“Holy Hurt” with Hillary L. McBride, PhD

Healing from spiritual abuse and religious trauma is not a simple, linear journey. In this week’s episode of the Allender Center Podcast, Rachael Clinton Chen sits down with Dr. Hillary McBride—psychologist, researcher, and author of Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing—to explore the invisible wounds that trauma leaves on our minds, bodies, and spirits.

They talk about:

• How trauma can be reinforced by the very systems meant to guide and protect us.
• The profound importance of witnessing, connection, and radical welcoming in your recovery journey.
• Recovering parts of ourselves that were buried under burdens we were never meant to carry.
• What it means to grieve, to repair, and to show up for ourselves and our communities.

This conversation is an invitation to sit tenderly with your own story, to bear witness to your pain, and to glimpse the possibility of love, mercy, and goodness in the midst of it.

About Our Guest:

Hillary L. McBride, PhD, is a therapist, researcher, speaker and writer. She loves to help see people grow, heal, change, and come into more fullness in themselves and their relationships. She is passionate about the well-being of all people, and wants to make psychology and academic research accessible to a wide variety of people. 

You can order your copy of “Holy Hurt” by Hillary L. McBride, PhD, here: https://hillarylmcbride.com/holy-hurt-book/

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies at the Allender Center, you know if you’re listening, we are fiercely committed to continuing to engage the harm of spiritual abuse and religious trauma as well as the process of healing. And I can’t think of a better companion for this continued conversation today than my guest, Dr. Hillary McBride. I am so thrilled that you’re joining me, so thank you.

Hillary: Thank you for having me. I just felt the warmth in your voice and I could feel it in my chest. It feels so good to be here.

Rachael: Well, I’m delighted, and I know we’re going to jump into some complex waters, but if you’re not familiar with Dr. McBride’s work, she is a registered psychologist, award-winning researcher, speaker, writer, and I would add podcast host. Her books include The Wisdom of Your Body, Practices for Embodied Living and her most recent labor of love that came out earlier this year, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing. Now, prior to this moment today, we’ve not actually had the privilege of having a conversation, but I just want to name that through your public presence in writing, you possess such an embodied wisdom and fierce kindness that allows your clinical insights and humanized stories of healing and flourishing to feel tangible. If not, dare I say possible. Your passion for making psychology and academic research accessible to a wide variety of people definitely shines through. I think especially in this most recent writing. Holy Hurt. As you weave together your insights, research and stories with body practices and these very rich conversations with fellow practitioners and healers. And I just want to say one final thing before I will turn it to you, I promise. I just really appreciated the tender and thoughtful ways you made space in your writing for survivors of spiritual trauma to be where we are without demand or prescription, offering such generous imagination for the multitude of ways we might be able to locate ourselves as we read your words, and just that imagination for the multitude of ways we could locate ourselves in our own healing processes. So I just felt your intentionality and your generosity in the kind of wide path that you set for the people engaging your work so, deeply grateful.

Hillary: Oh, thank you, Rachael. That feels so, oh my gosh, that’s just really landing me that that’s exactly what I would want for people who are reading this book to feel like they get to be exactly where they are and what a message contrary to what so many of us who’ve been in religious context that have been abusive and harmful have heard this story that we have to be somewhere else or we have to be different in order to be good or lovable or safe, and what a relief to feel like we can be where we are and be met.

Rachael: Yeah, absolutely. I’m just grateful for, I know in my own healing journey to have companions in the process that can feel so disorienting too. Like, okay, I like the invitation to be where I am, but I’m so used to someone just telling me, this is the way, and you just do this and everything will be okay, even if so many fractures led to deep questions. So I did want to hear more from you. How did you find yourself engaging so directly the reality of spiritual trauma more deeply? What led to this labor of love and this season?

Hillary: When I was early in my graduate education, I remember taking a trauma course with a giant in the field of trauma, traumatology, trauma therapy and intervention, and feeling myself so drawn to that work because, well, it took me a little while to get there, it landed in a personal way. Often these are the things that we feel drawn to something that resonates with our own material and lived experience. And so as I got into the field of trauma studies and trauma therapy and deepened my research and clinical skill, what I noticed is that as patients were coming to me in my practice, who would’ve never reported a trauma history. Who would’ve never identified as having an index event or meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD because “everything was fine, and I was loved really well,” what I was seeing is that their bodies, the way that they narrated their story, what it felt like to be them inside it was all saying– trauma. It was all saying there’s a trauma history here, but there was a gap in the way it was being organized or conceptualized by them and by me as being not trauma because everyone around them was doing it because there was a whole theological framework behind why what happened happened, and because it was good and right to believe that they were bad. It was good and right to feel guilt and shame and terror for being in the world. So that the paradox of what I saw in front of me really highlighted something that’s foundational about this particular configuration of trauma, which is that it is indeed trauma and it often lies invisibly in the nervous system and in community systems because of how much social reinforcement and theology and social narrative around it being good lives there, right? There’s so much around the way things are in spiritually abusive and traumatic context that supports them to be that way, rhetoric, audiology behavior or practices, et cetera. So that for me really opened up this possibility that this could be trauma, legitimate trauma. At that time, we didn’t have a language to talk about it. I mean, this is like 2015, 2014, 2015, 2016. And like you said to me earlier, I can’t remember if this was previously to when the recording started in the conversation, there’s not so much language for this early on, and so we’re groping around in the dark for how do we conceptualize what’s happening? And it was really in paying attention to the lives of my patients that I started to look at my own experience too, and realized, oh, there’s a lot here in my own life that I think made it hard for me to see that what was happening to people was trauma because I couldn’t even call it trauma for myself.

Rachael: Oh, I feel like that’s such a unfortunate journey for so many of us that yeah, this thing that, yeah, we’re working with other people, we’re seeing it, we’re naming it, and then all of a sudden having to go, oh, wait a minute. What does this mean for me? I know for myself, I was talking to you beforehand, all of in my Master of divinity program, all of my research, I was at the Seattle School and they were like, take your therapeutic insights you’re getting from being at this kind of counseling school and all your deepest theological questions and your vocational hopes and write a 25 page paper. It was a great time. It was a great time to be alive for me and in my own brain, which I was like, okay, I’ll do this. I almost didn’t finish it, and that was its own trauma of itself, but wrestling with, oh, I want to wrestle with my own developmental trauma history and how that formed my spiritual imagination and how these theologies I’m taking in are also disordering things and how do we heal together? And then that was in 2010, and then 2017/2018, Dan Allender said, “Hey, you want to do a podcast with me on spiritual abuse?” And I was like, sure. That’s kind of a weird, yeah. I mean, we work in abuse. I understand it. I’m really drawn to people who’ve been harmed by the church or bad theology. But yeah, I’ll have this conversation with you. And it was literally in the middle of this conversation, I start telling this story that I had always been able to identify as clergy abuse, or I dated my youth minister when I was a teenager. I just saw all these people out here that I was helping, and there was something of having to put language to spiritual abuse with them. And I started telling the story just kind of like I’ve had some experiences of church charm and a really fundamental environment, and it was just one of those lightning bolt moments of like, okay, okay, this is a new hermeneutical frame for understanding my story. And okay, spiritual abuse, this is real. And I don’t just care about it because I care about other people. I care about it because it’s my story. And I just think that’s true for so many of us, especially with something like spiritual abuse or spiritual trauma. And I think you’ve put this so well, it is coming more common. It’s becoming more in a shared language or cultural imagination, and it can still feel so hard to define. And I think you’ve done a really good job in your writing trying to put a robust imagination for what are we talking about when we’re talking about spiritual trauma? I mean even your language and how the house is haunted, what our bodies have always known, which is what I hear you putting words to in your work with clients. But you also do a great job of locating spiritual trauma within a historical context of in some ways, this is not a new phenomenon. It’s been in the water. So I would just love to hear more from you how you help people make sense. What are we talking about and how long has this really been going on?

