Guest post for Choices by Dr. Leona Stucky.

The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God is an historical personal account of a young Mennonite woman who finds herself on the front lines of the Invisible American War.
 
I remember the breathless reaction I had when, years after my war experience, I read in Jeff Wolf Wilson’s book, Children of Battered Women, that during the same years that the US lost 39,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War, 17,500 American women and children were killed by members of their families. 
 
I was shocked.  I had almost become one of those 17,500 women, but if I had to guess, at the moment I read those statistics, I might have thought 500 to 1000 women had been killed in that period.  It would still be devastating that so many women and children had died needlessly - suffered unknown traumas, had often been tormented and tortured perhaps for years before their deaths.  I had been.  My son’s life had been altered by the horrors.
 
It started to soak into my resistant brain.  It wasn’t 500 or a 1000, it was 17,500.  These were the women and children who had been murdered by family members.  Why didn’t I know?

Shame is a powerful emotional force. We are all familiar with shame, yet it often goes unnoticed, unexplored, unchallenged, even by experts. In this blog we will explore the way culture and religion utilize shame to assist humans to become conscious social beings.

Shame invades our internal being. I’m probably writing about it because it invaded me and forever changed my life, as my memoir, The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God, illustrates.

Perhaps shame builds upon Darwin’s evolution, often in insidious ways. We may be hard wired for it. Parents instill it in their young.

How did shame become a precision power tool to connect internal and external worlds?

It emerged as a consequence of the dynamic relationship between babies and their caregivers. It developed within the internalized representational world of infants as they processed security and rejection from significant loved ones.

Guest Post for Bookworm by Dr. Leona Stucky

Seldom can human evil be fully known before it slashes its wrath across the soft underbelly of human constancy. Evil causes immense suffering and yet it confuses us.

Evil is “gift” that keeps on giving. One patient told me that since terror struck her she thinks double and contradictory thoughts simultaneously. They circumscribe her mental and emotional movements. If danger persists, so does the anguish that surrounds it. The soft underbelly thickens. Evil has to be considered. We guess and re-guess. We are not free to set aside the slashes and live as if they had not happened and will not strike again. We are not free to banish troubling thoughts. They come unbidden. We think and fear them before we can consciously understand or attempt diversions.

Evil eviscerates the safe-harbors of our well-being and leaves scars that won’t allow our soft underbellies to stay placid and playful. We lose our innocence, trauma unfolds, and memory membranes, scattered asunder, must be recollected as if sense can be recreated.

Power struggles often provoke couple or families into therapy, especially when one person wins most of the time. Typically, the more one person wins, the more dysfunctional the couple or family will be. No one likes to lose all the time and winning often comes at the price of damaged relationships.

So I ask each family member, “What does winning mean to you?” Frequently members will say, “It means I get my way. They let me get what I want.”

“Does winning come at a heavy price?” Now they look confused. The ones who seldom win often struggle because the typical winner is a poor loser and will make their winning experience miserable by using resistance tactics or displacing disappointment. Other than that, they aren’t so sure what the price of winning might be. But, to some extent, they have already expressed it. They all felt locked into unsatisfying dynamics, feeling resentful and unhappy, even the winner.

Guest Post for Writers Pay It Forward by Dr. Leona Stucky

Though I’m capable and resourceful, after terror settled into my relationship with Ron, I experienced a no-possible-escape helplessness. As a teen in the 1960s, horrified and completely trapped, I breathed terror. In The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God, I describe it this way:

Guest Post for C Smash Reads by Dr. Leona Stucky

We looked enough like a normal Midwest farm community that you might not guess we were Mennonite unless you knew our history, motives, thought processes, or noticed our controlled impulses and abundant gentleness. What you couldn’t see revealed the most about us. Underneath our disciplined exterior burned passion. We focused it on doing what Jesus wanted.

Our faith, the well from which we drank our identity, defined what our lives should be. We learned how to judge each event and where to place our trust. We knew another world loomed out there, a bad one that often dismissed our re-purposing of Jesus’s sermon on the mount. My family didn’t touch or taste that world, and seldom did that world intersect ours. Being held in Jesus’s love and resting in His arms was poignant enough for us.

– The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God

A couple of years ago a friend shared an obituary found in The Oregonian, about a woman named Jenny, who died at age 85. Its blunt honesty appealed to both of us.

Jenny came from humble beginnings and stayed that way except she married a businessman who gradually became successful selling up-scale women’s clothing – the kind Jenny wouldn’t wear. Her obituary said she was fired from several jobs but made quite a homemaker, considering she could cook several favorite dishes with a flair, could keep four boys in line, and still have time to read and keep up with friends, relatives and world events. She had opinions on most things and freely shared them.

Mystics have listened to and expounded their spiritual experiences. They are not alone in treasuring a few peak moments in which one feels transported to another reality. Eva Hoffman, in her book, Lost In Translation: A Life in a New Language, describes an experience that many people would recognize in variant forms. These experiences are often triggered in nature and inspire a sense of oneness with Other or other. They usually involve heightened awareness, vibrancy, and a capacity to know more than we otherwise know. This is how Hoffman describes one of her experiences:

“I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as if it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I’m holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plentitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me.”

Achievement dreams are as natural as hero worship.

I remember when Nick, my then four year old grandson, spent hours, days, years, pretending to be a Ninja Turtle. He made decisive moves, saving the day against the bad guys. In each encounter he led the winning team. When down for the count, his bulging arms reached for glistening weapons at his side. He hit his mark. No matter what the odds, he arose and conquered.

Though no one told me, a girl, I could be or do anything significant, I invented a few dreams for myself. Some day, after disking the wheat field, I would leave the Minneapolis-Moline behind, disappear into the house and, like Cowgirl Kate, emerge again as a ravishing beauty in a subtly seductive pink dress filled out with a can-can and a well endowed chest. A few years later I regularly metamorphosed into a new Janice Joplin. Still later I secretly transformed into a female William Faulkner.