Some of us grew up inside systems that taught us not to trust ourselves. To doubt our perceptions, silence our instincts, and defer to authority; whether that authority was a father, a pastor, or a god. Often all three.

This piece is for those of us who are DONE deferring.

I’m a fifth-generation Canadian Mennonite. I grew up inside conservative evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity, and left the church in my mid-twenties because I could no longer reconcile a God of love with a church that couldn’t accept my sexual orientation. Then I spent the next three decades working to unpack what I’d walked away from.

Thirty years later I discovered that my father — a man I had known my entire life as basically passive and emotionally detached — had wreaked a trail of destruction through the course of his life by sexually molesting and assaulting women. Many of them. Six of my mother’s seven sisters. He got away with it because the church condoned his behaviour, and groomed women into silence.

That discovery reframed everything: my childhood, my understanding of who my father was, my mother’s jumping to serve my father’s every need, and the belief system they had insisted was absolute truth.

I found myself standing in a very different relationship to all of it, seeing with fresh eyes from a new vantage point. And wondering: How could my dad have done that? Preyed on women. Over and over again. And also: Why did no one tell me?

Which brought me to the term narcissism, and specifically covert narcissism, characterized by low empathy, gross entitlement, chronic victimhood, passive-aggression, hyper sensitivity to criticism.

Yup, check, check and check. That describes my dad. But I’d never thought of him as lacking empathy. Just as detached and disinterested.

What I’ve come to see is that narcissism is not just a personality disorder but a system of control, one that operates in individuals, families and churches, and is embedded in belief systems and culture. The same mechanics run all of them: the manufacturing of self-doubt, the requirement to subject personal autonomy to external authority, the protection of those who cause harm, the gaslighting, the victim-blaming.

By the time I found out the harsh truth about my dad, my mom was in long term care with advanced dementia. I couldn’t ask her what she’d known when. But I have uncovered, through conversations with her sisters and her long-time friends, that she knew about his “indiscretions” from early on, likely from the earliest days of their marriage.

She never told me. Even when I asked directly what the tension was between my dad and two of her sisters. Even then, she refused to say.

So many layers to unpack: my father’s furtive predations, my mother’s determined silence, fundamentalism as a system of control, with misogyny as a driver.

Even knowing what I now know, I can feel a pressure inside me to remain silent, to protect my father’s reputation, to not upset him.

My father even tried to insist on my silence: “I don’t want you talking to your aunts,” he said.

“I will talk with whomever I want to talk with! I will say whatever I have to say!” My cheeks flushed, my body rigid with fury.

My brain knows that sexual violators do not deserve protection. But the requirement to protect was groomed into me by the predator who raised me, and through the enforcement of familial silence, and the patriarchal power structures of fundamentalism. It was encoded into my nervous system. It feels instinctual.

Undoing that grooming is excruciatingly difficult. It requires a resolute ripping up and ripping out, and then deliberately stepping into new ways of being and relating.

The story is still unfolding. My mother passed away a year ago from complications of advanced dementia. My father is in his eighties with limited mobility after a stroke but still living on his own. Still low empathy. Still entitled. Still hyper sensitive to criticism and unwilling to talk about his patterns of predatory behaviour.

So I write. To make sense of what I lived. To name the patterns. To understand their impact. To rewire my nervous system.

Because speaking up is itself an act of stepping out of the system.

I will say what I have to say, to whomever I choose to say it to.

That includes you.