My Path to Satan - A Personal Story
Many times when you met someone who identifies as a Satanist or Atheist, there is a back story of intolerance and/or abuse through one of the Christian denominations or other main stream religions. I come from the unique position of having suffered religious abuse through Paganism. I know you're probably thinking the hippies with the crystals and sage? Really? Yes. Really.
I live with a disorder, Manic-Depression - Bipolar, whatever label you want to give it. It is incredibly unpleasant and not an easy thing to live with either for myself or the people around me. I spent much of my life being shamed and gas-lighted for my mental health issues. If I took medication I was "crazy and needed meds", if I didn't take medication everything that came out of my mouth was dismissed "because I was just off my meds." People close to me, friends, family, and significant others, would try to distort reality and pretend conversations between us did or didn't happen. I had one partner who would consistently pick a fight with me right before I left for work where we were both employed so that when I showed up upset and having obviously been crying, our co-workers were prone to believe him that I "was crazy and insufferable" and that it justified his cheating on me. My best friend for many years was very emotionally abusive and when I would get to a point where I'd tell her off she would berate me on how I was "making this all up because you're a fucking nut case." Those are just a few examples and you're probably wondering why I put up with that at all. Well I was young, and growing up that was what I was used to. I didn't know anything else. As a result I didn't have a proper sense of boundaries or anything to compare as "acceptable behavior" so I pretty much dealt with whatever shitty treatment was directed at me telling myself, "well at least they're here. At least they put up with me. I know I'm very hard to deal with." It would be a very long time before I understood it was better to be alone sometimes than around people who mistreat you.
As a survivor of child abuse I spent a lot of my teen years angry, hurt, and confused. Why did this happen to me? I felt like I was being punished for some unknown wrong-doing. I was furious at "God" and all the two-faced Christians that told me to "forgive," "turn the other cheek." I was a child, is God not supposed to love his children? What was so unlovable about me? And why should I forgive my abusers? This hostility and feelings of being outcast and unwanted by the Christian's god, lead me to read everything I could get my hands on in regard to religion, looking for answers. The end result? I found Christianity to not only be repulsive in their morals (misogynist, racists, hypocrites, etc) but riddled with holes in scientific accuracy surrounding their beliefs. I found something that made more sense to me; Wicca and Paganism. Communing with nature, working with energy, karma, all of that made so much more sense. More importantly I felt like I was "normal" here. I dealt with psychosis episodes when I left my abusive situation; it's a common for people who live with PTSD to develop psychosis as a means of coping with unpleasant or stressful situations. It's a hell of lot nicer to hear though that this is happening to you because "you're special" and "you're just really in tune with the other side," rather than "oh you're just a little bat-shit crazy." I was told this over and over again by many groups and individuals practicing in the Pagan community and I believed it. I whole-heartedly believed it. I even explored becoming a "death doula" to aid in people transitioning to the other side in hospice settings because I really, truly believed the images I saw and nightmares I had were some special connection I had with another realm. Turns out I just have really bad PTSD.
Before I knew that however, I was an active member of the Pagan community here in Arizona for over a decade. If you search the internet deep enough you'll come across photos of me leading and participating in rituals, practicing healings or tarot readings for others, articles I was interviewed in, etc. Some of my favorite photos I have kept, and I still maintain friendships in that community, but it's a huge part of my life I've done my best to wipe clean from my current self. Sometimes I regret that and I wish I hadn't destroyed photos, deleted websites and social media accounts, gotten rid of gifts....other times I know it's the best decision I've made for my own mental health. I joined a coven in 2011 and that pretty much consumed my life until I left in August of 2015 when the increasingly emotional abuse and dogma being enforced became too much for me to deal with. Nothing anyone ever did was "right," or good enough, we were systematically isolated from the rest of the community as it was rule we could not attend other group's rituals or classes if she was hosting one. She made sure she was always hosting one. Fear and threats of being kicked out for the slightest disobedience or not meeting absurd expectations of time and energy dedicated to the coven were almost a regular discussion in our group. I watched our leader attack two other women for their mental health impairments and remove them from the coven as she so often threatened to, berate another on the phone in front of all of us for daring to choose recovering from a hangover over attending a ritual (yes I know a dumb college student got drunk on Halloween, how unheard of) and it more and more felt like I was attending one of the churches I had so vehemently spent my life opposing for the way they mistreated and shamed people, especially women (she many times went on tirades against sex workers and the goddess temple for being "prostitutes in disguise"), even so far as to sit there and tell one of the women before she had kicked her out that she lost her job and was having such poor luck because she broke her celibacy vow to one of our Goddesses (no she was making destructive life choices and should have gotten some help - getting laid had nothing to do with it), just with different terminology and some sage thrown in to make it different. Confronting her on her inappropriate and abusive behavior just lead to her gas-lighting me, attacking me, and manipulating personal struggles she knew I lived with to her advantage to make it appear to others that I was just a "rogue witch" that couldn't follow rules. I continued to battle with this "leader" for a good year in the community itself after leaving, one by one watching members of that coven, who had become like sisters to me (turns out that feeling was never mutual but there was a time when I've done anything for any of them) leave my life, some by force due to her threats, she even kicked one of them out at one point because of this. I tried to establish my own coven, to provide a safer alternative for some of those women and others I had met - which lead to research. A lot of research.
