I’m excited for the neurodivergence stuff. A lot of people in the online autistic community talk about how autistic people only follow rules if they make sense and so they tend to get in trouble in school and other settings because they don’t instinctively just obey authority figures. I always found that really alienating because for me part of the way being autistic manifests is I do instinctively trust people and I am both by personality and as we all know by upbringing very compliant as a person to other adults even because I don’t see hierarchical structures, and even as a kid I would feel like I had to obey the other kids because I couldn’t distinguish in my head between me and an adult and so I treated everybody as equal and so I thought well if I have to listen to all the adults in my life. I guess I have to listen to everybody, and nobody ever has to listen to me, which is you know not awesome.
Also, if somebody says this is how you do something then I’m gonna do it that way forever and if I can’t do it that way, I’m gonna panic because I can’t generate alternative ways of doing things and that often extends to thought patterns. I will say recently I have seen more about autistic people who do follow the rules automatically but there’s still isn’t much said about that aspect and I wish there was more. So I’m looking forward to seeing what y’all think. Usually when neurodivergent and control religion gets brought up, it’s framed like here’s all the ways autistic people or ADHD’ers would have trouble fitting into a system like that and I never really see anything on here’s all the ways they actually might be the ideal in a system like this, so hopefully you all touch on that too.
such a good point, and in my experience with neurodivergent folks, its often both/and... often a natural resistance to hierarchy and can at other times be easily manipulated. Also, we talked a little bit about this in our interview with I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist - I think we did, I remember thinking about it, how even stuff like struggling with building allistic friendships, and how church can solve problems like that because it creates a clear structure of friendship through small groups, etc.
Yeah, that makes sense! And for me growing up, there was a lot of teaching on loving your neighbor and treating people like you would want to be treated and so me seeing everybody as the same almost got framed as a good thing like I didn’t “show partiality” to use a KJV phrase and so nobody realized that it’s not that I am on purpose trying to treat people with a sense of equality. It’s I didn’t see a difference between me as a five and six year-old child and an adult in a position of authority over me and that’s probably dangerous.
I would be interested in this too. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about how this kind of parenting hurt me as an autistic person and it prepped me to come to some harmful beliefs about myself within American Evangelical Christianity.
I’m also this kind of neurodivergent where I’m too gullible and trust people too easily without thinking critically. The obedience first parenting my parents employed overrode my critical thinking brain and it still is a problem for me when someone authoritatively tells me what to do.
YES. That’s exactly what happens to me! Someone says something in an authoritative way and I just do it. I have a colleague who was helping me find something and finally she said, “look at me,” and I just immediately did it, and she kind of laughed at how “compliant” I was—not in a mean way, she didn’t know my history—but it’s so frustrating.
My dog has trauma from a veterinarian because of this too. I’m in the south and most of our vets are still in the era of, “you have to be the alpha” 💩 and unfortunately I had a vet like that. She took my 16 week old puppy’s obvious signs of fear as “behavior” that I was enabling and forced me to put the harness she’d backed out of back on my terrified and hiding puppy who then proceeded to bite me out of fear. I said I’d just do it later and that awful woman got mad and said it was bad behavior I was enabling and I had to make her wear the harness, or words to that effect. I don’t remember exactly because I’d started dissociating.
I went into a trauma response because I was so overwhelmed by empathy for my dog and fear of this abrasive jerk of a woman that I just complied when she angrily insisted and now my dog has PTSD around harnesses. She’s a small breed and really probably should be wearing one for safety reasons, but I haven’t been able to coax her into one really since and the only times I’ve been able to, I’ve had to force her and that’s not good for either of us so I don’t do that anymore. I learned a whole lot better ways of working with the dog and so that’s better, but she and I still have trauma from it.
That wouldn’t have happened if I had been able to see myself as an adult who was capable of standing up to this woman. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. I’m 38 years old and I still feel like a little kid who just has to do what they’re told so they don’t get in trouble around literally everybody and it’s exhausting.
