A journey from self-blame to self-truth

An Introduction

Recently, someone asked me to share my Y.W.A.M (Youth With A Mission) story. I started to tell it casually, the way you might mention any difficult chapter from your past, but I quickly realized the story was too long, too layered, too important to be compressed into polite conversation.

So I did what any writer does when words demand more space—I went digging. I found my old blog, “Rachael Around The World,” buried in the archives of a digital life I’d tried to forget. I scrolled through entries from 2013 and 2014, reading words written by an eighteen-year-old girl I barely recognize, a girl who was drowning in self-blame and desperately trying to make sense of trauma she couldn’t yet name.

What I found broke my heart and set me free at the same time.

This post is my response to that eighteen-year-old girl—the one who wrote with a heart full of questions she wasn’t allowed to ask and pain she wasn’t permitted to feel. It’s the story I should have told ten years ago, but couldn’t, because I didn’t yet have the language for spiritual abuse, neurodivergence, or the courage to trust my reality over their version of it.

Some stories take a decade to tell correctly. This is one of them.

When Faith Felt Like Prison: A Y.W.A.M Story

A memoir woven with truth

The Girl Who Arrived Already Dangerous

I knew something was wrong the moment I put my bags down on that top bunk.

I was eighteen, pulling into the Loganville Y.W.A.M base with my car packed full of everything I thought I’d need for the adventure of a lifetime. I had been raised in the kind of Baptist household that balanced deep conviction with genuine grace—where my parents served as pillars in their church and my godparents led entire congregations. By eighteen, I could break down Hebrew and Greek roots in ways that made people twice my age shift uncomfortably in their seats.

I had traveled internationally, done real mission work in places where faith cost something, and I had been financially independent long enough to own my first car and fund my dreams. I thought Y.W.A.M would be the natural next step—six weeks of intensive Bible study followed by international outreach. I had my Chinese visa, everything paid in full, and a heart genuinely eager to serve God wherever He might send me.

The base was a converted family home housing our small D.T.S. class: five women and one man, including myself. The leadership structure should have been my first red flag. Our primary leaders were barely older than us—kids who had completed their D.T.S. just a year prior and somehow found themselves responsible for forming the next generation of missionaries. Above them sat a married couple who “owned” the base, flanked by a handful of actual adults in their forties, though what anyone did there beyond teaching classes remained mysteriously unclear.

I was the last student to arrive, and the only bed remaining was a top bunk in a room with two other girls. I’ve always been heavier, and the bed looked precarious, so I made what I thought was a reasonable request to the smaller girl: might she consider switching with me?

Her laugh was sharp, dismissive: “Should have gotten here sooner.” 

I had never been to college, never navigated dormitory politics or the strange social dynamics of forced intimacy. I thought her response was unnecessarily cruel, but I didn’t yet understand it was the first lesson in a carefully designed curriculum: your needs don’t matter, your comfort is negotiable, and asking for basic accommodation reveals character flaws.

That night, lying on that unstable bunk listening to the sounds of strangers in spaces too small for privacy, I felt the first whisper of something I couldn’t yet name. This wasn’t the holy adventure I had signed up for. This was something else entirely.

Stone Soup and Sacred Schedules

The house rules felt arbitrary from day one: no shoes on carpet, use only the front door, mandatory breakfast at 7 AM. What struck me wasn’t the rules themselves, but how they were presented as spiritual disciplines rather than practical necessities, as if the carpet in a converted family home had somehow become holy ground.

The food was inedible—giant pots of watered-down liquid they called soup. I started driving myself out for lunch, using my own money for real meals. The 6 AM wake-up call for breakfast and group prayer felt like the first real assault on my autonomy. I had never been a breakfast eater—still am not—and I had always found my deepest connection with God in solitary prayer later in the day.

When I gently pushed back, explaining my natural rhythms and personal prayer habits, I was told this was about “community” and “submission to leadership.” But even at eighteen, something in me knew this was wrong. I had grown up in a genuine spiritual community—I knew what it looked like when people gathered around shared love for God rather than shared compliance with arbitrary rules.

This independence was quickly identified as a problem. I was told it “created distance between students,” as if my refusal to accept substandard treatment somehow damaged our group unity.

I also made the grievous error of driving myself home on weekends to see my family, who lived just twenty minutes away. This too was discouraged, then actively criticized. They wanted total isolation from any support system that might remind them that we deserved better treatment than what we were receiving.

