Listener Questions: Spiritual Abuse & Healing

by on August 9, 2024

We’re back to engage more questions from you, our listeners, about healing from spiritual abuse. In this episode, Rachael Clinton Chen, alongside Allender Center Product Manager Melissa Dowell, addresses heartfelt and challenging questions from our community. 

These questions explore the complexities of bringing spiritual abuse to light, navigating healing as survivors, especially those who have faced backlash for speaking out, and managing the unique struggles of working in a church while dealing with past or present spiritual harm.

Thank you to all who submitted questions. This is part of an ongoing conversation, and we are deeply grateful for your willingness to ask questions, listen to this episode, and engage with these issues with us.

More Resources on Spiritual Abuse & Healing:

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Well, good people with good bodies. As you know, we have been asking for your questions on spiritual abuse for a kind of podcast Q&A, and I am really grateful and privileged to be joined by my friend and colleague, Melissa Dowell. Hi Melissa. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. Melissa, you may remember her. She is the manager of product development here at the Allender Center and has hosted a Q&A with Dan before. She’s also been on an episode we did on different forms of spirituality. So her and her husband Jordan joined us for an episode on the Spirituality of Craft. She’s an actor, she’s a fellow new mom, and I experienced Melissa not only as just a colleague who’s kind of been assigned to ask me these questions, but as someone who is a fierce advocate for survivors and someone who seeks to bring a context and a process of healing wherever you go. So I’m really glad to be doing this with you today.

Melissa: Thank you. I’m excited to be here and we received so many questions, so many wonderful questions, difficult questions. We really have our work cut out for us today, so excited to dive in.

Rachael: Absolutely, and I think that’s just something I would say is just these questions do not come just from your mind or logic or cognition. We know these are deeply and in-storied embodied questions and we’re holding them with a lot of honor and also a lot of heartache. So I guess we can just jump in.

Melissa: Alright, our first question is when is it appropriate or biblical to bring things to light even publicly? While we don’t want yet another news story about a church, what is our responsibility to expose works of darkness and help prevent further spiritual abuse? I don’t want to damage the witness of the church, but I also feel the responsibility of warning others.

Rachael: This is a painful question and I think I hear the kind of bind and the complexity of your question. And as someone who tends to lean more toward mercy and also fear, I’m just warring with my own initial response, but what I want to say is this, the biblical witness we have about truth telling when people are abusing power, especially spiritual power, is pretty clear. You have the prophetic witness where the prophets are constantly calling out the people of God where they are failing to live the mission and value of God and God’s love and God’s justice and God’s mercy in real community, especially where they are oppressing and heaping heavy burdens on the least of these, on the people that need protection, that need care, that need a deeper kind of healing. So for me, at the very minimum I would say, well, we see the prophets doing this constantly at God’s bidding filled with the Spirit. We also have Jesus who came into his own spiritually abusive religious context where the people in power had not only political power, even though they still didn’t have full access to that political power, but they had some power because they were willing to do the bidding of the political powers of their day, but also had religious power. And Jesus was very clear at speaking truth to those powers and exposing what was at play where people were being abused even with good intentions, even where people are thinking they’re following the laws of God, they’re living rightly. Jesus wasn’t afraid to say you’ve really got it wrong. And Jesus always did this in a way that centered the victims, that centered the people who needed the most protection, needed the most lifting up needed to be healed not only physically or emotionally, but needed to be returned to a safe enough social status. So on one hand, because what happens a lot in when some abuse is happening in a church context or in a religious context or religious system is we turn to things like, well, you need to forgive or Matthew 18, you need to go have a direct conversation with the person who’s harmed, which I just want to say absolutely where someone, there’s a huge power differential that is a setup for further harm. We hear things like what I hear you as whoever asks this question, what I hear you putting words to, right? Like how do we do this? In a way you’re going to bring unnecessary harm to the church and it’s going to ruin God’s witness. And what I want to say to that is what we hear from God time and time and time again is my power is made perfect in your weakness and vulnerability. And if we really are the people of God who want to be a witness to the world, then in moments when there has been profound harm and failure in our midst because of our structures of leadership, because of the ways we’ve misused power or have a misalignment, we’re the very people that say we’re not bound by that, that we are covered by the grace of God, that through the spirit and accountability and repair that restoration is possible. And that might mean a dismantling of leadership structures. It might mean something transformational is taking place. It might mean bringing to justice people that need to be in a process of restoration that looks like losing access to power and authority and leadership. But whatever we’re doing, what we’re called to is to center the people who need the most protection, who have the least amount of power, who need healing. That’s who I’m concerned about losing a sense of the witness of the church. People are going to see God reflected where love and justice and mercy and humility are actually prevailing, where the people who need the most protection are being protected. Where power that is of this world and not of God is actually being called out and disarmed not just for the good of the least of these, but for the good of the whole. And so I totally get where this question is coming from in some ways because any of us who have ever had to speak up about an abuse or a harm in certain church settings, one of the first things we hear is don’t bring a bad witness to God. And I just want to say I don’t think we’re a little bit past that right now in the church in general with the continued exposure of the ways in which abusers have been protected in our religious institutions and in our churches. So I think we could try something new and see if there’s a different way forward. And I think there are ways in which to bring to light harm that is happening that doesn’t have to be intent on destruction, but we can’t always prevent people self-destructing, people moving towards defensive mechanisms that kind of double down. I think we actually have an opportunity as a church to show people a different way, to be held accountable, to be transparent and to be transformed.

