'd read to see if we shared the same loves, but it was against the rules to talk about non-LIA literature.

“I guess you're right about doubt,” I said. “I don't want to take the wrong step. I've already taken too many bad ones.”

“No,” he said. “You don't look like you've ever done anything too bad. There's a look people have here when they've done something they don't want to share.” Though we knew there were former pedophiles in therapy, no one talked openly about it, and it was only vaguely hinted at by our most dull-lidded members.

“I don't want to share any of this,” I said. “It feels too personal.” It wasn't that I was afraid of my role in the production of sin. It was that I was ashamed of the lack of experience I
actually had, or at least the lack of agency I'd had in my experience. How could I let J know, in front of everyone, that my first and only time had already been taken from me against my will?

“You've got to share with people,” he said, walking back to the sliding glass door and pulling it open, a gust of cold air hitting my arms. “It's the first step in the right direction.”

“But what if none of this works? What if it only makes me more confused?”

“Good question,” J said, turning for a second before heading back, as always, to our semicircle around Smid.

•   •   •

I
T
SEEM
ED
CONFUSION
was a key feature of Step One. Out of our confusion we would come to see that we were truly “out of control,” that we needed to rely on God's and the counselors' authority. The day before, Smid had asked me to think back to a time when my father and I had played sports. Had I felt uncomfortable? Had I received enough masculine-affirming touch from my father? Had I sought out love from him that he didn't want to give? After only a few questions, I no longer remembered what I felt. It was true that I was never any good at sports. It was true that I never liked to toss the ball with my father in the front yard. Yes, I might have caught my father's initial pitch, but I'd eventually thrown down the baseball glove and let the ball roll out of its leather grip. But did that mean I hadn't enjoyed the way the grass felt beneath my toes? Did that mean I hadn't loved the feel of the hot sun on my face—hadn't
felt my father's voice as a warm vibration passing through my chest? I could no longer be sure.

The Bible often spoke of sacrifice, of how the world wouldn't understand you once you took up the cross and followed Jesus. “You'll seem boring to a lot of people,” my father had said on the day of my baptism. “They won't understand the deep joy in your heart. To them you'll seem crazy.” But did that mean my father and I would no longer understand
each other
? Jesus spoke in Matthew:
For I am come to set a man at variance against his father
. And though I'd read those words dozens of times, I didn't know if I wanted to give up on experiencing in real life the beauty of the messy, complicated relationships I'd read about in my literature classes.
Lord
, I prayed in those first few days,
help me to know the difference between beauty and evil
.

LIA was clear on the difference. On almost every page of our 274-page handbooks lay some iteration of the following: In order to be pure, we had to become a tool, something God could use for the greater good. That meant there was no room for beauty as we had once known it. Any habitual behaviors that made us more than tools were considered addictions that developed out of the harmful messages we'd received in our childhoods. All of this was laid out clearly in the Addiction Workbook.

Addictions stem from a severely distorted belief system. Our minds were fallen from birth, naturally leaning away from truth. This problem is common to everyone. However, when
we received confusing or hostile messages as kids, we became vulnerable to developing addictive patterns.

The Addiction Workbook went on to say that everything in our sinful, sexually deviant lives had been co-opted by the world, by Satan. In a section titled “You Are a Product of the World (and the Devil!),” we were told that “Satan is the god of this world,” that he has free dominion over everything not directly issued from the church or the Bible, that “it is actually this world that is out of order and upside down, not God,” and that we needed to be willing to test what we think and believe. But it wasn't enough simply to question our beliefs. We had to be willing to undergo extreme changes, leave people behind who were harmful to our development, who reminded us of the past. We had to be willing to give up any ideas about who we were before we came to LIA: “Also remember that now, as a Christian, you are NOT YOUR OWN, but you have been bought for a price (1 Cor. 6:19), you must see Jesus as Master.” We had to give over our memories, our desires, our ideas of freedom, to Jesus our Master. We had to become His servants.

•   •   •

“I
T
'
S
UP
TO
US
to ask God for help,” Smid said. “It's up to us to beg for forgiveness.”

When I looked at Smid from this angle, I couldn't help but notice his striking resemblance to Jeff Goldblum, the actor I'd most often seen in repeated viewings of
Jurassic Park
: narrow
nose, wide smile, sharp eyes accentuated by sharp glasses. But when Smid cocked his head at another angle, his face grew flat, lost its Goldbluminess. One second it was there, and the next it wasn't. I wondered if Smid had practiced this effect, if he'd figured out the proportions: one Jeff Goldblum for every five boy-next-door, good-ol'-boy Smids.

I tried to keep from smiling. It was absurd, really, how much Smid could look like Goldblum. Afraid I'd start crying otherwise, I relaxed my face into an idiot smile. I wondered if J saw Smid's Goldbluminess, too, if his parents had even allowed him to watch
Jurassic Park
as a kid.

