The Attachment Wounds of Spiritual Abuse
Abuse of any kind involves a setup and a breach of trust – and spiritual abuse is no exception.
Whether it stems from personal relationships or institutional settings, spiritual abuse can deeply disrupt our sense of attachment and connection, leaving lasting wounds. These wounds may have their roots in early developmental trauma, making spiritual abuse feel like an echo of past harm. It’s not just about the betrayal of spiritual abuse in the more recent past—whether during teen years, college experiences, or adulthood—but about understanding how our earliest experiences have shaped our ability to trust and heal.
New: Spiritual Abuse & Healing Online Course
We know that Spiritual Abuse can be hard to name, understand, and confront. If you’re looking for more resources to explore and heal from your own experiences of religious trauma or spiritual abuse, we invite you to explore the brand-new Spiritual Abuse & Healing Online Course from the Allender Center.
This 6-lesson course, complete with reflective practices and deep dive panel discussions, helps you engage your body, mind, and spirit as you unpack the harm caused by spiritual abuse.
Whether you’re just beginning to wake up to this reality or have been on a healing journey for years, this course provides a safe and welcoming space to deepen your understanding and work toward healing.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: I don’t need to remind you as an audience, but I am, that we are the Allender Center of Trauma and Abuse. And in that we address often the reality of what it means to live in a fallen world where there’s more than suffering, there is suffering that has come because of the intentionality of another, to bring about some degree of debasement, of humiliation, of degradation, ultimately of harm. What we’re going to do today is again, enter into the realities that many, many heartbreakingly, many have experienced in the context of the church and larger in the context, even a parachurch organizations and maybe even larger from the hands and the mouths of believers to other believers. And so as we deal with a category of spiritual abuse, we don’t enter this conversation with harsh judgment against the church. On the other hand, there has to be an honorable entry into telling the truth, and we don’t address these matters. To presume that a podcast provides sufficient balm and healing to be able to address all the realities that have come to many of you. Yet, we also know that by putting words to reality, there is an openness to what the Spirit wishes to do. So I know as we enter into this, Rachael, this has been a realm of immense, shall we say, importance but passion on your part. Before we get much further, I just want you to be able to put words to why it is one of your central callings, one of the hell no and heaven yeses of your life.
Rachael: No, that’s a great question. And some of what we’re going to talk about in this particular conversation is how the harm of spiritual abuse is very pervasive and holistic, but at its core, it is such a wound on our attachment, our capacity to trust, to belong, to connect with ourselves with God, and certainly with other people, and we can talk more. It’s such a misuse and exploitation of power and authority often with this kind of emphasis on God-given authority, which is why it plays out in churches and para church organizations and education systems and families. Honestly, it wasn’t until we had a podcast conversation initially on spiritual abuse in 2018 that the language of spiritual abuse came to be something I would’ve said, yes, that’s it. You asked me to be a part of that conversation and I was like, sure, I’m doing this. I could have said, I love working with trauma survivors and how that impacts their spiritual formation. That was very clear to me. I could have said in our trainings and work I was doing in story workshops and recovery weeks, I am deeply passionate about working with people who have been harmed in the context of faith and where they’ve encountered in really many ways a false image of God or a false name of God or a false experience of God. But something about that podcast we did, I began to share aspects of my story, and it was one of those, I know we’ve talked about how you’ve had these moments in your own work and connection to vocational work where it’s like, oh my God, as we were talking, it was very much like a spiritual abuse is a core part of my story. That’s not a connection. I would’ve said, oh yeah, I’m recovering from fundamentalism. I know something of abuse. I’m an abuse survivor. All these things I would’ve named. But to see how they came together in this language of spiritual abuse was kind of a profound awakening for me. And I think at my core, I just refuse to let bad shepherds, bad theology, addiction to worldly powers, weaponizing and wielding of wicked power to get to have the final say on what I believe is actually this language I’ve been using… Do what you will. Our connection to God and our attachment to God in our innermost being is actually a part of our divine birthright of being made in the image of God. So there’s something I feel just incredibly fiercely passionate about when that innocence, that way in which we are wired for connection, for trust, for belonging, gets violated, gets distorted, gets disordered, and gets exploited.
Dan: Amen. Well, I remember only too well the shall we say, the light in your eyes and face as you were beginning in that podcast to name some of the realities it was both holy, but at one level, not surprising because most of us don’t choose the passions that we bring into living out the kingdom of God. I think most of us stumble into it almost like we get caught and then in it we begin to acknowledge, yes, I have to speak about this and I’m so grateful that you have done so, and we’ll put more words to it in a moment or two, but I do want people to know glory be to God. You and I will say I was privileged to be part of, but a number of others were privileged as well to join you, but you are the prime voice on a new online course addressing the issue of spiritual abuse. So even though I’ve said already that one podcast is not enough, an online course is not enough. But it’s the open door to begin to language because we will not change what we cannot name. We have to name in order for transformation. So proud of you.
