Moving From Broken to Beloved with Brian Lee

by on August 22, 2025

Spiritual abuse can shatter trust—not only in people and institutions, but sometimes even in God. It can leave survivors wondering if healing or belonging is possible on the other side of betrayal.

In this conversation, Rachael Clinton Chen is joined by Brian Lee, founder of Broken to Beloved. Brian shares his story of growing up as a pastor’s kid, becoming a pastor himself, and eventually facing the reality of spiritual abuse in his own life. Out of that painful journey, he has learned the daily work of reminding himself—and others—that no matter what has been taken, we are still beloved.

This work doesn’t happen in isolation. Brian and Rachael name the importance of the wider movement—survivors, advocates, pastors, and therapists—who are rising up to expose abuse and create spaces of honesty, care, and repair. Together they remind us that while spiritual abuse is devastating, it does not have the final word.

Related Resources:

About Our Guest:

Brian Lee is a pastor, coach, and speaker. In his 20+ years of experience in vocational ministry, he experienced three instances of spiritual abuse and toxic leadership. After living with an identity of brokenness for too many years, he learned to recognize and reclaim his own belovedness.

He founded Broken to Beloved in 2023, a nonprofit organization that exists to provide practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse and religious trauma.

He is a certified Trauma-Informed Coach (Centre for Healing) and holds a certification in Religious Trauma Studies from the Global Center for Religious Research.

Based in Richmond, VA, Brian loves to go on mini-adventures with his family, exploring their neighborhood, community, and city with his family. As a coffee snob and addict, he could always use another cup.

Follow the work of Broken to Beloved at brokentobeloved.org

Episode Transcript: 

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. As much as I long for the day when spiritual abuse and really all forms of abuse cease to exist, today is really not that day. Unfortunately, at a return, it seems the abuse and misuse of power from those in spiritual authority has only intensified, or at the very least, the exposure and revelation of the abuse has intensified. And it doesn’t help when those in our government at the highest seats of power perpetuate harm and claim to do so with God’s permission and provision, which honestly is a tale as old as time. All that to say, if you are a victim and survivor of spiritual abuse, it’s likely you find yourself incredibly activated these days. And I just want to name that you are worthy of safety, care, and healing. I think you know by now that we are committed to this work at the Allender Center, but it’s really one of those realities we need all hands on deck.

So I’m always encouraged and incredibly grateful for trustworthy partners in this work. And I’m very much looking forward to introducing you to one of those partners who is here with us today. Brian Lee is a pastor, coach, and speaker. He’s also the founder of Broken to Beloved, a nonprofit that exists to help victims and survivors of spiritual abuse, religious trauma, and church harm to offer practical pathways towards healing and wholeness.

They provide a lot of resources for recovery as well as support pastors and leaders and those churches who are really wanting to build healthy, trauma-informed environments. As a survivor of spiritual abuse and religious trauma himself, this work is personal as much as it is vocational. And I’m just really looking forward to this conversation with you, Brian, so welcome.

Brian: It’s an honor to be here. Thanks Rachael.

Rachael: Yeah. So from one survivor of spiritual abuse to another, I know that I’m assuming that you didn’t like when you were dreaming about calling and your vocation, you weren’t like, someday I’m going to be someone who’s committed to healing and providing resources around spiritual abuse. So tell me a little bit about some of your origins and getting into ministry and yeah, how you found yourself here today.

Brian: Yeah. Isn’t that what we all dream of as second graders and third graders is I want to talk about spiritual abuse? I didn’t have the language of spiritual abuse till about five years ago, and I had been experiencing it for over 15, maybe more prior to that. And until then, really you just live your life thinking, am I crazy or what’s wrong with me? And I’ve grown up in church my entire life. I grew up in a large Korean church outside of New York City. My dad planted a church in Pittsburgh, a Korean and American church. I left there and went to Philly and that’s where I started working in churches. And it’s funny because I saw the way that church life consumed my family growing up. It becomes everything, especially when your dad is the pastor. And so I kind of vowed to myself as like, oh, I’m never going to do that. And joke’s on me because I did. I went to go work for church, I got my credentials. I’m an ordained minister for over, I dunno how many years I’ve worked in four or five different churches I think now. And I’ve experienced three distinct instances of spiritual abuse and toxic leadership in three different environments. So like we said at the beginning, it was just like, man, what just happened? What’s wrong with me that I was treated this way or that, what did I not do right? Because you hear leaders speak with one kind of language and then you see a completely different kind of behavior behind closed doors and sometimes very much out in the open that causes that cognitive dissonance of what in the world is going on and my brain doesn’t know how to reconcile this. And then it happened again at the next church where I landed. So that’s where you think, oh, the problem must be me because it’s still happening and it happened again in a different way, but it sure feels very similar. And then I landed in a place where I could kind of catch my breath for a little bit. I actually felt like I was doing really well, maybe for the first time thriving in ministry and then ended up down in Virginia where we are today with a place that offered the promise of healing. I was very upfront because I would walk into interviews and introduce myself and they would say, Hey, why do you want to be here? And I would say, well actually you don’t want me here because I’m damaged goods. I’m broken. You don’t want me because here are the experiences that have happened. And so they’d listened with what I thought was empathy and compassion. Say, well, we would love for you to come and just heal and have a place to catch your breath, get your feet under you and don’t those sound like wonderful things. And then it ended up being the most toxic and abusive place I’ve ever worked.

