Unreliable Narrator
What it does to a child when the person explaining reality can't be trusted
| Series: Understanding What Happened to Us
I’ve often wondered what was wrong with my mother. I was raised in a cult, so I know how they got me. She was 21 — certainly old enough to have a little skepticism, or to make lifelong decisions with a teensy bit of care.
One of the answers came, of all places, from Edgar Allan Poe.
When my daughter was doing a homeschool high school English class, she had to study Poe.
Poe is a master of the unreliable narrator. He writes from the perspective of a character so deep in delusion that the reader is left guessing which parts of the story happened and which were in his head. It’s fascinating to read.
It’s considerably less fun to live through a childhood narrated by one.
That was my mother.
The Stories
She was deep in magical thinking. The Two by Twos have some strange religious beliefs on their own, but my mom also believed in ghosts and spirits and psychic phenomena that was pretty dubious.
I want to say from the outset that I don’t discount that there may be more to the universe than what we can measure with our instruments. I believe firmly that tapping into our inner voice is how we connect with the divine, and I’ve seen how hard every high-control group works to shut that off. I believe we all have an inner knowing, and that it’s in our interest to be aware of it and to listen. If nothing else, it teaches us what is authentic to us.
However.
I do not believe that my grandmother’s ghost psychically attacked my mother and tried to take over her body, and that my nonverbal infant sister witnessed it and confirmed the whole thing.
I do not believe that Sasquatch had a nest on my mother’s property overlooking the Entiat River — that she found the spot under the tree where he had spent the winter, unbeknownst to anyone, and that at that very moment he was headed over the ridge and she heard the whoop that Sasquatches are known to make.
In that story, and in another one set thirty years earlier, she felt the “psychic sniff” of Sasquatch checking her out. Never saw him. Heard the tell-tale whoop.
I do not believe any of this.
I believe these stories were told to me by an unreliable narrator.
And if that’s unreliable — what else is?
What That Question Does to a Child
It’s like I grew up in Wonderland – full of odd, crazy, and also not that fun, unpredictable weirdness. I lived the psychology long before I had the words or the capacity to understand it.
In psychology, this is called epistemic trust. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Peter Fonagy and Elizabeth Allison describe it as the capacity to accept information from another person as trustworthy, as generally true, and as relevant to yourself. A child learns how the world can be known through other people.
Children build it through caregivers who reliably and accurately reflect reality back to them. That’s the mundane, invisible work of parenting — this is a dog; that was thunder; it hurts, but you’re okay; this man is safe; that man is not.
When the caregiver is unreliable, the child develops what researchers call epistemic mistrust, or epistemic hypervigilance. This means you automatically suspect any incoming information, or you obsessively fact-check to know if what you’re told is true. When you grow up in Wonderland, with your own story narrated to you by the Queen of Hearts, this is a completely logical response.
However.
That response is expensive everywhere else.
It’s expensive because you cannot trust any reality narrated to you by another, and you’re not entirely sure what’s inside your head and what’s outside it. The ability to perceive reality is actually built through relationship, by an adult who confirms or corrects. A child handed Sasquatch on the ridge and a grandmother’s ghost as facts doesn’t learn to test reality against the world.
She learns that reality is whatever the narrator says it is. Off with his head. So the queen says.
Then She Turned It on Me
When I was about kindergarten age, she would pick me up, then pick my sister up, and say that we weighed the same on the scale but that I just felt so much heavier.
That was the beginning of her comments about my weight.
I’ve gone back and looked at the pictures from my early childhood: she was definitely an unreliable narrator. I was not an overweight child.
When my daughter was about six, mom commented that she was going to have a hard time learning cartwheels because she was so heavy in the buttocks region. By then I knew to dismiss her, and I pushed back. My daughter was not overweight. I had not been overweight. My mother was spinning a story in order to cause harm, and I was unwilling to paint white roses red to accommodate her.
Even so, it affected me because our sense of self comes first from our parents. Mine told me I was fat and lazy. That I was so smart I was weird. That I was oversensitive. That I couldn’t believe the evidence of my eyes and ears. It’s still hard for me to trust myself without checking another source.
That’s the thing about being raised by an unreliable narrator. You don’t just inherit wrong facts about Sasquatch. You inherit wrong facts about yourself, and those are much harder to check.
Looking for the One Right Way
My mother grew up Presbyterian. She tells the story that the Presbyterian church gave her one of those little bibles with the New Testament and Psalms. She liked to say that it was the worst mistake they ever made because she read it.
She was looking for the One True Way of God and became convinced that the Presbyterian church was not it. When she met my father, she asked him about his religion, and he answered, “I know what’s right, but I’m not willing for it.”
She was floored. She could not understand how anyone could know what was right and then not want it because all her life she had wanted to know what was right.
When he eventually decided to go back to Meetings, she went with him.
She said that she was looking for The One Right Way. If that’s what you’re looking for — then you’re looking for fundamentalism. They’re the only ones making that claim.
