Ann Maree:
Hello, and welcome to the Safe to Hope podcast. Safe to Hope: Hope Renewed in Light of Eternity exists to offer women space to tell their stories of suffering and loss with care, dignity, and honesty. Though all suffering is loss, we ground that belief in a God who cares and remains present. This is our hope.

My name is Ann Maree, and I am the executive director of HelpHer and the host of this week’s podcast. Today, I’ll be joined in the studio with our resident expert and board member, Julia Fillnow.

This podcast is made possible by donors who believe faithfulness means protecting the dignity of women’s stories and creating a space for truth-telling without pressure or performance. Together, we listen for God’s redemptive thread and look for ways to join Him in His transforming work.

Before we begin, we want to take a moment and care for our listeners. The Safe to Hope podcast typically includes discussions of abuse, and this season will as well. In particular, we’ll be talking about spiritual abuse. However, our conversations may include other abuses. Please listen at your own pace and take breaks as needed. If at any point you need to pause or step away, that’s okay. Your well-being matters.

We are super excited today to have with us as our expert contributor, Rachel Clinton Chen. Rachel, an MDiv, is a trauma care practitioner, a speaker, and a pastoral leader. She serves as lead instructor for the Allender Center at the Seattle School and is co-host of the Allender Center Podcast with Dr. Dan Allender. She also leads the Story Workshop for Spiritual Abuse and Healing.

Rachel holds a Master of Divinity from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and is devoted to addressing the harm of abuse, especially spiritual abuse, at the intersection of trauma, healing, embodiment, and spiritual formation.

Rachel, it is wonderful to have you with us. If you would, if you want to share any more of your story or how you came to this work, that would be really helpful, I think, for us to hear.

Rachel:
Yeah. So I grew up in Oklahoma in the Southern Baptist tradition, and again, so much good. My love of Scripture. I encountered Jesus very early, around four. Loved church, loved being a part of church, had genuine encounters, had actually, I would say in my formative years, very good spiritual formation.

One of the stories I always tell is, you know, in vacation Bible school, I’m probably five or six, and I’m just wrestling with, like, “I don’t think it worked,” like Jesus coming into my heart, because I’m still sinning. I’m still human. And I go to my teacher like, “I don’t think it worked. It didn’t work. I’m still mad at my brother. I’m still getting in trouble.”

And she just said, “I don’t think it’s as much about Jesus or God fitting into your heart as much as it is, like, you get to be a part of God’s heart.”

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And, you know, I think I was very fortunate to be in a context that there was just some really good spiritual formation. For me, it wasn’t until my more adolescent years where we moved into a Southern Baptist church that was very fundamentalist in its practices and in its policies and in its theologies.

And part of that four-year period for me was being set up in a dating relationship with one of my youth leaders as a young teenager. A lot of spiritual abuse around gender roles and gender norms and what women could and couldn’t do. You know, it’s like, I don’t know, taking those spiritual gift assessments, and it would always be like, “Oh, no, that’s not your gift. Your gift is this,” or, “If your gift is that, you can only do it here.”

And again, all those things were internalized for me. I would have argued with you until my 20s a lot about what women can and cannot do or should and should not do in the church. Like, I very much wanted to belong, and I very much wanted to be married, and I wanted to be desirable.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And I had already taken in a lot of messages, especially I got called to ministry at 12 at Falls Creek Baptist Camp, youth camp in Oklahoma, and it was very real wrestling around calling for me. It was a very clear, like, I’m giving up plans I have to surrender to these plans. But being met with disappointment in a man’s face when I ran down with my, like, “I’m called to ministry,” and then being told, “Well, here’s where you can do it and here’s where you can’t,” and feeling deflated and kind of set up by God.

But always being met with grace, like at every turn from the Spirit, which is why I feel like I have an embarrassment of riches that I want to be faithful to give away, because that’s not everybody’s story.

So I went to Oklahoma Baptist University, eventually got out of that dating relationship, switched from nursing to biblical studies, started to ask, you know, be given tools of critical thinking, and started to get to ask good questions, was affirmed by professors in my giftings, even as I was resistant to their affirmations. Like, “Don’t say that to me. That’s dangerous. I don’t want to be an abomination,” as they’re like, “You need to go to seminary. Don’t go to these seminaries as a woman. Here’s some ones that will, you’ll get an education and you’ll be valued in your calling.”

And so it was a long journey for me. And ending up at the Seattle School was kind of like, I’d had all this healing around theology and sociology, and the world was opening up. But in the Southern Baptist context at that time, psychology was definitely a no. That’s for crazy people or unfaithful people.

And I just decided at the end of college, when I had a complete nervous breakdown, well, I think I am both crazy and clearly unfaithful because I can’t, like, there’s no spiritual practice I can do to find peace in my body to get to a place of healing.

So going to Seattle, going to the Seattle School, was a huge journey of healing for me, to get that access to psychology and understanding trauma and having to start looking at my story. I mean, I was your typical, like, “I’m going on to grad school to help the people, to get more tools to help the people,” and I thank God I landed at a divinity program that was couched in a counseling program because it was like, “You are going to help people, but you need a lot of help.”

All of my theology research, all the work I was doing in my MDiv, it all kept coming back to this question of how does our experiences of harm and abuse collide with our theological and spiritual imagination? And what happens when that spiritual imagination or theological imagination is actually sustaining and perpetuating the abuse because it’s kind of abusive or maybe toxic or restrictive or dehumanizing in its existence?

But at the time, I would have never said to you I am passionate about spiritual abuse, or I have a story of spiritual abuse. I would have said, finally, by 27, I am a pastor in how I move and breathe and live. Like, I’m a shepherd. That’s just true of me.

I almost switched to counseling 1,000 times, but I was paying attention. Like, I’m in hermeneutics, and I am just on fire. Like, I was paying attention to where, like, I don’t know if that’s everyone’s experience. I love preaching. Like, there were these things that started to get affirmed.

So I could have said, “And I am working with the Allender Center. I love working with people who have been harmed in their faith, have spiritual wounds, have experienced bad shepherds, have been cut off from God. I love working with people and helping them regain access to God.” I could have said, “I have some clergy abuse.” I could have said, “Yeah, I have experience with fundamentalism.”

And it wasn’t until 2018 doing a podcast with Dan where he was like, “You want to talk with me about spiritual abuse?” And I was like, “That’s such a weird phrase. I’m kind of reading about it. I’m understanding it, but sure.” It felt very esoteric. You know, like, what is that? It felt like water coming through a colander. Like, I can kind of grasp it.

But it was in that conversation where it was like that lightning strike from the Spirit of, oh my gosh, I don’t just care about helping people connect to God because that’s just like this gift I have. It’s like I’m a survivor of spiritual abuse. No wonder I’m so passionate about this. No wonder this is a core part of my calling.

And so it’s really been in the past eight to 10 years that I would say that language started to become even in my imagination, and it is something I’m really passionate about, and it’s something I’m still learning about, and as I said, something I’m still in many ways being transformed out of in reparative ways that I’ve perpetuated some spiritual abuse as well.

Ann Maree:
I love even the ideas you’re putting language to around the awakening process being sometimes gradual and sometimes fierce and sometimes apparent. It comes through other people speaking truths into our lives. It comes through different experiences. It comes through moves across the country and different contexts.

A lot of people who are maybe struggling in their environment do feel this sense of guilt and shame, especially maybe if they’re looking back saying, “Why didn’t I see it earlier?”

Rachel:
Oh, yeah.

Ann Maree:
Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I feel it? But it is such a process. It does take a long, long time.

Rachel:
Yeah, absolutely, especially because it’s such a communal thing. And, you know, when you’re talking with people in a family system, it’s the same thing, right?

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
If it’s your normal, then it’s hard to know maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. And by the grace of God, we’re wired for survival. So we’re wired to be really resilient when there are failures of love or failures of care or failures of trust and dignity, you know, whatever you want to put there.

We’re wired to find a way to survive that from our earliest moments with primary care providers, so why would it be any different in communities that also mirror that canopy of care, so to speak? You know, that mirror that sense of here’s your belonging and your identity and have a lot of power to name us, but also where we often develop a lot of rich relationships and a sense of purpose.

So it’s very hard to want to see or have capacity or the luxury to see what’s happening when the cost of seeing is so high. Or if what’s happening is severe enough that the cost of seeing is so terrifying. And that closeness to powerlessness would feel almost debilitating.

And I think it can kind of run on that spectrum, so there just has to be so much compassion, like so much self-compassion and curiosity that we get to bring with us towards those places where we do feel a lot of shame and contempt that maybe we stayed or that we believed certain things that, like, maybe now we go, “How did I ever believe that?” You know, “How did I ever champion that?”

And just having a lot of mercy and also just understanding development. Like, that’s just part of our childhood development. My four-year-old right now needs very black-and-white, rigid thinking because she’s trying to make sense of the world, so everything kind of has to be in contrast to each other.

And as she grows in wisdom and in love and hopefully in secure-enough attachment, those beliefs and understandings of the world will get more complex and hold more contradictions and hold more capacity for both/ands instead of either/ors. Hopefully, if we can do a good job of tending to our own lives where that still feels really frightening. So, yeah.

Julia:
Well, and as you’re talking too, it’s reminding me to have patience for the people that don’t see it yet, that are still in the systems, that are still perpetuating the harms that I, even myself, was complicit in.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Julia:
And believing the theology that I wouldn’t anymore.

Rachel:
Yes.

Julia:
All of the things, you know, I just have to keep being reminded that it’s God that removes the blinders and having compassion on others.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Julia:
To a degree. I know that there’s also the evil that we don’t nod yes to or give a bye for.

Rachel:
Right. But there’s also, like, yeah, when we’re talking about, let’s say, maybe more vulnerable people in those systems, there’s a misuse and abuse of power that’s coming against them, right?

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And it’s often familiar enough that in our nervous systems, it’s going to feel deeper than just that experience, right? It’s going to feel more normal, more familiar. And so you’re right. I, too, am having to grow my compassion.

And I think there’s an appropriate place for fury at those who have a lot of power and lack humility or lack character or utilize their power more towards fear, like exploiting fear, control, coercion, dehumanization.