During my time with that coven I was discouraged from using psychiatric medication; it "created a film on the aura and made it harder to commune with the gods", it "limited my power." This shouldn't be surprising, we were discouraged from most medications or common medical practices. Naturopathy was better. We often had classes on how to make our own salves, oils, herbal teas (I was once given tea for an asthma attack during a ritual so that I could continue working because it was "better than an inhaler in some cases"- guess who ended up in the hospital later that night?) and encouraged to use alternative medicine whenever possible - because our leader was somewhat of a conspiracy theorist on big pharma and accused everything as attempts to poison our bodies - and this mentality didn't just leave me they day I walked away from the coven. But as luck would have it, as I researched my own materials for my coven, I also began a relationship with a very vocal atheist. He's loving and supportive, but he's also very blunt and quick to point out when something isn't right or doesn't add up. So sometimes when I was making these oils or salves, or practicing a new ritual I was writing he'd start teasing me and I'd pull up google to prove he was wrong...except he often wasn't. It wasn't long until I read enough scientific articles and materials to realize I had been living one ridiculous lie after another; these naturopathy techniques were mostly bullshit spewed out by people who cherry-picked their "evidence" or disregarded facts completely - probably the most devastating was discovering there is absolutely no reality to astrology or "mercury retrograde", two things I had always factored into a lot of my decisions. It's not like this information was just now available to me; I had just never bothered to look. I had never thought to question any of it.
I have always been infuriated by people who deny scientific facts to stick to their beliefs. "how can they just blatantly fucking ignore facts?!" I have many times shouted after infuriating arguments, usually with pro-lifers or creationist, and now I found myself in that very position. Do I continue to stand by my beliefs and choose to disregard scientifically proven facts that reflect them to be false or accept it and change? I'm a lot of things, a hypocrite is not one of them.
By my one year anniversary of leaving my coven I had denounced my faith in magick, naturopathy, and any god or goddesses. I got ride of my altar, books, crystals, sage bundles, all of it. The really solidifying moment in making this decision came one night when I was driving home from my father's house after having had a lengthy discussion with a family member about how my antidepressants were working (I was extremely suicidal after I left the coven and I ended up seeking professional help), and it dawned on me the "gifts" I had suffered with most of my life, the psychosis and nightmares, had all but stopped. "I'm just fucking crazy." I remember literally saying out loud as I was realizing for the first time in my life I had been blind to what was real, I had chosen the nice pretty story of being special over being mentally ill and combined with all the reading I had done I just sat there feeling so stupid - stupid and angry.
I am personally a big fan of metaphorical drama. I don't need a destruction ritual to get rid of something, but it feels good, and that's okay. There doesn't need to be a deity involved, or some supernatural belief attached to it to provide a person with some sense of closure or release. So when I saw the flyer circling around Facebook for an Unbatism Ritual in Bisbee Arizona the weekend of my birthday, I remember thinking how nice it would be to truly feel cleansed of the coven, paganism, and the life I was leaving behind me. It gave me some closure and a clear defined starting point in starting my life over. The added benefit to attending that event was meeting the Arizona Chapter of The Satanic Temple, meeting people who would become real friends, building relationships with causes I cared about, being part of a real community based off mutual want instead of force or fear of exclusion. It's been the sense of belonging I've looked for most of my life. It's not perfect by any means, nothing is, but I look at pictures of me now; I genuinely look happy. I am happy. I'm disappointed in myself when I look back at such a significant part of my past and realize I never felt that way before. Every time I worry that I'm not doing enough for the chapter, that someone is mad at me, or I apologize for things I shouldn't be apologizing for, every time I find myself cycling fear through my mind that they are just going to suddenly kick me out and hate me forever...I remember that I did that to myself. I allowed others to mistreat me and I continue to allow the disgusting residue of their behavior impact me now.
That's going to end this year. I plan on participating in the next Unbaptism, this time I need to toss out all this emotional baggage like I did the fairytale world of goddesses and reiki healings... I need to live my best life all the time, not just most of the time.
