Naming Spiritual Trauma

One of the early and essential parts of healing is noticing, staying with, and beginning to name your experience. Even tentatively finding language for the emotions, dynamics or beliefs that have organized one’s life, can help these key realities be felt and processed. For many people who are survivors of, or currently are experiencing spiritual trauma, it can be a threshold moment to recognize that “what I’ve experienced has a name. This is real.” This is particularly true in the case of spiritual trauma because this kind of harm tends to operate below conscious awareness, in subtle and not so subtle ways, influencing very core layers of a person’s being, including their sense of worthiness, their belief in their own agency, and how they experience their body and how they experience their own body, sexuality and relationships.

Dr. Hillary L. McBride, author of Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing, conceptualizes spiritual as the sense a person has of being connected to oneself and to something bigger; this is a capacity for connection, wonder, awe and pleasure, which are often experienced bodily, through the five senses and the felt sense of an experience, not only the intellect. According to McBride, spiritual trauma contributes to disconnection and fragmentation of the self, which often looks like a lack of trust in oneself, a pushing away of needs and desires due to seeing these parts of oneself as faulty, unworthy and untrustworthy.

How do religious spaces form people to be disconnected from themselves? A few important ways include teaching often very young people doctrines of total depravity and sinfulness, which forms impressionable and sensitive minds to feel that they are inherently bad and in need of saving from something or someone else. McBride writes that, “Whether or not it manifests in clinically acute ways, and no matter the cause, the belief that a person is bad, untrustworthy and broken at their core is one of the most destructive things a person can be told or can come to believe.”

Another way that high control religious settings further spiritual trauma is through enforcing obedience and submission to authorities, and often using divine texts and spiritual practices to teach this. When someone is taught to never question and are told that their eternal salvation depends on a relationship with a certain authority figure, this makes it very hard to ever disagree or voice dissent. Simultaneously, being taught to constantly question or dismiss one’s own desires, questions, needs and concerns can further this pattern, setting up a very dangerous power dynamic that can cause great harm. 

Yet another significant aspect of spiritual trauma that forms a person’s sense of their own worthiness, as well as how they relate to others, is conditional belonging. Tia Levings explores this in her memoir, A Well Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, describing how following the extensive and restrictive rules in her religious community did meet a need she had for belonging, but at a tragic cost to herself. Levings notes, “I was doing what I’d spent my life doing: conforming to someone else’s vision so they’d keep me. No one will love you unless you obey their rules.” Levings lived in great fear that if she lived outside the norm and didn’t live by the rules set out by her community, she would be judged and discarded; when she finally left the high control setting she had lived in for over a decade, she did experience what she feared, but also realized there were healthy, loving and wise people ready to welcome her on the other side.

Levings’ story is a powerful depiction of survival from spiritual and other abuses; some may feel what Levings experienced is at the very extreme end of how religious communities can function. It may be true that spiritual trauma, like many things, exists on a spectrum, but that shouldn’t be used to dismiss the very real harms people experience no matter how overtly abusive their lived experience is. Distrusting and devaluing one's own worth, intuition, desires, needs and sense of themselves in the world, as well as not being in touch with one's own body and desires, can have very painful and long lasting impacts.

A final and very important way that religious institutions cause harm is through the spiritualizing and minimizing suffering, including covering up abuses. This could happen through quoting scriptures, demanding deference to authorities who know best, equating spiritual authorities with God (therefore to criticize them is to criticize God), or teaching someone it is their job to endure the suffering faithfully. Countless examples of religious institutions hiding and covering up physical, sexual and emotional abuses could be cited here. 

Naming spiritual trauma and recognizing that this may be part of your story is never easy. The hopeful edge is that disconnection from self is never total, and connection back to oneself and others—beginning with coming to know and trust one’s instincts, desires, intuition, needs and one’s own ability to discern what is good or not good—is always possible. Through reflection, learning about spiritual trauma, unlearning harmful beliefs, therapy, connecting with others and healing in a myriad of other ways, it is possible to come out from under high control religious settings with a deep and grounded sense of self, and (if one wants it) a healthy and vibrant spiritual life.

Notes

Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary McBride

A Well Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash