What’s Hardest in the Healing?
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What is the leading cause of pain for those who have endured church hurt and spiritual abuse? In the long healing journey, what takes longest to heal?
Mary DeMuth recently asked this question on X/Twitter, and I was struck by the responses, which total around 280 (including quote tweets).
Although everyone had the freedom and ability to choose their own language, the responses share a lot of similarities with clear patterns. I thought it would be worthwhile tabulating the replies and categorizing them to show what matters most to people with these experiences.
What follows is a very rough, informal summary. I made the categories rather large, and many replies listed multiple rather than just one “hardest thing to get over.” I included every answer, so my totals won’t add up to the total responses.
My main takeaway from looking through these is a) how the sources of pain can be grouped according to relationships with God, self, and others (although I could be imposing that framework), and b) which relationships cause the greatest pain.
Category one: Interpersonal (109)
As a cursory read through of these shows, the majority of respondents said that loss of community was and is the greatest hurt to heal. By interpersonal I mean relationships with others at an individual or small group level. These are relationships with faces (as distinguished from the third category of corporate relationship, relationship with the church/group/system as a whole). I counted 109 such responses. As this was the highest number, I’m sharing more examples to show how people described this pain (much of which I’m paraphrasing):
Betrayal, interpersonal rupture, shunning, abandonment, no advocacy, blamed, not believed, loss of community, friends turning on us, slander, DARVO, othering, being avoided, isolation, labels like heretic and bitter, difficulty finding belonging in new church, whiplash after quickly changing from insider to outsider, callous lack of empathy, realizing one was seen/treated as an objectified commodity, disposable, pawns in their kingdom building, pastor isolating by telling people don’t contact them, learning to trust others again (especially pastors), harm done to one’s children.
Category two: Intrapersonal (84)
These responses, of which there were about 84, focused on wrestling with pain at the individual level: questions and doubts about self, God, beliefs, and addressing trauma. I will also list examples, but I want to highlight what seemed to be the most frequent answer in this category: the ability to trust oneself. I didn’t go back through and count the number, but I was surprised by how many people chose this specific “hardest thing”—wrestling with their sense of intuition, discernment, ability to both identify harmful people/beliefs as well as avoid perpetrating that harm themselves.
Here are just a few examples from the intrapersonal theme:
Making sense of what happened, difficulty trusting self/intuition/discernment, wrestling with difficult questions about God, church, self, personal complicity vs innocence, fearful of telling one’s story, boundaries, PTSD, lost agency, lost time, forgiveness.
Category three: Corporate (33)
I counted 33 responses that expressed some form of ongoing hurt from lack of accountability and justice. This stems from a survivor’s relationship with the corporate community as community, something which Judith Herman has powerfully addressed in her book Truth and Repair: How Survivors Envision Justice. That this source of pain was not the number one response might surprise some. Churches and leaders who respond to allegations of abuse often characterize their victims as vindictive, vengeful, bitter, etc. But based on this sample, that simply is not the case. It is certainly a common issue, and a justified one. Just because a survivor didn’t mention lack of justice as foremost doesn’t mean that pain isn’t there, and it is also connected to pain from interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.1 Examples in this theme include:
Zero accountability, no justice, prioritizing those in power, pretending it didn’t happen, gaslighting, cowards looking away and moving on, lack of protection and safety, hypocrisy.
Categories overlap
As mentioned above, these are permeable, overlapping categories. For example, @librarianAbi posted this response:
Realizing it’s a repeating pattern that still hasn’t seen ‘justice’ [corporate] and that I was complicit in staying when others were hurting and leaving by not questioning it until it happened to us [intrapersonal]. The loss of those who clearly meant more to us than we did to them [interpersonal].
Prioritizing the abuser disconnects a survivor from the community as a whole, ruptures interpersonal friendships, and causes intrapersonal doubts of self and God that can echo for years like a painful tinnitus that strikes when and where comforting is needed most: church sanctuary and altar, Bible, prayer, small group meetings, one-on-one conversations with a pastor or elder. The causal arrows can go in the reverse direction as well, and can be mutually reinforcing. The pain is multidimensional. And healing must be, too.
Quote from Judith Herman
“Justice, from the perspective of my informants, was not centered on questions of the offender’s fate; it was first and foremost about their own recovery. In their view, the primary obligation of the moral community was to help repair the harm that had been done to them and only then to figure out what to do about the offenders…When the community embraces the survivor, justice is served.”2
Recommended Resource
Mary DeMuth recently created a Church Hurt Checklist that helps give language to experience that is often hard to describe. This can be helpful both for those with such experiences as well as friends and caregivers.
Question
What has been hardest for you in your healing journey from church hurt and spiritual abuse? How do you resonate with categorizing harm along the lines of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and corporate?
1 See Truth and Repair, esp. pp 77-91.
2 Truth and Repair, 131.