Discussion of the Botkin Family in the Press

Much gratitude to the author of the article, Gina McGalliard, who I believe extended great honor to the many earnest people who have followed this lifestyle in earnest, in their desire to honor and follow God. She didn't identify herself as a Christian, and I believe that she showed great integrity in the writing of this article a few years ago.

Recently, Empirical Magazine published another of McGilliard's articles entitled Homeschooling, Creationism, and Citizenship. I understand from the author that other more liberal publishers turned it down because she was not willing to exploit Christian homeschoolers in a negative way. I'm grateful to her integrity and the respect she's shown to those who follow the practice. Bravo, Gina!

Here is Gina's seminal article from a few years ago about patriarchy's model for daughters. (I finally decided since it now appears in so many other venues, I would post it here.)

HOUSE PROUD: 

The Troubling Rise of the Stay-At-Home Daughters

   by Gina McGilliard

   From Bitch Magazine, Issue 49 | Winter 2010, in an issue entitled Confidential

“Daughters aren’t to be independent. They’re not to act outside the scope 
of their father. As long as they’re under the authority of their fathers, fathers have the ability to nullify or not the oaths and the vows. Daughters can’t just go out 
independently and say, ‘I’m going to marry whoever I want.’ No. The father has 
the ability to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, that has to be approved by me.’”

There’s a lot of talk in American mainstream media lately 
about the diminishing role of men—fathers, in particular. Have feminism and reproductive technology made them obsolete? 
Are breadwinning wives and career-oriented mothers emasculating them?

What does the literature on family dysfunction, covert incest and addiction have to do with the Botkins?

Explaining the Botkin Model for Stay At Home Daughters

I present this information here to those who have some interest in the Botkin Daughters and Family because I believe their model, promoted by patriarchy/patriocentricity and groups such as Vision Forum is destructive and unhealthy, but the nature of the dysfunction is not so apparent. For those who are interested in the Botkin concept, I hope that you will benefit from my experience and the experience of the study of families who struggle to cope with the inevitable frustrations of life.

We have unavoidable tensions in life, many painful realities that even concern religion. The Apostle Paul said that we “see through a glass darkly” so that we do not know everything that we would like to know about God, the world and ourselves. That can be painful at times and leaves us with many unanswered questions. The so-called “Biblical patriarchy” in Evangelical Christianity has been termed more succinctly as “patriocentricity” because the practicalities or the daily working out of it describes all family life as centered around the father. His considerations and protections and wisdom comes first and it therefore the functional center. I believe that this father centered model is just another construct or tool that Christians developed in order to deal with the unavoidable pains in life, but it actually does more harm to people as opposed to helping them.

I grew up in a wonderful home, an only child with two wonderful parents that have been married 45 years, at the time of this writing. We went to church and I was a devoted Christian that loved God for as long as I can remember. I grew up and entered a helping profession as a nurse (though the available choices for me were very limited by my parents), then got married. But there were many problems along the way (which you can read about in greater detail by selecting the “personal testimony” tag). We didn’t have alcoholics or drug addictions, but we had other things that we did in order to cope, one of which was religion.

I was shocked to realize that though there was no substance use or gambling, we had all of the characteristics of an alcoholic family (centered around depression instead of substances or debachery). For some time,

 I followed two different religious alternatives in an attempt to cope with the pain of life: (1) the Word of Faith teachings that I shared with my family, and (2) a formulaic and rule-oriented Christianity through my church’s eclectic combination of Bill Gothardism, shepherding/discipleship from the Charismatic movement in the ‘70s, and through a misapplication of Theonomy (introduced to us through the Bob Mumford connections to Chalcedon through the shepherding movement). I believe that patriocentricity, the Botkin Model, is just another type of religious means of coping with life, and they differ little from the religious means that I used myself.


The Botkin Model

The patriarchal model, the Botkin model, describes and prescribes ways by which a person can hopefully avoid many of the pains, pressures and unpredictability in life through following the wisest plan of living: the Bible. But the Bible is not so specific, and application to our age must be clarified for us. In the process of making application of those principles to our daily lives, there is a great deal of our own ideology worked in as a part of the process. We select elements from our culture that have worked for us in the past. We work in our own personal beliefs as a consequence as well, since we are the ones who are working out the plan. We use what we grew up to interpret as “normal” as a guide for us. And for our family, this constitutes a good guide. For us, the effort has been noble and worthy.