My parents don’t realize this and so they have me go to the doctor appointment by myself or go pick up nova from the vet inside the office anyway by myself and it’s overwhelming and it’s scary because there’s a part of my brain that feels like this overwhelmed little kid that is so hyper focused on trying not to make anybody angry that I can’t even process what I’m being told most of the time and in the case of Nova it hurt both of us and I hate it and it makes me really angry thinking about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the whole “in the world but not of it” really impacted my worldview and concept of reality.
We were very sheltered from pop culture, and very in-depth in scripture and Christian media. I never could relate to my peers in school or the neighborhood, and I don’t know if that was intentional on the part of RAP methods or just a byproduct, but it became such a barrier to friendships with others outside our little enclave.
this definitely fits, Marlene Winell (author of Leaving the Fold) talks about how being cut off from the outside world can create a developmental delay!
This absolutely impacted me too 😭 it was already hard for me as an autistic to keep connecting with people in relationships. So being sheltered so much really made it difficult for me when i finally transitioned from homeschooling to public school in 10th grade. I felt like an alien
I have thought about this often as well. "In the world not of it" was drilled into me not so much by my parents as it was part of the evanglical milieu they shoved me into and later the safe Christian college bubble I insulated myself in. While there was some silliness to it (i.e., taking a stand for Jesus by performatively throwing away all my secular music) it also had massive consequences for my social, educational, and in turn professional development. It's very seductive for insecure, striving young people to be told you're special and somehow live on this elevated plane above the rest of the degenerate world around us. (A college chapel speaker once likened us to Professor Xavier's gifted mutant pupils, I shit you not.) It's a poor substitue for self-esteem and self-worth and it's devastating when this image of self crumbles.
I'm looking forward to exploring the neurodivergent component as well. My wife and I are both autistic cult survivors, and we have a theory that cults/high control groups attract neuro-spicy folks because of all the rules and the scripts. Super fascinating, super sad.
I'd also love to learn more about how RAP represses sexuality of any kind, but especially non-heterosexuality. I know it has been mentioned several times, and I think it deserves its own chapter {or two}.
FWIW, my wife is a therapist specializing in neurodivergence, religious trauma, and Queer folks. As she likes to say, "the Venn diagram is a circle."
I’m excited for the neurodivergence stuff. A lot of people in the online autistic community talk about how autistic people only follow rules if they make sense and so they tend to get in trouble in school and other settings because they don’t instinctively just obey authority figures. I always found that really alienating because for me part of the way being autistic manifests is I do instinctively trust people and I am both by personality and as we all know by upbringing very compliant as a person to other adults even because I don’t see hierarchical structures, and even as a kid I would feel like I had to obey the other kids because I couldn’t distinguish in my head between me and an adult and so I treated everybody as equal and so I thought well if I have to listen to all the adults in my life. I guess I have to listen to everybody, and nobody ever has to listen to me, which is you know not awesome.
Also, if somebody says this is how you do something then I’m gonna do it that way forever and if I can’t do it that way, I’m gonna panic because I can’t generate alternative ways of doing things and that often extends to thought patterns. I will say recently I have seen more about autistic people who do follow the rules automatically but there’s still isn’t much said about that aspect and I wish there was more. So I’m looking forward to seeing what y’all think. Usually when neurodivergent and control religion gets brought up, it’s framed like here’s all the ways autistic people or ADHD’ers would have trouble fitting into a system like that and I never really see anything on here’s all the ways they actually might be the ideal in a system like this, so hopefully you all touch on that too.
such a good point, and in my experience with neurodivergent folks, its often both/and... often a natural resistance to hierarchy and can at other times be easily manipulated. Also, we talked a little bit about this in our interview with I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist - I think we did, I remember thinking about it, how even stuff like struggling with building allistic friendships, and how church can solve problems like that because it creates a clear structure of friendship through small groups, etc.
Yeah, that makes sense! And for me growing up, there was a lot of teaching on loving your neighbor and treating people like you would want to be treated and so me seeing everybody as the same almost got framed as a good thing like I didn’t “show partiality” to use a KJV phrase and so nobody realized that it’s not that I am on purpose trying to treat people with a sense of equality. It’s I didn’t see a difference between me as a five and six year-old child and an adult in a position of authority over me and that’s probably dangerous.