But anyway, so yea that's how I got to this point in my life. Now excuse me while I go pick up my prescription and head to therapy.
I live with a disorder, Manic-Depression - Bipolar, whatever label you want to give it. It is incredibly unpleasant and not an easy thing to live with either for myself or the people around me. I spent much of my life being shamed and gas-lighted for my mental health issues. If I took medication I was "crazy and needed meds", if I didn't take medication everything that came out of my mouth was dismissed "because I was just off my meds." People close to me, friends, family, and significant others, would try to distort reality and pretend conversations between us did or didn't happen. I had one partner who would consistently pick a fight with me right before I left for work where we were both employed so that when I showed up upset and having obviously been crying, our co-workers were prone to believe him that I "was crazy and insufferable" and that it justified his cheating on me. My best friend for many years was very emotionally abusive and when I would get to a point where I'd tell her off she would berate me on how I was "making this all up because you're a fucking nut case." Those are just a few examples and you're probably wondering why I put up with that at all. Well I was young, and growing up that was what I was used to. I didn't know anything else. As a result I didn't have a proper sense of boundaries or anything to compare as "acceptable behavior" so I pretty much dealt with whatever shitty treatment was directed at me telling myself, "well at least they're here. At least they put up with me. I know I'm very hard to deal with." It would be a very long time before I understood it was better to be alone sometimes than around people who mistreat you.
As a survivor of child abuse I spent a lot of my teen years angry, hurt, and confused. Why did this happen to me? I felt like I was being punished for some unknown wrong-doing. I was furious at "God" and all the two-faced Christians that told me to "forgive," "turn the other cheek." I was a child, is God not supposed to love his children? What was so unlovable about me? And why should I forgive my abusers? This hostility and feelings of being outcast and unwanted by the Christian's god, lead me to read everything I could get my hands on in regard to religion, looking for answers. The end result? I found Christianity to not only be repulsive in their morals (misogynist, racists, hypocrites, etc) but riddled with holes in scientific accuracy surrounding their beliefs. I found something that made more sense to me; Wicca and Paganism. Communing with nature, working with energy, karma, all of that made so much more sense. More importantly I felt like I was "normal" here. I dealt with psychosis episodes when I left my abusive situation; it's a common for people who live with PTSD to develop psychosis as a means of coping with unpleasant or stressful situations. It's a hell of lot nicer to hear though that this is happening to you because "you're special" and "you're just really in tune with the other side," rather than "oh you're just a little bat-shit crazy." I was told this over and over again by many groups and individuals practicing in the Pagan community and I believed it. I whole-heartedly believed it. I even explored becoming a "death doula" to aid in people transitioning to the other side in hospice settings because I really, truly believed the images I saw and nightmares I had were some special connection I had with another realm. Turns out I just have really bad PTSD.
Before I knew that however, I was an active member of the Pagan community here in Arizona for over a decade. If you search the internet deep enough you'll come across photos of me leading and participating in rituals, practicing healings or tarot readings for others, articles I was interviewed in, etc. Some of my favorite photos I have kept, and I still maintain friendships in that community, but it's a huge part of my life I've done my best to wipe clean from my current self. Sometimes I regret that and I wish I hadn't destroyed photos, deleted websites and social media accounts, gotten rid of gifts....other times I know it's the best decision I've made for my own mental health. I joined a coven in 2011 and that pretty much consumed my life until I left in August of 2015 when the increasingly emotional abuse and dogma being enforced became too much for me to deal with. Nothing anyone ever did was "right," or good enough, we were systematically isolated from the rest of the community as it was rule we could not attend other group's rituals or classes if she was hosting one. She made sure she was always hosting one. Fear and threats of being kicked out for the slightest disobedience or not meeting absurd expectations of time and energy dedicated to the coven were almost a regular discussion in our group. I watched our leader attack two other women for their mental health impairments and remove them from the coven as she so often threatened to, berate another on the phone in front of all of us for daring to choose recovering from a hangover over attending a ritual (yes I know a dumb college student got drunk on Halloween, how unheard of) and it more and more felt like I was attending one of the churches I had so vehemently spent my life opposing for the way they mistreated and shamed people, especially women (she many times went on tirades against sex workers and the goddess temple for being "prostitutes in disguise"), even so far as to sit there and tell one of the women before she had kicked her out that she lost her job and was having such poor luck because she broke her celibacy vow to one of our Goddesses (no she was making destructive life choices and should have gotten some help - getting laid had nothing to do with it), just with different terminology and some sage thrown in to make it different. Confronting her on her inappropriate and abusive behavior just lead to her gas-lighting me, attacking me, and manipulating personal struggles she knew I lived with to her advantage to make it appear to others that I was just a "rogue witch" that couldn't follow rules. I continued to battle with this "leader" for a good year in the community itself after leaving, one by one watching members of that coven, who had become like sisters to me (turns out that feeling was never mutual but there was a time when I've done anything for any of them) leave my life, some by force due to her threats, she even kicked one of them out at one point because of this. I tried to establish my own coven, to provide a safer alternative for some of those women and others I had met - which lead to research. A lot of research.
