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TW: suicidal ideation, child loss, emotional neglect/abuse, spiritual abuse
This post is a transcript of the conversation between Krispin and DL, where DL talks about their childhood with a parent who believed it was the end of the world. In this episode, we also discuss late-diagnosed autism, making sense of family tragedies, and being gender non-conforming in a world that was obsessed with the patriarchal binary. There are some heavy topics and themes discussed in this episode, so please take care of yourselves while listening.
To see images and artifacts from D.L.’s story, please see the transcript below.
DL’s Story
“Basically, I was in an end times cult of me and my mom.”
Krispin: Welcome to the STRONGWILLED podcast. I'm Krispin Mayfield,
DL: I'm DL Mayfield.
Krispin: and we are a couple of ex-evangelicals talking about growing up under religious authoritarian parenting.
So last time we heard from me, telling my story and we just thought it'd be helpful for you guys to hear a little bit of our story of us growing up, talk through some of these things.
And so today is DL's turn. This is hard. It's hard to tell these stories. It's hard to look back at these things. It takes a lot of work. And I don't want to give spoilers, but DL was really deep in this. And so I've just been really impressed by all the work that you've done to process, to think about what did it mean to grow up in this and getting to the point that you're at right now.
DL: I want to normalize that it has been programmed into me to not share what your internal experience was like, if it deviates right from what God or your parents desire for me. So lots of stuff was coming up last night. I was like, I don't want to do it. And I think I'm in a place where I've been in enough therapy, I'm in touch with my body, my emotions where I can just be like, “yeah, I have a ton of different emotions around this, and they're not all bad but there's definitely some ones there,” like you explained last time, you're breaking the family rules, and, all that. So, welcome -- I have a tension headache already. We'll see how I am at the end of it.
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: Exactly. And one of the things is I knew this was going to be a part of our podcast and what we put out on our substack in August. And so as you were getting ready to share your story, I was like, okay, I think I should probably go back and read some old journal entries. And that is something I have not been able to do, and I have not wanted to do. I guess that's maybe a good way to start off. I was recently rereading my journal entries, and I was like, oh, there's no escaping the fact that I was in a cult. Like, me personally, I was in a cult. I am not saying everyone who was a part of evangelicalism is, but based off of how I was operating, you know, I was! And so processing the reality of that . . . sometimes it's funny to joke about being in a cult, and then sometimes you're like, Ah, it's not fun at all, and there's such long-term repercussions of this.
So yeah, all that kind of happened for me in the past few weeks. And it started when we were going through some old materials where you found stuff from your childhood. And then I ended up finding a few ripped out pages of a journal, shoved in some stuff from my high school days when I was in a Christian punk rock band. And I didn't know what was on these pages. And I started reading them and I was like, holy shit. Like this is like one of the most traumatic things that happened to me. And I wrote it down, and at some point — I don’t know when — I ripped out these few pages and saved them. And so that kicked off some processing that, you know, maybe I didn't want to do. But anyways, that's getting ahead of myself because that's adolescence!
Krispin: I was going to ask, where do you want to start? Do you want to start in your young childhood or do you want to start with the generation before you?
DL: We can do what we did with you, which is talking about why were my parents drawn to evangelicalism and making it their entire identity and their entire career. And yeah, so I think, I also want to do what you did, which is say I'm not a Christian anymore. As we were talking last night, when I was sort of freaking out, you were like, don't talk to the Christians or all the people who you know what they're going to say if they listen to your story.
Because a part of me is like, once I share some of this stuff, I bet people will be like, oh, it makes sense why DL is no longer a Christian. But then of course, some Christians are going to come out of the woodwork to say “you've just experienced a bad form of Christianity!” And to that I just want to say: shush.
If Christianity is so good then adults with fully formed brains will come to it, okay? So you don't need to tell me that. But you were like, just talk to our patrons, you know, just talk to the people that have been with us on this journey for eight years. So that's what I'm going to do. And that's kind of what I'm keeping in mind as I, as I'm talking.
Ok one last caveat. I do not want to talk about my mother publicly, okay?
Krispin: Are you going to talk about your mother publicly?
DL: Yes, I am. I have to, because of the way I was raised, the way I was parentified, and the way I was enmeshed — it means that I cannot talk about the emotional experience of being me without involving my mom.
So I really wish I didn't have to do this, okay? I don't want to. But that's, that's just the truth
So starting with my mom, you know, she became very good at telling her testimony. So I'll just tell it how she told it, if that's OK?
My mom was raised the oldest in a Roman Catholic family in Kansas. Her mom was an alcoholic. My mom ran away from home when she was 16 and lived on the streets of Kansas City and did a lot of drugs and was sort of a hippie. A sad, traumatized, young woman who became a Christian because she was picked up as a hitchhiker by a Christian when she was 16. This guy told her that Jesus will always love her. And she was like, that sounds great. My mom also always said that she had made a death wish that when she was 18, she had planned to overdose on heroin on purpose. And so then this hippie Christian guy picked her up. She then goes to live with her aunt in Texas and then goes to Bible college, right? Because she's a Jesus freak. She's a Jesus hippie,
Krispin: Which is connected to the Jesus Movement, right?
DL: I mean, sort of, that's where this hippie guy got it, right? So my mom goes. to college, I think first in Tennessee and then eventually San Jose, California, where the Jesus movement was obviously in full swing. That's where she meets my dad. He had become a on fire Christian youth camp. And the story is that he was going to be a doctor until he went to this youth camp and he heard from God that he's supposed to be a pastor. So he goes to San Jose Bible college to become a pastor and meets my mom.She wanted to be a missionary, but then gave up those dreams to become a pastor's wife.
