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Sex and the Religious Guilt That Comes with It: An Interview with Davy Brown

Davy Brown grew up in Aspen Colorado as a Christian with her pastor father. She was part time homeschooled by her mom and a part time christian student where pre-marital sex meant you were going to hell. Five years later, Brown recounts the moment she lost her innocence and how she struggled with her religion. 

Q: Can you tell me the moment you feel like you lost your innocence?

A: When I was a freshman in high school, I was raped. I never knew how to deal with those feelings because I had felt like my innocence had been taken away. The hardest thing about it, still to this day, is not being able to separate the feelings of being disgusted that it ever happened and the religious guilt that I felt. I felt like what had been done to me was a sin that I had committed. I now felt like I was going to hell and I was evil. 

Q: How do you feel like you coped with all of that? That’s a very young age to feel those feelings. 

A: I have never been good at coping even now that’s something that I struggle with. At first and for a long time I would over sexualize myself. I thought that if I had control over how people sexualized me I was taking that control out of their hands. It always left me feeling empty and didn’t give me any healing. It wasn’t until I could really channel my healing in a better way that I learned from it. 

Q: Did you grow up religious?

Oh, yeah. We were Christian and all my life I was taught that you have sex and you go to hell. It’s very black and white in the church that I was in. My father was one of the pastor but that aside, the other pastor was very adamant about implementing that in our heads at a very young age. Sex is evil, sex is a sin, sex is disgusting. In a christian school I was taught that everyone who had sex was going straight to hell. When I told my parents I had been raped, which was a long time after it happened, it was very hard for my parents to wrap their heads around. Their little christian daughter was no longer pure.

Q: Do you still feel like you still deal with that religious guilt? Not even just with sex but in general?

A: I have taken a lot of time to sort out my relationship with God. Religion, as an industry, is toxic. It’s honestly disgusting. Telling young children [that you’re going to hell for having sex] is the worst thing you can do for their mental health and development. I have started to handle it as a spiritual growth. I’ve been working on my inner development and have realized that times have changed. If the whole point of god and religion is to not hate and to love and to give, who am I to set one sin higher than the other? 

Q: How does that feel to you now?

A: I feel like I’ve broken those toxic chains. I had a conversation with my parents this summer. It was one of the most in depth, vulnerable conversation I’ve ever had with them. I told them I was really upset that they taught me those things and drilled it in to my head. It was really good for them. They came clean to me, it was really good for me, they told me that they didn’t feel that way and they were sorry that the church had done that to me. 

Q: Do you ever still feel that religious guilt?

No, I’ve been able to think and understand that if love is the whole point why am I rejecting that love and feeling guilty. I think about my innocence a lot, even now five years later. I feel like through what’s happened I’ve been able to grow my strength and resilience just because I don’t feel guilt religiously anymore.

Q: What advice would you give a young person feeling the same way you did when you were younger? How would you help someone struggling with that religious guilt?

A: I encourage others to channel their own healing in a way that doesn’t take from them. You’re never going to grow if the way that you are coping is taking more from you than you are getting. It made me stronger in the end.

[dkiddsposts]

Life Narrative

This is how a body dies: the body first conserves the heart, lungs and brain so it starts to spare the things that aren’t important. The first is the blood to your hands and feet and other extremities. Then the kidneys shut down. You lose your appetite and your blood pressure drops. Your heart rate increases and the body temperatures drop.

I didn’t understand how close I was to death until I learned this. The surgeons said I had about twelve more hours before I lost my leg completely or lost my life.

In middle April of 2021 I woke up on a Monday morning at 5:25AM for weight training. It’s normal, as a collegiate swimmer, for my body to hurt. For my muscles to feel strained, pulled and fatigued. So when I moved my right leg and felt a pain almost like a pulled groin I didn’t think much of it. I skipped out on anything during weights that might irritate or strain it more and thought nothing less.

Tuesday morning I went to work. My back always hurts after standing for a long time. I have a habit of choosing fashion over comfort and instead of wearing the shoes I specifically bought to stand on for eight hours I went for my Air Forces that morning. About three hours of making coffee later I could barely stand. My leg hurt every time I took a step and my back felt like it was killing me. After four hours of making coffee I passed out and had a friend pick me up from work.

I’ve always been a healthy person. I’ve been swimming for eleven years and am always raved over by doctors because of my low resting heart rate and rarely ever getting sick. My mental health was a different story; I’ve been seeing psychologists and psychoanalysts since I was seven years old. My freshman year had not been easy on me and to cope I turned to bad and old habits. I was ultimately very unhappy with my life and what was supposed to be a year of growth. To add a serious illness felt like the last straw but I chalked it up to a bad groin strain and stress sickness.

By Thursday I called my mom. I couldn’t keep any food down, was seriously dehydrated, had to switch between getting in a scalding hot shower and sitting face first in front of a fan because my body temperature was fluctuating so much and I could barely walk without crying. She picked me up and took me to urgent care where they could tell there was some type of infection in my groin but didn’t have the technology to tell what. Next stop was the ER where they gave me antibiotics and told me it was cellulitis, an infection of the skin.

Feeling a little better because of the mild pain killer I slept for about two hours before waking up freezing cold. I hopped in the shower to warm up and immediately threw up. At this point I couldn’t keep even water down which meant I for sure couldn’t keep antibiotics down. My groin had swollen to the size of a baseball and I thought this is what dying must feel like.

We went back to the emergency room the next morning and they admitted me just to monitor and give me IV antibiotics. The next week is a haze but I could feel it getting worse. I was on enough pain meds to supply a pharmacy just to get through a couple hours of sleep. I remember how they weighed me at some point and I had gained thirty pounds because my kidneys were failing and I wasn’t releasing any of the liquid in the three IV drips I was constantly connected to. I remember them doing an ultra sound on my now softball sized and blistered groin and how my sister had to leave the room to throw up because I couldn’t control the sounds I was making from the pain of a plastic tool being pushed into my leg. I remember my dad telling me that the best dream he ever had was under anesthesia about fly fishing and he hoped I had a dream that made me happy right before they took me into surgery.

The plan was to make three small incisions in my swollen leg to see what was wrong but they ended up taking a plate sized chunk of tissue out of my leg all the way down to the muscle. What they found was necrotizing fasciitis commonly known as flesh eating bacteria. I was lucky because twelve more hours and I would have been flown to Denver if the infection was in my muscle or blood stream. I narrowly avoided a life without a right leg or possibly death.

I spent another week in the hospital before they sent me home. Three weeks later and I had a skin graft done. Five weeks after that, I was cleared for all physical activity. The recovery was fairly easy and I’m blessed with what was the best case scenario. But I wanted to get back as soon as I could to the life I had been living.

You’d think that you would be scared of death and change your life after being so close to dying but in my head I was immortal and nothing could touch me. I went back to drinking too much and choosing unhealthy coping mechanisms. They say it takes six to nine months to work through trauma at the minimum but I’ve barely started scratching the surface.

This story doesn’t really have an ending. Physically I’m healthy and back to normal but I’m faced with a decision I have to make. Do I start focusing on what’s important and turn my life around and take this as a fresh start or do I continue what I’ve always done with my life? This seems like an easy decision but you’d be surprised how hard it is for me to take action and take care of myself. My sister once told me how scary it was that I almost died and still had no regard for taking care of my health or well being.

I have no plan of action. I’m stuck in purgatory between two decisions not really doing anything for or against myself. For now, purgatory is better than hell.