Rachael: Oh no.

Brian: And very quickly, within three or four years was gone and 2020 didn’t help COVID didn’t help and all the anti-Asian hate and stuff didn’t help. So the short answer to the long explanation is after lots and lots of counseling and therapy and reading and getting the language for spiritual abuse, as soon as I heard those words, I was like, oh my gosh, that’s what happened to me. I had no idea. But now that there’s a word for it, I need to learn everything I can. And the more I learned, the more I got language for validating the experience without excusing what happened to me without excusing my part that I played. And it was actually my counselor who said, hey, you’re a different man today than the one that walked into my office a year ago. Do you think this might be helpful to someone else? Because I was reading so much and getting all these resources. So started doing the work and offering, I was like, hey, would this be helpful to anyone else? And sure enough, it was, and people started showing up. And so now here I find myself doing this crazy thing that whoever could have imagined. Right?

Rachael: Well, I mean it certainly speaks to your generativity and generosity, and I think it’s true of most healers. I know it’s in some ways we know about healing out of necessity and it’s kind of like a blessing out of our own poverty in some ways, both out of our own poverty and our own riches, but not necessarily what we signed up for. I can relate to that in the sense that, I mean, I was working in the Allender Center tending to trauma and abuse, growing my trauma-informed capacity, could have said I experienced clergy abuse. I grew up in a kind of more fundamentalist environment that certainly had some not helpful things. I could talk about developmental trauma and different things, but I had not made the connection, this is actually some of these things you’ve experienced. It’s a form of abuse. And I think for a lot of people, you’re naming your experience as playing out primarily in a church setting, which I actually think it’s harder for people in church leadership to see that what they’re experiencing is spiritual abuse. Then let’s say if you’re in a little bit different position in the power dynamic. So it makes a lot of sense that you would’ve had a lot of confusion as to what is happening and why does this keep happening. But I often say spiritual abuse can feel almost like something if we don’t have the language for it. If someone hasn’t helped us make the connections, it can feel like water draining through a colander. What is it? So I would love to hear from you as you have found language from others, been given language from others, developed your own language, how would you help someone define or paint a picture of what are we talking about when we talk about spiritual abuse?

Brian: Man, this is what I’ve spent the last five years trying to read about and consolidate and synergize into something that makes sense and everyone has a different definition, right? I love a short clip I saw from Jenai Auman probably on Instagram, and she just said, spiritual abuse is when you use God’s words to dehumanize God’s beloved. And I think it’s that there’s a power differential. So someone in power above you is using their influence, power, and control to make you feel like less than, and usually within a spiritual context. So whether they’re weaponizing prayer or scripture or they’re quote spiritual authority, whatever it is, in a way that makes you question your agency, your worth, your value, your belovedness, any of those things when God or something spiritual is used against you instead of to enrich you or disciple you or point you towards Christ, it points you towards shame and wickedness and all of these other things. So I dunno, that’s my best attempt right now.

Rachael: Yeah, no, no, I, like you, I’ve kind of pulled so many people’s definitions and I think very similarly that just that sense of when spiritual authority is being weaponized or utilized to control or harm or violate. And it can be so tricky because I think so many people think, well, spiritual abuse is clergy abuse. And it’s like, well, it certainly is. But spiritual abuse, if we’re talking about spiritual authority could play out in a family system, it could play out in a school system or any kind of community or relationship really, where the trust that’s being given because of the place of spiritual authority is being weaponized or being wielded in a way that, like you said, I actually love that that is not leading you to a sense of being beloved or coming against your identity as beloved. And it makes me think about how spiritual abuse can be an umbrella for so many different forms of abuse. And I think also what makes it tricky is someone can say, well, yeah, I experienced maybe some emotional abuse or some sexual abuse or physical abuse, but we don’t always get to name the spiritual abuse of realities that are playing out. And I think it makes me think about what you said about the last community you were a part of because I think this is a really important part for many of us and where we have the most shame is when what’s being offered is something we desperately need and we’re actually meant for. Like you are meant for healing and recovery and honor and rest. And when that invitation gets flipped in a way that it’s like it happens, it’s kind like the frog and the boiling water in a way that takes you a while to catch up, to wait a minute, hold on, a minute…

Brian: What’s happening here?