I take this very seriously because as someone who has opportunities to have places of power to speak, to have access to people’s stories, like, when Jesus talks to the religious leaders of His day who have tremendous power, even in a system where they don’t have power, He is very clear. I mean, it’s some of the harshest words you ever hear Jesus say are reserved for those in religious authority and power when they weaponize that or they use it carelessly.

You know, to have language like it’s better for a millstone to be wrapped around your neck and thrown into a lake than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble or to exploit these vulnerable ones. I don’t know. I hear that and I go, “All right. This is serious stuff to have any kind of religious, spiritual authority and power.”

And so I think there’s also an appropriate anger and righteous anger at those who, whether they are doing it wittingly or unwittingly, you know, you can be more angry at the system or you can be angry at a lot of these kind of systems that are in the water for us that shape that misuse and abuse of power. So yeah.

Ann Maree:
Yeah. And Rachel, in your work you get to interface with a lot of experts. You’ve formulated so much teaching content that I’ve personally benefited from. You also come into contact with so many different stories, and there’s a lot of different ways that you can describe or define spiritual abuse. Is there one that you’ve sort of settled into that feels like it fits best?

Rachel:
Yeah, I have a couple because it exists on a spectrum, right? So that’s why it’s not as easy to just be like, “This is what spiritual abuse is,” right?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Tabitha Westbrook.

Ann Maree:
Oh, yes. I’m familiar.

Rachel:
Yeah. Okay, so Tabitha Westbrook, therapist, educator, speaker, she kind of shared her very simple but I think profound definition of spiritual abuse with us. She had me on her podcast. She said, “Abuse is taking good and right devotion to God and using it as a weapon against them.”

And there’s something about that that I do think encapsulates. Another definition I’ve used before is coming out of the Reclamation Collective and Religious Trauma Institute because they talk about spiritual abuse as the conscious or unconscious use of power to direct, control, or manipulate another person’s body, thoughts, emotions, actions, or capacity for choice, freedom, or autonomy of self within a spiritual or religious context.

Julia:
Mm.

Rachel:
What gets tricky is that that spiritual or religious context, for many people, they go, “Well, it might happen more in a family. Like the spiritual authority was my father, was the patriarch,” if you’re coming out of, let’s say, the Quiverfull movement. Or, I always block his name, I think it’s like a trauma response, Shiny Happy People.

Julia:
Gothard.

Rachel:
Yes. Bill Gothard. Yeah. If you’re coming out of that very patriarchal and I would say white supremacist context, that’s often playing out more in a family system than it might even be playing out in a church. Although I would say no one in my Southern Baptist fundamentalist context was ever saying Bill Gothard’s name.

And so I think it’s important for people to hear this is happening, again, in any context where trust that’s coming from spiritual authority is being exploited. So it could be in a relationship with a mentor at school. It could be in an education system where there’s a faith structure. It could be in a nonprofit or parachurch ministry. Obviously, in our current day, it could be in a political system that’s weaponizing theology or biblical imagination to do tremendous harm. That’s definitely falling in that control, coercion, and dehumanization category.

And then one other, a couple things I would say is, like, it functions like an umbrella, and that’s what can also be tricky, is most people who have experienced spiritual abuse have also experienced other forms of abuse. It’s almost like domestic violence, right? Where you could have experienced economic abuse, where you have to ask someone how to use your money. You could have experienced emotional abuse or physical abuse or sexual abuse, but it’s happening under this umbrella.

Misogyny playing out in a church context is its own thing, but again, when it’s being authorized because it’s biblical, which I do think any time the word biblical is thrown around, it’s such a red flag for me. How is power being tied to theology in a way that it’s being more weaponized than it is being utilized for flourishing unto life and helping us grow in love?

Because ultimately, if you want to use a biblical foundation for something, the whole point of it, as we know, when Jesus says the whole point of the law and the prophets is that you love God and you love your neighbor as yourself. So ultimately, if it’s not leading towards that, it’s being weaponized.

And so I think that can be tricky for people because so many people would be able to say, “This leader in my church, they did this,” and I could say that was harmful, but they may not be able to see how that’s, again, being covered and sustained and lifted up by some of these spiritually abusive realities.

But Dr. Alison Cook, she also says, like, all trauma causes you to question your worth, but spiritual trauma adds that terrorizing layer that God might question your worth, too.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
So ultimately, when we’re looking at spiritual abuse, we’re looking at where someone is doing something in a way that’s tying our relationship to God, the love of God, our security with God, to these behaviors.

When you look at purity culture, one of the most damaging things of how purity culture impacted many of us is that it tied our sexuality to our salvation and belonging with God, which again, is not actually biblical. Like, that’s not the story of God.

And so when we’re in that place, that spiritual attachment, that attachment to God, that for many of us, even if we grew up in really traumatic environments or abusive environments, something of that relationship with God could be a secure place of resourcing. And so I do think spiritual abuse is also a pretty core attachment wound, right? Because it so deeply disrupts our sense of trust, both of ourselves, other people, and certainly, can we trust God?

Because the God we’re being given often is kind of a god I think we need, probably do need to say, “I’m not messing with you.” You know, like, if this is actually who you are, if your love is this fragile, I don’t know if I want you. I think I might, it might be better to go it alone. I might have more resourcing outside of your umbrella. This is a really weak canopy of care.