Again, these are just the stories they told me. So my parents squarely come out of this Jesus movement, where Jesus takes away all the bad things in your life. Now, both my parents had pretty bad dads, just in different ways, right? My mom was basically estranged from her family my whole life. But my dad's dad was an engineer at Lockheed Martin, worked for NASA, all that stuff. Very smart, but also very mean.
Krispin: Yes, right. And your dad came from a middle class Christian family.
DL: More Republican than Christian, right?
Krispin: Yes. Uh huh. And then your mom had this dramatic story of trauma and drug abuse and sinful life and then finding Jesus. And then this transformation happened.
DL: So I think what is interesting to point out is that my mom was an addict when she became a Christian, and she transferred the addiction over to religion and to the personal relationship with Jesus.
My mom was very charismatic and my dad was not. My dad for most of my life growing up was a pastor at these various tiny non denominational churches. We moved around a lot, which is kind of traumatic in its own right.
Krispin: It definitely is!
DL: And I don't know why! I don't know if there was conflict. The family narratives around this have always been like, '“oh, we're just on adventure with God and we just follow God and that means we move every two to three years.” And so what that meant for me was just like never having a stable community. There was never like adults in my life, who were there with me more than a few years
Krispin: It really means that not only were you isolated in this Christian bubble, really, it was just your family, right? Like you didn't have long term friendships, even within the church,
DL: Yeah, and I was homeschooled eventually when I was old enough. Very isolating. And again, my parents were like, ‘this is an adventure.’ Like it's always an adventure and no complaining. And none of that allowed.
Thinking about the family stories about me as a young kid, there's not like tons of them. The main ones, and I'm just going to go rapid fire because these all go into sort of like evangelical, charismatic family mythologizing. One of the main things that happened. As a young kid is when I was six months old, my entire family was in a car wreck and my older brother died in the car wreck.
And he was the oldest in our family. And at that time I was the youngest and the narrative was always, God miraculously spared me and my older sister. And then God took my older brother Jonah to heaven. And so obviously being six months old and both my parents were really hurt in that car wreck.
They were both had like multiple broken legs. So I think that's just an interesting thing to think about. My mom was really depressed, obviously. And strangers had to take care of us for a while until my grandma and grandpa could. And my grandma and grandpa had said all along, we're not here to take care of kids. That's what they told my parents when they first had a kid. So then they had to take care of me for a while. So there is that. Being miraculously spared
Krispin: And healed.
DL: yeah, a few months after that, I developed this condition.
And again, I don't know how to make sense of this.
My parents always said they took me to the doctor and I was diagnosed with hydrocephalus. Or water in the brain. My head was huge and I had excess fluid in my ventricles and they weren't draining. And so they were like, we have to put in a shunt, where we take out a portion of the skull and do all this stuff. So my parents were just devastated to have that on top of. Losing their son, but then they had the church pray for me and I was healed and I didn't have to have the surgery. Now that didn't stop them from calling me alien for the first two years of my life because my head was so big.
But I think that really cemented in my mom, like the charismatic stuff. But again, I'm like, it doesn't really make sense since in this world, God allows my brother to die and then me to survive. And this will also come into play, but my brother was diagnosed autistic in the 1980s, which was hard to do. And he was classic-presenting, middle class white boy autistic. That was interesting too, because my mom would always say like in heaven, Jona’s healed. I'm now diagnosed autistic and I was obviously missed in my family. And part of that is because I didn't present like my brother did.
So there's all that. The other narrative was that I was a really colicky baby. until I became perfect. And so I'm like that probably happened around the time my brother died. My parents were not able to respond to my needs. So you just stop expressing needs. That makes the perfect baby in the 1980s.
And then the narrative of me was like, I was the perfect child and I did have a big head. So much trauma. And as far as the James Dobson connection, I don't remember being spanked or anything as a young kid, but young kids don't remember that.
My mom did write for Focus on the Family magazine when I was young, and she wrote articles about Jonah, about autism, and about how someday we'll see Jonah in heaven again. And she actually published kids books too. So I think that's an interesting connection. My mom writing about autism for James Dobson — and she believed some really faulty information, including that vaccines caused my brother's autism and that's probably why she believed he was healed, right?
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: So great! What a cool legacy to be born into as an undiagnosed autistic kid.
Krispin: Yeah, it's wild to think about that transition of then you are a perfect child. And that really was your persona in your family.
DL: My mom needed that from me. And that is definitely, a part of this narrative and the older I got, you know, I knew the way people perceived me when I grew into my head a little bit, right? I was like this cute little blonde girl, right? And people just thought I was so sweet and so quiet and so shy. And then when I hit puberty, that all changed. And I just remember [thinking], Oh, now my family's not as pleased with me anymore because I'm not this tiny perfect little doll, so there's that.
Krispin: Yeah, you were just trying to fit into that role.
DL: Yeah, just trying to fit into that role. We were moving around a lot. So here's one of the first, like, really depressing things: when I was eight my family moved to Wyoming. Until that point we lived in Northern California where I was born in Sacramento, then we moved to Alaska for a few years. Then we moved to Wyoming.
I was eight, almost nine, when we moved to Wyoming. And that's when my mom really, I don't know I shouldn't make guesses about what was going on with her, mentally. So I'll just talk about my experience: my mom became obsessed with the end of the world and she talked about it all the time.
Now we were homeschooled and I don't remember my mom teaching us anything ever. But I do remember Bible times. So five mornings a week, the routine was she would get up and go on a really long walk and listen to praise and worship music and talk to God. While she was gone, we were supposed to be doing all of our chores, cleaning the house. And then having our own quiet time and being prepared for Bible time when she got back. You shared in your story about the times you connected with your dad were around spanking. Mine was around Bible time.