Rachael: This is bad, this is really bad. But it can feel, so why did I choose this? Why did I want this? Why did I say what’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t I see that this was going to happen? And I would just be curious in your own story and your work with others, how often that is the case with people that it’s something actually really good that’s drawing them to a certain 

environment or a certain relationship.

Brian: Oh, that’s so good. I’m thinking of a couple of different things. Hillary McBride and Alison Cook, Hillary’s new book, Holy Hurt, which is so good. And she has conversations with all these other people among them, Alison Cook, who says, I think that all abuse is spiritual abuse. And I thought, oh my gosh, because we are spiritual beings and so when we abuse or violated, it has spiritual undertones no matter what kind. And so whether you are identifying physical abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse, any of these things, if they happen within a spiritual context, guess what? It’s also spiritual abuse. So I think I’m giving people permission and language to say, oh, actually what I’ve experienced is also spiritual abuse without having to have to take on the stigma or the shame of, oh my gosh, I’ve been abused, I’m a victim. What is this? Right? So there’s also all that shame that we’re talking about. And so Alison Cook, again, one of my most helpful conversations was with her when she gave me the permission to take all that shame that I was carrying specifically around why did I stay so long when I knew I needed to get out? And I think people often feel that where they’re like, was I complicit? Was I just Stockholm syndrome? Was it something else? And what it was is I felt such pressure and I felt trapped. I had no options. Right, because when you’re abused so often your agency is stripped from it. And she reframed it in a way that says, but of course you stayed. You had to provide for your family. You were the only income, you were the only way that they were going to have insurance. Of course you stayed. And I just thought, oh my God, if I would’ve allowed myself that shift to be like, oh, I’m making a choice to say even though this is horrible, even though I’m having blackout panic attacks, even though I’m suffering all of these things mentally and physically, it’s like I’m choosing to stay because I have to provide for my family right now and I can look for a way out at the same time, but instead of feeling trapped in that decision, like I didn’t have any other way out, would’ve been a completely different mindset than making that choice. And so much of the shame that comes with spiritual abuse or abuse in general, I think is owning way too much of the fault.

Rachael: Absolutely.

Brian: When abuse, if you were abused, it wasn’t your fault. Someone did that to you and you wanted something good. And our friend Adam Young talks so much about desire, are you able to go back and bless that desire? It’s like I wanted to find healing, I wanted to find rest. Of course. I wanted to find those things. It is unfortunate and horrible that the opposite was found in that place, but that doesn’t negate your desire for the healing and for the blessing and the good things that were promised to you.

Rachael: Absolutely. Well, and I think it’s also so much, so many spiritually abusive environments or cultures weaponize shame and fear in a way that you actually believe you’ll lose God too, or you’ll lose calling, you’ll lose something of this belonging and belovedness with God. And I could look back on my story, and I’ve said this before in some different contexts, but my formative years of spiritual formation were, even though they were kind of in these larger waters, white evangelical, Southern Baptist, and that’s not an indictment on all white evangelicals or all Southern Baptist context, but just even though that was the waters I was in, I actually had a very liberating, I would say mostly secure healthy attachment with God. I had some developmental trauma going on in the background. So in many ways God was probably my most secure place. But when I entered my adolescent years, that’s when we were a part of a faith community that got increasingly fundamentalist, really just, I mean, so toxic, rigid binaries out the wazoo, purity culture in all of its forms

Brian: Of course.

Rachael: Out the wazoo. And it was such a pivotal time that even though I had this very secure base, the distortion, the manipulation, the fear, the shame, the ways in which the walls closed in and had massive capacity to bring confusion and make me feel as though one wrong step and God is done with me. And it’s like, yeah, I have so much compassion for that young girl who really opted into things at the time as someone called to pastor, which I would’ve never even said out loud because I’m taking all these spiritual gifts, inventory tests, and it’s all coming out, oh, you’re a preacher. And it would be like, no, it’s “you’re administrative,” or “you’re this.” And I’m like, you’re right, because I don’t want to be an abomination. Why I would’ve been compelled to have an infatuation with one of my youth leaders, why I would’ve been set up to be drawn to a narcissistic structure to cover my strengths so that something could be bigger than me so that I could actually have this calling and live this life that I know I’m meant to live. It’s like I have so much compassion for her. But that took a lot of work because there was something in me that was like, I can’t believe you ever agreed to these realities, but I can be like, I wanted to keep God. I wanted to keep this very sacred attachment. And I just, yeah, there’s something that makes me really furious. And I think Jesus actually, his most furious words are reserved for people in religious authority, fused with a kind of empirical power who are oppressing vulnerable people and heaping heavy burdens on burdened people or his language of if you cause these little ones to stumble. And yeah, just as someone called to places of sometimes spiritual authority, I take that so seriously. So seriously. But I think you’re absolutely right, that invitation to compassion towards the parts of ourselves that we actually feel a lot of shame around or feel like there’s something so broken about us. And it’s part of why I love that what you called your nonprofit Broken to Beloved. It’s such a beautiful story in a very poetic phrase, broken to beloved. And I would love to hear more from you. I mean you’ve put some words to it implied about your own journey from understanding yourself as broken to beloved. But just tell me more about what you’ve seen in that shift, in that transformation. What is some of the healing work that people need to encounter or be invited to be able to have a new kind of sense of self in relationship to God and others and with ourselves?