Melissa: That’s good. Preach. I want you to… I feel you. I feel your energy. It’s so good.

Rachael: And I think I say that as someone who still struggles to find words to advocate for myself in places where I’ve known harm, this question actually hits really home for me because I think these places we do feel a need to protect God from our humanity, and I think God’s made a pretty strong case against that in coming to be with us in our humanity.

Melissa: It can be scary to expose the darkness because it can be scary in that you think it might implicate the goodness, the good parts, and I hope we can trust that the good parts are good, that God’s goodness is good, and the darkness can’t take that away, can’t take that goodness away. But we also can’t hide the dark parts either.

Rachael: No, no, absolutely not.

Melissa: Yeah. Okay. Question number two, what recommendations do you have for healing for survivors? This question came in so many different forms, healing for survivors of spiritual abuse, especially those who stand up to the abuse and call it out to the elders and then get punished for it.

Rachael: Again, such a painful and infuriating question because how common this experience is. It’s not comforting to be like you’re not alone. There’s a great cloud of witnesses who have spoken truth to power, whether it’s spiritual abuse, other forms of supremacy and power, misuse of power and abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence. Again, a lot of the larger systems we’ve talked about on the podcast, racism, sexism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. On one hand, I want to say sadly, you are not alone in the great cloud of witnesses of that prophetic posture of speaking truth to power and not just for the sake of believing a different way as possible and getting punished or silenced or rejected or exiled or excommunicated, oftentimes being like maligned your reputation, your personhood, your character stories being told about you that are not true to paint you in a picture as the crazy person or the disgruntled person who didn’t get some volunteer position in the church. So they’ve made this big deal about something. I think the first step is one, I just want to say thank you for having the courage and the integrity, but again, that doesn’t necessarily take away the pain of the rejection. And in some ways this is why I work at the Allender Center and do story work because one of my first questions for you would be, are there other places that you have known this experience? Because my guess is if you’re someone who has the courage and integrity to tell the truth or to call people to the more that you believe is possible for them, that you have tasted something of this experience, whether it’s in your family of origin, in your friendships in other communities. So I would want to make space for you to process what have you already known of exile, of being estranged because you believed things didn’t have to be this way and you refused to be silent when you saw something happening that needed to stop and you took people at their word that they cared and wanted to create a context of flourishing for all people. I think part of the healing is an opportunity to know trauma doesn’t discriminate in the sense that one experience of trauma is going to reverberate other experiences of trauma. So I’d want to make space for you to make connections to where this is a familiar experience and where maybe you’re even invited to turn against yourself and to join the people rejecting you and excommunicating you. I’d want to make space for the parts of you that so desperately want to belong and want to know that you’re beloved and that fighting for community is still meaningful and worth it because I think what often happens for people in this position is in order to protect yourself, you kind of need some of those motivating defense mechanisms like fight or anger or things that help you find enough safety. But what’s also a sister to that is the profound grief of losing friendship, of losing community, of losing social standing that you’ve spent years cultivating with a community. So can there be space for grieving what has been lost, what the cost was? Can there be space for grieving that people that you counted as friends that have shared really beautiful moments with you are no longer safe or are no longer in relationship with you? So making space for tending to the parts of you that are getting really activated because maybe there’s some familiarity here, making space for the loss that you’ve experienced. And then I think definitely wanting there to be a place for you to process like what it is for abuse to continue happening and to have to contend with some of our powerlessness that we feel when we’ve brought our voice to try to bring advocacy for a victim or a survivor, whether that’s ourself or others that we know. We’ve brought our voice in a way that is restorative because we have imagination that the people causing harm, that’s not all that they’re meant for, or that at the very minimum they need to stop and protection needs to come. What happens when we feel like, well, what was the point of that? Nothing changed. So I’m certainly moving in a more intimate pastoral care type modality, who I am and what I would want to offer for you. And I think, yeah, wanting you to have space to process what this experience has been as a part of the healing in an ideal world, part of the healing would also be a movement towards justice with these communities. And I think we’re seeing something of that in what’s happened, like happening with contexts like Greater Grace in Baltimore. And if you’ve been paying attention to that story, a lot of advocates and victims and survivors letting their stories come to light and whether or not it’s going to be lasting change and protesting and finding each other and coming together in a way to say, we don’t want this to keep happening. In some ways that does need to become the first impulse when power coalesces together, but also we want to see change. We want to see this, we want it to stop and we want to see change. Sometimes there is power in numbers, so whether it’s that discerning piece of finding your people who also have brought their voice maybe in more isolated ways and letting your voice become stronger while also knowing that it can take time and it can take years, and sometimes it leads to really beautiful growth and change and possibility and sometimes it leads to further excommunication and rejection. And so really being able to check in with what your capacity is and what you’re feeling called to and what feels good and kind and wise in different seasons with regard to your body and your story and what you’ve suffered and what feels necessary. So these processes tend to play out longer than we would like.

Melissa: A related question, but a little more specific is could you please talk about how to heal from spiritual abuse when you work at the church, when that’s your profession?