Hillary: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot there. There’s a lot there. Maybe I’ll start with the how long, the how long, because you’re right that this is new for us to make sense of. This is new for us, and when I say us, really who I’m talking about is people light-skinned European ancestry, Whiteness in North America, or what we would call Turtle Island if we’re using the indigenous name for North America. So when we think about the history of spiritual trauma and how long this has been happening, one, we could say that spiritual trauma has been happening as long as people have been using God and naming God in their attempts to grab power and silence and disenfranchise others. I think spiritual trauma has been happening as long as people have had to make meaning about the awful things in the world and have had to do that in a way that has been disembodied and disconnected from culture and land. And then more specifically, because that can feel like it stretches into our history in a nebulous way more specifically and directly to think about first contact and what it was like for our European ancestors to come to North America and take people’s land, take their culture, take their customs to colonize them, to colonize land and to do so in the name of their deity, that spiritual trauma and spiritual abuse has been happening for a long time. And the point that I try to make in the book is it makes a lot of sense when we look at the legacy and the stretching reach of spiritual trauma in our present day religious configurations, experiences, because look at the soil, it’s built on so many of our religious foundations and institutions, and I speak particularly as coming from the Christian tradition that our tradition on the soil of indigenous people has the legacy of spiritual trauma rooted in it. So right when there’s something toxic in the soil, of course it’s going to impact the trees, of course it’s going to shape what happens to the fruit. And then more specifically, I think what does it actually look like in our lives today and how might we language or craft some sort of sketch of spiritual trauma? Two ideas come to mind, and I’m happy to go into them further if it feels like they’re kind of rudimentary. But the first is any trauma that happens in or is justified by religious or spiritual context and figures. So that your trauma happens in the walls of a church or in a synagogue or in the walls of your spiritual community, or there’s a religious or spiritual leader who’s there in enacting abuse and in a way like instructing the community to engage in these abusive, toxic, traumatic practices, but also, and this is perhaps the lesser known flavor or profile of spiritual trauma. Trauma that has an impact on our religious and spiritual beliefs and practices as in trauma that happens outside of the walls of, or the relationships with our spiritual and religious community. But because we’re offered meaning-making structures from our religious and spiritual communities, we impose the meaning-making on the trauma or interpret trauma through the lens of what we’ve been handed. For example, just to make it really clear, if someone has been told God wants all things to happen to you that happened to you and therefore you’re good. And that’s a story that someone has handed in development by their family, by their church community, and then they experience sexual abuse by a soccer coach or a teacher or any kind of abuse happens in another sphere. And the only way to interpret that is that God wanted this for me. Then there is spiritual trauma woven into that experience of abuse. And my point in the book, if you read it, then you’ve heard me say this, and for survivors this might not be so surprising or maybe will be, my understanding is that all trauma is spiritual trauma. And the reason for that is there is no way for trauma when it is in fact within that category of what overwhelms us to the point of us facing a kind of death internally on a nervous system level, that there is no trauma that does not impact the way that we experience ourselves in the world. And there is no trauma that does not irreparably shake the foundation of how we interpret what it means to be human. And if we’re good, if we’re safe, if we can be trustworthy, if others are trustworthy. So there is a story that many of us inherited that our spirituality is fragmented off from, distinct from our bodily experience, our social experience, our existential experience or cognition. And what I’m suggesting is that spiritual trauma is all trauma in a way that reminds us that we are deeply integrated, that there is no physical trauma that does not also impact our meaning making systems, our social sense of identity, location, et cetera. So that hopefully starts to sketch some parameters. But in doing so, I recognize we include pretty much everything in the container of spiritual trauma.