Looking back, I can see the strategy with painful clarity: keep people hungry, literally and figuratively. Desperate people are compliant people. People with options ask uncomfortable questions. My ability to feed myself properly and maintain a connection with loving family members made it impossible for me to be controlled through manufactured scarcity.

What I was learning was that abusive systems always attack your sources of strength first. They isolate you from people who see your worth, convince you that your resources are somehow selfish, and reframe your competence as rebellion. They need you weak to keep you compliant.

When Sickness Becomes Sin

When my doctor started me on a new medication that came with warnings about severe headaches and mood changes, I did what any responsible person would do: I informed the leadership about potential side effects. I missed exactly three classes due to severe symptoms—what I now recognize as my body’s natural response to medication that wasn’t agreeing with me.

Each absence was treated like a moral failing. Students and staff alike looked at me as “some freak that couldn’t push through,” as if enduring unnecessary suffering was somehow more holy than seeking appropriate medical care. I was learning their twisted theology: if you’re struggling, it’s because you’re not faithful enough. If you need help, you’re weak. If your body has limitations, your spirit is deficient.

But the real violation came during what they called the “outreach phase.” Even though I lived ten minutes from my doctor and had my transportation, they told me I wasn’t allowed to go to my medical appointment because we were now “on outreach,” and real missionaries don’t have access to healthcare.

I had to fight for permission to see my doctor for medication I needed to take for the next two months. The conversation was humiliating—I had to explain, plead, and justify my basic medical needs to kids barely older than me who had somehow been given authority over my healthcare decisions.

Finally, they agreed—but only if I brought leaders with me to supervise the visit.

Strange doesn’t begin to cover it. It was degrading. They had transformed basic healthcare into a supervised privilege, turning my most vulnerable moments into opportunities for control and surveillance. This wasn’t preparation for overseas ministry—this was psychological manipulation disguised as spiritual discipline.

(My two choices were: don’t go, or go with staff supervision. I chose not to go. Within 2-3 weeks, I stopped taking the medication as prescribed by the OBGYN specialist. To this day, I still have problems that could have been identified if I had stayed on that medication.)

Christmas Break: The Attic Experiment

The Christmas break felt like parole from prison. For a few precious weeks, I could breathe without someone monitoring my breathing, eat without judgment, and pray without performance. I had no idea what awaited me when we returned.

They had decided to move all of us—boys, girls, leaders—into one attic room. This was supposedly to “prepare us for missions,” but I had been on real mission trips to challenging locations in Brazil and had never been asked to sacrifice basic privacy for spiritual growth.

This wasn’t preparation; this was an experiment in total environmental control. When you can’t be alone with your thoughts, you can’t develop your relationship with God—you can only absorb theirs. When every conversation is monitored, every moment observed, every private reflection becomes impossible, and you stop thinking for yourself entirely.

The packed living conditions were suffocating in more ways than one. I could smell everyone’s most intimate bodily functions, hear every private conversation, and witness every breakdown and recovery. But somehow I was the one creating “distance” by occasionally leaving the base for fresh air and real food.

But they didn’t see a girl whose nervous system was overwhelmed. They saw rebellion, antisocial behavior, and an unwillingness to embrace community. They pathologized my neurological differences and turned them into character flaws.

The Road to West Virginia: Hypocrisy Revealed

The trip to West Virginia shattered any remaining illusions I had about their leadership. They packed six of us into a minivan like sardines—me at 230 pounds, three other girls who were larger than me, plus luggage and supplies—while the two leaders who were dating each other drove separately in their car with all the comfort and space they had denied us.

Let that sink in for a moment: the people responsible for our safety and spiritual formation prioritized their comfort above our basic well-being. A nineteen-year-old student was navigating a packed van through icy mountain conditions none of us had experienced, while our actual leaders followed behind in luxury, unwilling to share the risks they were asking us to take.

The hypocrisy was staggering. These were the same leaders who preached to us daily about self-sacrifice, about putting others’ needs before our own, about the spiritual discipline of discomfort. But apparently, those rules only applied to us students. Leadership, it seemed, came with exemptions from the very virtues they demanded we cultivate.

We drove through snow and ice that rose above our heads on mountain roads that could have killed us all. When we finally arrived, I fell asleep shivering in conditions that would have been criminal if imposed on prisoners, while our leaders settled into their private accommodations.

Breaking in the Mountains

By the time we settled into the West Virginia base, I was running on fumes. Months of inadequate food, forced schedules, new medication, constant surveillance, and manufactured crises had worn me down to nothing. The black sheep rumors had preceded me, carried by those same leaders who had spent months documenting my every perceived failing.

The breaking point came during their attempt to force me into a performance skit. I had clearly stated my discomfort with being on stage, explaining that I would rather wash toilets by hand than grab a microphone. But my preferences didn’t matter; what mattered was compliance with their vision of what I should be willing to do.

The skit required me to play a demon tormenting another student—pushing, pulling, creating physical confrontation as part of some spiritual warfare demonstration. The irony wasn’t lost on me that they wanted me to perform the very role they had cast me in real life: the disruptive force that needed to be controlled or expelled.

What made the situation even more absurd was what had happened the night before. They had forced all of us into an all-night lock-in at a local youth church despite our unanimous protests that we were physically and emotionally unprepared for such an event. We were exhausted, unprepared for harsh weather conditions, and desperately needed rest instead of another manufactured crisis.

I remember the moment I broke. I was crawling on all fours into a utility closet in the back of the church building and collapsing face-first onto the concrete floor. The cold seeped through my clothes, but it felt more honest than anything I had experienced in months.

Within an hour, the other three girls in my class had joined me, all of us curled together on that cold floor in the most genuine moment of connection we had shared since the program began. No words were exchanged. We just held each other in shared defeat, four bodies acknowledging what our minds weren’t allowed to process: this was not normal. This was not healthy. This was not God.

In that utility closet, pressed against cold concrete with three other broken girls, I felt something I hadn’t felt in months: peace. Not the performed peace of group prayer or the manufactured peace of compliance, but the deep, honest peace that comes when you finally stop pretending everything is okay and admit that it’s not.

The next day, exhausted and overstimulated beyond my capacity to regulate myself, my exhaustion got the better of me, and I pushed the other student too hard during practice. It was an open-handed shove from a low chair to the ground. She wasn’t hurt. We both laughed about it afterward—we were both horse girls who had grown up with real roughness and knew the difference between an accident and aggression.

But the leaders seized on it like they had found smoking gun evidence of a crime they’d been trying to prove for months.

Years later, when I finally received my diagnoses—ADHD and autism characterized by high intelligence and low social functioning—I would understand what had happened in that moment. My nervous system, already in chronic overload from months of overstimulation, had finally reached its breaking point. What they saw as aggression or poor impulse control was a neurological system in crisis.

The Verdict: Unfit for Trust

The conversation happened in West Virginia with just the female leaders—the males were too important to be bothered with the dirty work of destroying a young woman’s dreams. They told me they couldn’t trust me to continue to China because Christianity wasn’t widely accepted there, and they couldn’t trust that I would listen to leadership in unsafe situations.

I sat there, numb with disbelief, as they explained why I was unfit for international ministry. The irony was so thick I could taste it. They couldn’t trust me in unsafe situations? They had put a nineteen-year-old behind the wheel of a packed van on icy mountain roads while they followed in comfort. They had forced us into overnight events when we were too exhausted to function safely. They had denied me access to medical care ten minutes from my doctor. They had created unsafe situations at every turn, but I was the liability.

I had my Chinese visa sewn into my passport. Everything was paid in full. I had traveled internationally and done real mission work in places where discretion mattered, where a wrong word could mean imprisonment or worse. But none of that experience counted because I had pushed too hard in a staged scene about spiritual warfare while running on months of manufactured crisis.

Meanwhile, another student was screaming from the front porch daily about not having money for the mission portion of the trip, melting down in public displays that would have gotten any of the rest of us labeled as unstable. But she was compliant, and compliance mattered more than competence, more than calling, more than actual readiness for cross-cultural ministry.

They had taken my strengths—independence, critical thinking, spiritual depth, financial stability, international experience—and systematically reframed them as character flaws. My questions became rebellion. My resources became selfishness. My competence became a threat to their authority.

What I was learning was that spiritually abusive systems always attack your greatest gifts first. They can’t afford to let you know how valuable you are, because valuable people don’t accept substandard treatment. They need you to believe you’re broken so you’ll accept their version of fixing.

The Long Ride Home

The twenty-hour drive back to Georgia was conducted in complete silence. I stared out the window at the landscape rolling past and felt the weight of what had just happened settling into my bones like a disease I would carry for years.

Not one student spoke up for me. Not one person acknowledged the good heart or genuine intentions I had tried to communicate for months. The silence in that van wasn’t just awkward—it was the sound of complicity, of people choosing their survival over basic human decency.

This is how spiritual abuse works most effectively: it isolates you from potential allies by creating an environment where speaking up for someone else is seen as disloyalty to the group. It convinces everyone that the problem is the individual, not the system.

