Panel of an angel beating a man hanging over the front door of a local Catholic church. With that image in my mind I don’t think I’ll ever visit there!
Stumbled across this email I wrote more than three years ago to the church board of the church we attended here in Costa Rica. I wrote it to a particular board member I was close to over the last nearly five years. Sharing it here to show that there will be times post your original bad church experience where you might just have to take stock and RUN!
The problem attending any church that is without genuine local, state and national oversight is that you can more easily experience spiritual abuse and all the nasty that comes with it. Gaslighting, minimizing the negative issues, being told to simply shut up, through being told that your problem isn’t ‘real,’ that you’re just imagining it.
You beat yourself up because here it is again, post your original toxic church experience and you find yourself in a similar place. That’s because it’s easily possible that the same factors that led you to your first place directed you to the next one, and the next one and the next one. It’s what feels comfortable and right! You don’t notice the red flags at first, and if you do you tell yourself that you must be mistaken because this place seems awesome.
It’s also illustrative of how badly churches tend to handle the disabled in their ranks, even in simple ways like making sure a huge heavy iron gate at the top of the wheelchair ramp is open. I see this strange disinclination to help members who aren’t fully able. It’s a sad fact!
Unless we do the work and keep up strong boundaries it’s way too easy to find ourselves yet again in the emotional wreckage. It happened to me, and I was more than ten years post initial experience at a toxic place. Read on. Names redacted because as much as I dislike a few of the folks below I have no wish to openly shame them. I don’t know why they are this way.
Dear C-,
First, I want to thank you for making sure that gate on the ramp is open every Sunday. It makes a difference in my morning coming into the church. If you are dealing with a lack of balance, or a cane, or crutches, or a wheelchair the heaviness of that gate makes it just that much more off putting.
I am writing to you because I know of everyone else at church you struggle with asthma as well. In light of our discussions after the unsettling ouster of Pastor L- I feel I owe you an explanation as I’m leaving.
However, yesterday amply illustrated to me that my time at T- Church has come to an end. Why? Well, because I cannot be guaranteed physical safety any longer. Yesterday I had one of the worst reactions with my mastocytosis I’ve had since arriving in Costa Rica. I was using my epipen and visited the hospital ER for oxygen and treatment. I am still sick today, and will likely be the rest of the week. (editors note: it took more than a month, closer to two this time to shut down the reaction.)
It didn’t have to be this way either. Back when we first joined T- Church I had a severe reaction during worship team rehearsal to S-’s fuzzy dog. Pastor L-, and others, witnessed how incredibly sick I got how quickly. After that L- stopped people from bringing their dogs into the church building.
Some weeks ago someone neither J- nor I have ever laid eyes on before started showing up with her full sized poodle. The dog was wearing an emotional support animal vest. The very first time the poodle and owner showed up I was wheezing within minutes, before I ever saw the dog. I went outside to wait out the rest of the service and medicate, having a bad reaction, but not a reaction strong enough to go to the ER. B- came out to see why I left, offering to put a chair on the porch so I could sit outside and watch the service through the window, not understanding that’s no solution if you are on worship team and having active episode that requires medications, air conditioning and rest. I desperately needed to get home to use the two solutions in my nebulizer.
I spoke to her then about this, told her this was why Pastor L- had a no dogs policy during the five years I’ve been attending. She promised she would speak to the board and an attempted solution would be forthcoming. Fine. Great.
The next week it happens again, exactly the same. I don’t even see the dog before the episode starts, a little harder, a little worse, a few days longer to recover from. B- tells me she forgot to bring it up at the board meeting, but that she would next week and I was welcome to sit outside and watch the service through the window. Again not getting this was still problematic because I was singing female lead on worship team and needed air conditioning, medications and rest now.
Again, she’s not understanding the nature of the beast I am dealing with. Simply going outside does not end it! It barely slows it down once I’ve been triggered. This time I just leave, ending up using my injectable benadryl and epipen just to get home and begin all the nebulizer treatments.
The week after I’d resolved I was just done with church because these two incidents. I have mast cell, not asthma that eases once you use your inhaler. It keeps going once the switch has been flipped, and repeated exposure to the same allergen just builds the reaction stronger each time.
But I went because J- begged me. The lady and dog were not there. I was told that the next time she and I were there that she would be seated on the other side of the church and the dog would be out on the balcony next to her. Not perfect, but worth a try.