So what my mom would do is she would go through a passage of scripture. Then she'd want us to say what we thought about it. Sometimes there'd be prayer times where we'd have to like, listen for God and then share what God was telling us. And in Wyoming, she'd been doing this for a while, but in Wyoming, she started going through the Book of Revelation and explaining how it was all coming true and asking us “do you see the signs too?”
Krispin: Was she just reading Revelation or was she getting this information somewhere?
DL: I'm not sure. She definitely read a lot of these prophetic books. There's this guy, Rick Joyner, that she was really into, which he is still going and basically has this compound in Northern Carolina and he is terrifying. He's telling people to prepare for a civil war, right? “Arm yourself.”
Krispin: Was it the same back then as what he’s saying now?
DL: I don't know. It's the same kind of like the end is coming. We must prepare. And it's always about the Democrats. But back then, this is now in the early nineties, right? A lot of talk was about the one world government.
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: So my mom was obsessed with talking about the European Union. But as a little kid, it's just really scary to have the main person in your life who the main thing my mom had implemented in me from birth was that God talked to her.
And a part of my story is, I just want to say, I was undiagnosed autistic. This stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. It's genetic. Maybe my mom is undiagnosed autistic and trying to find some solace through religion. However, the thing about autistic people is we take shit literally. She's like, “I'm reading these modern day prophets, they're saying this is happening.” She’s like, “I'm reading Revelation. I'm putting two and two together. I'm making meaning. I'm making connections. I'm seeing the patterns.”
Krispin: Right?
DL: Everybody says God has a personal relationship with you. Jesus is telling me all this stuff. And I always thought maybe she told us about this all the time to protect us, to prepare us.
Krispin: Huh Yeah,
DL: But I don't know. I think maybe it was just her special interest and that's what she was obsessed with. And as a little kid, she was my whole world. I firmly believe that God talked to her. And so what she said was the exact same as what God said. So I'm taking it as yes, the world is ending. We have to prepare. And with that came all these things — my mom believed in mid-trib, so she believed that there would be 3.5 years of tribulation, then Jesus would come and rapture the Christians, and then 3.5 more years of suffering. And she was like, the biggest thing is, during these 3.5 years of suffering, where all these horrible things are going to happen, which she talked to me about constantly, she always said, “You cannot reject Christ. You cannot deny Christ. You have to remain a Christian to the very end if you want to get to heaven.”
Krispin: So, before you are even 10 years old, you're being told over and over again about these horrible things that are going to happen to you?
DL: Basically, I was in an end times cult of me and my mom. Because my dad did not believe in this stuff.
Krispin: She probably talked to you because he did not believe in it.
DL: Probably. That's such a valid point. And my two sisters also did not believe either.
Before I just had this narrative of how I was really spiritual. I don't know why I was drawn to it. And now I'm like, I think it was a protective measure. I think my mom was extremely upset that nobody believed her and nobody was taking her seriously because my older sister, Lindsay was very stubborn and didn't trust my mom at all. And so when my mom's [like], What did God tell you about this passage in revelation? Lindsay would cross her arms and be like “nothing.” She heard nothing and just stare at my mom,
Krispin: And then you have to talk about what your younger sister did.
DL: My younger sister would be on the floor like drawing and be like, “Oh yeah. God talked to me.” And my mom was like, “Okay, what did God say? And my sister was like, “Yeah so, cats can talk. And also God wants me to get a ferret. So can you buy me a ferret?”
I saw both of those responses. So then I was like, “Oh, it's up to me to take this seriously.” And she really needed someone to also believe the world was ending with her. So I did. Because when my mom felt better, she hurt us less. You know what I mean? Be it spanking or shaming or whatever.
Krispin: You needed your parent to be regulated.
DL: And so I became a vessel for her just to pour out all of her apocalyptic anxiety. And it doesn't seem like she had any concept of you should not be telling an eight-year-old, nine year old kid this stuff. And that might actually make them quite anxious. She made us all of us kids watch movies like a thief in the night, which, now people are like, that's such a funny B horror movie.
But It wasn't funny! If you're autistic and your mom is [like] yeah, all of this is actually going to happen. Plus my mom, wherever we went, including in Wyoming, she found these little charismatic churches because my dad never pastored at a charismatic church because he wasn't charismatic. So she'd take us to all the charismatic church services and the conferences and all that. People started prophesying over me that I was going to die at the hands of the Antichrist before I was 16. I was gonna be a martyr and my mom and all these charismatic adults were like, this is an honor! This is such an honor. God has such amazing things for you.
Krispin: It just makes me tear up.
DL: Yeah, I can't even think about it because of course I believed it. And everyone around me is saying you can't be scared. You can't be sad. This is amazing. God has this calling on your life, right? God healed you. And just to do that to a kid, right? My view of the future was absolutely snuffed out. And my only goal in life was to not deny Christ. Which is interesting. Looking at me now. Yeah. So I think eight or nine is like a really big deal for me. And I don't have a lot of other memories.
Krispin: It makes sense. That is when you start to have more of a conscious idea of me as a person in the future. And I'm not just like a kid in my family. “I'm a person in the world.” And this is what your mom said. This is how you be in the world. You have to survive a world that is going to torture you literally.
DL: Yeah. And not feel sad about it or scared, which I felt scared a lot, and I just learned you have to shove those emotions deep down. My mom also was always telling me like, “You're my best friend” and I didn't really have other friends.