But herein lies the problem. Those who grow up in a less effective family generally grow up coping with the struggles of the other members in the family. This need not be alcoholism. In my own family, it was depression. You stand on your head and move mountains to help the depressed person survive, through constant acts of self-sacrifice and service. This is not different than how the alcoholic family operates, and it is far from healthy. In my own family, I did everything I could to “enable” the depression itself. As a consequence, I developed and LEARNED my own similar ways of coping by being both depressed and sickly. Instead of being the bad kid, I was the very good kid but also the sick child because that was the only thing that pulled my other family members out of their depression. And while I was a child, it worked. And I learned very unhealthy and destructive ways of coping, and to me, they were “normal.” But I grew up, and none of it worked anymore.

I believe that the Botkins are perpetuating the same type of system. I do not know what the original problems were (addictions or a smothering parent or through some abandonment of some type) that produced the dysfunctions in the family systems of those who have constructed patriocentricity. What I can readily recognize is the pattern and the rules, both written and unwritten. I did not grow up with an understanding of “multi-generational faithfulness” in the terms that the Botkins now profess, but I did grow up with a devotion to my depressed and dysfunctional family that needed me to perpetuate it in order to survive the pains of life. I can spot the patterns a mile away. And I know well, along with every other adult child of a family trying to survive some pain of life, the destructive outcomes that the patterns produce. Those who hold the power benefit from those who support them, and I know well the role of the enabler (as well as the pleasure of the benefits of that role – the secondary gain).

(Read more under the "triangulation" tag from the label list for more information.)

What the Botkins declare to be a Biblical model -- that outlines the wisest way to live the Christian life -- I see as the die-hard attempt to make religion work to avoid the unavoidable and inevitable unpredictability and pain of living.

The Botkin model, that of patriocentricity, contains many Christian elements and concepts that are Christianly in general, but it also has the dysfunction of the addicted family rules woven in it. From my vantage, it is obvious to me that those who drafted the specifics of it have not dealt with the grief and pain of elements of their own past, and have made patriocentricity their drug of choice.

The tragedy is that they claim that their potpourri of preference (Christianity, Old Testament Legalism, Victorian and Medieval culture, the cult of domesticity, American Nationalism, and the dynamics of dysfunctional and addicted families) is the only Biblical alternative for effective Christian living. In reality, they are preaching the family dynamics of addiction, representing them as faithful Christianity.

They are using the integrity of Word of God to legitimize (and market!) their own emotional and psychological disease processes..

Healing from Emotional Incest

From “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” by Patricia Love with Jo Robinson.. Exploring the dynamics of covert (emotional or non-sexual but gender-related) incest.

In previous posts on this topic, specifically from Patricia Love's book “The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent's Love Rules Your Life,” I presented information directly from this book to demonstrate the many similarities between covert/emotional incest and the family relationships advocated by patriocentricity.

 Where the so-called “Biblical patriarchy” movement applies these same dynamics, teaching them as the true Scriptural model for family relationships, I've named these same dynamics “Botkin Syndrome.” Geoff Botkin as well as his daughters, Anna Sophia and Elizabeth, advocate these relationships through avenues affiliated with Vision Forum including their book “So Much More,” and their video production entitled “The Return of the Daughters.” Presenting information about healing and correcting these unhealthy patterns of relating to one another within families proves to be far more complicated than citing examples of dynamics from Love's book, but subsequent posts here will give you a taste of the wise advise that I believe that Dr. Love offers in the remainder of her work on this subject.

In addition to the general problems of covert/emotional incest, I believe that the Botkin's teachings represent an outgrowth and logical conclusion of a legalistic and work-based understanding of the New Testament, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Protestant faith. A true experience at the Cross of Calvary and forgiveness of sins through faith in Jesus should dispel the understanding of the Christian faith as a process of living by and under Old Testament legalism, such as I believe is followed by those within the Biblical patriarchy/patriocentric belief system. So in addition to healing this type of emotional abuse of children and families by those who were likely unaware of the damaging nature of this process and related teachings, I also believe that an honest examination of the teachings of patriarchy is called for to bring about complete healing. To that end, I believe that reading at my other blog and website gives those interested a good place to start the process. I also recommend “thatmom” Karen Campbell's podcast series on Patriarchy/Patriocentricity (Sept – Nov 2007) and Spiritual Abuse (Apr – May 2008), and a planned update in the Fall of 2008 as a good place to start. These podcasts can be downloaded at www.thatmompodcast.com. The links here to both the Patriocentricity and the Spiritual Abuse series sets will also link you to a discussion of the material covered in the podcasts.

