Suppressing the Fight or Flight Response

A Helpful Tool if you want to Embrace a High-Control Religion

In 2017, when I began digging into what, exactly, had caused me to deep dive into evangelical christianity, and ultimately what the crux was that enabled me to break away, I had to reach back—all the way back to my earliest memories. That was when I began to see that my mother’s harsh and abusive control had perfectly groomed me for life in the church.

Before I was old enough to go to school, I was used to being controlled, and I hid my true nature to stay safe.

One of my first memories is of physically running away from my mother.

I was three.

I’d been hunting for dyed Easter eggs in our Colorado house’s gold-painted living room because several inches of snow had fallen overnight. When the sun emerged, my mother dressed me in a navy blue dress, white tights, and fake fur coat, my long brown hair in ringlets. My father set up the tripod outside and we three stood together in our slushy yard with snow-capped Pikes Peak as backdrop.

“Look at the camera and smile,” my mother said. She lay her gold-ringed hand on my shoulder, a frozen smile on her lips, her high-heeled shoes posed at a debutante’s angle.

But I spotted rabbit tracks in the snow. They etched curlicues across the yard and disappeared under the blue spruce we were posed in front of.

The Easter Bunny.

I crouched to peer under the spruce’s lowest branches and my mother yanked me up by the arm.

“You’re ruining the picture!”

The shrill edge to her voice caused a cold fear to shudder through my body. We stood still again and faced the camera. But the rabbit tracks looked fresh. The bunny had to be there. I crouched again and my mother yanked me up harder this time.

“Keep this up and I’ll get the wooden spoon.” Her voice was low and clenched.

I blinked at the camera. My father had arranged it in my direct line of sight with the sun. I squinted and tried to look at it, but it hurt my eyes. I thought I heard the click, so I turned and squatted again to peer under the tree.

Then something in the air shifted.

“That’s it!”

My mother’s red-lipstick smile had vanished. In its place was a deep line between her dark, penciled-on eyebrows. She stomped away from my father and me, across the slushy patio in wedge heels, her green maternity dress swishing against her pantyhose, her teased black hair encircling her head like a helmet.

I looked to my father for help. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t meant to make her mad. I hadn’t meant to ruin the photos. But he was squinting off into the distance, his hands in his suit pockets.

Through the screen door, Everything is Beautiful played on my mother’s kitchen radio—her favorite song—but she wasn’t singing now. Drawers slammed and angry footsteps echoed across the yellow linoleum.

The screen slid open with a snap and I jumped. She charged toward me with one of my father’s belts curled in her fist. My scalp electrified with panic. I didn’t think, I just ran.

I ran across the backyard to the gate in the chain-link fence my father had shown me how to unlatch. I shoved it open and ran to the side street, heading past our neighbor’s house as tiny rivulets of snow melt rushed over and into my shoes, drenching my tights.

A chemical reaction takes place inside the human body when a person physically fights or runs away from danger. When the brain detects a threat, it activates the glands that produce adrenaline, making the heart pump faster. That extra blood oxygen gives the body more energy and readies us to fight or run. When we physically strike back or sprint away, our body rids itself of the threat, and the chemicals can begin to return to normal levels.

At three, I had only begun to push back against my mother. I still felt confident enough to run away even though she scared me. Within a year or two though, I knew better. Running or resisting only made things worse.

When I suppressed my natural urge to fight or run, my body chemicals remained activated, and my nervous system became overworked, trying to regulate itself.

In Evangelical Christianity, congregants are urged to submit to the teachings of the Bible, to erase their true human nature in the name of following God, and to study and question, but only within a carefully contructed Biblical framework. Starting as small children, they are encouraged to memorize and internalize Bible verses about erasing their wants and needs, and embracing only the tenets of God and the church.

That Easter morning, I ran for what felt like a long time until I stopped, looked around, and realized I had never ventured so far up our street alone. I turned, and from two houses away, I could see my father with his head down, trudging dutifully through the gate. My mother disappeared into the kitchen. From that distance, they looked small, like toys. I couldn’t see my mother’s face, but I imagined she slammed the coiled belt on the kitchen table and then pulled the shiny silver compact out of her purse to powder her nose.

My father walked up the street in his suit and picked me up with a smile under his mustache.

“C’mon Darlin.” His voice smelled of wintergreen lifesavers.

I lay my head on his shoulder and wished he would buckle me into the backseat of his old Bronco and take me to Norma’s convenience store for Smarties or Pixie Sticks. Then maybe he would drive me into the mountains where we would walk together to the gazebo at Green Mountain Falls and look for rainbow trout in the pond. Anywhere but back to the house where my mother was already sitting in the idling car, waiting behind her dark sunglasses for my father to drive us to church.

He turned and carried me back down the street, into our driveway, and toward the car. My sprint up the road had been all for naught. Perhaps the same other-worldly pull that kept me bound to my mother had claimed my father, too. He buckled me into the seat behind her. The scent of her perfume filled the car and I could feel her anger seeping over the seat onto me. I worried that she had the belt up there on her lap. I could barely breathe.

I couldn’t run away. I was too small to fight. I would have to find another way to survive.

The evangelical church we headed to that morning was there waiting to welcome me into a lifetime of obedience and capitulation.

Beautiful Things I Read This Week

The Virtual Wound by Maya C. Popa

Stealing Mrs Glasman’s Sultanas by Ros Barber

I’m only interested in the mid-life by Amy Key

If You’re in Maine

I’m teaching two local, in-person classes in September and October. Dates will be posted soon.

Are you a member of Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance? If not, you should be. They offer a plethora of workshops and events and opportunities all over the state. And they have this great thing called Gather where writers meet in various areas to talk, network, and get to know each other.