So that’s a lot of words to put toward how I define or think about spiritual abuse. But I do think it’s really helpful, and we could talk more about, like, I think some of the core tools, if that feels like it would be helpful. But I’ll defer to you guys.

Ann Maree:
I would love to hear about some of those tools, but before we go there, just to kind of reiterate that there’s this use of trust or misuse of trust, misuse of power and authority. There’s using and misusing somebody’s gifts and their own image of God against them or in a controlling manner. And I think that fits across any kind of theological context that we’re taught.

Rachel:
Absolutely.

Ann Maree:
It’s not just conservative or hyper-conservative.

Rachel:
That is right.

Ann Maree:
Because sometimes people do think about fundamentalism as that way, or cultish behavior as a particular kind of cult that is more on the extreme end, rather than, like you were saying, it is all on a spectrum and spiritual abuse can fall anywhere up and down that spectrum.

Rachel:
Yeah, because the tools are really important for that, right? Because what happens to a lot of people is maybe they are coming out of a more conservative environment, and you see actually this both ways, right?

Ann Maree:
Oh, yes.

Rachel:
And then they swing to another pole, but there’s the same kind of fundamentalism around who’s in and who’s out, what’s right and what’s wrong, the weaponizing.

Again, I think a core tool is both the exploitation and weaponizing of fear and shame. If the ways that you’re being motivated and formed are primarily coming out of both these are all the things you should be afraid of and I’m the person you can trust to lead you in the right direction, or shame, right? Scapegoating is such a tool of spiritual abuse because it’s very effective.

I don’t want to be canceled or exiled or maligned or treated like that person who questioned or stepped outside the lines or said, “Hey, I think maybe we need to move toward a little more complexity here, a little more openness with this.”

And so this arousal of fear and hatred to create common scapegoats, reinforcing compliance, demanding loyalty under threat of punishment, you know, exile, humiliation, or a withholding of care. You know? Well, you can stay, but all the good things that were keeping you here, those are no longer available to you because you’re bad.

But to me, the two that precede that are grooming, which is kind of what is a part of any abusive context where, yeah, there’s that power of attunement, you know, to gain trust, but in an exploitative way where there’s an ulterior motive, whether it’s we need more people in the seats or we need busy bee worker bees, and so we’ll dangle some things in front of you because we need you. Or I want to abuse you, and so I want access to you, so I’m going to offer you really good care so that I can dismantle those walls and take something from you.

But then gaslighting too, right? And gaslighting is such a common experience in spiritual abuse, any form of abuse, but certainly spiritual abuse. Because let’s be honest, spiritual abuse, at least in our context in the United States, is so deeply tied to narcissistic abuse. I mean, it’s, you know.

And gaslighting is just that feeling of where we are manipulated into questioning our own sense of reality, whether it’s through spiritual bypassing. If you aren’t happy with this, you’re prideful. Or you just need to forgive. Or any way that your behavior that might actually be good and honoring is being twisted as something bad, and you’re actually trying to put words to harm, but you walk away feeling like, “Oh, I’m the harmful one.”

You know, again, where something is being done to protect the power as opposed to protect and kind of lift up the vulnerable.

Julia:
Yeah. I’m always looking for gaslighting. And just when you feel crazy.

Rachel:
Mm-hmm.

Julia:
When you feel crazy and it feels like everything’s turning back towards you, no matter what you bring, it’s coming back to you in a way that feels like you’re bad or you’re the dangerous one or you’re the harmful one.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Julia:
Rachel, I love your definition of grooming, and I’ve heard you talk about it before just how you said it. It’s attunement without honor.

Rachel:
Mm-hmm.

Julia:
Help our listeners understand maybe a little bit more what you mean by attunement for those who may not be familiar.

Rachel:
Yeah. I get teary-eyed because so much of my work with people, the work of grooming is the stickiest and trickiest, right? Because it’s where we come to hate ourselves the most or feel the most shame or feel so foolish. Or to hate our vulnerability that likely we didn’t ask for, wasn’t formed in a vacuum.

But, you know, attunement is attachment language. And when I think about attunement, I think about that capacity to attune to another human being’s needs, to anticipate their needs, to meet those needs, to bring delight. You know? To that sense of, I think about with my daughter, like when she comes home from school or when I’m picking her up, and I want her to see my face light up with like, your presence impacts me in a way that leads to life, right?

And I think both those things are true. And so when we’re talking about intentional abusers, which I do think happens in spiritual abuse, because an abuser is going to be able to read where there are vulnerabilities. It’s why it’s so textbook, and this is not me saying if you are a survivor of this you’re just textbook and you should’ve known better. It’s just when a vulnerable woman in a faith context is entangled in an abusive, sexually abusive relationship with a man in leadership, somewhere he’s read, this is a vulnerable woman.

You often hear women coming out of divorce, women who have a lot of trauma. Why is a man reading you might be vulnerable to his good care that he can hide behind because he’s a pastor, and there is an immediate sense of trust, right? If someone’s in spiritual authority, surely they have the character to be there. They have done the work to be honoring. We have this perception of some closeness to God that they would never harm me in this way.