Rachael: But it feels very true, and we’ve named that as well, that in many ways any form of degradation, of manipulation, of control, of violation, as you put so well really is an assault on what it means for all humans to be like image bearers. Let’s say you still ascribe to a Christian worldview or deep theological roots, any abuse is assaulting what it means to be human. And that image bareness is not just in isolation, it’s the sense of shalom of all of creation and relationships and wholeness. And so you’re absolutely right, and I think it can get really tricky because we’re talking about something that is true, right? All trauma, all abuse is a spiritual, it’s intrinsically in part a spiritual wound. And you’ve also very well named some clear parameters are like, what do we need when we talk about religious trauma? And I just think, yeah, you kind of put some words, this is actually my next question. I’m just going to say you’re doing a really great job of just moving right into the questions I have…

Hillary: Setting you up well? Great.

Rachael: …which so fun. Yeah. Just the double wound of religious trauma when, yeah, the very context that you’re being formed in is setting you up for meaning making that actually is keeping heavy burdens on an already burdened person. And I can say for myself, I actually, I had a pretty secure attachment with God, even though I was raised in a context that in the larger context was certainly more fundamentalist, definitely leaning into some white supremesist. I mean, I’m a Southern Baptist, I was raised Southern Baptist, so there’s some white supremacists structures in the beginning of the Southern Baptist Church. I mean, it’s separated from other Baptist denominations because it was pro-slavery. That’s it’s beginning. So I’m not like ascribing some judgment, it’s just historically that’s in the water. But I had just had really good spiritual leaders in my early childhood. There was a lot of developmental trauma in my home. There were ways my nervous system was being wired to be very bent towards fear and anxiety and panic and survival. But I had spiritual, I’d say something like, oh, I asked Jesus into my heart, but I’m not being changed. That was the way it was. So being talked about even as a 4-year-old, you should have some moral shift in your little world. And I’m like, I still get mad. I still am human. And I had a little VBS teacher that was like, I don’t think it’s as much about God coming into your heart as it is, like you being wrapped up in the heart of God as a beloved identity. I dunno how this person brought that. But there were just these moments where there was just a lot of honoring of my personhood space for my questions. But when I was a teenager, we moved into a very fundamentalist, probably more meeting some of the criteria of a cult in some of the insular nature of this particular community. Like little example, instead of going to prom, we were encouraged to come to MORP, which is prom spelled backwards, which was like churches, prom. It was a very anti-sex. And it was within this context that I was set up in a relationship with one of my youth leaders, very rigid gender roles, a lot of fear-based manipulation and control. And it’s just like the power of that short amount of time to just completely reorder my sense of who God was. And I think you bring in some of Dr. Allison Cook’s language around spiritual trauma adds this sort of terrifying layer that God might question our worth to. And I think about that particular period of my life because it’s where some of the most profound spiritual abuse happened that was keeping heavy burdens on an already burdened nervous system. So things like six months into this dating relationship, which I could say was 100% an abusive set up, I started having massive anxiety because then the infatuation had worn off. I didn’t actually want to be with this person, but I’m in an environment that’s making meaning by saying, well, God wants this. This is a covenant relationship. You’re not married, but this is like you’re supposed to be in this. So if you’re having different feelings, that’s a failure of love. Your anxiety is a lack of faith. Everything was being turned into a spiritual meaning in a way that actually just made God really… scarier than the developmental trauma I was experiencing. Just like I was so bad and I was trying so hard to be good and just, you dedicated your book to all the younger selves who needed to know then, but can finally learn now you can listen to your body, you can trust yourself and you’re good at your core. And I guess I’m, I would love to hear more from you. You bring in Michelle Panchuk’s stuff. You do great work around the role of developmental trauma and underdeveloped maturity. So be free to kind of go where you want to go with that. I know that was a long meandering way to get to a question, but I think I just feel the very personal impact in my own world. And I’ve said so many times, if the context I would in had even had an inch of trauma informed care, like an inch would’ve gone a mile in my little body, and the meaning making that was actually, it was like a double wound. It was like intensifying the trauma. It was deepening the trauma instead of alleviating it or giving me an imagination out or forward or, yeah.

