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Many of these reasons are also the very reason that many parents did not speak out. I know that I soon learned the limits of criticism that would be tolerated. Not much.

Parents, too, were afraid of "getting kicked out" and finding themselves unemployed. And, having invested years in a ministry, being forced to walk away from it. It was just easier to go with the flow.

To my lasting shame. At least the MKs were kids. I was an adult, but allowed myself to be pushed around and bullied.

Well, Gene, we didn't go with the flow in two areas, because we knew that it was wrong, and we dearly paid for it.

My son once told me he'd like to write a book.
About how MKs are like the sacrificed Isaac tied up on the altar of their parents' devotion.
Only there is no substitute ram waiting in the bushes.

Tears of contrition and repentance from me.
Many tears.

Raz please pass on my encouragement and thanks to your son for communicating his pain so clearly in a metaphor that cuts deep. I'm an MK and a parent...and it challenges both of my identities.

I am sorry it has taken me so long to respond.

Thank you, MKs, for being so open and honest. I appreciate it. I am hoping it will help me understand my husband better, but I am not sure it will. Every person is different, and yet each of you endured so much the same pain.

Things have taken a turn for the worse around here again. It's not to the point of open aggression yet, just withdrawal. My husband withdraws into his personal inner space- the only place he felt safe is boarding school, yet the place that is his prison now. He is using computer games, sports and working out as venues to avoid his family- keeping the don't feel, don't trust, don't talk rules like a pro.

This is the precursor to bad things for me. I keep trying to love him, to get him to open up to me and be open to my heart, to be a part of a healthy family dynamic- but of course that breaks all three of his rules for survival. Also, when he speaks of himself as a child he uses angry shaming words- he was a "potty-mouthed, rebellious hypocrite"- not an emotionally abandoned, neglected child. Ah, another clue he has gone back in his mind to being the kid in denial.

So all that unacknowledged anger- he haughtily told me last night that he was not angry with his parents and then condescended to me that he would try to work some up for me since I thought he should- does not bode well for me. He pours it all out on me. I am the "authority figure" he is allowed to hate. Passive men frustrating their wives to the point of exasperation is acceptable missionary behavior, plus he gets to shame his wife for being emotional and score points for putting up with a "controlling, rebellious" woman- always nagging him to stop neglecting his family or his responsibilities.

I gotta tell you, I absolutely loathe how fundamentalist missionary culture took this once sweet, open-hearted little child and turned him into a white-washed tomb. He is a master of insincerity, going through the motions, while inwardly he is full of rottenness and dead men's bones.

He continues to shame himself- wouldn't all the missionaries be proud!- for the ways he acted out as a child. Yet every time he does this, slips back into denial, he BECOMES that kid all over again! He becomes an insincere faker who goes through the motions of doing what is expected, all the while inside he is full of anger and resentment.

Still his sainted parents get a free pass, and I will have all those feelings ascribed to my being a bitch. So sad. Meanwhile he comes closer and closer to forcing his current family to abandon him for our mental health and safety, and the lie he believed as a child- I deserve to abandoned- becomes reality in a sick psychosocial dynamic he seems unable/unwilling to stop.

You MKs who are no longer in denial, I take my hat off to you. Let the healing continue to come to these worthy people, Holy Spirit! You win your life back. Good for you.

To the repentant parents, good for you. Your accepting responsibility for the abandonment and neglect, as well as the spiritual abuse that accompanied it, have transformed from abusers to agents of healing. Good for you.

But please, don't any of you downplay the damage that was done. Not everyone finds healing. Not everyone gets to live free to trust, feel and talk. Some MKs will wind up reliving the abandonment over and over; causing the abadonment because of all the dysfunction they internalized.

My heart breaks. Please know that you and your family are in my thoughts and prayers. There are days when my anger consumes me, often not at what was done to us, but at the ones who would dismiss what was done to us. Your gift of language gives voice to what many want to express.

Oh, shadowspring. This pain is so great. And you are right, this damage may be irreparable. My heart breaks for you, your husband, and your kids. You have very deep and clear insight into the dynamics going on in your MK's life. I can hear your deep love for him, even while you are realistic enough to see that it may no longer be healthy for you and your children to continue on in this unhealthy pattern with this broken child/man.
Oh God, how can you bear to see all this damage done in your name??
Have mercy on us Lord, and save us please.

Praying for you today, shadowspring, that God will give you peace and continued healing.

I have taken the liberty of copying a post from the ABWE site which I found very educational. By comparing the response of children in two different documentaries, the author of this post points out how incredibly vulnerable children are to manipulation, coercion, control, shame, and all the other things that twist innocent children into silenced, wounded victims.

Not just MKs. All children. I was reminded of that by a little incident with one of my grandchildren this week. He's not an MK. But he's a child. And just as vulnerable as all the MKs who are now adults struggling to make sense of their own confusing childhood.

Where Is the Victory?
Posted on June 1, 2011 by isaiah 618
by Tamara Barrick Rice

I like documentaries. I’ll admit it. I’m kind of a “doc” snob, actually. But when I finally sat down to watch All God’s Children about the horrific MK abuse in the 1960s at Mamou, a Christian & Missionary Alliance boarding school, my heart just wasn’t prepared to be that broken.

The Time Machine
First, there was the obvious realization as I watched, that all missionaries in the 60s still dressed as if it were the 50s — whether Baptist missionaries in Bangladesh or C&MA missionaries in Africa. (It’s as if there were a missionary dress code back then, right?) So these pictures and images along with the hymns being sung on the documentary’s soundtrack, instantly transported me to the far away place I spent my own childhood. Where time sometimes seemed to stand still, in part because people often dressed, so charmingly and with admirable innocence, just a few decades behind American fashion.

But for me, the soundtrack of All God’s Children was one of the hardest parts. Music is like my time machine. And maybe there is just something about the sound of 30 to 40 American missionaries singing hymns in a brick building with a tin roof and a concrete floor and a badly tuned piano that pushes me over the edge.

Memories that should be beautiful, songs that should be sacred, are tainted for me, because quite often the man leading us in my mind, the man singing the best and the loudest in the chambers of my little time machine … is not someone I want to remember.

No Justice for the Abused
But more than that little trip in my time machine, when I watched All God’s Children, and I heard the stories of horrible abuse at Mamou, I was struck with the repetition of an awful phrase: “No charges filed.”

These crimes happened on foreign soil, you see. And so even those abusers who have confessed their guilt are seemingly immune to real justice, because our laws have not yet (not yet) been altered to protect little American children on foreign soil.

The Other Side of Injustice
In contrast to All God’s Children, I recently sat down to watch Witch Hunt, about the wrongful child abuse convictions of about a dozen or so parents in Kern County, California. These people were victims of ambitious prosecutors and investigators who did not know what they were doing in the 1980s — investigators who would interrogate 6-year-old children for hours on end, until they got the answers they wanted. Innocent people were sent to prison on outrageous charges of child molestation for as many as twenty years in one case, before convictions were finally overturned and these individuals were set free by these same children (now adults) taking a stand for truth.

I began Witch Hunt as a skeptic, thinking I wouldn’t feel much sympathy for the accused. But by the end I was weeping, just as I had in All God’s Children. There are several parallels between these documentaries. One is this: Little children are powerfully influenced by the adults in authority around them. The other follows closely and logically: Little children must sometimes grow into adults before they are able to speak the truth and seek justice, speaking out against the authority figures of their childhood. And, speaking of truth and justice, both documentaries contain the same third painful reality: That justice in this life is sometimes just out of reach.

Where Is the Victory?
You can’t give people back years of their lives. You just can’t. And you can’t give someone a new childhood.

So where is the victory for all of these people? Truth has finally been spoken, but will justice ever really be in their grasp?

I admit I was torn for a while, pondering these thoughts about truth and justice and victory in my head. And then an old hymn began to echo in my mind this morning, by John Yates and Ira Sankey: “Faith Is the Victory.” I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I can’t even begin to guess the last time I heard it sung, and yet there it was … stuck in my subconscious, like a little splinter in my heel. I couldn’t get it out.

And then I began to realize that maybe right there in that hymn lies the answer: That sometimes the only victory in this life is our faith — being able to hang onto it, no matter how much injustice we see. I’m not sure that’s what Yates and Sankey meant, but it’s how I hear that chorus this morning:

Faith is the victory!
Faith is the victory!
O, glorious victory,
That overcomes the world.

As I looked up the hymn in my old hymnal, my eyes were drawn to the song that followed it, just below the chorus on the page. It’s one I was not familiar with, called “Peace, Perfect Peace.” So I read the lyrics.

Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin?
The blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
Peace, perfect peace, by thronging duties pressed?
To do the will of Jesus, this is rest.

I have much on my heart today, but oddly enough God sent calm through these hymns, which are, to me, unlikely messengers. But they are there in my heart and right in front of me despite my sometimes adverse reaction to the worship music of my childhood.

I do think that holding onto faith is our victory, and I do think that doing the will of God is our peace. For me, I intend to work toward justice, as I believe that is the will of God. And I will not let injustice crush my faith along the way.

There is still work to be done, to protect the children of American missionaries, to get justice for the children of American missionaries who are now grown adults.

And I hope that you will stay with us through this journey, no matter how long it takes or how many times we must remind each other again and again to hold to the balance of justice and mercy and to cling to our faith as we do the will of God, wherein our own peace may be found.

And maybe living in — make that thriving in — that continuous pattern, in all it’s tiresome redundancy and beautiful simplicity, will be our sweet victory.