thank you all. I don't know why I didn't get this earlier.
My therapist just wouldn't spend time on my adult traumas like my years as an EMT/firefighter or my traumatic injuries from car accidents. I was getting tired of going over early childhood stuff, things I barely remembered and didn't see as anything but a set up for the PTSD that was caused later on. I was ready to just quit if she wouldn't get into the heavy lifting with me, but now I see the missing pieces and I can see how thoroughly dealing with the root causes is important.
My parents have never seen me as anything but a rebellious kid. Their religion is extremely judgemental and they take it to an even higher level than most in their religion. There is no way I was ever going to get any kind of approval from them in spite of raising three successful grandkids that never got so much as a speeding ticket. I have been a loyal husband and kept my career in line for 26 years at the same place. I volunteer, I pay my mortgage on time and wash my cars and mow my lawn, all without their false religion in my life. But unless I join their cult I am a vile sinner, a lost soul.
My younger sister has raised 3 of her own and 3 adopted kids in the religion, sent them to the schools and summer camps, even working on them the point that they went to a national level bible knowledge competition, but it all gains her no approval because the step mom believes that all competition is evil including bible knowledge competitions, they might even treat her worse than me because she should supposedly know better.
I am done with them, they are dead to me and I don't see a sense of closure coming to me until they are dead to the rest of the world too, unfortunately. I haven't spoken to them in 2 years.
When I look back on all of the christmases and birthdays and favors asked and tolerance of their religion I have given them, all of the times I put my family aside so I could do something for them on a holiday weekend, the times I have made my kids behave differently out of respect for them and the times I have bit my tongue and just accepted them as poor un thinking sheep caught in a brainwashed cult of a relifgion, I cringe. When I look back on the way they treated me as a lesser person because I wouldn't accept their beliefs, the way they treated my wife and kids because they weren't in the cult and the way they witheld all approval and passed judgemengt on us all I want to cry. I wasted my life living in a shadow that I recognised at age eleven but tolerated until I was 49!
I truly did try to gain the approval of my abusive parents and I bought into the idea that I was at fault because that was all they ever showed me my entire life, my faults and shortcomings. Never approval, never acceptance, never a thought for me or my family unless it was to try to find another way to show us all how wrong we are to live outside the church and how right they were to live their lives so devoted to the church and to enforce the judgements based on their interpretation of it.
If there is a hell, it waits for them, not us.
