I Have Survived the Concentration Camp

I have recently escaped from the concentration camp, the tyranny of a warped world view from an abusive childhood. It is amazing the unbelief that can keep you from receiving your promises. I am learning the truth, and the truth is setting me free.







I was conditioned to believe that my mother was always right, that I could trust her opinion on anything. She was the worst of tyrants, conditioning me to run everything by her. She infused in me her unending suspicion about everybody, deceiving me to believe that everyone is bad, mad, or just plain out to get you. I endured her abusive manipulations and verbal abuse, convinced it was normal. She contradicted my intuition, ridiculed my insight. I was never good enough, convinced that I was always wrong, unless she approved.







When I was fourteen, my mother took my sister and me away from my father in a bitter separation. Forced from stability to instability was too much for an adolescent who was still trying to make sense of the world. My mother never hit me, but she stole my savings, accused me of things that I did not do. She found fault with me in many ways. When she wasn’t bad-mouthing others for every grievance in her life, she would rail against her own failing parents.







I lived in fear or depression around her, although I never connected my discontent with her caustic comments. Looking back, I recognize now that I was under intense pressure to try and be good, an enslaving habit of mind which crippled me.







I felt so alone in the world. One night, I got down on my knees and begged God for help. He answered my prayer most unexpectedly. When I told my mother that I was still depressed, she began screaming and yelling at me, simply unwilling to deal with me. Labeling me “spiritually sick” and beyond help, she kicked me out, sent me back home to my father, the man whom she had denigrated for so long.









Back at home, I cried myself to sleep. For the next two days, I just wandered the city to forget my shame. Miraculously, my mood improved. For the first time in months, I was happy. At the time I did not connect my mother’s absence with my improved outlook.







After Mom and Dad got back together, I still stung from her abuse, fearful that loneliness, inadequacy, or fear would overtake me.



For a long time, my mother believed that she did the right thing by sending me away. Because she was my Mom and “could not be wrong”, I regularly descended into shame and condemnation that rarely abated. I grew up believing that I was an incompetent who had to look over his shoulder all the time. Every time something bad happened, or that someone got mad at me, it was my fault. I would do what I was told, never stand up for myself, all the while taking personally everything that others said or did.



This past year, I define myself by a Higher Authority – not Mom, not Dad, not even myself.  “When my parents forsake me, then the Lord will take me up,” (Psalm 27: 10) I have forgiven many because I have been forgiven so much.



In a documentary following Holocaust survivors, one Polish Jew thrived despite the stinging privations which he had overcome. He laughed at the terrors which he had endured. “As long as I am alive, I choose to laugh!”



I have escaped the concentration camp of my childhood trauma. Why cry? I choose to laugh!