And grooming always intensifies, right? There’s always a gaining your trust, but then bringing violation that starts small, that somewhere in your body you go, “This feels off,” but that care I’m receiving is so good, and now I’m complicit because I didn’t stop this thing.

And so that intensifies where there’s such a, because there’s no honor, there’s no containment, there’s no dignity, there’s no, “This is actually for your good,” and there’s certainly no repair. There’s never going to be an ownership of, like, “You’re right, I did wrong, and I need to make this right.” It’s going to be the gaslighting of, like, “No, this isn’t wrong. It’s good. It’s okay.”

I mean, we’re seeing this so rampantly play out in our world where it’s not always men, sometimes it can be women. But where people in spiritual leadership have this wake of abuse that they have exploited people’s genuine good needs for care.

And so what ends up happening in the wake of grooming, once we do get out of something, we’re so confused because a part of us feels tremendous grief and loss of that really good care. Even if we can logically know it was tied to a lot of harm that didn’t feel good, that might have been the most care and the most being seen by someone in our particularity that we’ve ever experienced.

So not only are we left with a kind of confusion around our grief and a contempt and shame toward our grief, but we’re feeling like, “Something’s wrong with me,” or, “I am a fool. I should have seen this. Why didn’t I see this?” And it’s like, well, the nature of grooming is that you don’t see it. That’s the whole point of it. You’re being groomed to let your guard down. You’re being groomed to trust, and you’re being violated as that’s happening.

So as the ante gets up, it’s harder to walk away because you feel so complicit in the harm, especially if this is happening when you’re an adult, which we see a lot in spiritual abusive dynamics. A lot of people say, “Well, but I was an adult, so I had more agency than a kid.”

And I think this research, my friend TJ just shared it with me, is coming out of Baylor. One of the professors there does a lot of research on clergy abuse, and in their research, they’ve actually found that it’s kind of impossible to consent when you’re in such an intense power dynamic, even if you are an adult.

It doesn’t mean you don’t have agency. It just means that how can you consent to something that, to say no would be a tremendous loss, and you’re already being kind of exploited and distorted into something?

So I think that’s helpful because a lot of people can have compassion if they were children or teenagers but can almost feel like, “I should’ve known better. I should have seen this. Something’s wrong with me. I was bad.” Especially if things just get named as an affair, right?

Ann Maree:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think we’re going to have to have you back for our next season when we do consent.

Rachel:
Ugh. Ugh. It’s like, ugh.

Ann Maree:
Prepare now.

Rachel:
Yeah. Yes.

Ann Maree:
I think that’s so meaningful for people to understand, that there is a vulnerability that is not your responsibility because people can walk out of these feeling so much self-hatred and self-blame. But especially so if the foundation has already been laid for them.

You talked a little bit earlier about childhood development and developmental trauma or complex PTSD from childhood. If that’s already built into their system to doubt themselves or to question, not trust their intuition or their gut responses, that can get reactivated in these kinds of instances.

Rachel:
Absolutely, and it can feel like this has to be me because this is so familiar, and is this all I’ll ever know? And what’s wrong with me? Why do I attract, like, why am I choosing these abusive contexts?

And it’s part of the heartbreak for me, and why a lot of the people I work with want to talk about the spiritual abuse that’s happened maybe in their current life, but it’s like, we’re not touching this stuff. But they have to kind of begin to do some of that work to get connections to why overriding their gut, that was familiar. That’s what they knew.

So they were going to have a hard time seeing the red flags because they’ve had to eat the red flags their whole life.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And that was so much a part of my story. Maybe more in being one of those kids that was fiercely committed to caring for my care providers, and so really pushing my needs far away. And when my gut would say, you know, so in this clergy relationship, after the infatuation wore off, nothing in me wanted to be a part of it, but it was being framed as a courtship. It was being framed as what God wanted.

And I was groomed, as a woman with tremendous gifts toward preaching and speaking and leadership and shepherding, to know deep in my bones the only way I could even let any of these things come out is if I was with, if I had a hovering in a partner who had more gifts than me, which again is going to set me up in that system for narcissism because it’s a narcissistic system, you know?

So of course I’m drawn to the youth leader who, if I’m partnered with him, this must be God’s way of saying, “You get to bring your gifts in fullness because he’s bigger than you, older than you, smarter than you, more gifted than you, has more power than you. So therefore it’s a bigger umbrella for you to get to be a little bit bigger.”

So that’s a grooming that I’ve just started naming, and a part of that’s also playing out because of my family of origin. Like, what would feel familiar to me. I mean, that would not be the last narcissistic church leader that I would be entangled with.

You know, I would go through a big healing season and then go work in a summer camp with a male camp director 10 years older than me. Love-bombed me. I didn’t know what that was, you know? It felt amazing. I felt chosen. I felt like all this heartache, and then maybe I can bring my gifts to the parachurch because it seems like they’re more okay with women in leadership, as long as they’re partnered.

You know, so it’s like I was still trying to. I didn’t know it at the time, because again, I would’ve fought you that women shouldn’t be in leadership. You know, it was very confusing, but I was still groomed to be looking for someone big because I wanted my gifts to be okay, and I wanted to be loved in bringing them and not an abomination and not disgusting and not disobedient or all these things.

