“I’m gonna blog EVERY DAY!!” Said the naive American, confident in her blanket cell phone service and wall-to-wall wifi. Then, she landed in an airport in Dublin, which is supposedly a European capital city, yet has an airport strangely reminiscent of a dilapidated Social Services building. She was immediately confronted […]

Lessons Learned in Ireland

I’m sitting in the airport in Raleigh, North Carolina. In just 2 more hours I will be on my way to Ireland. The past weeks have been difficult. Some unfortunate contact with my mother has had me full of anxiety. And of course she’s heard about my trip and tried […]

A Healing Pilgrimage To Ireland

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I’ve written a good bit about my childhood abuse trauma lately, and today I want to bring the focus back to the main type of trauma this blog is supposed to be about: Religious trauma. The concept of Religious Trauma Syndrome is fairly new, and even those at the forefront […]

When Someone Dismisses Your Trauma

Yesterday, all the Pagans I’m friends with were in an uproar on Facebook. And they had good reason. I have some things to say about the issues, but I’m going to try and be as diplomatic as possible. In a nutshell, one Pagan leader said she didn’t trust the scholarship of […]

Wading Into Pagan TERF Wars

I grew up 30 minutes from The Cove, the “Training Center” in Asheville, NC where Billy Graham and his family lived. I have relatives that live off the same 1-40 exit you take to get there. My paternal grandparents were the type of Southern Baptists Graham spent his lifetime trying […]

Billy Graham: No Different From Today’s Evangelicals

I’ve been in a very deep pit. Surrounded by fog and darkness, weighed down by heavy stones. According to the date of my last post, I haven’t written on this blog for nearly 3 months. Chunks of that time are completely missing from my memory. For days on end I […]

Mental Health, PTSD and The Morrigan

I woke up this morning to the new trending hashtag #MeAt14 on Twitter. Many of the tweets are just images of girls at 14, who are obviously too young to be in any kind of sexual situation with a man in his 30’s such as Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. […]

Yes, This Hurts. So Don’t Waste The Pain

CW: Non-consensual physical contact, emotional abuse.   It could begin over anything. Sometimes it was over some youthful indiscretion on my part. Sometimes, my dad would even be laughing and joking one minute, and the next minute it was as if a switch had flipped and he was full of […]

The Systematic Erasure Of Me

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On a cold night in December, 1970, a barely 18-year-old girl was dropped off at an unwed mother’s clinic just over the state line from where she lived. Her father watched her get out of the car and then drove away. She was in labor, and nobody other than her […]

Twice Motherless: Adopted by The Morrigan

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If I had $1 for every Christian who, since I left the church, has said to me some version of, “You were hurt by people because you were following traditions/ false doctrines/ human error.. I know better because I  know the REAL Jesus…” I’d be Joel Osteen. This morning on […]

It’s Not The People. Christianity Is Toxic

I distinctly remember a moment when I was perhaps two or three years old. It had occurred to me that my parent’s had stopped saying “I love you,” to me. What did this mean? Had they just forgotten? Had I done something wrong? So tiny little me formulated a plan. […]

Childhood Abuse Becomes Spiritual or Self Abuse

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So it was a rough weekend. My last post mentioned how I was in Western NC for a memorial service, and how anxious I was about seeing my dad again. The day came. He decided to skip the memorial and only show up at the cemetery, “so he wouldn’t make […]

The Healing Waters of Creeks and Streams