Brian: Yeah. Well, I mean the name Broken to Beloved again comes out of my personal experience that I viewed myself for years as broken, that I introduced myself in places as damaged goods. And it was all the years of work in counseling and just doing the reading and learning and to untangle myself from that identity, that brokenness is something that happened to me. It’s not who I am that at the core, I am still beloved. And that was really hard to accept as someone who is a recovering perfectionist and has to do things the right way. And if I mess up, then I have to throw the whole thing out. All of it is bad, not just this one mistake, but the whole thing. So reclaiming that sense of belovedness was a big deal for me. And I think when you talk about those pieces of shame and when you talk about having compassion for that little Rachael who grew up thinking, I’m called to be a preacher, but no, you’re not because you’re not allowed to be in this context. And we all have these desires and dreams that we have and we’re taught to shame them and we’re given these strict binaries and we’re given all of these things when really it’s like, no, at the end of the day, you are and always will be God’s beloved. And it’s why one of the values that we worked so hard to articulate was this idea of goodness over wickedness that I want to hold to a Genesis 1:2 theology of humanity, versus a Genesis 3 theology that yes, we can be wicked and depraved and sinful in all of these things. And that was not our original intent.

Rachael: That’s right.

Brian: That is not how we were originally created. God created man and said very good, right? And so what does it look like to reclaim that sense of two things can be true at the same time, but it doesn’t mean that we take this default position of wickedness and depravity and sin and all of this stuff. And so moving out of that towards that belovedness, I think it’s when we wrap ourselves up or wrap our identities up in any of the other things outside of our belovedness is where we get tripped up. That’s where the shame comes in real hard, because if my identity is in my position as a pastor or as a Sunday to school teacher or as a mentor, or as whatever I do for my work or as a mom or as whatever that is, anytime our identity gets wrapped up in anything other than our belovedness, we set ourselves up. And so because what if that thing is taken away from me? Or what if I do make that mistake or whatever it is that happens that inevitably will happen. So what does it look like to move from that brokenness to belovedness? And so the name, honestly, that came out of a cohort that we launched and I launched the cohort first and then Broken to Beloved was kind of born out of it. But it’s this idea that we walk people through this process of how do you learn to own your own story? And I know Allender Center obviously is all about story work, but it’s so often when we’ve experienced abuse or when we carry trauma in our bodies, it’s the sense of someone else told my story for me and they stole it from me.

Rachael: Absolutely. Yeah.

Brian: So how do I reclaim my story and I get to tell it now instead of the pastor standing up on the stage with his hand on my back, usually with a knife attached to say, oh, can we thank Brother Brian for all of his years of service and can we just be so appreciative and all these things? Like you’re the one who pushed me out, dude, what’s going on? And it’s such a right, crazy making thing that happens so often in churches all across America slash the world, but your story gets told for you and go, God is calling him in a new direction. It’s like, no, he’s not. I don’t have a job. The direction is just not here. And so all these lies get told about us for us, and we don’t want anyone to talk to, don’t reach out because he just needs space. It’s like, no, you’re telling them to isolate.

Rachael: Cause we don’t want anyone to know the truth.

Brian: Exactly. So what does it look like to reclaim and tell your own story knowing that it will be believed by a safe and compassionate community? And once you’re able to do that, how do we equip you with language and words to define what happened to you? Like spiritual abuse, what is trauma? What are the effects of trauma? What is gaslighting, narcissism, deconstruction, spiritual bypassing, all of these terms that people are like, oh my gosh, I had no idea. Even just defining agency. For some people who were like, I don’t know what that means, I hear it. And then moving from there into this liminal space and recognizing, Hey, you feel really untethered right now, and that’s normal and that’s okay and it’s actually good, And there’s a lot to figure out here in this space. And while you are here, just take a deep breath because re-engaging with your own body is going to give you a sense of groundedness that you haven’t had before. And it’s the one autonomic response that you can actually control anyway. And it reminds your body, Hey, when everything feels out of control, I am in a little bit of control because I can speed up my breath, I can slow it down, I can hold it, I can do whatever I need to right now. And so I’m here right now and moving through that practice of breath and mindfulness, we start to go really nerdy and deep into polyvagal theory and autonomic nervous system responses and what happens when you’re triggered and activated so that you can become aware of, oh, I’m being pulled back into a trauma response right now, and so what can I do in this moment? And so the framework that I use is to notice what’s happening, give it a name, and then once you have a name for it, you get to choose how do we want to navigate. So it’s like now that I know what I’m dealing with, what do I want to do with it? Maybe I need to stay because I’m the only source of income and insurance.