Hillary: Yeah. Thank you for sharing more pieces of your story. My heart, yeah, aches knowing that yeah, that’s a part of your reality. And for so many of us, so many, I think a couple things that I’m hearing or feeling connected to as I’m listening to you is the way that the spiritual overlay on top of trauma often reinforces it or keeps us stuck within it or fragments us from possibilities which could be liberating or healing. And I think that going back to the story that I was saying earlier about noticing in my patients that it’s kind of screaming trauma, if I look at the nervous system, if I look at the incoherent narrative presentation, if I look at the shame, the defensive structures from the psychological case conceptualization perspective, it’s screaming trauma. But the person in front of me saying, but no, no, no, this is good. This is how it’s supposed to be. This was right. There’s nothing to look at here. This is exactly how it is for everyone around me too. I don’t know anything different. This is how it is. The tricky piece in the heartbreaking piece is when there’s trauma, but the interpretation on top of the social and community experience is this is how it is supposed to be. This is God’s will, this is God’s way. It really makes it impossible to see it any other way. Or maybe a better way of saying that is to challenge that would mean social ostracization and loss, perhaps eternal conscious torment, perhaps punishment

Rachael: Or this loss of even if it’s an insecure attachment, this loss of a connection to God, if I question this, then I have to lose it all.

Hillary: Which holds the whole thing together. It’s the thing that allows the whole abusive system to stay intact because to challenge it would be even more dangerous. Or in the book, I talk about that as being a consequence that there is punishment or consequences to doing it or seeing it differently, which keeps us within the system that’s harming us without knowing that it could be any different. And in some of the academic literature or a language tool that’s used is hermeneutic injustice. Which is a way of understanding how systems which are abusive and disempowering to people, keep people disconnected from knowledge sources and ways of understanding themselves and the world which could threaten the abusive system itself. So if you are forbidden from reading any psychology and going to a therapist and having any other way of understanding your nervous system, or even knowing that your body could have a nervous system which has survival, impulses and tendencies, which are good and right, then it’s easier to keep you at war with yourself. And at war with any place inside of you which challenges or could threaten whoever’s in leadership or power that is asking you to stay powerless to them. So those two things really come to mind. And then another thought that you brought up that I think is really important here is the way that, my colleague, Dr. Preston Hill and I are working on some research related to this as part of the spiritual first responders project, and some of the language that I’ve been using in the last couple of years of conceptualizing this, which we’ve adopted in some of our papers that we’re working on, is the valorization of the infantile psychological self. That in these contexts where healthy, normal developmental experiences are forbidden and punished, and then I would say not just subdued, but completely rejected in the self, that people grow up learning to outsource moral authority to somebody else. So development is suspended, my ability to have a voice, my ability to trust my body, my ability to say no, my ability to disagree, to challenge even. I use specific examples like this in the book to lie. It’s actually really important developmentally to learn lying and what does it do and understand its impact on relationship. And if we’re deprived of experiences like sexual exploration or lying or breaking the rules, then we actually lose out on something developmentally, not just psychically, but also relationally. But where it gets a little more complicated is people in abusive spiritual systems are often praised for not having acquired, integrated some of these developmental tasks. So the more you trust other people, the more you hate your body, the more you have no contact with any kind of inner will or desire or erotic sense of self, the more praised you are for being spiritually mature, which creates kind of an incentivization and reward around the loss of self. So not only is the loss of self or sense of self is suppressed, because that’s really what psychological development is. Psychological development is becoming growing into more of who you are and acquiring the tasks to face life and to have a sense of flourishing connected to your identity and social belonging, belonging and your ability to be in the world as an adult that not only is that suppressed, but then it’s rewarded. It’s rewarded for not having developed into a secure sense of self and praised for people for being spiritually mature, which can make it really, really difficult for people when coming out of these systems and realizing the betrayal blindness that they had. I had no clue that I was hoodwinked the whole time, and that what I was told was good and right actually was fragmenting me from myself and from the world and maybe from the goodness of if I can use this language, what is God the divine? What is sacred in me, around me, through me, through all of us, that it becomes really difficult to realize I missed out on lots of really important things, like the right to know who I am in the world and have space to be in contact with that. So there can be in the, we would call it religious de-identification, deconstruction, maybe even just like the reckoning with the legacy of trauma… I, as a person, had to go away and what does it mean to live now? What does it mean to perhaps acquire some of those developmental skills that I missed? What does it mean to grieve the loss of my life up until this point that I gave in service of doing everything and being good, but feels like it just harms me? Yeah, there’s a lot there for people.