Yeah, going back to some of the Dobson and stuff we've talked about, so the dynamic in my family was obviously I was perceived as the golden child. And so both of my sisters resented me, including, especially my younger sister, who my mom spanked constantly and always calling her the strong-willed child. And so Candyce wasn't able to have her anger go towards my mom. So it went towards me. My older sister just totally peaced out. And so in their mind, I was mom's favorite.
I got all this special attention when in reality. My mom didn't care about me at all, if I'm being honest, right? I just existed as this spiritual…I don't know, not spiritual side-kick, but like I was going to be her in some ways. And when I got older, it was, “you need to be a missionary, because I wanted to be a missionary and I ended up marrying your father. You need to be a missionary.” And because I had no sense of identity and because I had no sense of the future, I was like, “Sure, yeah. That makes perfect sense to me. I'll do that.” And that's getting into my later years a little. The narrative has been that I was like a suck up to my mom. And it's helpful for me to reframe it as I was trying to survive.
And I was actually trying to help my mom be regulated so all of us could have an easier time. And I didn't really get a lot of companionship from my sisters, nor did I actually get any peace and comfort from my mom. So I'm like, it really sucks to be the golden child, if I'm being honest.
And the thing, again, is people want to say oh, charismatic Christianity is fine. Like all this stuff. I think both me and my mom are such good examples of when people take this shit, literally, it ruins their mental health. It can ruin their lives. And I think autistic people are the canaries in the coal mine of Christianity, but these adults just go around saying these prophecies, having these elaborate apocalyptic fantasies because they have a lot of anxiety.
They, they have a lot of trauma and this is the way it's coming out. And people, kids like me took it seriously. And I know I'm not the only one.
Just because both my sisters were able to be like, “Mom says God talks to her and maybe he does sometimes, but she's also unstable.” I wasn't able to do that because I needed my caregivers to be right. There's no way I could have thought otherwise or else it would have been too horrifying to contemplate what my mom was doing to me: taking away my sense of self, parentifying me. Grooming me to only care about her and not myself and calling it God.
Krispin: Totally. There's that aspect of being autistic and taking things literally, but there's also just this aspect of like, how do you keep connection with the most important attachment figure in your life?
DL: The only one! I'm not going to talk about my dad very much, cause I don't have a ton of memories of him. He was nice, calmish, except when talking about politics,
Krispin: But you were with your mom, again, being homeschooled so many hours of the week. Yeah.
DL: Yearrrrll. Toddlerhood and adolescence is big in the world of Dobson. I don't have a lot to say about toddlerhoodt. I was not spanked that much according to family lore. And my mom would tell everybody I can get Danielle to do anything just by telling her that she hurt my heart or hurt God's heart.
So that was the punishment of choice for me. So my mom manipulated me and she was like very happy about it and told people she would control me using religion and her emotional state.
Krispin: The control piece is so important: caring so much about God's experience and your parents’ experience at the expense of your own experience.
DL: Talking about sibling dynamics again, my sisters knew this as well. And so Candyce in particular would use physical violence against me.
And sometimes Candyce would steal like the paddles and the spoons and stuff my parents used on her and then use them on me, which obviously hurt. And then I'd be like, I'm going to go tell mom and Candyce would be like, “If you tell mom, you'll make her heart sad.” And Lindsay would do that to me too.
So both of my sisters would hurt me physically and then be like, don't tell mom cause you'll make her heart sad. And so I wouldn't. And just, it's just interesting thinking about those dynamics. And it totally worked on me.
So we moved around a lot. We left Wyoming, we went to Northern California.
Yeah. In my mind, there's like a ticking clock, countdown to the end of the world. But I think in Northern California, my mom's existential dread must have lowered a bit because she didn't talk about the end times as much. We still went to some charismatic churches. There were still some prophecies and the martyr thing came up a little bit. Not as much.
Krispin: So I think it's important to clarify here. Your mom stopped talking about it. But in your mind it never ended.
DL: Exactly.
Yeah. And so now I'm like entering into adolescence. When I was 13, I decided, I was still homeschooled, I decided I was going to start an evangelistic punk rock band because I had discovered punk rock at our local Christian bookstore.I got my older sister to be the front person. I got these two boys from youth group to be in it. And I used that as a way to play with some identity stuff. I taught myself electric bass. I was very pragmatic because nobody wanted to play the bass.
I was like I'll do that. I cut my hair really short. I only wore clothes from like the men's section of Goodwill. I wore three sports bras. I was really into like dog chain necklaces and like chain walls. I tried to learn how to skateboard, which did not go well for me. And it's just cute to think about.
And my mom, of course, is very controlling. She was really worried at first. I had to show her every single lyric of every single like Christian punk band to prove that they were about Jesus. Then when I started this band and I was like I'm going to be a missionary to the young here in Northern California.
And she was like how about I be your band manager? I was like, sure. So then my mom got in on the thing.
What's wild is my parent, my dad's church at that point, we ended up starting like a concert venue in the church because of me.
And then my mom taking it on is “Yes, I'm such a cool mom. I let my kids do this.”
Krispin: Your life, I've said this before, it's like a devastating indie movie with an intrusive and enmeshed mother.
DL: My mom didn't seem to worry about me dressing like a boy for a few years because I was like, I'm just reaching the people. And my mom, like we didn't have access to a lot of materials and stuff. My mom had a ton of missionary biographies. So I had grown up reading those and I'm like, “The best ones take on the culture.”
Krispin: Was that to convince her? Or did you believe it?
DL: It was all of it. Oh. But I'm like in the late mid to late nineties, like androgyny was in and the, especially in Northern California, right?