Rachael: Yeah. Obviously the person asking this question wisely is not sharing more particularity, so there’s a lot of follow-up questions I have for this question. What kind of, are you experiencing spiritual abuse or seeing a spiritually abusive context in the community you’re currently in? Or are you in a community that maybe has enough health that you feel like it’s worth staying in and good work is happening but you’re contending with past harm that’s getting triggered because you’re working with human beings and maybe there’s still systems at play that you would long for more healing. So there’s definitely more context that would be helpful to know exactly how to answer this question because sometimes the answer is that you need to leave that particular context, but other times the answer is that you need to stay in that context, but with a kind of wisdom and awareness of what your boundaries are and what kind of access people have to you, what are some of your red lines as far as like, yeah, if this happens or this happens or this happens, this is my leaving point. If you’re in a context that actually does feel redemptive, but you’re dealing with past harm, it’s why we exist at the Allender Center because we know that time doesn’t heal all wounds and the past doesn’t magically evaporate with more time or even with restorative communities, like in some regard, many of us find we actually enter more excruciating healing processes when we do have a different experiences because it gives our body a sense of it didn’t have to be that way and what happened to you. It brings it to stark contrast, the experiences we’ve had. So I think when you work at a church, you need a robust network of care outside of that community because in many ways our church systems are still set up to isolate our leaders to both give them tremendous power, but part of the cost of that power is incredible isolation. So I would hope that you have places you can go and have honest conversations about what’s happening for you. Certainly, I would hope that you’re in a safe enough environment where you can be talking with fellow leaders or leaders who have power over you about the environment. One of the hardest things about our church culture is very rarely are there safe places to bring grievances. So yeah, because I don’t have more context, I don’t want to answer this question in a way that someone’s like, yeah, that’s not my situation. But when you work at a church, you need safe spaces to be in your own healing process. And so when you have a power differential with other people, even if they might be friends or people you’re in community with, it may not always feel safe to be in healing conversations with them about the abusive experience. Really honoring your body because when you’re healing from abuse, you’re certainly getting activated and triggered and can you take that seriously? Does your church have a sabbatical as a possibility for you? Could you take a sabbatical season and do some more intentional healing and some more intentional discernment? What resources are available as part of what’s needed is some deeper healing within the structures and the leadership. Is the leadership open to healing? Is transformation of value? Is there outside helps that could come bring some support to the community and to the staff? Yeah, it’s a hard place to be when you’re constantly being confronted with the thing that triggers you. And I’m assuming if you still work at the church and you want to stay that you feel like it’s worth staying at. And so I think just taking your abuse seriously and then asking for some of the margin and space and boundaries that you might need to get to a different place of grounding in order to have more capacity to be in the context that you’re in. And these places can be hard like, well, you didn’t ask for this to be part of your process or part of your journey, and here you are. And each person is different. I think we’re in a context right now in a culture right now, and certain bodies and identities need separation from places that have been harmful. I’m thinking about maybe a person of color who’s been on a pastoral staff at a predominantly white church, and you’re waking up to all different kinds of abuse where you’re like, I actually can’t stay in this context and I need to get a deeper healing elsewhere. And that’s okay. We get to be in discernment about what is good and right for us and what kind of capacity we have to even stay in the work if different healing is needed. But we’re also in a context right now where we’re tempted to split as a way to heal. And by splitting I just mean thinking that we can escape harm by just cutting a community out of our life, cutting a sense of our calling out of our life and moving in a totally different direction. And a lot of times we just find ourselves in a reenactment of the harm we’ve experienced. It might just be in a different context, but we’re still in a place that’s really rigid that uses fear and shame as tools of change, even though they aren’t effective where we have a real clear sense of who’s in and who’s out, but maybe it’s just shifted or it’s changed or we’ve split off parts of ourselves that feel dangerous to us, like our innocence that longs for belonging or maybe more naive parts of our faith that we feel like set us up for harm. And I just think that there is a reclamation process that’s worth it whether you end up in the same context or not. There are really core parts of us that we need for the journey that are part of our birthright. And I think when we’re in the realm of spiritual abuse, it’s okay to need a break and space from familiar things, whether it’s regard to our faith or a certain community. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as we understand that just cutting them off and never returning to them is not going to leave us with the kind of healing and hope that we most long for.

Melissa: I’m so glad you said that because when I first read the question, my first impulse was, wow, this person is asking these questions. They’re wrestling with this, what a gift they are to their community. They’re asking these questions, what a gift for this church context that this person’s in their midst, that this person can bring these kinds of questions. And to what you said, to your point, and how costly is it? And is this the right season for you to be bringing that gift or is this the season for you to find healing in other spaces. That’s really good.