Yesterday I get to the gate, stopped for a second to talk to the pastor who preached yesterday. Got one whiff of his heavy cologne, started wheezing (not unusual, another severe allergen in my path), but went on inside so that I could sit down and quietly do my rescue breathing exercises. I get inside and my eyes start watering, I thought it was just the cologne again, started pulling out things to extra medicate. Kept wheezing worse. B- came over to tell me that the dog and lady were in there on the other side of the church, the dog inside, not out on the balcony and the wheezing and watering eyes made sense. The dog owner refused to put the dog on the shaded balcony three feet away and visible through the sliding glass door. My reaction. It got worse. I left. B- unhelpfully suggested yet again I sit outside and watch the service through a window, still not understanding this reaction keeps building even when I am away from the trigger. It’s like trying to get the brakes on a freight train to stop it once it starts. It takes time and medications.
Look, I don’t expect B- to know all the ends and outs of my condition, just to realize it is real and not offer unhelpful suggestions on what I am to do! There are any number of ways this could have been handled including being seated in the high balcony, or nursing mother’s room.
By the time I went home and medicated I was in nearly a respiratory crisis, unable to talk normally, seeing spots before my eyes, with low oxygen levels and close to using another epipen. It’s been a wild ride since, low blood pressure followed by crazy high spikes at stroke level. Still with my airways so narrowed my oxygen levels that I can barely function. I burned through a fortune in prescriptions between yesterday and today, endured an ER visit and I know it’s likely I’ll be sick all week. (it was several months in reality!) I’m hurt and disappointed beyond what I endured in increasing health crises.
I’m also pretty much disgusted that I as a long time member matter less to the board than a visitor’s dog does. Do you have any idea how awful, demeaning and soul crushing that is? It’s humiliating. I’ve always taken care when having health issues to slip out quietly and rarely say anything to anyone, not expecting others to care about my battles. But to be chased down again and again by B-, asked about it, and then told I can sit outside like some abandoned waif and that the visitor’s dog rates more highly than I do?
I am sorry I have to do this, but I cannot be kicked around any more. I matter. My health matters more than a stupid emotional support dog and if the board cannot see that then there’s nothing more I can do but leave.
C- wrote back, told me that there had never been a board member discussion about this, that B- was lying. Later I found out that C- had lied from another board member G-. G- had taken it upon himself to call up the Costa Rica health dept. and ask about the disability laws here, which are the same as in the U.S.A., how best to accomodate both of us. He told them it was a service animal, never mentioning it was an emotional support animal. Both are handled differently. He was told that the dog had priority. We had some very unfriendly conversations about it, that G- expressing to me that it simply wasn’t possible to be ‘that’ allergic to dog fur. He wanted us to come over to his house for a meal, I had to point out that wasn’t happening because.. he had four dogs.
G- ran his mouth all over town, to family members of mine even, that it was impossible to be ‘that’ allergic, including saying it several times to my face. This is what gaslighting is. It’s when someone tries to tell you that your reality isn’t real, tries to make you question your own sanity. But this time I expected it, and knew better how to combat it. We left for another church immediately.
This was another case of me ignoring my inner voice and doing something contrary. When the board had tossed Pastor L- out on his ear because he’d managed to anger a local dumb billionaire we’d talked about leaving. It was a mere three months before. Over the course of the previous eighteen months the dumb billionaire complained copiously about his grievances and started doing juvenile things like getting a group of sycophants to point and laugh at Pastor L- during sermons. But that’s a story for another time.
The church kept reaching out to my husband, flattering and cajoling him to come back, that his ministries were too important to just abandon. He was told he could come back without me, even as I was the sole female vocalist on worship team and ran the offering count teams. It was a strange inverse to what happened when he left our old church PCC. I was begged to stay, he was blamed.
I love dogs, really I do! I love how loving and accepting they are, their kind hearts. It’s just my stupid body that reacts to the undercoat. I cannot be in some sealed spaces indoors with kinds that produce very fuzzy undercoats, even hypoallergenic dogs. Hypoallergenic does not mean its an impossibility to be allergic to that dog breed. It’s a shame because many peoples dogs tend to run up to me for a quick pet. As long as we’re not indoors and it’s certain breeds I do pet!