The rest of us say we believe this or think that and just allow that there might be others who have inner knowledge or wisdom. That worldview requires some humility.
My mom wanted so badly for someone to tell her what was true that she never checked the accuracy once she found him.
She wanted a reliable narrator.
She settled for confidence in an unproven claim.
A Terrible Way to Raise Children
My grandmother went to high school with a Two by Two girl.
Nobody liked that girl. She was made strange by the rules and the clothes and everything she wasn’t allowed to do. My grandmother didn’t especially like her either, but she was kind to her.
Years later, that girl grew up and named a daughter after my grandmother because she was the only person in that school who had ever been nice to her.
Whenever the Two by Twos came up, she would say to my mother: “Those people are Jesus’ Way. It’s a terrible way to raise children.”
She was raised with that statement on the Two by Twos.
And then at 21 she joined, married into it, and raised me in it.
She made me that girl in high school. Made to look different, act different. No television. No idea what anyone was referencing. I didn’t fit and I couldn’t.
What I got were lectures about my personality defects. Why I had social problems. What was wrong with me.
Not one word, ever, about being raised in the “terrible way to raise children.”
Sasquatch was something she believed. This she had been told, plainly, by her own mother, many years before I was born. Then she chose that very religion — and when I paid the price for that choice, she told me it was a flaw in my character.
The Reliable Narrator
My best friend of thirty years, whenever I’d come back with some horrible thing my mother had said, would answer the same way every time.
“Well, Kathy’s mean.”
And that was that.
She gave me permission to use the word for the thing I was seeing. She let me see the pattern — that this was not, and had never been, about me.
She was being my reliable narrator.
The research has a name for what she was doing, too. Attachment researchers talk about an earned secure pathway. When you find that one dependable relationship, you can begin to repair what an early one broke. There is a path to wholeness, and I had stumbled upon it.
It was my friend, saying three accurate words, over and over, for three decades that made the difference. And I went to therapists, too. This kind of damage takes deep and sustained work to undo. Not magic. Work.
Learning That the Dead Stay Dead
Mom believed in psychic phenomena, and she always told me I came from a line of psychics and was one myself. I’ve never heard of this being common among Two by Twos. But this was how reality was related to me.
When I was in middle school, a girl at our very small rural high school died by suicide. I sat there at the funeral praying to bring her back, fully believing I could if I just had faith as a grain of mustard seed. That belief was a combination of my mother’s magical thinking and Two by Two preaching.
But the dead stay dead.
I had to learn that from experience, because the person in charge of raising me hadn’t told me that the laws of physics are laws all the time and we can’t bend them with our minds.
Around that same time, I developed bulimia because I believed I was far too fat for anyone to ever love me. I can look at the pictures of my 14-year-old self and have a much more reliable sense of my body size than I had then. It was a setup by a hypercritical parent. The unreliable narrator.
It has taken a lifetime to undo the negative relationship with my body.
The Rebuild
Around the time I left the Two by Twos, my sisters called to tell me they’d found a crystal stand at a market and that crystals buzz. I bought a book called *Crystal, Gem and Metal Magic* and started a journey into New Age spiritualism. I read Louise Hay on using affirmations to become young, beautiful, successful, thin, and happy. Magical thinking was familiar to me.
Reading them, it struck me that most of the goals were pretty superficial.
I dedicated myself to affirmations and crystals and New Age magic and found myself underwhelmed. I also met people who were clearly confused about where their psychic ability ended and their imagination began. I met a gal who had all kinds of information about the Zeta Reticuli, the gray aliens who abduct people, and how they’d issued an apology for it that was channeled through a person. I even saw a psychic who told me I was “meant to be” with the abusive guy I’d crossed the country to leave. I listened to predictions from very confident psychics, and then heard their reaffirmations when those predictions did not come to pass.
Someone close to me went further into it than I did. I watched a person I love lose the thread between what was happening and what she believed was happening, and there was nothing I could do from the outside.
Unreliable narration isn’t just something that’s done to you. It’s something that you can learn and pass on.
Inner knowing has to be grounded in reality. Otherwise it’s just imagination gone wild.
So I moved toward a rationalist perspective. I like things you can prove. I like being grounded in facts. My undergraduate degree is in History — research and sourcing and accuracy checks. I studied Women’s History, which is the discipline of asking the questions the male narrators never thought to ask. Later, in my career, I moved to math. Consistent. Provable. Reliable.
That progression looks like an intellectual preference. It isn’t. It’s what happens when the daughter of the unreliable narrator becomes hypervigilant, grows up, and gets a job. Alice grows up and needs to check the facts after a childhood in Wonderland.
2023
So in 2023, when the Dean Bruer scandal broke and the crisis line went online, I followed the facts.
I read the court cases. I found names I knew. I learned that church leadership in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand knew about the abuse of children in Two by Two homes, and that they moved male Workers to new places without warning anyone. Two by Two ministers live in the homes of the congregation. That means they were deliberately not informing parents that they had scheduled a known predator to live in their house, with their children.