Rachael: Yeah. Or is this the right community? And again, those questions are challenging, and that’s why not giving a prescriptive answer feels important because are you financially dependent on this job and this role and this place is your primary community, this community and their relationships worth holding onto that you feel like if you were to walk away? So there’s a lot of questions that need to come into play when someone’s discerning, but I do think when you are in a season healing specifically, it’s like I can answer this in a similar way, not specifically around exactly spiritual abuse, but I work in healing from trauma. I work in a trauma center, I work in healing from trauma and seasons where I have been more activated in dealing with particular traumas I’ve shared before on the podcast experiencing a sexual assault in my adulthood in a dating relationship while I worked at the Allender Center. And there was a time there in that season where I did need a little bit of space from some of the work I was doing, even though it was really good work and I was working with good people. And it wasn’t because I was deficient or I wasn’t working hard enough, it just that it was a real kindness to take some space talking about trauma and trauma recovery all the time. When I was in the midst of my own process of recovering from trauma, I needed a little space to be in my body in a different way. And so sometimes we need help with creativity there when we’re in a healing process because we don’t always feel like we have access to that and what’s possible for us.

Melissa: Well, Rachael, you’ve been so generous in sharing your story on the podcast and different aspects of that. This question kind of plays to that. What was it like for you at the beginning navigating possible healing modalities outside of your Southern Baptist tradition or even modalities that were outside of the Western Christian tradition? This person says, I’m a Christian and I have been my whole life, but sometimes I feel fear of navigating too far outside of my group, so I do not get lost.

