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takebackthetreasure92 · 5 years

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For my cult leader ex-abuser

Dear Gregor,

I hope you're doing well. I just want to lay down some ground rules for this point onward.

Let me start this out with: I know how much you want to be a good man. And I know your dedication to Jesus is wholehearted.

But I also know how much you want to win the battle with everyone you meet over who is the more godly individual. Why else would you have insisted, at your last Rockbridge, on interpreting my cringe in response to the realization that you really would not listen to anything that might turn you away from your rage as evidence that your accusation of non-forgiveness really hit home? Gregor, forgiveness was easy for me--as much as I had to let my reactions out somewhere where you could not put your hands around my neck--because I cared about you so much. You have so much potential. But until you learn how to care about being good ultimately for the sake of other people (or at least with that among your primary motives), you won't get to fully harness that. You may have collapsed in sadness when you caught a glimpse of my pain that one time. But let me ask you: Do you think of others in moments like that? Or do you think of how you "lost," in a sense, with the question of whether or not you are indeed worthy of praise?

I am still wary of your potential for gaslighting; domestic violence; and remorseless games of domination and manipulation. "Like a game of chess," you once called it in talking with me. I knew perfectly well, even at Rockbridge, that your narcissistic rage at the threat of being exposed as a cheat and unabashedly irresponsible would very likely have led to my actual murder at your hands if I became confrontational. (You were a cheat in every sense, Gregor. All false dichotomies, one-sided prudishness, and patriarchal hypocrisy aside, if you demand someone else's romantic attention all the freaking time, act inappropriately petulant and possessive when other men's names come up, follow the person around like a puppy dog--that was you, not me, thank you, though I foolishly tried to satisfy your apparent wanting sweet attention as best I could--and then do the same things to someone else simultaneously without changing your expectations for the other party and without their knowledge or consent, that is still cheating. I knew poor Brooke was not to blame for the pile of distortions and half-truths you'd given her. But Gregor, you might want to cogitate over the fact that it was the fear of merely having other people see you as bad or unworthy that pushed you to murderous rage. That is the definition of unhealthy for you.) And for the record, I had meant to just look one last time and then head to my cabin room, which was next door to the other cabin, when you turned to address me. I'd become convinced that you were having a psychosis--and that only I had the power to get through to you, and to effectively calm your violent urges in the situation. When you turned around all of a sudden, I thought God had suddenly given me a chance to finally get through to you. When you nodded and responded to me the night before, of course I thought it was okay to resume talking to you about it the next day leading up to that evening. You did that to yourself.

The only thing I was very wrong about was your mindset. You remained just as narcissistic and self-exculpatory and, by consequence, violent as ever you had been. And as much as you value showing the right emotions in evincing empathy toward others, I think your real issue is that you have a deficit in conscience--and an insatiable desire to be looked up to and deferred to.

Gregor, you are definitely a clinical narcissist. And you are in dire need of psychological help, if you haven't gotten it already. And if you contact me or come anywhere near me again, or my partner (this is primarily for their sake), then you will be the one who will have a restraining order filed against you. I would like to gently point out that with your stalking behavior in the early months of our thing, pointing that projection back at you where it belongs would be a cakewalk in any court of law. But I don't see the need to take it there, provided that you leave me alone. As far as you went in your games of domination with me, I will never trust you to stop always trying to decimate me or "win" over me again. I may be mature enough to *actually* forgive you (as in actually let go of the anger and not still become enraged at memories of the other party's "insubordination" later on), but I am far from dumb enough to trust you again.

By the way, being a spiritual mentor gives you no right whatsoever to subordinate the protege. I was never under any obligation whatsoever to refrain from processing the resultant trauma with others (this, at least, I knew from day one)--or to use my experience and the experiences of others to educate folks and warn them against people using the same abuse tactics as you did. It's been part of my calling since the aftermath of Rockbridge. Even if it *were* slander--which it isn't--you'd find that I am quite within my legal rights to do it, as I never see the need to bring your actual name into it (or your aunt's, for that matter). But good grief, Gregor, the damage you have done to so many people with both your sense of entitlement (you had no right to ban me from 24/7 Prayer planning meetings while you were projecting your own creepy behavior onto me, but I obliged you just out of the kindness of my heart because I thought it was driving you literally mad), and your desire to dominate others and try to gaslight them if they protest--to Julia, to Brooke, to me, and God alone knows all of who else--has been incalculably high. (Wanting to get your girlfriend of five months to "cook like my mom?" I think that is entitlement beyond words, and I interned at a rape crisis center for three years.) (Precisely the same can be said for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship itself and for IV I avoid giving the organization any more power through merely anonymous reference, because they do not need any more covering of their asses and other people need to be warned. Underneath all the love-bombing and aggressive pushing into your social circle and into conforming almost all of your personal theologies, their cult structure is outright dangerous to anything and anyone that threatens their image. I've witnessed this firsthand many times. Totally apart from the fact that your urging me to stay in the cult because "it is what is good" involved that hilariously arrogant assertion (ROFL), what you said there may have stood out as one of the few sincere lines of that message, but it was still just as untrue as the rest. The manipulative and abusive behavior I and countless others in both that chapter and other chapters saw from them time and time again is far from Christ-like. It is nauseating.)