Rachael: So much, and just for those listening, I know it’s so painful and it’s so disorienting, and it can feel almost like, how do I put the pieces back together? How do I build something that didn’t get built in the ways it was meant to get built? And I really appreciate the ways that you help us think about healing as not a linear triumphant process where we kind of exercise these broken parts of us and arrive at some destination of goodness, which I think is so fascinating because so much of the toxicity of these environments, because it’s so about control and being good, the emphasis is not even on wholeness or becoming a full human, which I actually think is part of this biblical witness of what Jesus is inviting us to this capacity to live into complexity and to love beyond what we imagine is possible to receive love in ways that is deeply healing, but the emphasis on I’ve got to become good, which I think for many people coming out of these environments, I’ll just speak for myself, we’re so enticed by a new kind of fundamentalism, like, okay, my desire for belonging, my capacity to trust, these things are actually really good and beautiful about us that are part of what make us human become dangerous because they bear so much shame because they bear so much powerlessness and they become dangerous. They become something we want to mock, we want to keep ourselves at bay from, I’ve just noticed this just for so many people like this swing toward a new kind of fundamentalism, but maybe it’s political, maybe it’s whatever it is, but there’s a kind of splitting, and I think you do a really great job of helping us remember that a part of the healing work that we’re called to is actually like radical welcome. It’s a befriending you’re using, you’re talking about the direct people. Certainly Shelly Rambo comes into the conversation around witnessing, which we can talk more about, but you have this line, “if trauma is about fragmentation, then healing is about connection”. And I think there’s just something really powerful about that. I say this to people all the time in trauma care work, you think what is going to make you whole is splitting off and exiling or eradicating these vulnerable parts of you, but actually the work is to bring them close,r to welcome them in. And that takes time, and that’s really messy. It’s not like, okay, well, I just go to therapy for six sessions session, and then I do it right. It’s good, we’re good. Everything’s fine. So yes, I would love to hear more from you and your work with people and your own healing journey. What have you noticed about this kind of non-linear but very powerful journey of healing this radical welcome, this witnessing that is necessary?

Hillary: Well, it redefines healing as a process, not an event, and a process which unfolds as we live. And that can be really excruciating when we have come from a system which prioritizes the erasure of anything painful as proof of healing. And the word, I just want to say something really briefly about that word. It is so fraught with complexity in the landscape of spiritual trauma because so often the word healing has been weaponized. It has been used as a tool for harm and coercion around behavioral, spiritual, emotional, cognitive compliance. And so people have been told, your healing isn’t happening unless you look like us. Unless what’s painful goes away completely. And so I feel really lots of complexity. The grossness of that legacy of the way the word healing itself has been used to harm. So I like the definition proposed by Judith Herman where she talks about recovering and recovery and Katie Cross and Karen O’Donnell who talk about the post-traumatic remaking of the self. Remaking implies something irreparably has been shattered, and what do we do with the pieces? And I still hold in my heart the possibility of there being actually something more beautiful on the other side. And so when I think about healing… When I think about healing, I think about being in relationship with the pain, and I think about creating a way of being with ourselves and in the world, which brings along the legacy of what’s happened to us, which allows us to turn to words what’s painful, and to let it tell the truth about what happened. I’m imagining sitting in the room with a version of me who carries the legacy of the trauma and the injuries and letting her tell her life story and what happened and how painful it was for the rest of our lives, and to be in relationship with her in a way that honors how much pain there was, and to think of healing as not her absence. If I’m, again, sitting in the room or sitting at a table with a version of me who holds the memory of trauma healing doesn’t mean she goes away. Healing means that I am with her continuing to remind her that she’s believed it really did happen and she’s safe with me now. So the healing is like this, letting love in, letting corrective in, letting belief and attunement and witnessing into the places where it was missing. I love Steven Levine says healing is to touch with love that which was touched by fear that he is saying to go right towards the places where we were terrified, where we had to go away, where something inside of us really did die, and to bring love there and not in witnessing way the kind of love that says, I can make space for all of the pain kind of way, and I’ll stay here the whole time all the way through to the other side. So when I see that in myself, there’s a hopefulness. When I think about the application of this to my own life and my own spiritual trauma, the hopefulness and going, oh, it can still hurt. I can be on the healing journey, and it can still hurt, of course, actually the model that I’m trying to present around healing accounts for their still being pain. It’s not the erasure of pain, it’s not the disappearance of the wounds. It’s like, oh, whoa. There’s actually a way to be with that. And there’s something I won’t get into the details of here, but there’s something in my life that’s actively unfolding right now that feels exquisitely painful. And when I think about my instinct to control and manage it and try to create an outcome that I want to try to create, it actually leaves me feeling more stuck and disempowered because there’s some level of awareness I have that I can’t actually do that. But when I say, okay, I can be with how painful this is, I can actually be with a part of me that is experiencing the grief, the fear, the anguish… that moves me to realize I am showing up differently with myself than I could have 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. I’m actually building a relationship with myself that is brave and sturdy and wise enough to hold all of the pain that I could ever feel. And in that I’m recognizing the sense of capacity, clarity, sturdiness love, tenderness, bravery, wisdom that again, is there in the presence of the pain, not to the exclusion of it.