Rachael: That’s right.

Brian: Maybe I want to look for a way out. Maybe this community is not great for me and I’m looking for something else. Maybe this is my spouse or my child, and I don’t have the option to sever that tie right now. So how do I want to choose as Allison Cook says again, to suffer wisely? That’s right. At least I do it with an awareness of what’s happening instead of just taking it. Right. So again, it’s offering people a chance to recover their sense of agency, to not prescribe things to them and say, hey, this is what you have to do or what you should do. I really try to resist telling people what they should do. I’ll frame it in a, hey, this is what has been helpful to me. If it’s helpful for you, I would love to hear that. And if not, I would love to hear how you handle it. But story, work, definitions, language for where you are, understanding how your nervous system is responding to things so that you can notice and even navigate your way through it to move towards recognizing and reclaiming ultimately your sense of belovedness that this is your birthright. If nothing else, this is your calling that you are beloved. And so live out of an overflow of that belovedness instead of constantly grasping for it somewhere else.

Rachael: I love that progression and a few things I just want to call out. One, I love how you take the body seriously, because I think a lot of they hear a language, spiritual abuse and spirituality in general, we have this very platonic enlightenment like, oh, it’s this kind of ethereal part of us that exists outside of our bodies. It’s emotions or it’s as if those aren’t deeply connected to our brain and our nervous system. But yeah, when we’re talking about abuse, we’re talking about the ways in which our body has been traumatized and in spiritually abusive environments. So much. I love, I think it’s Peter Levine or it’s Gabor Mate, in an intro to Peter Levine quoting Peter Levine to himself. But it’s this phrase, trauma’s not what happens to us. It’s kind of left behind in the absence of an empathetic witness. And there’s something about being in a spiritually abusive environment, exactly what you’re saying. We don’t have the luxury of anyone helping us make meaning of what’s happening. And if anything, they are telling us the meaning of what’s happening in a way that invites us to bear the shame. You put that so well, that has huge implications for the body. Shame impacts the body, terror impacts the body, powerlessness impacts the body. And so I just love that you’re giving people tools and resources to understand this is not just one part of you. This is a very holistic healing journey. The other piece is that sense of agency, and I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I experienced this. A lot of people I work with, it’s both the thing that at some point in the work they would say, I’m so grateful for the ways in which you authorized my personhood. But in the midst of it, sometimes they’re like, but I’m actually pretty formed and trained to look towards authoritative figures and can you just tell me what the steps are? Just tell me what to do. And it’s such as a two on the enneagram with a one wing. I have both. I’m a helper, but also I’ve got to do it right. It’s gonna be good, it’s fine. I’m fine. I will just be a therapy forever, but I’m fine. I’m totally fine. It’s like, oh, I want to be helpful to people. And to know that mysterious place of what it is to say it’s like, why my therapist for five years was like, what do you need today? And I was like, you shut your mouth. I dunno. I just want you to tell me what I need. And she’s like, this is our work.

Brian: This is it.

Rachael: You get to embody what you need. And it genuinely took a long time. I could be like, I know what you need. I know what the bus driver needs, I know what everyone needs, but if you ask me that, I just kind of go blank. It’s like obviously she would be like, you’re wearing sweatpants, and this was before COVID where wearing sweatpants meant something. It meant something. She’d be like, you’re wearing sweatpants. It feels like you’re giving lots of nonverbal cues that you’re not okay. Would you say that’s true? And I would be like, how dare you judge me? But also I’m not okay now. It wouldn’t mean anything. It would just be like, oh, you left your house. Great.

Brian: Yeah. Exactly.

Rachael: Yeah. So just that sense of agency and personhood is so powerful. And yet when you’re a survivor of abuse, especially spiritual abuse, it is some of the hardest to recover and trust yourself that you could make a decision without some kind of authoritative figure basically tell you what to do. Yeah, I’m just so grateful for that language. But I would be curious, what have you noticed in people even for yourself in that part of the healing process?

Brian: Yeah, that’s a great question. You talked about the absence of an empathetic witness. And so much of what I’ve read in the process of moving towards healing and wholeness, which is what we say all the time, that’s kind of the language that we use, is how important community and connection are. Because trauma is profoundly disconnecting and disintegrating. And the problem is so often in communities where we’ve been abused, we’re also made to feel isolated.

Rachael: That’s right.

Brian: You are alone.

Rachael: That’s absolutely right.

