existential crisis

Musings on how Christians should treat each other

In the church, we have people using each other and treating each other like dirt,

bullying each other,

cussing at each other,

calling other people names for disagreeing with them on politics or religion or personal issues,

jumping to conclusions, without apologizing for their outbursts, without trying to resolve things peaceably, without trying to understand each other.

Having an organ in the church (a controversy among Orthodox converts) becomes more important than whether or not the congregation is learning how to love Christ and fellow man.

They talk as if it is their right to respond violently–whether verbally or physically–to a perceived slight, even though the writings of the Apostles and the Church Fathers tell us this perception of entitlement comes straight from Hell.

Then these people go to the Communion chalice as if they’ve done nothing wrong.

How can we expect the world to bang down our door when we act like this? If Christians are just as bad, if not worse, than the “heathens,” then we have nothing concrete to show that our invisible, supernatural beliefs are Truth.

Early Church congregations added members through their acts of charity and love, not through having the best, most persuasive speeches, or the most awesome worship music, or the flashiest tracts.

Contemporary accounts I’ve read of the time speak of a Church that was quite different from the surrounding culture, not because of dress or food or music but because they were taking care of each other and their neighbors, rather than following their own selfish interests.

Before you go to Communion, examine yourself:

Have you at least tried to make up with the person you hurt?

Have you tried to soothe the person whose feelings you hurt?

Have you bullied anyone?

Do you think no one has the right to feel hurt but yourself?

Have you realized that yelling and screaming or hitting first, then asking questions later, means you will lose friends or family, without them even wanting to tell you the truth about what you misinterpreted?

Have you so affected someone with your harshness and ill-will and abuse that when they see you in church taking Communion, they have a strong urge to run to the bathroom and throw up?

It’s enough to lead one to cynicism about religion. And to make one realize that we can’t judge someone for leaving Christianity if they’ve been driven out by what they’ve seen and heard from fellow Christians. We may not understand, but God surely does.

[Originally written in part 4 of my review of The Indwelling, which I posted on my blog/website/Facebook on February 2, 2011.]

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. We share a house

3. Tracy’s abuse turns on me

4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children

5. My frustrations mount

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

8. The Incident

9. The fallout; a second chance?

10. Grief

11. Struggle to regain normalcy

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13. Conclusion

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

14. Updates on Richard’s Criminal Charges

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on February 2, 2011March 25, 2020

Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

In late May or early June of 2009, while I was in an IRC chatroom with Richard–there only because I could find him there, not from any particular love of the place–two of the admins started sexually harassing and bullying me. Several of the other members–including a woman!–egged them on.

I did nothing to bring this on, was just sitting in the chat waiting to start talking with Richard. I had said nothing for some time, and probably wasn’t even watching the screen at first, while doing other things online. I sat there in silent disbelief when they started doing this.

(As for the woman who egged them on: At an earlier date in that same IRC channel, Richard posted, “Richard is sexing” [her handle], and Tracy posted that she was grabbing popcorn.

(I was amazed because I thought Tracy got insanely jealous and furious over that sort of thing. So I wrote him privately, asking about it. He wrote back that Tracy is friends with that person.

(Um…What was I, chopped liver? I was friends with Tracy, so why was I not allowed to do the same thing? And how could Tracy know this person from the Internet better than she knew me?–

(–Not that I wanted Richard to post “Richard is sexing Nyssa.” On the contrary, I directly told him I didn’t want him to joke like that with me. It was too–weird and icky to say you’re “sexing” someone other than your wife.)

Here’s what happened: I was just sitting there in the channel, which did sometimes amuse me. I may have been completely silent on the channel, maybe chatting a little with Richard in the channel or privately, because he was the reason I went there in the first place: It was easiest to find him there.

Then the Creep, who was one of the admins, because my handle was a hobbit, began making cracks like, was I hairy all over. His comments turned to my private parts.

I was just sitting there quietly and in disbelief, not responding at all, when he started going on and on about how awful it is for women to not shave that area, and how his girlfriend shaves.

And then one of the other Creeps, also an admin, started insisting I post pics of that area. I said nothing to these guys to bring this on; I don’t think I said a word through much of this.

I thought Richard would stick up for me, but he said nothing, at least not publicly so I could see it.

Richard quickly went onto a channel I myself had made recently for personal friends, so I could get away from these people and still talk with him. (He knew about this channel, which I hoped he would use all the time so I wouldn’t have to go into that nasty IRC channel. But he rarely used it.)

