Spiritual Gaslighting and the Wounded Body of Christ
Reflecting on my early work in understanding Religious Trauma
As I was beginning to understand the impact of Religious Trauma, I wrote several blogs which are still applicable. I am going to update the blogs and include them here as resources. This blog originally posted on July 9, 2019.
I watched as comments flooded my Facebook page after I posted a blog about the need for compassion in ministry settings. The responses were equally distributed between two of my denominational friend groups. With all the lines we draw between us, the common experience of pain within the church appears to cross those lines. Many of us really are the wounded body of Christ. Sadly, inflicted pain is often from those who proclaim “we are family” one year and then leave us abandoned on the church steps the next.
Tragic but true.
The posts and messages sent to me by my friends told the stories of their wounding experiences in church and church-related ministries. I wanted to clear the temple just as Jesus did when he saw the harm being done to his people. The responses to my post told me I was not alone in my painful ministry experiences.
The silence about the pain we have experienced is ever present, but as comments were left, I began to feel the wall cracking. I thought about how being silenced in the church was a form of spiritual silencing that disguised itself as virtuous spirituality. This is how it worked in my life—maybe yours also:
Someone hurts me.
I cry out in pain.
The person who hurt me says, “You need to trust God.”
I know I do trust God, but the pain is real and I cry out again.
The person who hurt me now implies in looks, comments, and sometimes outright attacks that I have an attitude that clearly indicates a spiritual problem.
You see what happened there? The abuser became the righteous and the victim became the one with the spiritual problem. The victim is now labeled as having spiritual lessness.
There is a psychological concept called gaslighting. It occurs when someone manipulates another—by psychological means—into questioning their own sanity (illustrated in the 1944 film Gaslight). In the church, the process described above is a form of spiritual gaslighting in which we, the victims, begin to doubt our spirituality. (I was not the first to make this connection.)
The silencing comes by way of feeling the lessness of our spiritual condition. If we happen to have abuse in our past, as I did, then it is pretty easy to believe our spiritual lessness is the problem.
I wrote a book twenty years ago in which I mistakenly said that. I believed my inner turmoil was my own fault because I didn’t read my Bible and pray enough. The cause of the depression and anxiety was trauma, but I thought I was responsible. Every victim feels at least partially responsible for his or her abuse. Those with abuse in their past are prime candidates for spiritual gaslighting.
The only way to break this incorrect perception of spiritual lessness is to speak—to tell our stories, and realize we are not alone. It is difficult to speak up when we are silenced by spiritual leaders who teach that expressing our pain and talking about the hurtful actions of others is a sign of a spiritual problem.
How is it that telling the truth about the pain inflicted on us makes us less spiritual than those who inflicted the pain? Making the victim responsible is how those who have power silence the powerless. Where accountability is avoided by the silencing and spiritual gaslighting of the wounded, truth must speak so the wounded do not have to feel they are the only ones—or less spiritual.
Let us speak out and place the blame where it belongs—on the oppressor or silencer, not the victim. Bitterness grows where pain has no expression. It is not less spiritual to tell the truth about pain. It is not acceptable to silence those who make leaders uncomfortable about their actions.
“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'.
There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” ― Arundhati Roy