Rachael: Thank you.
Dan: So proud of you for, shall we say, allowing a podcast to open your own eyes and then over many years faithfully moving into that. But I want to come back to that category of that in some sense, all spiritual abuse is a kind of attachment wound because it is a violation of some of the most holy categories of trust.
Rachael: That’s right. Well, that’s right. Yeah. And I think, and this is true, I mean, we know we’ve said any form of abuse is inherently spiritually abusive because the nature of abuse involves a violation of trust. So that can be a confusing thing because it’s like, well, how do you parse out what is, but I find that that’s something that the invitation most of us feel when we start to contend with our abuse is a splitting off of the parts of us that trusted as dangerous, stupid, foolish… and evil loves to kind of speak into this too. Somehow it was our fault. If we had been less naive, if we had had less desire, then we would not have been violated or abused in the ways that we were. I just feel such deep convictions that those parts of us, again, are really core to being human. And so that’s why similar to any form of healing, you can just split those parts of you off. And sometimes we need to do that for a season. We just need a break from feeling so vulnerable and we need space to kind of like you said, name what’s happened to us and get clarity. And yet I don’t think it’s a sustainable ending point. And we can start with the abuse and say, well, that’s where the wound came. But I also think we have to look even further back to some of our own developmental trauma or ways we were formed in our primary care provider relationships to attach or to negotiate trust. Because the reality is, and we’ll talk more about this, but any abuser is reading well, the vulnerability, the vulnerabilities of the people that they’re looking to harm. And even if the harm is more, I wouldn’t say innocent, but I think a lot of spiritual abuse actually comes from good intentions in the sense of, we’ve talked about this in the online course through thankfully from Rebekah Vickery, one of our instructors gave us this language of reenactment abuse where people are really just working out of their own attachment wounds, their own wounds to try to find some kind of certainty to try to prevent chaos that maybe they knew, but then will turn to really rigid structures or whatever. So whether the wounds we’re looking at in our primary formation were coming out of wicked abuse, intentional harm, or just where we have wounds that shape us and shape how we relate to the world. That can be some really beautiful, helpful work in tending to parts of us that were vulnerable before the abuse even began. I do want to make a caveat that for some people the spiritual abuse they’ve experienced was playing out in their home, in their family of origin. And so it’s not like two separate things. It’s like one and the same.
Dan: Well, and we need to be able to say that sometimes the spiritual abuse occurs in a one-to-one relationship. Sometimes it is more, shall we say, familial in the context of how a family orients their fear and anger regarding sexuality or regarding, so-called secularism and how the bondage into a kind of, you have to do X if you’re going to be loved by God. So familial. But yet we’re also talking about the reality that in a larger systemic sense that churches through individuals and through systems can obviously do great harm just even as we’re talking. I remember a particular person, unimportant who it was told me at the very beginnings of my work in sexual abuse that they said they had been praying for me, and God had let them know that this was a really dangerous and false path that would take me into a misuse of my understanding of the gospel and my ability to proclaim it. And I remember because this was a very significant person in my life, it wasn’t just a casual relationship. Again, when someone brings God with certainty into a radical demand that you alter something of the direction of your life that clearly is not a moral category. I’m not at that point doing something clearly wrong, but nonetheless, the imposition of God, having told them as to what I could or should not do, it was for a long period at the beginning of my work, this was before writing The Wounded Heart, I felt that what I just want to call there was something of bile in my throat, something of that nausea of I don’t want to violate what God wants, but I feel called to engage this. And yet somebody else’s reading of me and reading of God on my behalf did feel intrusive, violating. And again, though I wouldn’t put it into some of the worst experiences I’ve had within the broader range of the believing community, it was really a tough one to work through.
Rachael: Well, you can say no to answering any of these questions, but there’s a part of me that’s really curious if there was a way in which this person had a particular power because of some of the wounds that you had from earlier in your life, and if that’s something you’ve thought about with regard to this particular person or not, or if it just felt like because of your trust in them and respect in them.