While this stuff was going on, Tracy came in the main chatroom. I expected that she had seen everything and was going to give these creeps a piece of her mind, complete with her usual cussing.

But instead, when one of the admins told her I was being a b**ch for refusing to show him a picture of my private parts, she just said, “You know how hobbits are,” and started joking around and chatting with them about having a get-together at her house.

I finally told the main harasser to bite me. The other admin said that was a stupid thing to say. Then they kicked me off the channel, and banned me for several days. I kept checking to see if I could get in, but just for information’s sake: I intended to have nothing more to do with that channel and those jerks.

These filthy creeps were actually friends of Richard and Tracy! Nearly a year later, I learned that Richard told them they were being jerks. But he never made them apologize or anything. And they knew I was his real-life close friend, but did this anyway.

I was shaken and upset for days, trying to watch movies on TV, but this was constantly on my mind. It was disturbing, made me feel gross.

For probably at least a year, even making love to my husband would bring it back to mind, because of how gross it made me feel.

This was no joking around–This was sexual harassment! And Richard and Tracy did absolutely NOTHING to stick up for me!

On this page, I describe guys who sexually harassed me in high school, not just students but even a teacher! And here it was happening all over again!

I once mentioned the teacher to Richard. And as I wrote in an e-mail to Richard on June 5, 2009,

I’m sending this by both e-mail and [online game] because I obviously have no idea which one you’ll check first.
I’ve been feeling this massive boredom and sadness the past few days because of so many things happening at once….Family and friends dealing with problems, and being blindsided with my own issues at the same time….
This strange feeling of not knowing if I want to be around people or just hide away even from my best friends, waiting and waiting to hear that something has changed or been resolved….
I try to be happy and it almost feels like I’m manufacturing it, it’s not really felt.
I try to ignore the [IRC] thing, try to act like it’s not a big deal, but it just isn’t working.
I have to be honest with myself. I have to put my finger on the problem: Why should I be upset about being banned from a place with people I don’t even like?
If that’s all it is, then I’d feel like an idiot. So it can’t just be that. Is it pride because I’m not the sort of person who gets banned from *anywhere*? It’s part of it, maybe, but not all.
Is it the crying out for justice? Maybe that’s it. I want somebody to get chewed out. I want apologies. I feel humiliated.
That’s part of it: The humiliation. I’ve been in flame wars before; I recall once sticking up for my friends and getting ridiculed for it, until finally the sysop put a stop to the whole thing. I learned how not to feed the trolls.
But in this case I wasn’t even feeding the trolls. I was just bored and playing a little here and there to pass the time, not being mean or nasty to anybody.
Another part is that I went there in the first place simply so I could find you and play with you on IRC. We could all play off each other instead of me trying to think up something to do or say with just you….
It was fun to play with you and your friends and now for no fault of my own, I can’t do it anymore, I feel cut off, pushed aside like the kid nobody wants to play with.
I have nowhere else to go; none of my friends seem to want to play on IRC even though it can be like the old BBS’s we miss so much.
The humiliation comes from, mostly, being verbally abused for no reason and the others standing by and letting it happen–heck, some even joining in, saying don’t let the door hit me in the a** etc. etc., even a *girl* playing along like it was funny.
I remember it was [The Creep], [a few others], and possibly one other though I don’t remember now. You say you were chatting with [The Creep];
I want to hear that you told him to knock it off and that he’s being an a****** to a dear friend of yours and that he’d better be apologizing to me ASAP because his “joke” is not at all funny.
These guys remind me of this “popular” guy my freshman year of high school who spent the whole year sexually harassing me every lunch period. He even exposed himself to me twice. His “popular” friends just laughed.
It gave me an ulcer; after lunch I would practically double up in pain.
Actually, come to think of it, he wasn’t the only one: There were also two guys in Biology class who [sexually] harassed me. Once they even got so loud that the teacher had to stop his lecture and tell them to be quiet. I never did anything to these guys; I was just minding my own business.
When Tracy came in I thought she’d seen everything and was going to chew out [The Creep], especially after he said I’m being b*****y for not posting obscene pictures of myself, but instead she just says “that’s how hobbits are” and starts joking with him and arranging some get-together….
They start talking about doing it here in [our hometown]….
I don’t want these people anywhere near me if that’s how they treat women. All I ever did was be nice; I thought being your friend would mean good treatment; in return I got sexually harassed and verbally abused and banned. As far as I’m concerned, these are not good people. Even as a joke–That just isn’t funny.
Now after I get it all out I finally understand why I’m having trouble getting past this as just some other stupid Internet thing that can vanish simply by not going to that forum/channel/chatroom/newsgroup/mailing list anymore.
And also why I have to tell you how I feel. I feel sick inside. I know you were disgusted by the whole thing as well; I’m not blaming you for anything. I just can’t keep bottling it up.