Rachael: Yeah, this is a great question. Yeah. And the first thing I want to say is part of what you’re actually putting words to is one of the tools of a spiritually abusive, religiously abusive environment or of people and that sense of really rigid boundaries around who’s in and who’s out, who’s safe and who’s dangerous. And certainly you can’t trust yourself to discern that. So we’re going to dictate those for you. And we do see a lot, especially of western evangelicalism. I mean, I want to just make a point here that is not my point or something I’ve come up with on my own. This is something I’ve learned from a lot of people in my world, whether they’re friends or educators around white supremacy. But this is one of those places where we can start to see how white supremacy has infused itself in some of our Christian norms and values here in the west, especially in evangelical spaces that we can trust western cultural healing modalities, even though they’re very culturally located as somehow those are Christian, but other healing modalities that come from other cultures that might even be Christian long before we were are untrustworthy because they aren’t familiar. Again, this is where we have an opportunity to start to be educated more, to start to explore, to have curiosity. So what was it like for me at the beginning? I felt the same fear you’re naming like, can I lose God if I go too far? Will I be deceived? First of all, for me, and I think I put words to this in a podcast that aired a couple of months ago in a series I did on things I didn’t expect while healing from trauma. One of the first steps for me and healing in general was to get on some anti-anxiety medicine. That alone was a huge jump outside of my Southern Baptist tradition of healing modalities that were available to me and trustworthy because how could I trust to put a substance in my body to alter my brain? Why wasn’t my faith enough to help me see rightly or believe rightly? And a lot of spiritual abuse actually went into that using scripture. I think some people with good intentions, but in a very abusive and harmful way that actually heaped heavy burdens on me. And so any kind of body work or doing work that took my body seriously also felt like the heart is deceitful, your emotions are deceitful, your body is dangerous. It’s just the flesh. So for me, there was a lot of, I’ve said before, education was one of the graces that God gave to me to open doors of questions and possibility in a really gentle way that let me kind of discern for myself what feels good and right, and let’s say even godly or safe by getting to ask more questions and learn and get to critically think and develop critical thinking skills while also tending to my body that was setting off alarm bells because of a lot of the mind control and programming, which I think just comes again, doesn’t always have to come from wicked evil people who are trying to harm you, but it can come from tools that are being utilized to control that actually don’t. Like I have a 2-year-old right now and she is, I know I’m kind of meandering, but I promise I’ll get back to where I’m going, but I have a 2-year-old and I’m watching her constantly push boundaries and see what her body, what are the limitations of her body. She’s not even two, she’s turning two later this month and she was just learning how to swim when we were on vacation at my aunt’s house, was basically teaching herself how to swim… mommy back up, back up, swimming toward me wanting to turn around and swim back towards the steps. I say that because one of the things I’m trying to do as a mom is teach her that her intuition, her sense of safety, there are certain things she’s going to need to test out, and I can certainly help her because obviously she doesn’t know that she can’t swim and that if she swallows water, she’s going to drown. Now, something of her body was learning that, and I want her to be able to trust her body. If she doesn’t want to hug someone, I don’t want to force her to, because I want her to actually understand consent in her body from a young age. So I say that because that was a lot of the work I had to do as a grown woman figuring out how do I trust my own intuition? How do I trust that my body is actually good and wants to heal, and how do I discern when I’m