Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 16, 1993 TAG: 9308200096
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cody Lowe Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Susan Jenner says she never had been happy.
The daughter of a domineering mother and an indifferent father, she says she never felt she did anything right.
"Nothing I did was good enough" for her mother, she said. She has no memory of ever sitting on her father's lap.
Her mother made all her decisions for her, up until the day 21-year-old Jenner announced she was getting married.
It was an unaccountable act of rebellion, she says now. She was even asked to leave her church because its leadership disapproved of her husband.
It's been almost a year since Jenner last spoke with her mother, though she sometimes sees her in a passing car or at a grocery store.
But Jenner (not her real name) believes she is on the road to recovery from that dysfunctional upbringing. In recent weeks she's drawn surprised comments - "What are you smiling about?" - from her husband and co-workers.
Now 28 and working in a medical field in the Roanoke Valley, she credits a course called "When I Grow Up . . . I Want To Be an Adult" - and a prescription anti-depressant - with helping her gain real independence and joy for the first time.
The course is designed to deal from a Christian perspective with problems of low self-esteem, damaged emotions, codependency, and fractured relationships between adult children and their parents, according to course leaders Wayne and B.J. Paturel.
The Paturels, who are based in California, operate Living Free Ministries. They travel around the country, stopping for a few weeks or months at a time to run the "When I Grow Up" workshops and establishing Christian-based addiction recovery programs.
A former salesman and a recovering alcoholic of 18 years, Wayne Paturel is the son of alcoholic parents. His mother committed suicide when he was 22.
Paturel, 52, started ministering to people in his home church - Skyline Wesleyan - after experiencing a religious conversion at a Billy Graham crusade in California in 1985.
He later married another member of the church, B.J., 45. Preparing for the full-time ministry he and his wife now run, he completed counseling credentials courses at two San Diego colleges.
The "When I Grow Up" program was more than midway through its 11-week schedule when participants Jenner and Jay Adkins agreed to talk about the workshop and how it helped them.
Adkins, 43, says he has a "pretty good self-image but wanted to change some things."
Adkins, a sheet-metal worker for Norfolk Southern, said he has always avoided confrontation - and has been more reserved than he'd like to be, especially with his wife.
What the course has helped him do, he says, is confront his own past by forcing him to consider questions he'd never really thought about. The course prompted him to ask himself "Is it normal to bleed when you're punished?" or "Is it normal to wish I was somebody else's kid?"
What he realized, Adkins said, is that his father - a "periodic alcoholic" - did hit him hard enough to draw blood and did make him wish sometimes that he was someone else's child.
"When Dad was home, I stayed away from home as much as possible," he said.
That relationship turned around during the final decade of his father's life, Adkins said, after his father stopped drinking. "We had a great relationship those last 10 years," he said, when his dad became his best friend.
Even though that relationship was mended, Adkins said, his own personality had been molded in childhood, and that continues to affect his relationships with others.
His pastor at Penn Forest Wesleyan Church and the Christian support group "helped me realize the teachings of Christ give me a pathway to deal with things," and that standing up for himself is "not unchristian."
All of the programs the Paturels conduct are Christ-centered, they said, and though they are often conducted in Wesleyan churches, are non-denominational.
Men and women hold separate sessions in which participants complete workbook exercises and are allowed - though not forced - to share their feelings and reactions with others in the group.
"We don't advise each other but are encouraged to support each other," Jenner said.
People attracted to the programs are not attending "to learn theology," Wayne Paturel said, "but to get healthier." Participants have come from many Protestant denominations and the Catholic church, he said.
Paturel says his experience is that "normal is dysfunctional" in terms of modern families - that almost everyone has some negative influences from childhood that can leave sometimes unsuspected residual effects in adulthood.
That goes for those raised in Christian homes - as Jenner and Adkins were - as much as any others.
Jenner said her mother - a lifelong Christian - believes that "Christian people don't have problems," and she blamed Jenner for creating her own emotional difficulties.
As a teen-ager and young adult, Jenner said, she avoided involvement with other people - except the man she eventually married. Even after that, "I slept my life away" - going to bed at 7 or 8 p.m. every day and sleeping 11 or 12 hours.
Now, she said, she sits up late and gets up early, eager to face life.
She tried individual therapy that she says didn't help her and eventually saw a physician who prescribed a relatively new antidepressant that she believes has been instrumental in her improved emotional health.
But she says much of the credit for her new attitude lies in the lessons she's learned from the workshop.
Jenner knows that eventually she wants to try to be reconciled to her family. "B.J. told us we would be the ones to change" as a result of the workshop. "Those around us will be changed only because of the difference they see in us."
Adkins is hoping for an even stronger relationship with his wife and children, tearing down some of the "protective walls" he's built around himself over the years.
"My biggest aim . . . is to share these things with my wife. Because she's my best friend, she's my best bet."
Living Free Ministries will begin new weekly workshops in Roanoke today at 7 p.m. at Penn Forest Wesleyan Church, 3735 Chaparral Drive S.W.; and Thursday at 7 WRITER p.m. at Parkway Wesleyan Church, 3230 King Street N.E.
by CNB