And so that grooming piece, it is so much a part of my story that not seeing what’s happening in the moment and not trusting my good body when it is screaming, “This is bad. Something’s off. I don’t want this,” and to the point that I’m having massive panic attacks and they’re being named as demonic. Evil just wants to ruin this relationship. You know, perfect love casts out fear.

The distortion around what love was was so, like, the mind control around that. Like, I remember going to the head pastor and saying, “I don’t want to be in this relationship. Something’s wrong with me,” and him drawing all these charts about, like, changing your mind will change your behavior.

And I mean, if you knew how hard I worked, how hard I worked to be faithful, and not one person in that context being like, “First of all, this is wrong. This whole, this is a huge power differential.”

He didn’t like, the youth minister did not like anything about my personhood. You know, like, as anything that actually was me came out, it was stamped out. Again, I was 16. I didn’t have understanding or language for what was happening.

And the later relationship, I would not wish it on anyone because the humiliation that came with the public love bombing and then the public discarding, I mean, I’ve never wanted to crawl in a hole and die more. I’ve never felt so foolish in all of my life.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And what’s true is I had been writing in my journal, “I want to be known for my heart, my big, beautiful heart.”

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And in my head, when he ran down the hill after me, “Hey, I just want to get to know you,” I said, “Why?” He was like, “Because your heart is just so big and so beautiful.” I’m like, “It must be God.”

Now, 21-year-old Rachel didn’t understand that it would’ve been very easy for someone to know she has a big heart when she’s the one taking all the sick campers to the nurse’s station, when she’s really good at loving and offering care. I didn’t have an imagination that someone might be able to see that without me having to write it in a journal or pray it to God, and that they might prey on that or be drawn to that or want to destroy that because of their own pain and their own trauma.

And so that confusion in the body, that developmental trauma that sets us up for harm, it’s both in our family of origin, but it can even be in our faith formation, right? Because I can look back now and say that was misogynistic grooming around my full personhood as a child of God who, at least in my reading of Scripture, is called to the table and experiences the same Spirit that any other human has access to.

And so I don’t think that means everyone has to come to that conclusion, or if you stay in contexts that don’t believe that theologically, but if that theological belief is trickling down toward dehumanization, that’s where it doesn’t matter if it’s the correct theological belief. How is it playing out in practice?

Because if it has implications of harm, then again, it’s being weaponized in a way that I don’t think God ever intends. And that’s a story we see in Scripture again and again and again and again. The people of God really missing the plotline, but holding on to certain laws that justify the plotline they’re in, and prophets having to come and be like, “Hello?” You know, like, you’re missing the plotline, and it’s going to have huge implications, and it already does have huge implications for harming vulnerable people.

So I’m rambling. You can stop me. You can ask a question.

Ann Maree:
You can ramble. Well, we will have to cut this off at some point. Go ahead.

Julia:
Well, I was just going to say that, you know, we’re Western, we’re white, we are Protestant, and I think the sense of disembodiment, of disconnection from our body has been built into us for such a long time.

Rachel:
Absolutely.

Julia:
I think even the nature and the heart of abuse as a means of control, it does want to disconnect you from body, from your physical body, from your physical responses. And as we heard in this particular storyteller’s journey, but also other storytellers and our own, we didn’t come to a place of a choice point until all of a sudden our bodies were screaming at us.

And it felt like we were in disunity from the confusion that was going on in our mind, but then what our muscles, what our nervous systems, what our joints were experiencing.

And I think we do such a disservice to one another in faith formation, in shepherding, when we perpetuate that disconnection from the body. And so a lot of my clients that I see, like, talking about breathing, we’re talking about muscle relaxation, we’re talking about feeling, and they almost have to have permission to do that.

And it feels so uncomfortable because they’ve never had permission to sit in their body. They’ve thought that they’re just a brain walking on a set.

Rachel:
That’s right.

Julia:
Right? And that’s where their value is, and if they just know more and do better and think smarter and speak smarter, then that’s where their value lies.

So that’s just a broad comment about how particular to our faith context we are so disconnected from our body.

Rachel:
Yeah.

Julia:
And that just perpetuates abuse.

Rachel:
Yeah. Well, if you’re being told your body is not trustworthy, it’s not a trustworthy source of wisdom. If you’re being told, and if your trauma, like, your just, you know, I think about my very honoring, understandable experience of pretty chronic anxiety that I think is both genetic and also was just my body telling the truth about a lot of terror I was in the midst of, that was only being engaged as a failure, like a sin failure, right?

Like, you know, what’s the number one phrase used in the text? Do not fear. This is just, you can’t trust your brain and your body. This anxiety is a liar. It’s not the truth, and you just need to bypass it with your mind.

Again, I ended up going on medicine because I’m a huge believer in medical support for biochemical dysregulation that’s been chronic. And a lot of that I had to do by basically rejecting God, the God I was being given, by rejecting, kind of being like, again, I’m going to take my chances out here with scapegoats because I genuinely think I’ll have a better quality of life.

And I don’t often know where that sense of agency came from in me. I’m seeing it a little bit more in my daughter because she’s very determined and very strong-willed. And I’m like, I think I was probably like that too, but it just got kind of beaten out of me or complied out of me or theologized out of me because I so badly wanted to be good.