Brian: No one is behind you, no one is with you. If you say a word, we will cut everything off. And so it’s either threatened or it’s actually done. So what I hear so often from our community is like, I feel so utterly alone. How in the world am I supposed to move towards community when that’s the thing that harmed me and I’m just too scared and I have so much compassion for that person because I was there so many times and what I’ve slowly been learning maybe over the last year-ish, and I’ve sort of been getting, and isn’t this funny, I’ve been getting permission from other people and other experts to say this out loud, is the first person that you need to connect to is actually yourself. If there is no empathetic witness around, guess what? You can choose to believe yourself because you’ve been primed and trained not to. So what would happen if you went back to that story of harm and the way you’ve been gaslighting yourself to say, no, that didn’t actually happen. No, they didn’t mean it that way to say, actually, I think they did. I think they actually wanted to hurt me in this instance. Or maybe it was unintentional, but you’ve passed it off and you’ve dismissed it. And he was like, no, no, no. That wasn’t really that hurtful actually. Actually, no. That profoundly and deeply cut me in a way because I thought this person was my friend and then I didn’t respond to one message and they’ve never talked to me again. And so what I thought was a true and deep friendship ended up being nothing. And so what do I do with that? How do I sit with that? So believing yourself, being that empathetic witness for yourself, being community for yourself, which sounds wacky, but we talk about parts work and internal family systems. I mean, hello.

Rachael: This audience would be like, oh yeah, we’re in.

Brian: We’re all over it. It’s like all of these exiled parts of yourselves, all of these managers and firefighters and things that are competing for your attention, you get to integrate them and you get to pay attention to say, guess what? I hear you. I know you’ve been yelling for the last five or seven years about this thing that I’ve been trying to ignore because it was too painful to face.

Rachael: That’s right. Or too scary

Brian: Or yeah, absolutely too scary. And then you say, you know what? I think it’s time because this is not how I want to keep living and I don’t know where else to turn, and I don’t have a community right now, but I’ve gotten this voice in the back of my mind that keeps yelling to pay attention, and I do want to figure out how to pay attention. And so how do you reconnect to yourself and you about that sacred attachment with God bringing all these other attachment issues with you? It’s like sometimes there are reasons that we feel like we cannot attach to God. His name was used as a weapon.

Rachael: That’s right.

Brian: His name was used to demean or dismiss or belittle or whatever us. So it makes sense. So don’t go and heap more shame on yourself to why can’t I feel connected to God? Why can’t I pray right now? Why can I read my Bible?

Rachael: Exactly. Or the rituals that were connected there that again, you might need to set down for a season. That doesn’t mean that you may never get to enjoy them again. They might need to become something new. But yeah, that sense of, it’s almost like I’ve worked with so many people that still feel like, well, this is how I get back to God. And then there’s just so much torment and that keeping on of more shame, it must be me. I don’t have enough faith. I haven’t. I’m still holding onto something. And to me, I have so much heartache there, so much compassion, so much ferocity of like, oh, you don’t have to torture yourself.

Brian: Yeah,

Rachael: Yeah.

Brian: Well, I just had a coaching client this morning who has this eternal struggle with this need to serve God the right way and do the right thing because if not, I’m wicked. And if I’m wicked, then God can have nothing to do with me because he’s God. And if I’m wicked, that means he’s wicked. So he has to distance himself from me. And I was like, well, hold on. Listen to yourself. Are you that powerful that you are going to change God because of your wickedness? And is that even really what you believe about God? And the answer was no. I said, how would you describe God? And the answer was like, good, light, love. I said, that’s not what it sounds like when you talk about him to me. And so it was the whole idea of if I put myself on a scale of, and we got to the bottom of it just saying, if you don’t feel safe, there’s no way you’re going to feel loved. So do you even feel safe with God? And the answer was no. It’s like, and it makes sense why you don’t, because look at what you’ve been taught about him. Look at what you’ve been told about what God thinks of you. Of course you don’t feel safe. So what would it look like to move two steps towards feeling safe, not zero to 100, just from two to four? And so what would that look like? And we ended up just rewriting the whole script of what God thinks about me is not that I’m horrible and wicked and terrible, but that he is my protector and that he is not out to get me. He’s actually for me. And so moving again, moving towards that belovedness rather than all these shame spiral things that we do to ourselves, it makes sense why we beat ourselves up. It makes sense why we don’t feel like we can move towards or away from, and it makes sense. So the sooner we can again, notice and name that, then we can choose what we want to do with it.

Rachael: Yeah. It’s so interesting because two things come to mind one, early in my healing, which was more just my entrance into therapy, I came to The Seattle School to do an MDiv because I wanted to help people and I wanted to get more tools for helping people. And very quickly my journey was like, yeah, I mean I laugh because if you had told me 30 years ago you’re going to work in trauma, I would be like, what? And if they were like, and because you’re a survivor of trauma, I would’ve been like, what? It’s just…

Brian: No thanks.

