Editorial: PTSDA
Not long ago I talked to a woman who had suffered a lot growing up as a Seventh-day Adventist.
The abuse wasn’t physical. It was spiritual. She was one of those people (I am another) whose parents and teachers drilled down on all the awful things that were about to happen to Adventists: persecution, our families turning against us, having to run and hide in the mountains, the close of probation, never sure of salvation. She would cry herself to sleep at night, wondering if all her sins were confessed. She would be terrified by a dramatic cloud that might be Jesus returning, because she wasn’t perfect yet. She couldn’t tell her parents, because Ellen White said that parents would turn against their children.
Whenever I write about this, others chime in to say that they, too, grew up with these fears. Should we really expect those who have been terrified like this to love the Seventh-day Adventist Church—to set the fear aside as childish, when in fact it was taught to them by adult authority figures who are still saying these very same things?
It is a type of PTSD—I’m labeling it PTSDA. Post-Traumatic Seventh-day Adventism. Some of us have even sought professional therapy for our PTSDA.
Interestingly, I’ve never heard this legacy of fear addressed, much less apologized for, in official Adventist journalism. (Though Adventist Today did it!) Many pastors and church leaders double down on the fear: they search current events for signs of Jesus’ return as that young girl searched the skies.
Enough PTSDA. There are plenty of real things to fear—cancer, war, accidents, financial reversals, deaths of loved ones, families falling apart—without making things up. We should be giving our dear people reassurance to face a hard world, not warnings of things that have not happened, and probably never will.
Loren Seibold
Executive Editor, Adventist Today Magazine & Website
31 May 2024
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