Dan: Well, it was someone I would’ve put in a constellation that I would call a mentor, somebody who had invested and I did love and respect. So it wasn’t something easily just dismissed. But if you start looking at attachment wounds, what I would say is my core ambivalence was being lived out with a mom who’s borderline, but underneath that or rounded or above it or below it is a very absentee father who was a very gracious man, but also cowardly. And as a consequence left me so susceptible to the devouring presence of my mom. So I can easily say over a long period of my life, 20, 30 years, I was hungry for a mentor for a father, and this man was in the broad range of a father figure who to have someone whom I loved and respected shadowing something of what I sensed to be my calling. Yeah, it was again, the bile. Even as we talk, it’s like, oh, yeah, it’s still there. Not in the level of severity a lot’s been worked through, but yeah, individuals, families, systems can shadow us even decades later where I have no question in the universe that indeed I was and am privileged to address sexual abuse, but to do that there were obstacles that were put in my way that I do not believe where of God.
Rachael: Well, and I’m just even just feeling the ache then of the grief of giving up to be faithful to call and to say yes to Jesus, to have to say no in some ways, to a beloved mentor and saying, I’m going to choose to basically in some ways betray you and probably lose access to you in order to be faithful. And those are pretty profound levels of grief.
Dan: Yeah, the relationship was never the same. And in that, the sensibility again of going back to how such deep parts of us have longed for life, connection, loyalty in the relationship, particularly with non-blood family, our church, our community. And I think as I look over my experience of an ecclesial experience since I’ve been about 23, 24 years of age, there’ve been a lot of betrayals. And those feel at times more haunting than even, I want to say it carefully here, but somehow at times more haunting than even the experience of past sexual abuse.
Rachael: Well, there’s something about the ways in which we talk about attachment a lot at the Allender Center. A lot of this language was developed between you and Abby Wong-Heffter over many years in our trainings. But we talk about how we’re made for attunement, we’re made for that sense of being anticipated, delighted and nurtured and soothed like an empathetic witness who is with us not just in the joy, but also in the suffering and we’re made for honor and that sense of our personhood. The way I’ve heard you talk about containment being made for containment is like, I have enough capacity to make space for your beauty and your brokenness. Who you are as a person is not too much for me. I’m just going to say as the mother of a toddler who’s thinking a lot about attachment categories, this is hard. It’s hard, okay, because I am trying to honor her personhood. I am trying to make space for her beauty and her brokenness as she is a powerful human being. And I got my own trauma. So I have a lot of moments where I’m like, I’m not sure I’m doing great at containment, but what I know about good enough parenting is you only need to be good at it one third of the time. And you have to learn how to repair. Protection, a sense of not only can I make space for the fullness of who you are, but I will also be committed to holding the boundary lines when you don’t yet have enough wisdom or discernment to understand the danger. And then again, repair that sense of when harm is done, intentional or not, I will make things right. I will do the work to rebuild trust, other biblical language, repentance, accountability, reconciliation. This is not unfamiliar language for us, but this is actually not just like, oh, emotionally we’re meant for these things, which would be a truth no matter what, but it’s actually how our neurological biochemical framework is why… it’s how God actually made us from ourselves and our being. And that’s why just isolating and cutting off relationship and really feeling the shame of our vulnerability just can’t be the stopping point because at the end of the day, we’re wired to need other human beings in order to survive. And it’s so frustrating as much as it’s redemptive and glorious and beautiful.
Dan: And let’s complicate it, not that we haven’t already, but the reality is that if you as a believer have been able to meander or walk through your own ecclesial experience and not know something of spiritual abuse, you are rare. But what we’re also saying is it’s not enough to just deal with the most recent betrayal or the experience of harsh or cruel or violating interactions. The fact is that so much of what we’re experiencing may be in the here and now has its own story and history, which is why our beloved Rebecca Vickery spoke about reenactment that we’re actually seeing and experiencing in the failure in the present other wounds. So in some sense, it’s the echo of the past in the present that intensifies something of the nature of the violation, which sounds like we’re making it worse, not better. We’re asking more of you, not less, to deal with not only the here and now or the recent, but also the foundational traumas, developmental or directly violating that indeed or echoing into the present. And that’s back to that whole point. If we don’t name it, then we don’t may be making it bigger than it was, but in one sense, by putting our arms around through language, what’s actually happening in us, we may have more to deal with, but we actually can now see it and engage it rather than having it behind us and haunting us.