The skaters, like there were plenty of girls and people socialized as female who kind of just dress like dudes, and I was like, yeah, I'll do that. But like all the time and there's always these jokes that I myself was a lesbian. I didn't really know what that meant. And there were jokes that I was a chick magnet, that girls thought I was cute and would hit on me and all this stuff. I didn't care about any of that. I just know I wasn't like my older sister, who was very femme, very conventionally attractive. Got a lot of attention, right? And this is the period of my life where I'm starting to figure out, Oh, I'm not like that.
Krispin: She was looking to Gwen Stefani fashion for tips and you were looking to Mike Harrera.
DL: All right, this is the story of my gender non-conforming life and before then I When I was like nine, 10, 11, I had always been like, “It's not fair. I want to be a boy. I want to be able to go around without a shirt on,” and my parents were like “But you're a girl.”
But I just wasn't a church girl, you know what I'm saying? All the youth group talks about, oh, spaghetti straps are bad and your shorts can't be too high. I'm just like, “What? Why would I wear any of that?” You know what I mean? Like I was — none of it seemed to apply to me. Purity culture was a big deal, but not to me. Purity culture was a big deal for my older sister. And then with me, this is sad. It was like, “Nobody's gonna like you. You don't conform to what a Christian girl slash woman is supposed to be. So nobody's gonna like you.” And that's really the message I got was, you're one of the odd birds and the odd birds go into missions, so that was what was given to me. And again, it's interesting to think about going into missions when it really I'm like, but the world's ending. So why not just start a punk band and try and get everyone to become Christian, right? Because the world is ending.
Now when I was 14, something happened that I still, I've really struggled with did this really happen? It like impacted me so much, but it's been really hard for me to talk about.
So one of the things I found, the journal entries. that I had ripped out and saved, it was around this thing that happened. So I'm going to read some of the journal entries, if that's okay, just because it's like hard for me to talk about, and I'll give a little bit of context, but this first entry that I'm going to read is
the day before I turned 14. And I think it's such an interesting picture of how indoctrinated I was and my relationship with my mom and how I was just constantly being like, I must find my identity in Christ. Okay. So here we go.
This is March 11th, 1998.
Dear Journal, Tomorrow I am turning 14, and so I look back at the past year.
I feel that I have grown a lot, and I am so excited about the coming year with God. I have a clean heart, and I know Jesus will always be there. My mom says I'm glowing, and I feel like it. It's like I can be myself now, and people like me. Besides, me and my mom are best friends. Jesus, I thank you so much for her.
The only person I tell more stuff to is God, because we are the bestest of friends. Okay. Then I keep saying teach me your ways, God, and help me to be closer to you than ever. You're my best friend.
And I wrote down the words:Remember, love, repent, forgive, and forget
Krispin: Huh.
DL: So then the next day I turned 14 and then six days after that, I have the next entry and I wrote: God showed my mom that in the year 1998, she was going to die.
She does not know when, just sometime after June, as you can imagine, this was such a blow to me. How can a girl like me live without a mom? I cried some, then swallowed it all up until I was alone in the bathroom, and then I sobbed. It wasn't for long though. God showed me that this was a privilege so that I can cherish our times now. He has called me to be Elisha, learning everything I can while I can. It's hard not to run away from God and all the emotions, but every night I cry out to God all my feelings that I bottle up, and I just let him hold me. It is time to take all the complacency out of my life and devote it totally to God.
So here is my life, God, I surrender to you and to all the hardships that come with it. And yet I'm supposed to look beyond that, striving for the prize, which is a safe haven in heaven. Jesus, give me a double portion of the spirit of you on my mom. I want so much to be holy and good. I hide my problems so you won't think less of me, but you see all.
I feel like this means that my mom told me this a day or two after my birthday.
And we have an autistic teen, ourselves, who is turning 14 in two days. And I have a picture of what an autistic teen at this time is like, and they need a lot of support to be like, is the world worthwhile? Do I have stuff to look forward to? And their mental health is really, it's really important to us, right? To do everything we can to help support their mental health. And so I think about my mom. And this knocked me on my ass, right? I had just said, she's my best friend. Like all this stuff.
And what I didn't write down in my journal is my mom told me this and she said, you're not allowed to tell anyone. You can't tell your father. You can’t tell your sisters. But I'm going to die. I'm the prophet Elijah. You are Elisha. And you can't be sad. I hid all my emotions, sobbed in the bathroom, sobbed at night. I couldn’t be sad around my mom.
Krispin: You couldn't talk to anyone about it.
DL: So I basically don't have any memories from this year. I know I was in the band. I know I was doing homeschool, like video curriculum through Pensacola, Florida, Christian, whatever. But I just didn't know what to do because This was devastating to me, and yet I had to accept it to be a good Christian.
Krispin: And who else were you going to go to? You had been told that you're not allowed to talk to anyone about it, except her. And she gave you some clear messages that you're not allowed to be upset about this.
D.L.: You just have to try to be holy and just trying to find solace in the God that was going to take my mom. I have a few more journal entries, but mostly they're just so sad. They're mostly like: I want to feel close to you, God, but I feel so worthless. But just now at Bible time, I felt close to you. Have I been striving for the right thing? No, I'm so selfish, but now I am serving you, my master, Jesus Christ. I love you with all my heart, soul, and mind. I give to you my doubts, my self pity, my selfishness.
I will serve you forever and ever. Um, just keeps going. And a lot of it is to be good and godly, to be quiet. Jesus showed me to be beautiful and quiet. And I'm like, okay,
Krispin: Yeah. You started this whole story talking about growing up in a cult, right?And when I hear these things, I'm like, yeah, it's just so clear. This is an end times cult right?