But in the silence of that van, staring out at the Georgia landscape that meant home and safety, I felt something unexpected: relief. Not just because the ordeal was ending, but because some deep part of me had never stopped knowing this was wrong. Even when I tried to convince myself I was the problem, some core part of my being had refused to fully believe their version of me.

That refusal to completely surrender my reality would turn out to be the thing that saved me, though I wouldn’t understand that for years.

The Final Truth

When we arrived back at the Loganville base, I went straight to my room and started packing. I was done performing, done explaining, done trying to prove I belonged in a place that had never wanted me.

The head leader wanted to speak with me, but I honestly don’t remember half of what she said because I was so far beyond caring about her opinion. The gist was clear enough: nobody trusted me, this was somehow for my good, and I should accept their assessment of my character and calling with grace and humility.

But it was the kitchen cook—the one genuinely kind soul in that entire place—who gave me the truth I desperately needed to hear. She found me before I left and said something that would sustain me through the dark years ahead: “There was nothing wrong with your behavior. You just stuck out like a sore thumb in a smaller school. If you had gone to a larger base like Kona in Hawaii or somewhere else, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. You would’ve just blended in with the rest of the class.”

Those words hit me like a lifeline thrown to a drowning person. The problem wasn’t me—it was the system. In a larger environment with more secure leadership, my independence and spiritual knowledge would have been assets to nurture rather than threats to neutralize.

Her words permitted me to trust my instincts again, to believe that the wrongness I had felt from day one was real and valid. She couldn’t undo the damage that had been done, but she could confirm that my reality hadn’t been completely distorted.

I drove away that day carrying her words like a treasure, not knowing how crucial they would become in the long reconstruction ahead.

The Blog Post That Breaks My Heart

More than a decade later—today, as I write this—I found my old blog post from June 29, 2014. Reading it now breaks something in me that I thought had already been fully shattered and carefully rebuilt.

That eighteen-year-old girl, so desperate to make sense of what had happened, was drowning in self-blame: “Maybe most of the way I was feeling was my fault. Maybe because I went home every weekend, or washed my clothes at my grandmother’s house, or had a car, and knew my way around the town. Maybe it was me who did this to myself… I feel like I have failed as a missionary… I’m sorry I failed everyone who was counting on me to make it… my attitude at times was not the best, and I am embarrassed and ashamed.”

Look at what she blamed herself for: visiting family on weekends (maintaining healthy relationships), washing clothes at her grandmother’s house (practical problem-solving), having a car (financial independence), knowing her way around town (local knowledge and competence). Every single thing that demonstrated her capability and connection to a healthy support system, she had been taught to see as spiritual failings.

She apologized to the very people who had broken her spirit. She took responsibility for their failures of leadership. She internalized their narrative so completely that she became her prosecutor, judge, and jury, delivering a guilty verdict for the crime of being too competent, too independent, too secure in her own identity to be easily controlled.

That blog post stands as evidence of how completely they had succeeded in rewriting her story. A girl who had traveled the world doing missionary work, who knew scripture in Hebrew and Greek, who had been financially independent and spiritually confident—reduced to believing she was fundamentally flawed and unfit for service.

Reading those words from my younger self, I want to reach through time and hold that girl, tell her that every instinct she had was right, every boundary she tried to set was reasonable, every question she asked was legitimate. But she couldn’t hear it then. She had been too thoroughly convinced that the problem was her.

That blog post became a monument to their success. They hadn’t just kicked me out of their program—they had convinced me I deserved it.

What Came After: The Seven Years

I went home that day and tried to rebuild a life that made sense. I threw myself into helping my sister through a difficult divorce, poured my energy into work, and by twenty had saved enough from my job at PetSmart to buy my first house.

But after I closed on that house, something unexpected happened. I withdrew from the world almost entirely.

For seven years, I lived in solitude. Not by choice, exactly, but because I couldn’t figure out how to be around people anymore without constantly monitoring myself for signs of the defects they had convinced me I carried.

Those years were darker than anything I had experienced at Y.W.A.M, but they were also more honest. In the silence of my own space, without anyone watching, without anyone demanding I perform holiness or manufacture community, I slowly began to find pieces of myself I had forgotten existed.

I had to relearn everything: how to trust my judgment, how to set boundaries without feeling guilty, how to recognize the difference between healthy spiritual challenge and spiritual abuse. I had to untangle the lies they had woven into my understanding of myself, of God, of what authentic spiritual community could look like.