Rachael: Well, I’ll just give an example from my lived experience as to why are we talking about this? This is vulnerable and I’m going to bring story that I don’t have time to nuance in a way that I would most want to, but I just want to give an example of why we’re talking about this. I could say in my experience, I probably had a much more disorganized attachment in my primary, in my earliest beginnings, some of the most beautiful memories of childhood and also often a beautiful memory simultaneously holding excruciating fear or terror or pain. And so learning to navigate my world with a lot of, I want to be good so that I can help mitigate the trauma that’s playing out, that’s a lot of generational trauma so that I can make sure my big people get the care they need so that I can get some care I need. And I came into faith or spirituality around four, and my parents made really great decisions about our early spiritual formation. They were a part of the Jesus movement. They got saved in the Jesus movement of the late seventies, early eighties, and coming out of faith traditions. They both were raised in the church and mainline churches, but had this radical encounter with Jesus. But the group they were a part of got hyper-charismatic and was like, we’re all moving to Tulsa because Jesus is coming back. And my parents were like, and all their humanized-ness were like, we’re not going. That’s like this is the boundary line for us. And so they wanted to find a church that had a really good kids program. So we became a part of a Southern Baptist church in Stillwater, Oklahoma that was near the University. And I can honestly say that spiritual formation for me was very secure, my attachment to God, an example I often give is in vacation Bible school, when I was four or five, I was very troubled that in some of the ways salvation was talked about, I had accepted Jesus into my heart, but I didn’t have this radical transformation of my humanity. And as a 4-year-old, I was taking that very literally. So I was like, I’m still making bad choices and I don’t think it works. And I had a teacher who said something like, it’s not really about you asking Jesus into your heart. It’s about you being wrapped into the heart of God and the story of God. And I was like, oh, okay. I like that. That sounds better. And so very beautiful, for the most part, secure attachment with God until certainly immersed in a larger cultural of fundamentalism, which we’ll talk about in the next conversation. However, by the time I got into high school, which you can go back and listen to other podcasts we’ve done on this, we found ourselves in a very, very, I’m not going to say conservative. It was very fundamentalism like a church that had very rigid boundaries of who’s in and who’s out. A lot of fear of secularism, very gendered, patriarchal norms. I shared about how when I was a teenager, I was set up in relationship with one of my youth leaders. But the truth is that power differential between men and women and romantic relationships was actually a very pervasive part of the whole community and culture. And that four years of intense fundamentalism had the power to completely dismantle and distort my attachment with God and my understanding of who God was. And it wasn’t just because I had a moment of weakness, it’s because I had parts of my story that had shaped me to want to conform to whatever the culture was, to be good so that I could be loved and belong. And that has helped me make more sense of how this community had so much power to bring so much harm so quickly after so many years of a really beautiful spiritual formation that I’m so grateful for because I think it’s part of the grace I have that allows me to do this work on behalf of others that I have some memory of goodness to call upon as I’ve had to really reclaim and recover a sense of who God is in the wake of that. And then the grace of many years of theological education that allowed me to kind of reclaim aspects of my mind that honestly were pretty intact to some degree until this very particular season. And so I share that to say that’s part of why we have to take a deeper look at these wounds that make us vulnerable. It doesn’t mean, and I think this is true with any form of abuse, and in part it’s because we need to make a shift to talk about grooming because part of the reality of any form of abuse is the role of grooming in inviting us in some ways to feel complicit in our own harm and grooming, I would love for you, Dan, to talk a little bit more about it, but when I think about grooming, I think about it as attunement without honor. It’s that, and that definitely typically involves the power dynamic, even if you have people of the same age or same gender, but maybe there’s the power dynamic is innocence. There’s a loss of innocence and innocence. So it’s that sense of our attachment wounds. Our wounds are read really well, our developmental trauma wounds that might extend beyond attachment, right? Some of the supremacy structures or oppressive structures that maybe we were exposed to socioeconomically racially with regard to our sexuality. So it’s not just our family of origin that impacts these wounds that can be read well by others, but it’s just that sense of these most precious and glorious parts of us that are hungry, get read really well, and then exploited in a way that makes us feel really complicit in the harm we experience, which makes it harder then to untangle and to heal and to make sense of.