Also, if the narcissistic injury my pointing out these things causes you makes you want to file an RO on me after all, good luck tracking me down. I don't use any part of my birth name anymore (the name Megan Elizabeth Troy would get you nowhere), and I no longer live in North Carolina. I'm going to politely point out that unless you can push some people into perjury (nobody apart from Josh and a few 3rd Joyner folks even temporarily *believed* your distortions and bullshit stories about my stalking you, not even Julie), you have no chance of getting that house of cards made under court of the law. And rest assured: I have no intention of contacting you in future. And I would very much appreciate it if your extending the same courtesy to me started with not responding to this message--I don't read this temporary account anyway--or with trying to reach me in any other way, because I will block you back. You need serious help, and trauma that embeds deeply enough into the brain to create flashbacks and hypervigilance--each of which, psychologically, persist regardless of whether or not you've completely let go of the anger--mean that some wounds of mine really do run too deep for the healing. And there is nothing you can say to me that can impact me ever again. Please, just focus on getting the help you need.

Good luck and in Christ,

Julian

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takebackthetreasure92 · 5 years

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Making myself clear to my ex-stalkers

This is an email I sent my former staff worker from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in February 2018. Apparently, InterVarsity remains under the impression that I won't speak out about the fact that they gang-stalked me and encouraged my abuser to harass me--even strangle me. And spread slander about me that they knew was false, just because my would-be murderer was a model student leader and it was my reputation or his. Are they really foolish enough to think I will back down? #InterVarsity #metoo

"Hi Jordan,

This is just to set you straight on a few things and make sure you understand what I hope for and don't hope for with you in future. The reason for using the pseudonymous email address is just a precaution against a certain ex at the moment because my legal name change is not information he needs right now, but I think you know who this is ;). (It's Julian, who has ditched their birth name for good.)

So I know that you, at the very least, had the decency to recognize the low and utterly puerile nature of your betrayal of me. You even almost got yourself to believe your own lies sometimes. I say almost because you had your somewhat squeamish moments, like when you used Gregor's last abusive accusation of non-forgiveness as a way to try to shut me up about every way our former cult had fucked up. (Honey, you realize your willful blindness to InterVarsity's more dangerous qualities and failure to watch Gregor's paranoia and rage, both of which escalated almost no matter what I did (keeping my mouth shut not being something I owed him or that he deserved), could have resulted in me getting literally strangled to death at Rockbridge, right? If you honestly don't--well, that ought to at least explain quite a lot about my continued hypervigilance around IV that led to some perfectly understandable PTSD paranoia. Google around and inform yourself on what that looks like. For your love of God, please recognize the signs in the students that come your way in future at Needle's Eye or anywhere else.)

Jordan, I feel like if you had paid closer attention to the things I was trying to tell you every time I brought it up or a PTSD flashback brought it to mind, which I unabashedly recall was often because...your cult was (and is) dangerous, you might have picked up on the fact that I was hoping to wake you up to what was going on in the ministry. And you used both my persistence and my PTSD to stab me in the back in what was the most manipulative way possible (no matter what prettier half-truth you told the self-righteous and naive Halen about it). Your smile at me when you knew Josh's confusion at that ridiculous gossip situation (your poisonous cult was the problem there, dear, not me) gave you a way to fuck me over, and to let your own childish ass off the hook for having an openly pro-gay transgender member, recalled a seven-year-old boy who had just told a perfect fib to the teacher on someone else and thought he was going to keep the candy he stole from that other person after all. You were a child, to be blunt, Jordan, just an immature, accountability-shirking little boy who threw his more Christ-like morals completely out the window--and all in the name of covering up every disgusting arm-twist (all failed arm-twists in my case, hee hee hee) and mind game and coercive (and often abusive) move InterVarsity had ever pulled to keep its attendees in line. Speaking of which, your expression when you thought I was about to blurt out the words "I was gay" at one event might have led someone else to think I was about to forcibly break someone else's arm, at the very least. Jordan, becoming disappointed when people who say something controversial on Facebook and then have the temerity to show up at your event--that is a fifteen-year-old thing to do. Admittedly it's better than seven, but *really?*

You know, what I give myself a pat on the back for is not giving in to your or Gregor's immature insistence that I keep my mouth shut. What you did there was wrong, Jordan, not least because you knew perfectly well Gregor was a very, *very* dangerous person when his narcissism was threatened. The only thing I caved on with him was the fact that during our casual relationship he monopolized my time romantically, literally stalked me, and acted very petulant and possessive when other men's names came up--and in the later stages of that contemporaneously cheated on me with my roommate and later went out of his way to paint me as a complete ninny for getting offended by that, as if nonconsensually holding someone to romantic double standards does not count as cheating, which of course anyone without pathological narcissism and over the age of 18 or so knows it does. Just because I gave him my silence on just that one at the time for Brooke (who truly had no clue because she had taken his fibs hook, line and sinker, to the point where he would have had no problem still messing with her mind by smearing his way out of further accountability, just like you did with me later in the game) did not mean that I was going to even begin to overlook my conviction that InterVarsity classmates needed to be told what the ministry was capable of, under the wrong circumstances and with the promise of seizing more and more control over the lives of its members. That I never ceded that control to you all--for which again, I feel extremely blessed and grateful, but to God goes that glory--is of course the real reason you gave me the boot and then tried so hard to mindfuck me into thinking I had no one but my own sorry, selfish, deep-in-sin self to blame.

