What is Religious Trauma?

And what does it have to do with a river?

It will be February in a few months and that is always a month of milestones for me. As I experience more of them, they grow in their significance in my vocational history. This coming February, two main things are happening:

• One: I am officially stepping down from my work with an online vocational ministry school—a decision made from an alignment journey. And;

• Two: It marks the two-year anniversary of completing my doctorate on human dignity.

It was February 2021 when I started working in ministry schools in general. A few months prior, I received the invitation to apply, move to San Diego, and began to feel the excitement bubble up with all the projects I would get to work on. My time creating and educational model for future ministry leaders was short-lived due to changes in leadership and so we packed up and moved to Montana.

Montana has a way of drawing everything out of you. I warmly recall the experience of driving north and this feeling in my chest, almost as if my soul was expanding. I could feel it in my core; healing would happen here.

As I completed my doctoral coursework located in what I assume the arctic tundra is like, I began to consider and explore the depths of my own story. I began to wonder how I kept landing in organizations that were fueled by the need for control and practically weaponized religious texts to promote a shallow culture glued together by fear. The sobering reality hit me that I was now leading an organization, and is it possible to ensure this would be a generative, adaptive, and kind place to work and learn?

The goal here isn’t to name a singular organization, but looking at the swath of organizations I had either worked for or worked with—there was something in the DNA that made employees afraid to leave, and at the same time, we had a felt-yet-false sense of safety.

I began to look back at my job history and wonder why I held fear about transitioning out of organizations and then wonder even more why I was all but excommunicated from those organizations after I left. I was somehow disloyal to a system, and in moving on I was condemned as a traitor.

This fear even followed me as recently as two weeks ago, and yet the board of this organization was not like the leaders I had been with before. This trigger in me signaled something deeper.

In the research phase of my dissertation, I read about narcissistic leaders and structures and the language there helped give some insights about my experience, but it didn’t give me all the language I needed. There was something deeper, this sense that somehow my personal wellbeing was violated, and I was in trouble for it.

Thinking through these resume items, I tugged on common threads:

• moving targets for success,

• religious teachings used to promote specific values that separated me from myself; and

• the duplicitousness of leadership who literally sat me down in a now closed-down Panera telling me that there was a difference between “official polity in the bylaws” and how the organization will be run.

Moving to Montana was not just an escape hatch, it was and continues to become the venue for both my soul to breathe through exploration, gain more clarity around my experiences, and do my part in promoting human flourishing.

Here is the core of what I needed to heal. Throughout most of the organizations I was part of in the larger western evangelical churches in America (including a sprinkle of Pentecostalism if this were an ice cream), I and so many others experienced the same messaging through and through:

My humanity was corrupt, and I couldn’t be helped.

This did not sit well with me. It wasn’t the lessons my grandmother taught me about kindness and generosity toward self and others. It wasn’t the language of self-compassion and self-love that I had later come to discover. It was language of separation and desperation and was used in the context of control. Control the story, control the narrative, control the people.

This is the tension I named: the feeling in my body rejected the ideology I was being taught.

I focused my intentions here. The idea for my doctoral dissertation came through a coaching session with a professor I had at seminary. I am thankful for Terry. Together we began to distill my core values. Up and to that point, I had been an avid advocate for personal integrity. It was on Zoom that we posed the question, what is the opposite of or the dark side to integrity? What happens to other people and our-self when we violate our personal integrity? I call that space the violation of dignity. And so, these two values came together in a dance, dignity and integrity, violation and self-compassion. Healing and belonging.

When we think of integrity, we think of it as a noun and a verb - it is a thing and a posture. I committed to understanding dignity in the same way. What is it? How do we practice it? And how do we preserve it?

This research led me to into the deep dive of trauma research. There was a long, expensive book that kept showing up in my research titled The Trauma of Doctrine. This text, as well as my partner being a trauma therapist, made me wonder if I could write dissertation that looks at religious ideologies through the lens of trauma?

I began to write about the nervous system, our bodily response to threats, and how we can enter into stages of burnout and hypervigilance through repeated exposure to threats. And then it clicked.

The tradition I was raised in wouldn’t allow my nervous system to rest. And that is the root of religious trauma. 

The research on religious trauma is fairly new. Mostly because the research on trauma itself is new. For my work, here are the intersecting parts:

• religious trauma,

• spiritual abuse,

• the nervous system,

• and perhaps the most important question: How the hell do we heal from it?

The research here suggests that religious trauma and its cousin, spiritual abuse, are incredibly hard to name and are exceptionally pervasive. This is because they take on many forms. They are more nebulous than the overt physical and neglectful forms of trauma and abuse.

And here is the kick in the pants: our bodies can’t tell the difference. They can’t tell the differences between physical, psychological, spiritual, and emotional abuse. They all register in our fight-or-flight response the same way.

The experience of religious trauma is like the old Where’s Waldo books. It took us a while when we would first look through them, but eventually, we gained the muscle memory to know exactly where it was hiding. Once we know what we are looking for we can’t look away.

Theresa Pasquale writes, “Trauma is in the eye of the beholder.” Meaning that two people can experience the same event and for one it was just an ordinary event and, for the other, it was an acutely painful experience. And while this isn’t every church or every experience, I am willing to guess it is more than we would be comfortable admitting.

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Before I entered this season of my spirituality, I would have said that I don’t have many regrets. However, as I continue to participate in the research, evaluate my life, and consider the impact of my work on the lives of others, one of my top regrets is clear. I regret the way I contributed to the systems and perpetuated the teachings.

I am sorry.

What does this have to do with a river? Why the riverside? Why sit on the banks with me? One of the things I love about rivers is that there is both constant motion and constant barriers and redirections. The water is always moving; a person never touches the same water twice. And yet the large rocks, downed trees, and the shelves are always there. While they are barriers, they are also where the trout live.

I love the rivers and streams because they have capacity to hold us and our tears, our regrets, and support us in our journey of becoming. And over time we realize we are no different than the river. Slippery when wet, home to an ecosystem bigger than we can ever imagine, and the rough and rocky places eventually get smoothed over.

As if to flip the script for my contribution and participation in harmful religious structures, I want to make a shift in this community. I recognize this invitation may result in folks unsubscribing (or be unsubscribed if you are being a butt).

It is my intention to be part of the healing and meaning-making process. This Substack will focus on raising awareness and offering healing spaces that many of us spiritual seekers are looking for, without all the religious overtones.

The riverside is a place where all who wish to heal, be seen, and become nurtured are welcome.

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I invite you to share your reflections, pondering, and insights below.