Dan: Well, let’s start with one simple word, performance as the basis of our ontology, performance as the basis of whether or not we are beloved. So our doing defines our being. When that’s the case, you are being groomed so that in one sense you be a good girl and then you get the accolades of what your body and heart was made for. But what if you’re not a particularly good girl at a moment when there’s withdrawal, when there is a shaming, again, I’m not opposed to discipline, but when there is that violation at the core, you are no longer loved, then you are set up. That is in and of itself a setup that is a grooming to be “good”. I think a lot of Christians grow up being groomed to be good, and if they’re able to achieve it, then frankly the byproduct is usually more pride and self-righteousness. But most of us know that we can’t do that, and therefore we have now hidden parts of us. And those hidden parts feel real and the external feels to some degree real, but unreal. And so we live in this internal contradiction, which then demands, if you can see the cycle even more hiding, even more pretense, even more frankly, performance. So that’s the beginning structure of grooming that is much more systemic and yet very personal. But then we just have to say that there are those within the believing community who understand that this is a place where they can use and violate with a degree of impunity. Therefore, the grooming actually is far more, not just a bad theology. It’s actually an intention to steal, to steal your innocence. And obviously at the point I’m making, I’m reflecting on John 10:10, which again, the passage is not about directly about Satan, though it includes all forms of evil. It’s about bad leaders, and so bad leaders steal, they take away and own for themselves what should be left for you. And then of course, there is a kind of murder, a killing, a taking away, but then a violating. And ultimately the final word is marring. So if we can begin to talk about grooming as how does that person steal from you, your innocence, how do they kill the capacity of freedom and hope and imagination? And then how do they mar you with shame? Those categories are the realm of grooming. And for many of us, I didn’t encounter the church until after I had some degree of interest in the gospel. I dunno what to say about it other than so often I have thanked God that my family, as much as there was failure, never have I had to, in one sense, disentangle my mother and father from my relationship with God, not directly. And that has been a relief. In some ways, I think I was spared a certain amount of innocence being stolen because I didn’t have the overlapping realms of the church and family being so in one sense mired together. But in your experience, and we’ll use this as a launch for where we go next time, in your experience, you had chaotic attachment and then a deep secure attachment, and then a deep, deep violation and violations. And so I want to step back into the category of how is it that in the midst of all that spiritual abuse, that something of the living presence of Jesus remained? And I think that’s where we’re not trying to offer a quick solution, but there is something even for those who have been abused, where the reality of their own spirituality can be reengaged in order for a movement into the goodness of God in the land of the living. And I want to make sure that we enter more deeply into that.
Rachael: To me, this is such a mysterious place and a place that can feel painful and agonizing as I work with other people because it is a place that I kind of feel like, yeah, this is God’s work. If God is God, God better show up and follow through on those promises that there’s nothing that could separate us from the love of God, even like the abuse we’ve experienced and the ways it’s really harmed us and disordered us. I will say for me, enough of my righteous anger that actually was directed at God, ultimately because of the ways everything that was happening to me was being named as happening from God, like an actual rejection of that God, you know what? At the end of the day, I always thought it would be so… I stayed in this dynamic, even though everything was telling me, I don’t want this because I didn’t want to lose you, but you know what? I’m feeling suicidal. I’m feeling like I don’t want to live if I have to stay in this dynamic. So actually, if that’s what you want from me, I have decided I don’t want you. So where that kind of strength came from, I can only say watching my 2-year-old. I think it was just in me. And that was definitely directed at God and many others. And I would love to say that that was, I entered a season of a lot of restorative recovery that feels very mystical to me. I still don’t have a lot of language for. And then shortly following that experienced probably my most painful spiritual abuse from a narcissist in a church camp setting that actually whatever shreds of innocence I had left and trust that faith ultimately came the word just completely annihilated. And so it’s like I would love to say, oh, and that recovery period worked in perpetuity, and I wasn’t drawn in by any other abusers, but that was not the case for me because I had to do a lot more deeper healing work about other realities of my life. But I’ve felt a pursuit and a sense of a very patient, very kind God, who also is filled with rage at injustice and is very merciful in comfort.
Dan: Indeed. And so to go back to reenactment, we often perpetuate unwittingly cycles of structure that continue to bring heartache and harm. And in that we’re not at fault and not like you wicked little sinner, but it’s a matter of eventually the debris becomes so substantial that at one level we can’t slide it underneath the couch. We can’t sort of put it in the closet because it just overwhelming our home, our very heart, our very body.
Rachael: Well, and this is a good link to where we’ll go next, because the reality is yes, there was interpersonal grooming, there was theological grooming, but the reality is part of that reenactment for me of being drawn to strong narcissistic leader churchmen, was the cultural waters I was swimming in that were telling me you’re a really strong gifted woman and that’s bad if you want to be loved by a faithful follower of Jesus. And so you have to find someone even more powerful than you, more gifted than you, smarter than you, more charismatic than you to be a covering. Again, there were developmental wounds that were shaping me towards these reenactments, and there were cultural developmental wounds that were almost making it impossible for me to even perceive another way in another imagination. And that’s part of the spiritually abusive realities we want to talk about next. But anything you would add, Dan, before we bring this conversation to a close?
Dan: Oh, just again, marvel, marvel, marvel over the goodness of God, marvel over your ferocious and tender heart. And so glad that though I have not borne the same scars that in so many ways your integrity seen in the course, seen in this labor is such an invitation to a different kind of redemption.
Rachael: Thank you.