Rachael: That’s really powerful. And I can say just mercy and tenderness to you in these seasons because I think we do kind of have this temptation to believe, oh, if I do enough work, then I don’t have to suffer. And I think it is a paradoxical way of like, no, I think actually your tenderness grows, your vulnerability grows, like you said, your capacity to be with the pain, to be with the fear, to not split, to resist that movement toward like, no, I’ve got to shut these things down, or I’ve got to make meaning in a world that makes this feel good or be okay. But it doesn’t necessarily make this suffering easier. It can feel more robust, but also more life generating in some ways. You spend a lot of time talking about that complexity and expansiveness of returning to ourselves that what does the maturing of an arrested development, what does it begin to look like? And I think part of that really ties in well with that sense of recovery because so much of the work is also recovering parts of us that got buried under things that they were never meant to hold. And we need them. We need those parts of us with ourselves. It doesn’t mean we have to be like, and we’re taking all this toxic stuff with us. I think we absolutely get to say, that’s no longer mine, and it wasn’t really supposed to be mine to begin with. But that leads to a sense of, and this is kind of where I want to circle back to where we began of this history of religious trauma because a core part of the healing process, especially when we’re talking about spiritually abusive structures, because it’s pretty much impossible to wake up to the reality of religious trauma and spiritual abuse and not be confronted with a pretty profound complicity in systems that we participated in wittingly or unwittingly. So you invite us to this sense of accountability, lament, repair as in some ways sisters of this recovery process, that as we gain ground and maturity and cohesion of self, that we feel more sturdy. We’re often, I think the way you put it, looking at the hurt we’ve caused requires courage to wade into the pit of grief, knowing we have ground beneath us, a spark inside of us and a community around us that will support us so we won’t collapse into a hopeless spiral of shame. And I just found those words to be really comforting to me in my own journey of reckoning with some of the legacy I’ve inherited, and that the recovery process can’t just be about me, that I am connected to many others and their healing is intrinsically wrapped up in my healing and vice versa. So on this kind of indigenous people’s day, I’m thinking about that more with more particularity and what does accountability, what does limit does repair look like, and how do I have imagination that that too is a part of healing and that I won’t collapse under the weight of the shame and also the grief, the shame, and the grief. So would love to hear more from some of your wisdom on this journey and even maybe around that community around us. I think when we’re healing from spiritual trauma, that’s the piece that often feels like, well, I don’t have that anymore, or I don’t know how to have that. I don’t know how to build that.

