You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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A courageous, vulnerable, and spellbinding memoir that explores with visceral impact what happens when harm starts at home-and is exalted as God's will. For readers of Unfollow and Jesus Land, You Lied to Me About God explores spiritual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and weaponized faith A courageous, vulnerable, and spellbinding memoir that explores with visceral impact what happens when harm starts at home-and is exalted as God's will. For readers of Unfollow and Jesus Land, You Lied to Me About God explores spiritual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and weaponized faith At nine years old, Jamie Marich asked God to end it all. Doing it herself would be an irrevocable sin- an affront to the church and her father's God. She prayed instead for the rapture, an accident, a passive death-anything to stop the turmoil of feeling wrong- wrong in her body; wrong in her desires; wrong in her faith in a merciful God that could love her wholly as she was. You Lied to Me About God explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing tyhat tells you- no matter which path you choose-no matter what you know in your heart to be true-you're probably damned. With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes readers through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother's silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity-and even her eternal soul-"for her own good" and with a side of televangelistic hellfire. Hitting a breaking point, Marich embarks on pilgrimage- from shrines in Croatia to ashrams in Florida, she reckons with what it means to come home to a faith that heals and accepts her wholly as she is- in her queerness, in her body, and in her deep relationship to an expansive and loving God.

Author Bio

JAMIE MARICH, Ph.D. (she/they) speaks internationally on EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, dissociation, expressive arts, yoga, and mindfulness, and runs a private practice and online training network in her home base of Akron, OH. Marich has written numerous books, notably Trauma and the 12 Steps- An Inclusive Guide to Recovery and Dissociation Made Simple- A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Life. She has won numerous awards for LGBT+ and mental health advocacy, specifically in reducing stigma around dissociative disorders through the sharing of her own lived experience.