Rachael: When the thing’s your thing, but it’s your normal. And I feel like that’s actually true for any person I’ve ever talked to or worked with who is a survivor. It’s like if it’s your thing you going to, it’s going to feel like, well, it’s not as bad as so I can’t really take it seriously. And someone, I think Chuck DeGroat wrote this one Facebook or he was posting someone else, but just that sense of your nervous system is your nervous system. It’s not comparing itself to other people’s nervous system. And I just really liked that. But early in my healing journey, one of my therapists said, Rachael, do you believe God loves you as much as God loves God’s mission for you? I mean, I would love to say in that moment I was like, yes. But honestly, the question was so disorienting to me. It was something I had actually never considered up to that point. And it did lead to in biblical studies language, that hermeneutical shift that I love what you’re saying. It wasn’t like a 180 or a 360, it was one inch of a shift that changed everything. And another thing that comes to mind is when I was in the most horrible parts of, I would say, some of the most profound spiritual abuse I experienced when I was three years into this relationship with my youth leader that I didn’t actually at all want to be in at that point, but because the language was this is what God wants, I really was like, I can’t lose God. But I had this moment in my dorm room as a freshman, everyone’s playing. I don’t have friends because I’m very isolated by virtue of the abuse. It’s the whole point. I’d had a few professors start giving me language for, I’m concerned about you. Here’s some things red flags in your relationship. And I’m like, okay, I’m pulling the resources. But I had this moment of I want to die… if this is my future. I don’t want to live. And it was like some, I think God made part of me at the time. It felt rebellious. But some part of me, that agency that some little shred of agency in me was like, if you want me to die and you want me to be miserable, I actually think I would be better with my own devices. I actually think I got to lose you because I think I would be better without you. At least I’d want to live. And again, for me, that was a very important deconstruction moment of a certain image of God. I had been given my story again is very different than everyone’s because I did have something of that early secure… It was almost like in that moment it opened the door for all my rage and anger and those parts of me that are just what the actual… almost like the fever dream of just even if I don’t have any allies, I will find a way. And it wasn’t like the next day or the next minute, but it actually did open the door for me to have access to these parts of God that had just been totally eclipsed by whoever this God was that was being given to me. And there was a lot of grace in that for me. And I’m not at all saying that that’s everyone’s experience. I’m so grateful that it was mine that I got to enter this womb-like season of healing. And I guess I would just love to hear from you and your wisdom. It does feel like in healing from spiritual abuse and recovering agency, that there are things or images of God that have to be deconstructed. And deconstruction is such a term that’s thrown around and it’s scary to a lot of us because there are a lot of folks in the deconstruction world who have moved to I think a new fundamentalism that’s like anti-God, anti-religion, anti-scripture, a lot of defensive mechanisms. I have so much mercy for that. I’m not saying they need to choose something different. Well, maybe I am saying there are other options. I don’t think it means you have to choose those options, but I don’t think it has to be the only option. But there still has to be some sense of, I’m leaving you behind. I’m leaving this thing. And maybe, I don’t know. I would love to hear from you your experience of that and your own journey and your work with people. How would you talk about deconstruction and reconstruction?

Brian: I would want somehow, again, to be invitational and to strip the word deconstruction of all the stigma that’s been placed on it over the past several years. And to say that deconstruction is a good and necessary process that all of us go through in our lives because no one ends their life being the same person they were when they were 20. You went through deconstruction. Guess what? I think it was a conversation I had with Camden Morgante maybe, and it was this idea, there are different levels of deconstruction. When you think about your house, when you get one or move into one or whatever it is, sometimes it’s like a remodel. Sometimes it’s not even that. It’s like a refurbish. I’m going to refurbish my cabinets, or I’m going to remodel the kitchen, or I’m going to renovate the living room. And so there’s all these different levels. It’s like, but then you start to tear the walls out. It’s like, oh my gosh, look at this giant mold on the wall. And all of a sudden this renovation has turned into something else. But it starts with the process of just like, is this really how I want things to be? As I look at my life, as I look at my spirituality, as I look at my relationship with myself, with God, with others, is this really what I want? Does this feel right and good and true? And if not, guess what buddy Deconstruction’s coming for you. And so it’s what are the ideas that are holding me back? And this is not like a go and sin however you want to because that’s how so many people frame deconstruction is that they just want to go do their own thing. Scott McKnight and Tommy Phillips do such a great job of saying, is it Invisible Jesus I think is their book. It’s like people aren’t leaving the church because they want to go sin. It’s because they stopped seeing the Jesus that you talked about there, and they’re going to look for him. And so those who are deconstruction are most often the people who are trying to hold onto their faith not to leave it. And then like you said, the people who are embracing a different kind of fundamentalism are, I think it’s going to sound judgy, I guess it kind of is, are the ones who haven’t really done their work. They’ve just taken their fundamentalism and moved to a different arena. And so I talked about our values earlier. One of our other values is this idea of curiosity over certainty. And what I want us to do is to be able to ask really good questions of ourselves and of each other without needing to hold onto a position so tightly. Because again, if I’m holding onto a position that tightly, is it because part of my identity is wrapped up in it? And if I let that go, this idea about my politics or about sexuality or about abortion or about gun rights or about immigrants or about whatever the issue is, is it because somehow my identity is wrapped up in that a little bit? Or am I willing to be curious about where that idea came from in the first place so that I can remodel it and get something that’s better and more functional and serves me today in a way that it didn’t 10 years ago? And there are so many great books about asking s like Erin Moon, I’ve Got Questions, Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky, Pete Enns, How the Bible Actually Works. There’s all these books about learning how to ask good questions and to sit with of, I might not have an answer for this for a really long time or ever. And you know what? That would be okay because I don’t need mean if you need certainty, that’s not faith.