I would be interested in this too. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about how this kind of parenting hurt me as an autistic person and it prepped me to come to some harmful beliefs about myself within American Evangelical Christianity.
I’m also this kind of neurodivergent where I’m too gullible and trust people too easily without thinking critically. The obedience first parenting my parents employed overrode my critical thinking brain and it still is a problem for me when someone authoritatively tells me what to do.
YES. That’s exactly what happens to me! Someone says something in an authoritative way and I just do it. I have a colleague who was helping me find something and finally she said, “look at me,” and I just immediately did it, and she kind of laughed at how “compliant” I was—not in a mean way, she didn’t know my history—but it’s so frustrating.
My dog has trauma from a veterinarian because of this too. I’m in the south and most of our vets are still in the era of, “you have to be the alpha” 💩 and unfortunately I had a vet like that. She took my 16 week old puppy’s obvious signs of fear as “behavior” that I was enabling and forced me to put the harness she’d backed out of back on my terrified and hiding puppy who then proceeded to bite me out of fear. I said I’d just do it later and that awful woman got mad and said it was bad behavior I was enabling and I had to make her wear the harness, or words to that effect. I don’t remember exactly because I’d started dissociating.
I went into a trauma response because I was so overwhelmed by empathy for my dog and fear of this abrasive jerk of a woman that I just complied when she angrily insisted and now my dog has PTSD around harnesses. She’s a small breed and really probably should be wearing one for safety reasons, but I haven’t been able to coax her into one really since and the only times I’ve been able to, I’ve had to force her and that’s not good for either of us so I don’t do that anymore. I learned a whole lot better ways of working with the dog and so that’s better, but she and I still have trauma from it.
That wouldn’t have happened if I had been able to see myself as an adult who was capable of standing up to this woman. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. I’m 38 years old and I still feel like a little kid who just has to do what they’re told so they don’t get in trouble around literally everybody and it’s exhausting.
My parents don’t realize this and so they have me go to the doctor appointment by myself or go pick up nova from the vet inside the office anyway by myself and it’s overwhelming and it’s scary because there’s a part of my brain that feels like this overwhelmed little kid that is so hyper focused on trying not to make anybody angry that I can’t even process what I’m being told most of the time and in the case of Nova it hurt both of us and I hate it and it makes me really angry thinking about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the whole “in the world but not of it” really impacted my worldview and concept of reality.
We were very sheltered from pop culture, and very in-depth in scripture and Christian media. I never could relate to my peers in school or the neighborhood, and I don’t know if that was intentional on the part of RAP methods or just a byproduct, but it became such a barrier to friendships with others outside our little enclave.
this definitely fits, Marlene Winell (author of Leaving the Fold) talks about how being cut off from the outside world can create a developmental delay!
This absolutely impacted me too 😭 it was already hard for me as an autistic to keep connecting with people in relationships. So being sheltered so much really made it difficult for me when i finally transitioned from homeschooling to public school in 10th grade. I felt like an alien
I have thought about this often as well. "In the world not of it" was drilled into me not so much by my parents as it was part of the evanglical milieu they shoved me into and later the safe Christian college bubble I insulated myself in. While there was some silliness to it (i.e., taking a stand for Jesus by performatively throwing away all my secular music) it also had massive consequences for my social, educational, and in turn professional development. It's very seductive for insecure, striving young people to be told you're special and somehow live on this elevated plane above the rest of the degenerate world around us. (A college chapel speaker once likened us to Professor Xavier's gifted mutant pupils, I shit you not.) It's a poor substitue for self-esteem and self-worth and it's devastating when this image of self crumbles.
I'm looking forward to exploring the neurodivergent component as well. My wife and I are both autistic cult survivors, and we have a theory that cults/high control groups attract neuro-spicy folks because of all the rules and the scripts. Super fascinating, super sad.
I'd also love to learn more about how RAP represses sexuality of any kind, but especially non-heterosexuality. I know it has been mentioned several times, and I think it deserves its own chapter {or two}.
FWIW, my wife is a therapist specializing in neurodivergence, religious trauma, and Queer folks. As she likes to say, "the Venn diagram is a circle."