On June 9, I wrote to Richard,

Oh, look, I’m banned from [the IRC channel] again. Whatever. I have no time or energy for [The Creep’s] games. I only go there for a split second to see if you’re around, anyway.
I just finished watching Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” A knight, Antonius Block, returns from the Crusades to a plague-ridden Sweden, only to confront Death in a fateful chess game. Death is bloodthirsty and begins stalking his traveling companions as well.
There’s also a cool fire-and-brimstone sermon which is made even better by the Swedish language, with its accents and trills. What Baptist preacher can match that?
What’s up with the baby having no diaper? The baby is only a year old, yet I never saw a diaper on its butt once. In fact, I never saw *anything* on its butt.
To think it only got made because another of his movies was successful at Cannes. The theme seems to be that we can’t know if God, Satan, Heaven or Hell are real until after we die; even Death tells Antonius that he doesn’t know.
We see the fear of various characters that they’re going into emptiness. The supposed “witch” is full of terror as she faces emptiness at the stake; she says she sees Satan and talks with him, but we can’t tell if she’s crazy or lying, so Antonius still can’t get his answer.
This is why I don’t understand atheists who say it’s a wonderful thing that after death is nothing. Who wants to go into emptiness?

(The last part shows that spiritual doubt and despair already plagued me, and had for a few years. Richard’s betrayal of me in 2010 was the last straw plunging me into a spiritual pit of fearing that death truly is the end and nobody is up there helping us.)

I thought he would distance himself from them, stop hanging out with them, because they were so horrible, because they would treat a woman like that, because they were sexual harassers.

But no, he still kept going into that channel, still kept talking to the worst offender on the phone. He occasionally brought them up in conversation. I couldn’t understand how he could do this.

But he only mentioned them once or twice over the next year, so I said nothing–until I heard he was going to have them all over to his house in 2010. More on this below.

And after what I wrote to him about past sexual harassment and how I was adversely affected by what happened in that chatroom–

It still baffles me how nonchalantly he kept associating with these people, especially the Creep. I can excuse my other Internet friends, who weren’t there, since I never told them about it. But he was an eyewitness!

Then, as I describe below, he later blew it off as me being too “sensitive” and “ridiculous”!!!!!!!!

This was yet another sign of Richard’s true character, of his false friendship, but I did not want to believe it.

I don’t care if you’re sick of hearing about internet trolls. I’m sick of hearing about them too—but I’m also sick of hearing from them.
I’m sick of women being treated like shit and then being treated like shit for complaining about being treated like shit.
So anyway, don’t shut up. Keep complaining. This is your internet too. –Lindy West, We must not shut up about how women are treated on the Internet

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. We share a house

3. Tracy’s abuse turns on me

4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children

5. My frustrations mount

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

8. The Incident

9. The fallout; a second chance?

10. Grief

11. Struggle to regain normalcy

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13. Conclusion

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

14. Updates on Richard’s Criminal Charges

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

Why I put this story on the Web–at great personal risk

I keep putting up this story and taking it down again and putting it back up again. I take it down because I wonder how much I really want to post on the Web.

Then I put it back up because the issues in here–child abuse, domestic violence, bullying, women who abuse men–are very important and need to be addressed.

It’s a risk which sometimes I do and sometimes don’t want to take, but there are many things in here that need to be said about modern society–and it’s hard to make a complete picture of what happened without posting all of it. However, there are some private details which must be kept private.

1. This page is for NLDers, introverts, fellow bullying victims, fellow abuse survivors and friends of abuse victims.

2. I want to help raise awareness that women do abuse, too, not just men. If the roles were reversed and Richard did the things I saw Tracy do and heard that Tracy did, nobody would question that he was a jerk and abuser and that she needed to get out. But because the woman was the abuser, Richard kept trying to hold it together.

It takes great courage or stupidity to post this, because I’m scared the bully Tracy will find it and retaliate. She is, after all, physically violent when she chooses to be. (But then, she thinks I’m stupid anyway.)

