If I were to pick a scene from childhood to begin the story of what happened to my sister and me, it would be the one where under a wet tarpaulin at a Christian conference in Devon we are singing at the top of our voices, ‘My God Is So Big, So Strong and So Mighty There’s Nothing That He Cannot Do.’ Camp could often get like this, children plumped up on crowd hysteria, laughing into the faces of annual holiday friends exaggerating song actions, words growing in ferocity and volume as we competed excitedly to dramatise the enormous. 

In the children’s tent, the first of an age-ordering  of marquees, we were penned together with under elevens from ‘fellowships’ across the UK to receive the messages from a unique and highly spiritual brand of Christianity which took Paul’s gospel (his sudden transformation ironic from the point of view of the story that follows) as…gospel. It was our only holiday, a family getaway, and access to a brainwashing machine that meant our identity as people within these churches, and the development of our minds, became firmly embedded in all of its doctrine.

 Next I’d cut to a stark and poignant scene, strange and quiet in its juxtaposition, of my sister and me a decade or so later in the claustrophobic ground floor flat of an older sibling. We have entered a dual psychosis having recently converted to the fundamentalist faith of our childhood and all our beliefs, everything that has scaffolded the entirety of our mental life up until now, are being dismantled in mad tandem. Not seeing ourselves as unwell, we interpret what we’re experiencing as the Holy Spirit, and pray together through the night, calling friends, prophesying, and enjoying our perceived ‘born again’ and surrendered states whilst imagining the massive Christian revival that is coming for the whole world.

 I’d fade out of this scene and, with urgency, move in on another where a friend is waking her mum, concerned about the call she’s had in the middle of the night. For dramatic purposes, I’d hold back the information of the call and point to our parents arriving to pick us up the next morning, perceiving that our behaviour is not a case for medicine and specialist support, but rather spiritual warfare that we must allow ourselves to be guided through with prayer and rest. 

I’d use some clever movement of time, splicing between all the scenes of chaotic religious drama that follow in the home and beyond, an immense catalogue of childhood and teenage stress, mind-warping teachings, depression, poverty, family conflict, and my younger sister and I (as our two older siblings before us had already done in their separate ways) pressing self-destruct in the same university where we drank and starved our bodies in a post-home wilderness. Most of the truth and light was confusingly absent in many of the Christians we’d been surrounded by and it had gone out almost completely in a Christian mission where I’d stayed the summer before my sister and I had these simultaneous mental breakdowns. I’d need to show scenes there of forced fasting and a spirituality so intense that it was catching. How it triggered the beginnings of my deconstruction of the Christian faith, anorexia, and a profound existential crisis that only breaking the mind I’d been given would allow me to find my way out of. 

Scenes of our childhood indoctrination might include me standing on a chair in the kitchen as a four or five-year-old, an excellent memory and ability for recall allowing me to dramatise Exodus for the entertainment of the family (“And God said to Moses”). Another older sibling would one day throw stones at the farmer’s cows where the boundary between their land and our land was a stone wall, a steep bank, and hazelnut trees from which we only ever ate unripe sour-green nuts. She’d say “Sorry God” for her crime of cruelty to Fresians. I might show my mum writing letters to her family about Dad’s near-death experience being God-ordained. And I’d need to go back to that inciting incident of the radical New Testament life my younger sister and I were born into, of faith in the impossible where cars could flip over and land just in front of us on roads and we’d be safe because Dad had had a promise from God that no one in our family would ever be in an accident or seriously ill again. Our minds were grown on these beliefs, our brainstems trained up the cane of the Bible from the very first moment, shaped around and to its logic. Nothing could alter the way we’d been taught to bend towards that light.

We heard repeatedly the story of how our dad had been buried alive, and ‘spared’, in a farm accident. How it was a miracle that under a tonne of cold October mud he didn’t suffocate. In intensive care, he believed her met Jesus at his bedside whilst his kidneys failed and he was expected by doctors to die. Converting from atheist to a devout believer, he fled the farm he was raised to work on, and began a new life.

I’d try to show the complexity of our family dynamics as we watch scenes of my sister and me attempting to get help for my worsening eating disorder, only to be turned away by a hospital for having too much ‘insight’. At home afterwards, I’d be told that this is because God is over everything, and within this extreme relationship that counters modern Western culture, I’d believe and make sense of it: Yes, all my life I’ve been encouraged to love and trust the creator (before I knew even how to love any man), to nurture a relationship — which could only be done through denying the intellect. The song lyrics from that opening scene in camp would return to my mind as a maddening musical motif: My God Is So Big, So Strong and So Mighty There’s Nothing That He Cannot Do.
I can be healed.

I’d pull the curtain back even further then. To the corners of life before Dad’s accident. To before my parents meeting, and intergenerational trauma that was woven into parenting behaviours, mental illness through the generations, negative patterns of care — or control. I’d show how it is near impossible to untangle a personal identity from what we have been handed as a child, the teachings that steer the direction of our minds and ultimately those we lean towards as adults too (be that atheist or spiritual). How it’s no surprise to me that many who have left the religions of their childhoods have only done so after mental breakdowns. 

Nearing the end of the story, I’d have to reveal what was said in that call. I’d zoom in on my mum’s face in a prayer meeting, where she and Dad, eighteen years on, are asked about the darkest moment of their lives. I would show what they could not say when they look at one another and know that it is the night my sister and I rang them from that claustrophobic flat. The night my friend woke her mum because I had told her I had to die to myself for God. There was no ‘darkness’ on our side, merely mental illness and a regurgitation of teachings that they had seen as the devil. They had added the darkness to a line from the Bible about surrender that their religion had taught us in the first place.

In many ways in that scene in the flat, my sister and I were acting out the shame that has weighed heavy in our hearts all our lives, in our mental make-up. We were never good enough for that Kingdom because we couldn’t fully accept the story that I now understand most likely involves multiple episodes of what in the modern day is understood as psychosis anyway.

It would be important for me to finish this story on a happy note. To show that my sister and I were extremely lucky to recover and thankfully never experience it again.

 And so I’d want to show more than anything at the end of it the light of forgiveness that’s the good part my mind learned in all those indoctrination sessions. There’s huge power in thoughts and beliefs, their ability to lock us into systems — be that cultural, religious or familial. In many ways we are all victims of our minds, the impact these have on our body’s processing and function. I often think that’s why my sister and I recovered. Because in our sibling system we thought of it as a ‘weird’ religious experience rather than individual illnesses happening simultaneously. We promised one another that the confusion would end, and searched deeper for health and peace. We saw it was no one’s fault, not even our parents (knowing the start of their religious story and radicalisation in a church when they were themselves extremely vulnerable). But we now understood how you could make a person mad. How it could be hard to tell who the mad one is.