LOL! Grow up, Jordan. That is the kind of silly lie a fourteen-year-old boy tells his partner (especially if his partner is female-identified and he therefore feels entitled to say it to "his girl") when he's trying to get a get-out-of-jail-free card for screwing her over by making her believe it's because of something she's done. Spiritually, you are the one who needs to get your shit together. You and InterVarsity fucked our friendship over, and you delivered the coup de gras for an incredibly selfish, inappropriately domineering, and silly reason. Emma may have been able to behave like a manipulative, completely brainwashed fool on the matter most of the time (which of course, to a degree, she was), but your own acting and/or (more likely) self-deception skills left just a bit more to be desired. I mean, I get that the staff routinely throw both themselves and their dogma at people to earn their allegiance (in many ways it was like dealing with very persistent pimps, especially when you were trying to shut me up, just to be brutally honest there), but still. And for the record, I have called Gregor out on everything (partly to cleanse my own mind of any toxic remnants of his brainwashing and mainly to secure my safety and my partner's, now that Gregor lives just over in Nashville) and threatened him with a restraining order based on both his abuse and threats and his (actual) stalking behavior if he *ever* resumes any of that again--and pointed out to him that pointing those projections of his back at him where they belong would be a cakewalk in any "court of law," should it come to that. Which of course praise God it almost certainly won't, now that I've made it clear I don't trust him to behave in the event of reconciliation, not in this life. For the last seven years all I've wanted for him was for him to be free of all the poison in his soul--that is a wish extremely near and dear to my own heart and soul--which is why your disgusting use of the ammo he gave you in telling you of his self-exculpatory-nine-year-old accusation of non-forgiveness (no, child, the reason it so visibly hit home was not actually being guilty of that; I've given you the real reason) was so, so, SO low. And I did not give a fuck about what Mary and the other brainwashed, narrow, and foolish girls thought, just to be radically honest about them.

Again, for your own sake, for the sakes of your students in Needle's Eye, and literally for God's sake, you have got to get your spiritual shit together. For years I thought you were one of the ones who also remembered to hold onto principle and, more importantly, a sense of principle *that originates within the self,* not the cult. I was very, very wrong about that. As advice, I'll let you know that I often felt like one of the few people in the cult who hung on to their adulthood in that sense, mainly *because* I would not relinquish control over my life, let alone my mind. You almost got me with the implied lie about everything being just "benevolent misunderstandings," but in my heart and in the hearts of others who would have been vilified and dismissed right and left, had they voiced those opinions to the overenmeshed majority, all those childish fibs never quite held water. Your crimson-faced mortification when I cunningly ratted your bullshit out to Josh--that was a very adult high five on your part, so I sincerely high-five you in return for all that--said it all.

I need scarcely say that I make no apologies at all for exposing all of your evil as a ministry to the university's first-years. They were the ones who needed to be warned in light of all your intrusive, sneaky, manipulative, and just plain disrespectful rubbish in infiltrating the move-in volunteer staff and pulling out all the shots in your usual WAY-too-manipulative ploys to lure new people over. There is a world of difference between wanting a person to be Saved--God has a myriad of tools suited to that purpose, as you well know, for which good old-fashioned prayer will suffice if it's meant to be--and wanting to be the saving force and guide. And there certainly is a difference, a very consequential AND spiritually essential difference, in wanting it so intensely that you will stoop to ANYTHING to pull people into your ministry, not RUF or Cornerstone, and to make sure they join, stay, and follow YOU. The real kicker here is that their definition of "follow" is for their members ENTIRELY too invasive, inappropriately domineering, manipulative, unhealthy (the DEFINITION of unhealthy, dear, so it's small wonder your staff used that buzzword fairly frequently with folks, in the pot calling any criticizing kettle black), and just plain psychologically abusive in a much-too-frequent pattern.

So I beg of you. BEG of you. If you have not already, get your shit together. I intend to just let you be in future, and I would appreciate it if you would extend me the same courtesy, starting with not responding to this email. Even though you're out of IV now (for your sake I sincerely thank God for that), I don't need to tell you outright that you had your chance with my friendship; you blew it when you irrevocably broke my trust. Forgiveness always came easy for me, but almost no matter what comes up down the road I will never fully trust you again in this life. The same goes for Gregor and Emma. And there is nothing you can say to me that you can get inside my head ever again. I'm just being honest.

Please, just work on healing any remaining crippling and lies in your mind and soul.

In Christ,

Julian"

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