And so it did feel like for so long my body is a betrayer. And we did hear that in the story, that the body often tells the truth in a way that we can’t ignore, and the more we ignore, the louder it gets. The more we try to control or conquer, override.

The body is a good truth teller. Does it mean it’s the only truth teller? No, because we’re a whole person. We have a spirit. We have a mind. We have relationships and community. But you’re absolutely right. We have been formed in a spiritual imagination that says the body is just a vessel.

Which again is a bad reading of theology because the way I read it, we’re going to have a new heaven and a new Earth where we dwell with God in our bodies. And I think Jesus still has a body somewhere in some dimension. I like to think about quantum mechanics and quantum physics.

So our bodies are really important, and our bodies are how we experience faith, hope, and love.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And our brain is a part of our body, which, you know, we don’t often think about. And it is a very Western, patriarchal, you know, I think therefore I am. It doesn’t mean that’s inherently evil, it just means when that’s the only truth and it’s not held in connection to other truths.

Think about “I am because we are,” which I think is an African proverb, for sure. And so yeah, our bodies are very central, and spiritual abuse is a trauma wound, make no mistake about it.

And that’s one of the things I was thinking about for the storyteller. What she experienced was traumatic. It wasn’t just emotionally painful or confusing. It was traumatic because to be scapegoated, which is really what’s happening in the story, and to be scapegoated where there’s an arousal of contempt.

When you have people responding to a cultural moment, which again, we’ve seen on both ends of the spectrum, but I would say in the ’90s, the Southern Baptists really took a hard right turn on gender and sexuality in response to what was happening in the culture. So what’s that impulse to want to control what’s perceived as the more vulnerable people in the community in response to uncertainty, in response to an invitation to grow in love and complexity and welcome and radical hospitality?

I’m looking at that going, so in the wake of COVID and all that the summer of 2020 held with George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, you know, in response to this upheaval, there’s an arousal of contempt towards the faithful, diligent women in the community who are bringing their good gifts.

That’s not happening in a vacuum, and that’s not just, oh, we’re trying to come to the right theological, again, the biblical conclusion. That’s an arousal of contempt to control and feel more stable in power.

So there’s something playing out that’s in the water that actually is very violent, even if it’s normative in our faith communities to want to come to a right understanding. But the way the storyteller so poignantly and heartbreakingly and beautifully named her experience of dehumanization, when you are being dehumanized, you are in the realm where someone is actually being aroused by their power over you. There’s an arousal there.

And that’s where I go, even if you’re not experiencing it as explicit spiritual abuse, 100% it is spiritually abusive because they’re using their spiritual authority, the power that they have because of biblical authority as men in leadership, to dehumanize their sisters.

And we heard a lot of that dehumanizing behavior. It was very explicit, very clear, and I think that’s where I felt the most ferocity. Yes, it’s subtle in the fact, it’s subtle when we’re trying to make sense of abuse. It is not subtle when we’re talking about spiritual abuse because there is very clear behavior that is both a little sadistic.

Again, even if the people in the room aren’t necessarily sadists, there’s something about the group energy that is delighting in these women coming to the table and not having a seat and not having a piece of paper and not having a voice and getting to make these, and just being able to take power.

And all the energy that went into these meetings, the fear they’re feeling, the vulnerability they’re feeling, probably some of the indictment they’re feeling about how they have been wielding or using power or not, that rage, that energy, that contempt is being directed at people perceived as more vulnerable in their midst.

Ann Maree:
Wow. I mean, all I’ve said recently is, if I ever hear of a pastor, quote-unquote shepherd, leader, caregiver yelling in the face of another woman, I mean, there’s just nothing else I need to hear. But you just put a whole bunch of more intelligent words to that and what it does to the human being. Oh, my gosh. Wow.

But I do need to ask the final question that we usually ask, which is, what aren’t we asking? What should we be asking that we haven’t?

Rachel:
I think there’s something about the violence in the midst of people in power feeling vulnerability that we get to be more curious about.

Julia:
Mm.

Rachel:
Why is the trauma, like, in some ways, not like, “Oh, let’s understand why they’re doing it,” but let’s name more clearly what’s happening. Just because it’s a familiar kind of pattern of behavior, let’s get really honest about what’s happening in this.

And then I think, in some ways, the storyteller brought the really good question of, and I think you guys are asking it, and I think we’re asking it, but what does repair and, in some ways reconciliation, what can it look like and how do we know when it’s not possible?

Julia:
Mm.

Rachel:
And I thought that was a really beautiful part of the story, just that I have this rubric of discernment that I try to give people when they’re trying to discern, because no community’s going to be safe in the sense of the way we want it to be safe because it’s made up of humans. But how is power being shared? How are policies and systems changing? What kind of transparency is there? And how are people taking accountability to try to change behavior, to rebuild trust?

And so I just think we have to keep doing that work to give people imagination for what belonging, like the reclaiming of belonging, the reclaiming of personhood and belonging and spiritual imagination can look like. Because it’s that hard work of, like, we have to get into the dirt of what is it we’re dealing with so we even know what it is that needs healing and tending.

But I know so many of us are then left with, where do I go from here?

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
And what do I do with kind of these fragmented parts? Like these spiritual practices that used to fill from, I love the storyteller naming silence and solitude and body, like walks and rocking, and things got to be a way of being with God and making space for God.