DL: But also just like in a normal non-denominational Christian church, right? And I think there's levels of how people are buying into the actual theology. And I'm like such a good example of somebody who takes it all literally. And that has been true the rest of my life as well.
Taking Jesus’ words literally is like a big part of my progressive Christian writing. And here I was taking the Jesus movement seriously, because the Jesus movement is predicated on this idea that Jesus is returning soon. We all love the pictures of the hippie Jesus. But it was an End Times cult. It coincided with Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth which coincided with the rise of Christian Zionism, which we won't get into here, but my mom was really into all that stuff, too.
So yeah, that, finding those journal entries, and they keep going on. I will write later on, “Today I got sad about my mom again. And I am not doing very good. But then God reminded me to put all my trust in him and I sang that song “better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere” until I felt better.” And that would just set the pattern for the rest of my life.
When I'm sad, when I'm anxious, that means there's something wrong with me and I must press harder into God.
Krispin: You were fighting so hard to take care of yourself when no one else was taking care of you. With the tools that you had, which was this religion that just drew you in further,
DL: Yeah. I felt like my life was over. The year before the antichrist was supposed to kill me, my mom was going to die. And I couldn't tell anybody about either of those things. And I think what I realized a few years ago, before I found these journal entries, I was like, I know that happened, but what was that all about? And then I realized never once has my mom ever come back to me and said, “Hey, I was wrong. the end times didn't happen back then in the mid nineties.” And my mom eventually got into Y2K, which that was like my junior and senior year of high school. And again, I believed her, which messed up my whole senior and everything. My mom never once was like, “Oops! I was wrong.” So 1999 rolls around. It's not like she's ever going to come back to me and say, “wow, I got that wrong.” Nope. She just never brought it up again. Never apologized. Never even seemed to think that could have been emotionally devastating to me.
Krispin: Yeah. And you stayed in the religion,
DL: And in a very close relationship with my mom for many years.
Krispin: So there was like all this, like, how do I process this internally? It's just sitting there, right? There's not a point where it's like, “Oh, now I'm out. I can go back and recognize that wasn't true.” Of course you realize I lived past my 16th birthday, but there's no real avenues to process it. Cause like you said, you're still in the religion and you're still in a relationship with your mom.
D.L.: Because of how I was raised, eventually I do graduate high school. Y2K didn't usher in the end of the world.
Krispin: You didn't get your driver's license
DL: I didn't get my driver's license. I have something here actually. I must've talked about this stuff a little bit, but here's something that kind of annoys me is my, my sisters, everybody thought it was funny when I would share about some of this stuff. And so people made lots of jokes about the Antichrist around me and whatever.
That's fine. So my friend Laura, I think this was when I was a senior in high school. She made this little comic for me, about how I played the bass, I was in love with Mike Harrera. But then I became a missionary, went to Russia. I married a dancer named Steve because God said it was okay. I had two baby boys who looked just like Mike Harrera, and then I was killed by the Antichrist while defending my faith.
And then MXPX came and played at my funeral. And so I'm like, obviously I talked about it a little bit, but people again, at that point they just thought it was a very quirky bird and they didn't realize I was still living under that level of stress. Plus my mom had already moved on to Y2K. By then, they were stockpiling thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies and of food and supplies.
Krispin: I've been slow to realize these aspects of your life. I remember when we had our podcast on evangelical media, I was like, “Let's do the left behind series.” And you were like, “No, I cannot talk about that.”
DL: It’s not a joke to me. Like I can't joke about it
Krispin: Huh. And it makes so much sense. Like hearing these journal entries, thinking about what you went through. I'm like, yeah, this is, Serious trauma in there. You just can't joke about it.
DL: Cause the stakes were life and death. That's how it was presented to me. And so that's like how I was operating, in my brain. and it led to so many delays, right? Not getting my driver's license, not applying to college. I went into YWAM, which didn't go great for me. And then I bounced around to a couple different colleges and. Just was so lost and so confused and had no identity outside of following God.
But then I kept getting really depressed and anxious when I tried to follow God. And my parents were like, you can always come back and live with us. And we'll tell you what God wants you to do. And I think reading my journal entries, especially for when I was 19, 20, 21. The thing I took away from it is that there's no way I could have left the faith. It was my identity. It was my narrative of my family being good. It was my housing, it was my finances. It was what little sense of a future I had. It was my friends. It was everything.
Krispin: Even that aspect of growing up and moving all the time, you didn't really have consistent friendships over time. And I recognize if you've grew up in a small town, you run into issues of everybody else believes the same thing, but you didn't even have anyone else, really, to turn to that you could, if you needed space from your family. Your family was everything, which goes into this religious authoritarian parenting. Is, there's so much focus on the family that you end up so dependent on them.
DL: And I think my parents wanted me to be dependent on them and encouraging their child to become a missionary. I would always be dependent on Christians to give me money to live at a poverty level. I'd always need to come back and live with my parents in between, they seem to want that.
And now looking back, I'm like, I wouldn't want that for my kids to have to be dependent on being a Christian to do this. Cause I just wanted to help people, to be of use. I had no sense of who I was, just, I have to follow God. And this is the most intense way to follow God.
And my mom wants me to do it. I'll do this. And it's just so sad. And I think now though, I can put to rest this idea of like, why didn't I, see this sooner? It's just that I couldn't.
Krispin: I do want to ask, you were talking about 19, like 19, 20, 21. As you even went to high school, a little bit of like public high school, and you went to community college. And you worked at Starbucks. You were exposed to the non-Christian world slowly, but I wonder like how your brain processed that new information?
DL: Yeah, re-reading the journals is very interesting, and it's really sad. I viewed everyone who wasn't a Christian as, Like I need to be evangelizing them more.