There’s also still the faint hope that one day soon Tracy will regret the things she’s done, apologize and try to change.

But if she does find it, or Richard finds it–who knows, maybe reading this will show them just what they’ve done and that theirs are not the only opinions that matter. Maybe it will inspire them to make amends and changes in their own lives.

If they just look and laugh and make no apologies, then that would be childish and prove they have no business coming back into our lives. If Tracy beats me up, I’ll finally have physical proof of her true character.

[Update: The above was written somewhere between 2010 and 2011. They did indeed find this in May 2012; see here.]

3. But I’ve read other people’s accounts of how they’ve been bullied and abused.

So my story burns within me to be told as well, expressing to the ether what happened, hoping other abuse victims will be helped by it and learn from it–especially people who deal with NVLD, Asperger’s or selective mutism, or who are introverts, and whose social understanding is hampered.

I have been betrayed and thrown to the wolves by the very person I thought had my back.

4. You will see that it’s useless to deal with someone who is jealous, controlling and/or abusive, but won’t deal with her issues properly.

You will hopefully learn that it just isn’t worth trying to pacify such a person, that it’s best to just cut them out of your life early–before they infect you with their emotional damage and leave you to deal with the pain, the post traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms, the lies they spread about you, etc. Even a dear friendship isn’t worth that.

5. I hope to demonstrate the evils of jealousy, to make a plea for all those who are judged by advice columnists and bloggers and the like as whores and “inappropriate” based simply on one side given us by an upset wife in a short letter. There may be more to that story than you realize.

6. I hope to help NLDers realize their naïveté can make them far too trusting, far too easily taken advantage of.

7. As a writer, I am driven to tell stories, even and especially my own stories, whether positive or negative.

8. There’s a huge lack of stories, even on the Net, about the friends and families of people who are involved in domestic or child abuse situations; friends who are being abused by friends; the friends of friends who are being abused by friends.

You read about them, but mostly a sentence or two about how friends and family are driven away by the abuser and/or subjected to abuse as well, because they object to how the abuser treats their friend.

I searched and searched to find stories about friendship abuse, but kept finding very little (except occasionally in comments to blogs or advice columns). There are plenty of survivor stories from people who were abused by parents or romantic partners. The dynamics are obviously different, making it hard to relate if you’re the friend being abused.

So that’s another reason I put these stories here, because this is about a friend who sees her best friend’s verbally and physically violent marriage, objects, then finds herself subjected to abuse and accusations because she objected, until finally she cuts these people out of her life at great personal grief.

This story is for people who are abused by friends, or the spouses of friends, or who feel helpless as a friend or family member is domestically abused. Perhaps you will see that while the abuse of me did anger me quite a bit, what angered me the most was how Tracy abused Richard, the children, and others.

9. I want to help raise awareness of different types of domestic abuse.

10. I want to help raise awareness of bullying and abuse in other contexts.

11. We need to get our stories out there so others learn how to recognize bullying and abuse–to get away from it, to stop doing it, to help others out of it. Despite decades of attention, this problem persists.

12. I want to help others learn from my mistakes, of which you will probably find many.

13. I want to record my struggle with loss of faith and trying to hold onto it, after the most significant person in my conversion to Orthodoxy, became my betrayer and manipulator. The fall of a spiritual mentor into some kind of sin does happen now and then, shaking the faith of the ones who looked up to him, so this story is universal.

14. I want to raise awareness for what it’s like to be an introvert, or to have NLD/Asperger’s/selective mutism, and how people like us are constantly bullied in today’s American society, which values extroversion and looks down upon introversion.

15. And, well, this story is true from my perspective (that last bit added for legal reasons). I wouldn’t be so confident with a lie.

Here is another story of a woman abused by a friend, as seen through the eyes of another woman who eventually became subjected to abuse as well, for sticking up for the abused. And here is what appears to be the story of the friend being abused.

Here is another story of a woman being abused by her female friend, who is a narcissist. From what I have observed, Richard and Tracy both have narcissistic traits. Note the following paragraph from this link, from JoyfulAliveWoman’s blog. Note that her friendship was heterosexual, that there was nothing sexual about it, and yet this woman hooked in JAW so much that she wrote this:

I was under H’s spell. I couldn’t get enough of her. I became Codependent with her. It was pathetic.
No one else had that effect upon me, nor had they ever. My relationships with others were different.
That isn’t to say those relationships weren’t challenging, but there was a “hypnotic and obsessive quality” to the relationship with H (strong characteristics of a codependent, dysfunctional relationship).

