“There is a middle ground between having orgies at home and forcing me to marry a virgin. Instead, they chose the extremes. They sacrificed me to atone for their sins.” This is how Martina Pucciarelli, 37 years old and with an apparently normal life, but with a past of violence and trauma, talks about her experience in Jehovah’s Witnesses. He does so in his debut novel “The God You Chose for Me”, published by HarperCollins, out January 21st.
Martina left the community of millennialist Christians in 2016, and from that day on she was literally “erased” by her family, she says in an interview with Corriere della Sera. A long journey made of pain and abuse, where motherhood played a fundamental role in the decision to change her life.
Abuse and the drive to change one’s life
The suicide spoken of in the novel is the result of fiction, explains the writer, but as regards the sexual violence that the protagonist suffered as a child “I didn’t invent anything”. “For me that fact became a taboo for many years. The greatest pain was that the matter was not given importance. I have to admit to my mother that she had noticed it, I asked her to take me to a sister of faith who was like a second mother, to whom I was very attached and she committed the sin of superficiality.” However – he adds – there are girls who have suffered much worse abuse.”
The push to abandon Jehovah’s Witnesses came with motherhood. Or, rather, with the desire for the latter. “I got married, the children didn’t arrive”, she says. “I said to Jehovah: ‘I have always been good and obedient and I have always done what you wanted, I have given up many things for you and I ask you one thing, I want one thing, why don’t you give it to me?’. I believed it and I believed it. At the time I thought he was punishing me for something I didn’t understand. And then I did assisted fertilization, always according to the rules of the community, with my husband’s sperm, but there I said to myself that God didn’t give me the child, but God gave it to me. science”.
Psychotherapy and discoveries about parents
The psychotherapy process, which her family wanted to prohibit her, was fundamental: “It was 2014, and I was in my 7th month, I was expecting my second child, and I felt the need to compare myself with someone who wasn’t from the community, and the pregnancy made me given the excuse to go to therapy, which is generally frowned upon, they make you travel miles to see Jehovah’s Witness psychologists psychotherapy from one her colleague, I told my husband that if she went, I could go too.” Martina begged the psychotherapist for antidepressants. “Not her, she said, you have to work… And in a couple of years I left.”
From her past, she explains, she lacks faith, but not the hypocrisy that reigned in the family sphere, especially in the area of sexuality. In fact, over the years she and her older brother discovered unexpected truths about their parents: “They lived in a beat generation style, a youth of excess, my father confessed this to my brother. This was their way of rebelling. end, they punished themselves by converting. I felt anger, justified, because there is a middle ground between having orgies at home and forcing me to marry a virgin. Instead, they chose the extremes. They sacrificed me to atone their sins. They had to limit themselves to sacrificing themselves. They took my adolescence away from me.”