And if they don't become a Christian, it's my fault. And I'm so bad at being an evangelist and things like working at Starbucks.
Krispin: It's because you're too authentic. You're too like genuine of a person to be a good evangelist.
DL: But I genuinely thought it was true and the only way to go to heaven. And so what a bind to be in. And I did write about going to a community college here in Portland, and how everybody thought I was like a radical Republican, I'm assuming because of abortion or something. And then how my family was increasingly worried that I was a liberal. And I was like, “I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.” But I really dreaded work like Starbucks. I don't know if anybody who's listening and you've worked at Starbucks, like that is, it's an intense job for little autistic me. So I just journaled over and over again, like I dread work. I'm so afraid of failure. I'm so afraid of disappointing my boss. I'm so afraid of disappointing my coworkers. I'm so afraid of making mistakes. I'm dreading going to work tomorrow. Like I was just not enjoying life at all in so many ways.
And we can't even get into my whole story of having a depressive episode at a Pentecostal school. Like we don't have time to get into all of it. But, just, I think it's just in a way helpful for me to be like, there's no way I could have left because every single support system in my life was tied to Christianity and to this narrative that my family was good, a very good Christian family.
My dad, especially in Portland, became a pastor at a mega church where they got a lot of positive attention, both my parents. I think I also couldn't process what had happened to me because everyone in my life was like, “Your parents are the best people ever. You guys are the closest family ever.”
And so then when I met you and they adopted you into our family because your parents were, as we talked about before, not great, so you were like, great. I'm a part of this really close, great, family.
Krispin: Yeah, I know, that's the sad thing is I totally bought into it as well, right?
DL: You come from a traumatized background. In some ways, I think it makes sense in some ways and then slowly you and I have just distanced ourselves. And I think becoming parents was a huge point of change. Oh, I don't want to raise my kid the way I was raised. And I just had this horror of talking about the Bible, especially with our oldest, our first kid.
And I was like, “Something's going on here.” I don't want them to feel pressured to be Christian in any way, shape, or form, which doesn't make sense since being a Christian is the most important thing to me, which it totally was. But why do I not want that for my kid? And that's like slowly when I started to be like, “Oh, this doesn't feel good.” And then eventually I was like, “yeah, because I was indoctrinated. And that sucks.”
And that was hard. I think that's the thing, as I've been a progressive Christian and talked about all sorts of issues with Christian nationalism in America, that's been my beat for forever. The direction people could not come with me was when I started talking about the problem of child indoctrination in evangelicalism. That's where people were like, “No, I don't want to think about that.”
But I guess that's partly why I want to share my story is to say it's really bad for neurodivergent kids. It's really bad for kids with anxiety. This is a hundred percent the reason I developed OCD. It's why I have no self-compassion.
I'm building it brick by brick for myself now, but I can just see in my journal entries, my anxiety, depression, I blame myself for not being given any avenue to feel better except Christianity and a relationship with Jesus, and it didn't work. And I would say three entries out of hundreds did I write down, “Why is this not working? Why can't God take away my sadness? I'm doing everything right.” And then of course, how do I end it? “I must not be doing everything right. I have to press in harder. I have to make sure every single thought is of God.” I'm 19 years old. How could every single thought be about God? But that had to be the problem.
It couldn't be God because if God was wrong, that meant my mom was wrong, which meant I had been abused as a kid.
Krispin: Yeah. We covered the first 20 years of your life. And it was 20 more years, basically, before you could leave. It took all that, like tracing down all these different trails or following down all these different trails of, maybe this is how it works.
DL: And it started with learning how to care for my nervous system because I had been in survival mode for so long. I was put into survival mode by my mom, right?
And I think for me, getting in touch with my body and my nervous system has allowed me to be like, “I can't live as if the world's ending anymore. I have to be me with this one physical body and this one shot at life.” And so for me now, like the most radical thing I can do is live as if the world isn't ending, which hasn't been easy with all the political stuff going on.
It's very easy for me to get apocalyptic just because of my background, but, learning how to find pleasure and joy every day and learning how to access self compassion is, has been life changing. It's a total game changer, and I'm really sad that I wasn't given that as a kid. And I think a lot of kids who grow up in something like white evangelicalism are not given self compassion. And let's ask ourselves why. It made me so easy to be controlled, to not have access to self compassion. And the more self compassion I develop for myself, the more I know my worth and I know that my anxiety and depression is not something I've done wrong. It's a part of growing up in a chaotic environment where I was really stressed out all the time, it's generational trauma.
My story is there's so many testimonies of people who were addicts and then becoming Christians. I'm like, yeah, my mom was addicted to religion. She thought it helped her. But it really hurt me. I just wish we were able to have more conversations about this, but in America, and this might be changing, Christians are still so upheld as like good families.
And that's just such a double bind because it's really hard to break that narrative. It's hard to talk about this publicly when there's this perception of my family out there that I upheld. I used to post about my mom constantly, which is something you do in—
Krispin: I was gonna ask: What’s the most healing thing you've done for yourself
DL: It's interesting because when I met you, I was coming off this very lost and anxious period of time, but you perceived me as I had it all together, I was on a mission for God, and so that is— My journal entries are just a lot of masking, and I think I masked around you, I was masking around everybody, and then slowly over time, I feel like your safety, allowed my nervous system some safety and just to get in touch with myself in really small ways.
I would not have been able to do this, you know, quickly. And so I think my relationship with you has been a really important part of finding autonomy, which sounds weird, right? But it has been like, I needed a safe nervous system to relax. And when we were first dating I was always sleepy around you.
