Holy/Hurt: Exploring spiritual trauma and healing
From a podcast by
Holy/Hurt Podcast
Dr Hilary McBride, a clinical psychologist in Canada, has started a podcast series exploring what spiritual trauma is, how it impacts someone and paths toward healing. The series is meant to be an informed and gentle invitation toward learning and healing, designed for those who have experience with various kinds of spiritual trauma and also those who simply want to learn more about spiritual trauma. It is hoped it will help leaders consider how you can help build healthier communities and love those around you with more compassion and wisdom.
Here is an extract from Episode 1:
In her 2015 book,
'Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma', Teresa Pasquale defines spiritual or religious trauma as a
“painful experience perpetrated by family, friends, community members inside of religion.”
Marlene Winell, author of
'Leaving the Fold', developed the term Religious Trauma Syndrome in 2011. She suggests that religious trauma is the physical, spiritual, psychological, and emotional damage that comes from being indoctrinated into an authoritarian religious community, and then leaving it. And while there is a significant and specific kind of trauma for those who leave their faith community, especially after indoctrination, and the definition is useful for that particular experience, people can experience religious trauma who stay within their religions—or it can occur at the hands of a spiritual authority in a community that does not identify as religious.
Although there isn’t the word trauma in the title, another definition for a spiritually traumatic event is an
Adverse Religious Experience (ARE). These experiences are overwhelming, disruptive, and include any religious belief, practice, or symptom that undermines a person’s sense of safety, autonomy, or agency, and negatively impacts their physical, social, emotional, relational, or psychological wellbeing. These experiences include abuse or neglect at the individual level and the practices that happen in communities.
What you might notice in the definition of the AREs is that it feels much closer to the definitions of trauma above, highlighting the many ways a wound can happen and can show itself in different facets of our lives. Although some of these adverse experiences happen in isolation (a singular incident with a leader, a painful experience when visiting a neighbouring community), but - like the cases of other forms of complex trauma - because our religion often keeps us connected to systems, communities, and relationships as a primary value, but also at times a mechanism of control, it is more common these adverse religious experiences happen repeatedly, at multiple levels, and in a variety of ways.
I have found that the categories defined by
Michelle Panchuk to also be clear and specific, as she describes it in the following way:
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The trauma is caused by something that the person closely associates with religion or spirituality, is inflicted by someone who is thought to be a stand-in for the Divine, is said to be justified by the spiritual practice or religious belief, or occurs because of religious or spiritual practice. For example, a pastor who uses scripture to justify a public humiliation, a rabbi who is sexually abusive, a venerated leader in a yoga community who touches students inappropriately under the guise of education, or a parent who physically abuses a child and says they are disciplining in a biblical way.
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The survivor believes that spirituality or religion was somehow the cause for what happened.
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The post-traumatic psycho-biological responses are connected to God, religion, or spirituality in some way.
Here’s what I like about this definition. As she describes it, the trauma can be a wound of many kinds; there is no specifier about severity, and it allows for there to be traumas of omission and commission. The person doesn’t necessarily have to articulate it was a trauma, they don’t have to be leaving their religion or spiritual practices for it to be valid, and the responses can be expressed in any domain of the human experience. But here’s the problem with any of these definitions: whenever we try to define something, we have to exclude other things.
Trauma, especially of the spiritual kind, is complex, at times nebulous, and while there are obvious things at the centre of it that we can draw a circle around and point to, there are things that sit on the edge of that circle and defy our ability to create neat and tidy categories for our pain in the way that many of our religious systems taught us to. And, based on what I described above, I don’t think there is a trauma of any kind that doesn’t also impact our spirituality.
Trauma, by its definition, changes our spirituality, shattering our assumptive worldview we had before we were hurt, or seemingly reinforcing the experience of unsafety, fear, or mistrust that characterizes being profoundly overwhelmed and existentially wounded. Simply put, if I walk through life believing each chair I sit on will hold me up securely, then I sit on a chair and it crumbles under me, my assumption about chairs will change in the future. I’ll likely take a look around, inspect it, and be reluctant to let the full weight of my body rest on the chair. In this situation, the chair is like our spiritual worldview. We don’t think about how much of it exists and holds us up until it doesn’t anymore.
Regardless of the kind of trauma, it seems that a feature of trauma is the loss of meaning and trust, undermining the sense of self-worth, value, and humanity, while increasing the presence of guilt, shame, fear, and the numbing and defensive strategies to mask it all.
In his article
“Bearing Witness as a Social Action,” author Darryl Stephens highlights how trauma experts from a wide variety of disciplines and levels of training have identified the spiritual damage of trauma. Dr. Van der Kolk describes it as
“a hole in the soul” that stems from overwhelming experiences that create alienation from self and others. Resmaa Menakem describes intergenerational trauma as a soul wound. And Dr. Judith Herman identifies that the foundation of faith is basic trust, which is first learned in primary relationships, and that trauma fractures this sense of trust. Darryl Stephens says,
“fundamental self-worth, human connection, and basic trust are deeply spiritual issues.”
In a paper titled
“I will never know the person who I could have become,” research by Easton and colleagues published in 2016 showed that survivors of clergy sexual abuse found the negative impact touched every aspect of their lives: the psychological self, the relational self, the gendered self, the self they hoped to be, and the spiritual self.
Why not explore the podcast series to investigate spiritual trauma and healing some more.
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From a podcast by Holy/Hurt Podcast, 12/12/2023