J seemed like someone who'd been homeschooled, his concentration too intense to maintain an active social life, and most of the homeschooled kids in the Bible Belt were heavily policed by their fundamentalist parents. Still, I wondered how similar our childhoods had been, though I never asked. No one in the program was allowed to talk much about the past for fear that it would unearth some sinful pleasure we'd once experienced. This was how I imagined it would feel to meet someone you once knew on earth in Heaven, all the things that had been so familiar completely absent, with only the essence, or the aura, remaining.
Death shall be no more
, the Bible says,
for the former things have passed away
. But J and I were still far from Heaven, the white-walled facility only a simulation, and I could still feel the weight of my sin in the bottom of my gut.

“We can find a blessing and see God's goodness based on scripture for each aspect of our lives,” Smid repeated. He said it
so quickly, his words came out as a string I had to unravel: “We-can-find-a-blessing-and-see-God's-goodness-based-on-scripture-for-each-aspect-of-our-lives.” It reminded me of the prayers my parents taught me to recite every night as a kid, the words automatic, coming out in a sudden, desperate rush to make contact with an impatient God:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-take. Amen.

I no longer knew what time it was. I was staring at the strip of pale skin on my wrist where my watch had been. Smid's words continued running together, and before long the sunlight was slanting across the room, cutting the carpet into polygons. Smid circled our group, stepping around the light. I thought of a game my friends and I used to play after church as kids: one wrong step and you were dead, liquefied by lava; one wrong step and you had to sit it out on the sidelines and watch the other kids play. I angled my foot into the light, the plastic tips of my shoelaces glinting. If only it were that easy.

The handbook felt heavy against my knees, the MI ready to burn a hole through my thigh. Would I eventually learn, like many of the veteran members of our group had, to speak casually about a subject that terrified me? Perhaps it would be a change for the better, getting it all out in the open. I'd already
read the sample MI included in our handbooks, and I'd been shocked at the language surrounding the writer's instance of sexual sin, at the near-constant therapeutic language that seemed to blanket each statement, render it almost unidentifiable in the physical world, all of the speaker's FIs removed until there seemed to be nothing left but pure godly repentance, a platonic form of recovery, all identifying features already erased.

It reminded me of how I'd felt after I finished my genogram the day before. Standing up from the poster, I'd thought,
There they are
, as though my family had gathered together in front of me for the singular purpose of revealing my place at LIA. Oddly, it was the first time I'd felt truly comfortable with all my relatives in one room. They were innocuous, staring up at me from their little patch of Berber carpet, surrounded by their labeled sins, stripped of their judgment. And though the grammar needed tidying up, the sample Moral Inventory I'd read promised the same: a life with God; a restoration to our purest presinful selves; the “spiritual awakening” Step Twelve promised we would all eventually experience if we stayed in the program long enough, the world growing dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared from sight. The sample MI felt like a dispatch from another world.

I sought an encounter and used and manipulated another person to medicate me from the pain of my life. I used fantasy as an escape, but when the fantasy was over, reality was even more painful. I believed that he would offer me hope
and freedom, but all I found was more guilt, condemnation, and hopelessness. I lied to my friends and family about my struggle and attempted to hide from it. My struggle only intensified—my life became more out of control. I believed many lies that I was worthless, hopeless, and had no future. I rejected the people who could help me and embraced the things that were hurting me.

“Let's start here,” Smid said, pointing to S, who was sitting on the far left of our group. “But first, let's remember a few ground rules.” As he recited the rules, he ticked each one off with a finger until he opened his white palm to us: “Nothing illicit. Be respectful. No glamorizing, rationalizing, or minimizing what happened or how you felt.”

The kitchen behind me was quiet now, the main room filled with the sound of hushed breathing, the sunlight so bright against the carpet that it seemed to give off an audible buzz.

S stood and made her way to the center of our circle. Today she wore a long denim skirt and no makeup, her hair pulled back in a frizzy ponytail. She looked like one of those Mennonite women who sold brownies and various baked goods in small-town thrift shops all over Arkansas.

“It started with a kiss,” she began. “I'm not going to go into the details, but that's how it started. I thought it was innocent, but I was wrong.”

I looked at J out of the corner of my eye. He sent me half a smirk.
Get ready
, it seemed to say.

“I did . . . horrible things,” she continued, reading from a wrinkled sheet of wide-ruled paper that trembled in her hands. “I felt so much shame. I knew God was disappointed—more than disappointed. I turned my back on God. I entered into a sinful relationship with another girl. It was disgusting. Now that I look back on it, I realize how disgusting it was.” S looked down at her skirt. She closed her eyes.

“Don't be afraid,” Smid said.

“That was why—that was why—” She kept her eyes closed. “I think that was why I ended up with the dog.” The word “dog” sounded like a curse, something that had been boiling up inside of her for years.

She was in the Consequences section of her MI, well on her way to the Changes section—“I want to change myself. I'm tired of feeling empty inside”—the whole MI outline designed to lead her to redemption. The rest of her account was rather straightforward, with a string of stock phrases supplied for each section. Her voice, when reciting the phrases, swelled with a kind of pride that hadn't been there only a few minutes before.

Strengths
: “I'm learning to rely more on God, to trust in His grace.”

Goals
: “I want to read the Bible more every day, really listen to God's voice.”

Blessing
: “I see now how much love I've been given, how many blessings God has bestowed upon my life. I see how truly ungrateful I'd been in the past.”