Rachael: Yeah. Absolutely. One of my best professors actually gave us this whole thing about how our faith exists in tension. And you have to imagine it like that. And any attempt to swing fully uncertainty to one side of the tension or the other and the whole thing collapses. And that’s not to say there isn’t clarity of a way through. And I think as we come to a close here, I do want people to hear different ways they can connect with your work and the work of Broken to Beloved. So we’ll talk about that as we close. But one of the things I love about Belovedness being a core part of the recovery process and the healing process from spiritual abuse is that we’re back to how you talked about Genesis one and two. It actually connects to the truer story because if you reclaim a sense of being beloved, then you inherently start to see the belovedness of all people and understand that this story we’re a part of is not just to be redeemed from our brokenness and our sin, but to be a part of co-creating with the spirit, like the restoration of all things. Because the end of the story, at least the way I see it, and a lot of people see it, is not we go off to some planet on a rocket ship and scorch this place. It’s that God comes to restore and to dwell with us in fullness, in new creation. And I just think, yeah, where we’re moving in our healing is not just oh, so I can just be healed and feel good and feel better. It’s restoring also, like you said, our capacity to be in community and to imagine possibilities beyond just becoming good or becoming right or becoming good enough to fit into this thing. But actually like the restoration of all things. And I will say for myself, when I’m outside of a sense of being beloved, that invitation feels virtually impossible. Oh yeah. Because like I’m damaged goods. I’m not quite sure I can really help you with that. Good luck. So it can very much relate to that. Any final words before we just share a little bit more with people about ways they can connect with you and Broken into Beloved?

Brian: Well, I love what you’re saying about owning your own belovedness enables you to extend that to other people. And that’s the whole thing because what we talk about so often is this idea of grace, compassion, and empathy, except it has to be extended to you first. If I don’t know how to receive grace, I sure can’t give it. If I don’t know how to feel empathy on behalf of myself, how am I really to truly be empathetic toward someone else? And then same with compassion. If I can’t move towards action on behalf of me, it’s not really true compassion on behalf of someone else. And when I do receive those things, when I do reclaim and recognize my own belovedness, then again you’re saying you see it, you can’t not see it in other people and you can’t not see the injustices that are happening to other people or on behalf of other people or because of other people. And then going back to that sense of agency thing, if and when I’m able to reclaim my sense of agency and to speak up on my own behalf, then it empowers me to speak up on someone else’s behalf and to say, hold on, that’s not right. You can’t do that. That’s wrong. But it makes sense again, why we see what we see and why we don’t do what we don’t do and it’s not enough. So how do we move towards our belovedness? How do we snap that cycle of shame that we keep spiraling through to own what we can not as shameful horrible parts. They’ve been trying to help us all along and they’ve been yelling for our attention, but how do we learn to pay attention to those things, give them a name so we can navigate our way through it in a different way than our habitual patterns. And to break out of it like you’re saying, to find that true story of you are beloved and God has so much more for than just you in our individualized culture to say it’s about all of us.

Rachael: It’s good to talk with you.

Brian: I’ve loved this, Rachael. Thank you.

Rachael: Well, if you are feeling really drawn to this conversation and as you should be, Brian, tell us a little bit more about some of the work of Broken to Beloved and ways people can connect.

Brian: Sure. I am on Instagram at Broken to Beloved, but I’m on a social media break for the summer. So if you show up before September, you’re probably not going to see much. I’ll be back in September. I don’t know how often, but it’s been a fun experiment. You can absolutely find us at our website BrokentoBeloved.org You’ll find all of our programs. The cohort that I talked about is on a wait list right now. We usually open twice a year in October and February. We have our upcoming gathering, which Rachael will be at very excited in October, so you can sign up to get tickets for that. We’ve got a book club community that meets online. We get to speak to Adam Young next week about his book and reading a book every two months is a lot of fun. We’ve got all kinds of things and you can find them all at that website. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter to keep up what’s going on. And if you feel so led, we are always looking for supporters and donations. So if you want to head to just the website, you can take care of it there and we would be so appreciative.

Rachael: Well, thank you. I’m just really grateful for you. Grateful for the work of Broken to Beloved and look forward to getting to partner with you in the season ahead.

Brian: Same. Thanks so much, Rachael.