During my time with that coven I was discouraged from using psychiatric medication; it "created a film on the aura and made it harder to commune with the gods", it "limited my power." This shouldn't be surprising, we were discouraged from most medications or common medical practices. Naturopathy was better. We often had classes on how to make our own salves, oils, herbal teas (I was once given tea for an asthma attack during a ritual so that I could continue working because it was "better than an inhaler in some cases"- guess who ended up in the hospital later that night?) and encouraged to use alternative medicine whenever possible - because our leader was somewhat of a conspiracy theorist on big pharma and accused everything as attempts to poison our bodies - and this mentality didn't just leave me they day I walked away from the coven. But as luck would have it, as I researched my own materials for my coven, I also began a relationship with a very vocal atheist. He's loving and supportive, but he's also very blunt and quick to point out when something isn't right or doesn't add up. So sometimes when I was making these oils or salves, or practicing a new ritual I was writing he'd start teasing me and I'd pull up google to prove he was wrong...except he often wasn't. It wasn't long until I read enough scientific articles and materials to realize I had been living one ridiculous lie after another; these naturopathy techniques were mostly bullshit spewed out by people who cherry-picked their "evidence" or disregarded facts completely - probably the most devastating was discovering there is absolutely no reality to astrology or "mercury retrograde", two things I had always factored into a lot of my decisions. It's not like this information was just now available to me; I had just never bothered to look. I had never thought to question any of it.
I have always been infuriated by people who deny scientific facts to stick to their beliefs. "how can they just blatantly fucking ignore facts?!" I have many times shouted after infuriating arguments, usually with pro-lifers or creationist, and now I found myself in that very position. Do I continue to stand by my beliefs and choose to disregard scientifically proven facts that reflect them to be false or accept it and change? I'm a lot of things, a hypocrite is not one of them.
By my one year anniversary of leaving my coven I had denounced my faith in magick, naturopathy, and any god or goddesses. I got ride of my altar, books, crystals, sage bundles, all of it. The really solidifying moment in making this decision came one night when I was driving home from my father's house after having had a lengthy discussion with a family member about how my antidepressants were working (I was extremely suicidal after I left the coven and I ended up seeking professional help), and it dawned on me the "gifts" I had suffered with most of my life, the psychosis and nightmares, had all but stopped. "I'm just fucking crazy." I remember literally saying out loud as I was realizing for the first time in my life I had been blind to what was real, I had chosen the nice pretty story of being special over being mentally ill and combined with all the reading I had done I just sat there feeling so stupid - stupid and angry.
I am personally a big fan of metaphorical drama. I don't need a destruction ritual to get rid of something, but it feels good, and that's okay. There doesn't need to be a deity involved, or some supernatural belief attached to it to provide a person with some sense of closure or release. So when I saw the flyer circling around Facebook for an Unbatism Ritual in Bisbee Arizona the weekend of my birthday, I remember thinking how nice it would be to truly feel cleansed of the coven, paganism, and the life I was leaving behind me. It gave me some closure and a clear defined starting point in starting my life over. The added benefit to attending that event was meeting the Arizona Chapter of The Satanic Temple, meeting people who would become real friends, building relationships with causes I cared about, being part of a real community based off mutual want instead of force or fear of exclusion. It's been the sense of belonging I've looked for most of my life. It's not perfect by any means, nothing is, but I look at pictures of me now; I genuinely look happy. I am happy. I'm disappointed in myself when I look back at such a significant part of my past and realize I never felt that way before. Every time I worry that I'm not doing enough for the chapter, that someone is mad at me, or I apologize for things I shouldn't be apologizing for, every time I find myself cycling fear through my mind that they are just going to suddenly kick me out and hate me forever...I remember that I did that to myself. I allowed others to mistreat me and I continue to allow the disgusting residue of their behavior impact me now.
That's going to end this year. I plan on participating in the next Unbaptism, this time I need to toss out all this emotional baggage like I did the fairytale world of goddesses and reiki healings... I need to live my best life all the time, not just most of the time.
But anyway, so yea that's how I got to this point in my life. Now excuse me while I go pick up my prescription and head to therapy.
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