trying something that doesn’t actually feel good or honoring? And it’s not just me reacting to something like a rigid boundary that was given to me. It’s me actually discerning, yeah, this particular modality or this particular opportunity doesn’t feel good and wise and kind. So a lot of what you’re asking is how do you grow discernment, spiritual discernment about what’s good and honoring and wise and kind not only for your body, but for other peoples. And so this is one of those places where am I had to start small and be really faithful in the small so that I could cultivate a capacity where the stakes got higher and I needed to discern. Maybe it is more of a matter of life and death discernment, like being faithful in the small. One thing, I don’t, I probably, and maybe this will scare some people, I just take the Psalms very seriously and I don’t know if there’s a place we can go outside of God. I do think there are ways we can get misinformed. I mean, we’re watching this in our world play out in massive ways. And part of what you’re putting language to is maybe there was some misinformation about healing modalities outside of your cultural context or religious context that actually can be really good for you. Things like EMDR, things like acupuncture and massage and yoga, and again, indigenous healing practices that have been used by communities and cultures for thousands and thousands and thousands of years that yes, at times have their own spiritual meaning to them. And I think it’s actually appropriate that we understand how those practice might have a spiritual meaning. One of the things I love about Jesus is Jesus is not bound to any culture, though Jesus came within a specific culture and Jesus shows us that our specific cultures can be very redemptive and really beautiful, and it’s okay to stay sometimes within those boundary lines. And part of the kingdom of God is that you can be Christian and be from different cultures with different cultural practices. And if truth comes from God, then in some ways all truth is God’s truth. That was what I learned at my Southern Baptist liberal or arts school, that all truth is God’s truth. And so again, I think it’s one of the best healing postures for you, healing from spiritual abuse is beginning to trust your own internal compass. And does that mean we never need help or discernment from community? No, we’re not meant to navigate the world alone. But if someone’s using the tools of fear, shame again. If you do this, you’re going to be deceived by a demon and lose your way and get totally deceived. Do you trust yourself enough to know what is coming from God and what is not? And part of the madness of healing from spiritual abuse is a lot of what we’ve been told is coming from God is actually not coming from God. So it feels a little bit like being what’s Alice in Wonderland and kind of going through the looking glass and the world feeling a little upside down, and you get to move slow and you get to try things out and see what feels, what feels like it is showing you who God is, what is restoring some sense of hope and faith and love. And you get to grow critical thinking skills to see where someone told you something was unholy, but what was really showing up was something of their racism or something of their ethnocentrism or something of ways in which we’ve demonized certain cultural practices or indigenous practices and said, only Western modalities are Christian, even though Christianity did not originate in the West and the West as it is today, didn’t exist in biblical times.

Melissa: Isn’t that interesting? Well, Rachael, thank you for your good wisdom. Thank you everyone who submitted questions. It’s such a gift to hear from you and to engage with you. And I look forward to more of these because you’re bringing really, really good questions.

Rachael: And I think one thing I want to say is we are really committed to creating more resourcing for survivors of spiritual abuse who are looking for healing. So stay tuned. We’re going to keep doing our best to provide resources, and we’re not the only context that is doing really stunning work. So hopefully more and more people tending to this work, more and more language to make sense of what is it that we experienced and more hope and more healing.

Melissa: And may it be.