H had her so enthralled that, even though she didn’t acknowledge that JAW had wisdom and insight of her own, and her own superior attitude sometimes inspired JAW to rebel, JAW was always the one to go crawling back, contrite, while her objections were swept under the rug.

It wasn’t like this in the beginning between Richard and me, not until later on, but it was always that way with Tracy and me.

Although it is a common belief that grooming is most relevant to children, the same or similar psychological processes are used by perpetrators to exploit adults.
In the case of adult grooming, the victims family and friends are also manipulated into thinking the perpetrator is a “nice guy” and that he can be trusted.
It is not only a perpetrator’s victims that are groomed (which would be considered emotional abuse), but the victims’ family and friends, the perpetrator’s own family and friends, and even public servants and medical professionals (in which case it is purposeful manipulation). –Mel Stewart, The Fine Art of Grooming

I’ve described the Richard and Tracy story in little bits and pieces, interspersed here and there in my reviews of Gone With the Wind, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mysteries of Udolpho.

For more than two years I was bullied for being different by a grown adult, bullied by Tracy by proxy through Richard, verbally abused by Tracy only to have both of them act like what I did (basically, being shy, quiet and wary of Tracy, who bullied me, Richard and her children) was somehow worse than her bullying and abuse of me.

At first, Richard and I bonded over religion, music and Goth. He was my spiritual guide. He was my best, closest and dearest friend, the one I trusted so much that I told him things I hadn’t told anyone else. We were like a mutual admiration society. He told me I was the most awesome person he knew; I felt the same about him. But he betrayed me.

The first thing is, you were born this way. It is in your nature, and thus cannot be wrong. On average, one out of every three people is an introvert, if being quiet was wrong, that would make 1/3 of the total population born lesser. –serjicaladdict, Why are you so quiet?

16. [This part was written somewhere between late 2010 and early 2011.] Another reason is to try somehow to understand this perplexing situation. Only over the past several months, as I’ve been writing and adding to this story, have I started to see the whole picture and make connections and understand little bits of pieces of it.

I noticed the same thing over the past 15 years as I wrote memoirs about my life: Certain events that upset me greatly, long-term abuse and other such things, I wrote about as they happened, and put them into my memoirs several years later. I began to understand, but not quite yet.

Then several years after that, I put these memoirs online in public versions. As I did this, and did more research into abuse, I saw connections I never saw before. Things began to make sense, how guys would manipulate me, and that sort of thing.

I see this happen now as I write about this horrible situation. I see clues to what may have happened, that I didn’t see before.

All my life I’ve written diaries, letters, e-mails, journals, memoirs and other accounts describing my life, its various events, my emotions. This may be related to NVLD, being confused by life, not seeing the whole picture for the details, and needing to journal about it to figure things out.

It may also be related to Aspergers, having a long memory, going over things again and again in your mind long after other people have forgotten about it.

Or maybe I simply want to be a modern Laura Ingalls Wilder.

What Makes Your Control Freak Wife or Girlfriend Tick sounds to me very much like Tracy, and you will recognize various elements of it as you read my story, such as:

her being happy as she cuts you down
having to be in control (which she did to me, to Richard, to an ex-family friend named Todd)
histrionics I witnessed when she dealt with her ex
steamrolling me time and again, no compromise or concession, this coming back to bite her as people kept bolting from friendships or other relationships with her
two or three of the emotional states listed under “Losing Control” (when I challenged her for raging at me and she realized Jeff and I were ending our friendship with her).

Todd, who was friends with Richard for six years–from before Richard and Tracy got married–and stayed with them twice, for a month each time, said she yells at you but does nothing to work on her own part of the problem.

I witnessed a few arguments between her and Richard that got nasty, so I knew it wasn’t just me. If she were this way with nobody else, I’d have to look harder at myself, but this was not the case.

17. Tracy did her hardest to make me think I was the problem, but I knew this wasn’t true, and wrote this to remember why.

As the above article states,

Yes, this woman is deeply troubled, but it is NOT your responsibility to tolerate, accept or change her. The only way to gain mastery over a relationship with this kind of woman is to end it. Otherwise, you’ll begin an endless replay loop of your own misery.

18. This article, and my story, should help you recognize such people in your own life, and that it’s not worth waiting around for change. Take warning from what happened to me.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. We share a house

3. Tracy’s abuse turns on me