But I also had to learn something else entirely: how my brain works. The diagnoses that came later—ADHD and autism, characterized by high intelligence and low social functioning—suddenly made everything make sense. The overstimulation, the need for routine, the difficulty with forced social interaction, the way my nervous system would shut down under too much pressure—it wasn’t spiritual immaturity or character flaws. It was neurodivergence.

Understanding this changed everything. Those months at Y.W.A.M weren’t just spiritual abuse—they were also a systematic assault on a neurodivergent nervous system by people who had no understanding of how different brains work. They had taken my neurological differences and pathologized them as spiritual rebellion.

The Return

Today, I am married and living far from my hometown in Georgia. I’ve traveled a long road back to faith, but this time it’s mine—not inherited, not performed, not controlled by anyone else’s insecurity or need for power.

And here’s the beautiful irony that makes me laugh every time I think about it: I am now working as a missionary. I sit on the board of a nonprofit organization, serving in ways that honor both my calling and my authentic self. The dream they told me I was unfit for? It came true anyway, just not through their broken system.

Jesus saw what happened to me. He was with me the entire time, even when I couldn’t see Him, even when I walked away from everything I’d been taught about Him. I left the faith for a long time, but today I am happy to report that I found my way back to Jesus—the real one, not the version they had tried to sell me.

Because here’s what I learned in those seven years of solitude: Jesus was never the problem in this situation. It was the humans. It’s always been the humans.

The Jesus I know now doesn’t demand I shrink myself to fit someone else’s system. He doesn’t require supervised medical appointments or forced breakfast schedules. He doesn’t punish questions or independence. He doesn’t turn community into surveillance or love into control.

The humans at Y.W.A.M. confused their need for power with God’s call to discipleship. They mistook control for leadership, compliance for faith, and breaking for building. The leaders who were barely older than me weren’t mature enough to handle the responsibility they had been given. But the system protected their authority while sacrificing our wellbeing, and that’s how spiritual abuse perpetuates itself across generations.

Seven years. That’s how long it took to undo what they did in six months. Seven years to stop hearing their voices every time I made a decision, stopped feeling their eyes on me every time I expressed an opinion, and stopped feeling guilty for taking up space in the world.

Seven years to remember that the girl who drove away from Y.W.A.M wasn’t broken—she was just finally free.

Why This Story Matters

I share this story not to discourage anyone from pursuing missions or faith communities, but to offer this truth: if a spiritual environment makes you smaller, questions your sanity, controls your basic needs, isolates you from healthy relationships, or convinces you that your God-given personality is the problem—that’s not God. That’s humans playing God.

A real spiritual community builds you up. It honors your questions. It makes space for your authentic self. It trusts that God is big enough to work through your individuality, not despite it. It doesn’t require you to choose between your well-being and your faithfulness.

Some missions are meant to teach us what faith looks like when it’s truly free. Some journeys home are the most important missions we’ll ever take. Some stories take ten years to tell correctly, but they’re worth the wait because they might help someone else recognize their situation before it’s too late.

That eighteen-year-old girl who drove away from Y.W.A.M, thinking she was a failure? She was right on schedule for the journey God had planned for her. The calling they said she was unfit for, found her anyway.

The problem was never her independence, her questions, her needs, or her refusal to accept substandard treatment. The problem was a system that confused compliance with character, control with care, and breaking with building.

Sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is walk away from what everyone else says you should want, and trust that God is big enough to meet you wherever you land. Sometimes the people who tell you you’re unfit for service are the ones who are unfit to make that judgment.

Sometimes the voice that tells you something is wrong—even when everyone around you says it’s right—is the voice of God Himself, calling you out of Egypt and into something better.

That eighteen-year-old girl who drove away from Y.W.A.M? She wasn’t running from God. She was running toward Him, even when she didn’t know it. Even when it took seven years in the wilderness to find Him again.

Even when the people who claimed to represent Him had almost convinced her He wasn’t worth finding.

But He was. He always is. And He’s still calling people out of systems that diminish them and into relationships that honor who He made them to be.

That’s the real mission. That’s the real calling. And nobody—no matter how much authority they claim to have—gets to tell you you’re unfit for it.

Trust me. I know.

This is the first in a series about my Y.W.A.M experience. In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing actual diary entries from 2013-2014, unedited and uncensored—a real-time glimpse into what spiritual abuse looks like from the inside.

Thank you for walking this path with me. Remember: your questions aren’t rebellion, your boundaries aren’t selfish, and your authentic self is never too much.

With love and ancient wisdom,

Rachael