Hillary: I’m aware that one of the wounds of spiritual trauma that lives in many of us is individualism, and particularly individualism as it has infiltrated our theology around salvation and the perception of salvation as being an individual phenomena, which many of us carry the legacy of even after maybe left to faith tradition or religious tradition, that we are thinking about trying to do healing all on our own, that we’re thinking about trying to do a salvation effort of our own psyche all on our own. And it’s important. It’s so important that we’re borrowing from other people that we are in relationship with other people and other systems and the circle of all living things. I know that for, you’re right, for people who leave religious context and have spiritual trauma, it can be such a lonely time. I mean, that’s one of the things that the research literature suggests is contributing to really the acute mental health distress, post deconstruction and de-identification and spiritual trauma is so not only have I lost my meaning making system and so much of my life, I’ve lost the community that helps me make sense of hard things. So being able to find community in non-human ways I think can be essential for us to, I’m really interested in post-humanist philosophy at the time and thinking about the way that when we transcend species, we find mothers in trees and forests. We find sisters and cousins and uncles in ocean and orca and raven and fur and balsam and acorns and all of the things and the seasons. To find a family in seasons for me has been such a gift and for so many of my patients. But I think when we can allow ourselves to be loved deeply and accepted deeply, we become capable of holding that possibility inside of ourselves, that we are held, that we are loved, that we are good enough, that someone can be let close to our pain and stay. And when we can trust our goodness, I think is actually when we are best and most well positioned to be doing the grief, the lament, the accountability work. I think it is when we have a sure sense of self, which I mean who does permanently, but sure enough, let’s say sure enough, sense of self and sense of goodness, inner goodness, the truth of who we are is that I am loved and lovable, and I’m a part of this system of things and I receive love and I also can give it, and I have been hurt and I have also hurt. It’s when we are sure of ourselves and our goodness that we can be brave enough to look at how we’ve hurt people without moving into the defensive shame spiral, without moving into the collapse, without moving into the, and now I have to rescue you and do everything that actually was done initially to cause these wounds, to move into being the rescuer to feel like I have to do it on my own. So I think really the sense of goodness and the sense of interconnectedness is a very important set of the foundation with which to do really sustainable repair work, and that goes for wounds we’ve inflicted on other people and also the systems that we’ve been a part of. It is, as I’ve been learning from elders around repair work, decolonizing work, mending of systems, really from a justice perspective, it is such a novice idea to feel like, oh, I see the harm. I’m going to rush out and do it all of all on my own, and I’m going to do it from a place of guilt and fear that actually doesn’t disrupt the systems that wounded us, and it just reenact them.

Rachael: No, it’s such a sabotaging tendency because it’s like it’s only going to reinforce I’m not good and I don’t belong long, and I’ve wounded again. It just brings up all the defensiveness, but it’s such, yeah, this would maybe just be my little tip for myself and others. It’s part of why we can’t do all of our healing work in social media, intellectual intake. We’ve got to get in our bodies and these algorithms. It’s not to say we don’t get to stay in conversations or connected in ways that are really helpful, but the algorithms are not for our embodiment. They are for our fight, flight, or freeze constant reaction and taking in way more information than we could ever metabolize around belonging and goodness and possibility of repair. So.

Hillary: What a place to land. Holy. Exactly. Well said.

Rachael: It’s a part of healing from abuse and spiritual abuse. It’s not an invitation to check out or to not care. I just think part of the work is getting to build new neural pathways that help us sustain. So I’m just very grateful for you, grateful for the ways in which you are locating this conversation and this labor in the community of God and in a way that actually does feel very liberative and calls to a deeper work so grateful for you and hope that the goodness and kindness that you’re putting out there is returned to you. So thank you so much for joining me, and if you have any final words, I can leave a little space for that. It’s also well to say goodbye.

Hillary: Yeah, I think maybe wanting to leave people with a deep sense of knowing that even if you listening to this, don’t have contact with this place inside of yourself. I have a deep, deep unshakeable trust, unwavering knowing that you are good at your core, that your body is wise, and that even if it feels hard right now, that you can come to a place where you trust yourself.