Putting Dr. Love's Book and Advice into Perspective

Since the late 80s during my clinical experience as a nurse and during the first serious confrontation of my own denial about my family of origin, I've read about this concept of covert/emotional incest. As I recently wrote in this post, I've found that each time I revisit this process of looking back into my own history to be frustrating and intimidating. Even now that I am in a very safe place in my life with safe and growing relationships of trust with supportive others, part of me feels both anger and frustration that there is yet another unpleasant level of denial and myth to tear away in both my memories as well as in the way I look at the world. But this is precisely where the keys to my continued wholeness lay hidden.

When certain traumatic events occurred in my life, a part of me became fractured off from the rest, and I stopped growing in that area. I also had a series of traumas that followed one another when I was quite young. Though my faith teaches that I am living out God's plan for my life , I also understand the perspective that the lack of personal boundaries and behaviors that I learned in my family also made me a vulnerable target for emotional predators.

 I learned to yield unconditionally to all authority figures, any of those who were older than I was (elders as a general class of people), and particularly to men. In the process that was magnified by my own family situation and my personal history, I was taught to distrust my own internal discernment when I found myself in a conflict with the opinions of others, particularly if they were viewed by me as an authority by virtue of age, position and gender. The covert/emotional incest dynamics, not unlike the Botkin teachings, promoted the circumstances that resulted in subsequent traumas. I once saw a T-shirt that said something about “being flypaper for freaks,” and in this example, I agree that this was true. Like predatory animals target the weak and the young who linger near the outskirts of their flocks, I found myself in precarious and vulnerable circumstances because of the beliefs and experiences my family of origin taught to me.

When I see others suffer or when my life is touched by new pains as a consequence of living, I am reminded of similar hardships that I have encountered at earlier times in my life. As I pass by these events in memory or through a realization that the old hurts of the past have not completely healed at the deepest levels, I find myself going back to these similar places in my history. The process of reclaiming myself at each event where I became “stuck” or stopped growing as a result of trauma did not take place fully on the first visit of re-examining the past. Each occasion that seeks to bring deeper healing to these areas is like a redeeming of the parts of myself that became lost in the trauma. 

I currently have the great blessing of a loving therapist, a Christian, who has guided me through this process, adding to the work that I embarked upon through my own journey. (I also seek counsel because dealing with the emails and accounts of others who write to me also requires that I find my own support as I reach out to them.) I've been on a journey where I've gone back to rescue and liberate myself from those circumstances where a part of me became stuck in the memory of traumas and disappointments. I've gone back to those memories of the great disappointments and traumas in my life to rescue and redeem those “dis-integrated” (or “stuck”) parts of myself that never progressed past the disappointments, as I have “re-integrated” myself so that I am made ever more whole, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.

Note: I believe that God orders the events of my life, allowing trials to “prove” me like a master swordsmith repeatedly heats and pounds and processes the metals over and over again. I'm reminded of the narrative that we are given in the Book of Job where the Accuser approaches God, asking for the opportunity to prove what is in Job's heart. Jesus also states to Peter that Satan has asked to “sift him like wheat.” I believe that all that has occurred in my personal history likely follows this same process, including what the author calls the plight of the “Chosen Child.” God has a purpose and a plan to demonstrate both His Own Glory and Faithfulness through the events of my life as He demonstrates and manifest healing in my life. The process conforms me to His Image, despite the difficulties and often hard circumstances. As I have been comforted, I seek to also share this comfort with others, my main impetus for presenting this information.

Begin Your Personal Journey Toward Healing

I encourage all who have gleaned insight from the many examples of “Botkin Syndrome” and the “Chosen Child” excerpted from Dr. Love's book to buy and read the whole work. This journey of healing is an intensely personal one. I will begin to conclude this blog series with some summary ideas from the rest of Love's writings, but not in as great detail as I did in describing the dynamics and similarities between Botkin Syndrome and the Chosen Child.

Another great adjunct to this process, if you found a strong element of truth in the descriptions of the Chosen Child includes a study of the freedom from shame we should embrace as Christians who are made new creations in Christ Jesus. Please revisit the list of these resources in this blog post. Chamberlin's audio series concerning shame as well as the book, “Love is a Choice” provide much insight, adding a decidedly Christian perspective to healing.

I pray that all who read here will continue the process of recovery from all these “syndromes” posed by these dynamics – dynamics that I do not believe accurately reflect the freedom and liberty that we should enjoy in Christ.

Concerning
Dr. Patricia Love'sThe Emotional Incest Syndrome:
What to Do When a Parent's Love Rule's Your Life
Bantam Books, 1990