For decades. I went back to therapy for support with this.
When my mom asked, I told her. I had names of people we knew. I had court cases with graphic details of what children had experienced because of decisions her clergy made. I tried to be gentle, because it is horrific news, and it was deeply disturbing to me.
She sat there, quiet, kind of shell-shocked, while I told her.
My daughter made eye contact with me from the kitchen. She was shocked I was having this conversation with my mom at all.
She Told a New Story
I heard my mother’s version of that conversation — when she told it to a judge.
She said my daughter had not been there. No witnesses.
She said I had come into her home screaming and yelling, accusing her of being at fault for the sexual violence I experienced as a child.
She said she was now afraid of me. She asked for a restraining order for the rest of her life, so that I would never be allowed to see her again.
I had gone no-contact five months earlier.
If she wanted no contact, she already had it. I had made no attempt to renew it. Not once.
So that wasn’t what she wanted.
Here is what I think happened in that living room.
Somewhere in that conversation, she felt the conviction of her own conscience. I had been describing the Elder at our meeting — how we used to stiffen our arms when we shook his hand, which was a big deal, because refusing outright wasn’t done. How we tried to keep him from pulling us into a hug. Groping. Or worse, kissing us on the mouth.
Her solution had been to coach us in the car afterward about how to politely decline an old man’s advances.
With partial success. She saw it happening. It continued to happen.
She knew.
She raised me in a church full of predators and unsafe men. They were in our living room and we were in theirs, and my childhood is full of experiences of fending off the inappropriate advances of old men.
You can’t not see that.
So she did what she had always done.
She told a new story.
She made one up and sat in a courtroom telling a judge how frightened she was of her daughter, who had attacked her Christian faith.
A woman who had narrated Sasquatch on the ridge and a ghost in the bedroom and two little girls who weighed the same but didn’t, narrating one more time — and this time the story was about me, and this time it was official, and this time a judge was writing it down.
I think the problem was never that she didn’t believe me.
I think the problem was that she did.
Because I was quiet, and upset, and I had facts. One after another. Events she knew about. Court cases she could look up. I peeled away the magical world she had built to keep herself from knowing what she knew. Alice – pulling the Queen of Hearts into the real world.
And it was more than she could stand. The Queen wanted my head off.
Reliable Narration
I spent a long time angry, and bargaining, and moving through the other phases of grief. I worked it out in therapy — somatic work, EMDR, CranioSacral — all of which rely on creativity and imagination and connecting to your inner voice.
I’ve done imaginative exercises in therapy that led immediately to a reduction in anxiety and helped me move through grief. So I don’t reject inner knowing in favor of “just the facts.”
I embrace the divine within me that is connected to all that is, and that helps me move toward greater mental health.
But there’s evidence alongside it. Fewer symptoms. Better health. Something I can check.
That’s the whole distinction. Not intuition versus reason. Intuition that answers to something, versus intuition that answers to nothing.
No, I don’t believe in Sasquatch.
I look for evidence when someone tells me a story. I need my relationships grounded in facts and logic as well as emotional experience.
And for myself — I give myself the gift of reliable narration.
A Question for You
Whose account of reality did you inherit? And what have you never gone back and checked?
*If this article brought something up that you want to sit with — the door is open. The Little Mouse and the Purple Door Journal is a private space to do that work on your own terms.*
*If this resonated — share it with someone who grew up being told what was true by someone who didn’t know.*
*This piece mentions a death by suicide. If you’re struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24 hours a day.*
*National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline, 1-866-662-1235.*
Resources
Books
Little Mouse and the Purple Door — Amazon
Little Mouse Journal — Amazon
Little Bea and the Golden Key — Amazon
Little Bea Journal — Amazon
Author’s Work
purpledoorjourneys.com
TikTok: @littlemousepurpledoor
Two by Two Survivor Resources
Advocates for the Truth — advocatesforthetruth.com | Hotline: 1 (503) 386-4634
Wings for Truth — wingsfortruth.info
Telling the Truth — tellingthetruth.info
FBI Tip Line — fbi.gov/2x2
Broader Recovery Resources
Recovering from Religion Foundation — recoveringfromreligion.org
Religious Trauma Institute — religioustraumainstitute.com
This article is part of the series Understanding What Happened to Us — for survivors of high-control religious communities and anyone who ever angled toward the back of the stage.
August 2026 | Meliesa Tigard | purpledoorjourneys.com
So relatable. While my mother didn’t make up stories about ghosts and such, she indoctrinated me completely in 2x2 lore. And the split between what I was taught we believe and is reality and what I saw and experienced split my mind. Definitely Alice material. It is not an easy thing we did, finding our ways out of this labyrinth. Brava.
Interesting. I did not grow up in a fundamentalist household. My mother did, however, control the narrative. She spun unflattering yarns about every relative and neighbor, and as her children, we believed her. Like yours, my mother told stories about us as well highlighting our inadequacies & shortcomings, usually quite inaccurately. It wasn’t until years later that I began to question all the stories including her story of me.