I did. I felt like I could relax. And I think one of the sad things is everybody in my family was shocked when we started dating because they thought I'd never find somebody. They did not think of me as somebody who could find a partner which again, it's that's on them. I'm a goddamn delight
Krispin: you are a Goddamn delight.
DL: Just because I'm gender nonconforming doesn't mean I couldn't find somebody. And so that was interesting. Do you want me to tell a funny thing I found in my journals?
Krispin: Okay.
DL: So I have all these journal entries, right? Of having panic attacks and working at Starbucks and finally deciding God told me to go to Multnomah Bible College here in Portland. My first few semesters at Multnomah were rough.
In my second semester, I met you. I didn't really write about this. And when I wrote about boys in my journal, I never used names. I don't know why, but at one point I was like, “This is so weird, all of a sudden, everybody likes me. All these boys are flirting with me. All these girls want to hang out with me. And I just don't like any of them and I would be settling. Is this what God wants of me? I don't know.” I had also written, like a few months previous “Are my two choices being a single missionary woman or being a housewife with three kids? I'll take the single missionary thing, please.” Which is so indicative of the intense patriarchy I grew up with. That is just the bread and butter of white evangelicalism.
Krispin: Also indicative of you knowing yourself that you’re not just going to accept this subservient role.
DL: I was like, I can't imagine. Which is funny because now I'm like, home all the time with two kids and a dog. So basically three kids.
So I know I was writing about you when I was like, all these boys are flirting with me. I don't like any of them. I don't want to settle. I guess I'll be single. I was like, the one person I'm attracted to has a lot of growing up to do. And that was you!
Krispin: Yes, I did have a lot of growing up to do. Oh, my goodness.
DL: I was totally indoctrinated with all this stuff. But hey, that was a pretty good assessment. I was attracted to you and I was like, “Oh my God, this is a literal child.” So I waited a few months and then we grew up together,
Krispin: It's so true.
DL: And now we get to be more silly and childlike. Now that I'm, I just turned 40, and I'm like. I lived! I survived! It's taking me a while to let that sink in.
I survived, and I'm gonna enjoy my life while I'm here, and I bought myself some really sparkly nail polish to celebrate being brave and doing this podcast, and you're gonna take me out for a yummy lunch. We're just gonna keep living, and the best way I can combat what happened to me as a kid is to have hope for the future.
A future where I and my children and other people's children can experience pleasure, right? And wonder and awe. And so that's where I'm headed and what I'm thinking about and, I don't know. I want to end this on like an inspiring note, but I don't really have much else to say except that thinking about my childhood has been so hard and so painful, but it's given me a lot of gratitude for my life now. I no longer live in those constant loops of [when] I feel sad and feel anxious: “That must mean I'm doing something wrong. I have to commit ever harder to God, deny myself more, and I don't do that anymore.” So I'm really grateful for where I'm at now. It's taking a lot of work.
Krispin: Right?
DL: How many thousands of dollars do you think I've spent on therapy?
Krispin: So many and every single dollar is worth it because you are so worth it. But I think it's so important. I'm so glad that you shared these pieces of your story. 'cause it really helps us understand like, yeah, the indoctrination is real.
And it really forms how you think about reality. And in order to understand what is true now, you have to be able to go back and understand what were the false truths I was given to start with so that I can understand what my brain is doing
DL: You actually address what happened.
Krispin: Thank you so much for sharing. We're going to go eat a delicious lunch, to celebrate having these difficult conversations.
DL: You talked about your dad being more into the authoritarian. And it's evident that my mom was really into the religion. And we're two different examples of, there's many ways that people get sucked into these methods but it was my job to be a missionary, to be a Christian. That upheld the family business, that upheld my parents identity, and that was another important role I had that upheld my identity.
Krispin:. And that was another important role I had. People have different experiences. Not everyone is raised in this intense and times cult, but I think that there are so many similarities that people experience growing up in these ways
DL: And the end times cult is the basis of the Jesus movement and Christian publishing so I think that's just an important thing to consider. I just want to thank people for being on this journey on Patreon. And I just want to thank people who. have just listened as we've changed in process over the past eight years. I know we're not the only ones where 2016 was a catalyst for starting to unpack what the heck were we born into if you were born into white evangelicalism. So thank you everyone who's been along on this journey. If you want to continue supporting our project, we'd be so grateful.
It really helps us to be able to invest in this work. So you can support us on substack or on Patreon. They're both under STRONGWILLED. And I just want to say thank you specifically to the ones who have been here.
Krispin: What's coming up right now?
DL: It's just very special to me. I can't share without other people also being willing to be honest.
People have been really honest to us. And yeah, that's how I felt like I was able to show up today. So the people listening know that I'm talking to you. So thank you.
Krispin: We need to just end it there. That's really beautiful. Thanks again for sharing and thank you all for listening.
Whether you are someone who was raised with RAP methods, a therapist who works with religious trauma clients, or somebody who is simply interested in these topics, we hope you found this resource to be helpful. STRONGWILLED is a reader-supported publication and we are so grateful for all of the support we have received — there are over 2,000 of you here! You can help this project continue on by liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Substack and by supporting us financially.
Who we are:
D.L. Mayfield (they/them), is an autistic non-binary writer and parent. D.L. grew up as a homeschooled evangelical pastor’s kid, and spent many years in the Christian writing world before deconverting from Christianity in 2022, and they enjoy deep diving history in order to find patterns.
Krispin Mayfield (he/him), is a licensed therapist and author who specializes in religious trauma and neurodivergence. Krispin was also raised evangelical and spent his teenage years as a missionary kid before also leaving Christianity in adulthood. Krispin and D.L. have been married for almost 17 years and are the parents of two incredible children.
DL's Story