Because we just still carry that, like, “I have to be doing these certain things or I’m not going to have access to God or I’m not doing it right or something’s wrong with me.”

So I think we have a lot of work to do on continuing to imagine together what does healing from spiritual abuse entail? And not that there’s one we all know. We wish there was a three-step process and it was really linear and it could happen in one year, but it’s such a deeper, non-linear, ongoing process.

But are there specific ways we get to heal from spiritual abuse as we begin to understand more deeply what it is and its impact, and what are we learning? And that’s where I find myself just when I have these opportunities to be with people, and if we had more time, I would probably turn into the interviewer and be like, “What are you learning in your work with people? What’s helpful? What’s giving them imagination? What’s helping them reclaim personhood and find voice and heal their bodies, and have imagination that this connection to God is a part of their birthright?”

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
It gets to be theirs, and they get to fight for it, even if part of fighting for it is taking space from familiar things that still feel really harmful or scary or painful.

So those are my questions that I’m still asking. Like, we need more resources. We need more imagination.

Julia:
One of my favorite hymns, it was actually my grandmother’s favorite hymn. She was a gardener, and she would just tend to her garden every day, walk in the soil, feet in the grass, and at her funeral we played her favorite hymn, “This Is My Father’s World.”

Rachel:
Yeah.

Julia:
And it’s so tangible. I mean, it includes all of the senses. It includes listening to the birds. It includes seeing what’s around you. It includes experiencing God walking in the grass with you. And for me, that’s been really grounding, just playing that, meditating on it, doing those things, getting outside, putting my feet in the grass.

And just as our storyteller was saying, she found solitude with God so healing. So I guess my question for you, Rachel, is there anything that was helpful as a spiritual practice? Not as something that you held onto to make sure that your faith was certain, but like a new way that you experienced God that you hadn’t before?

Rachel:
Yeah. Well, I was really fortunate to be in Seattle, which if you’ve ever been to Seattle, it’s just very fertile and beautiful and brooding and big. You know, you can be outside and you just feel like, wow, there’s mountains and huge evergreens and lots of texture and gray waters and clouds and rain.

And I think for me, sitting outside even in the rain and just staring at the water and the mountains and the majesty and the beauty and the kind of moodiness too, right? Like, it’s a great place to grieve because something feels, there’s a deep calling out to deep just in this landscape and geography.

So I spent a lot of time sitting by the water in quiet, I would say. I say quiet. There was probably a lot of rumination happening because that was part of the healing, is just letting the loops loop, you know, without this demand that I have to silence them because I’m trying to attune or be with someone else. I could just let my body find a kind of calm.

I do think plants and gardening, I never would have seen myself as a plant person, but in a very significant season of physical healing, which was really interesting. I had a tiny little broken bone that I had to heal over many months. And it was really irritating. Like, how is this tiny?

Julia:
Yes, I broke my sesamoid bone on my foot.

Rachel:
Yeah. And it was like an 11-month journey. Involved surgery, a knee scooter, physical therapy, picking up marbles.

Julia:
Yep.

Rachel:
Well, I was not a good patient, and I went to Scotland and walked around without my medical boot because I was like, “I’m not going to wear the medical boot.”

Julia:
I didn’t go to Europe, but I took the boot off, and that was the—

Rachel:
I did. Choices were made, right?

Julia:
Choices were made.

Rachel:
But what was interesting is my healing process had always been so militant, I think. Even in story work, in therapy, like, how can I get to the thing? And we’ll do it. And there was something about the foot surgery that it was just like, all right, I have to have a different, like, I’ve got to embrace the slower, tedious.

And so I started tending to plants.

Julia:
Mm.

Rachel:
And, you know, learning they had different soil, and maybe I have different needs that are more nuanced. Turned out I really like them, so then I went from three plants to, like, 40. You know, it was like you walked into my apartment. And I lived in a garden-level apartment, so my whole dining room table was, like, in the sunlit area, was just covered with plants. People would be like, “Do you use that?” I’m like, “No, I don’t use that.”

And if you have that with your grandmother, it’s just so beautiful.

And then the third thing I would say is walking. Like, slow, that bilateral stimulation of the meandering walk. Because again, I was like, I can’t run because of my foot, so I’m going to get out there and speed walk, and I’m going to try to make three phone calls and knock things out.

But when I started just, like, I’m going to walk around the block, notice what’s around me, try to breathe, let the thoughts ruminate. So I think those three practices really saved my life in a season where, yeah, there was a lot going on. There was a lot of healing going on.

And as we know, healing processes, they feel both relieving and also more heartbreaking and more sad and more scary at the same time, more disorienting, more disruptive. And so yeah, that’s what I would say.

I wish I, now that I am a stepmom and a mom to a toddler, stepmom to teenagers and a mom to a toddler, I do think my plants are struggling a little bit because there’s a lot of other things that need attunement. I’m like, “I’m sorry, plant babies.”

Julia:
Plant babies. Oh, gosh. Yeah. You guys have a lot in common.

Ann Maree:
Yes. Well, and just in everything you’ve said today too, I’m thinking in themes, and the theme that I’m feeling just the sense of right now is just the heaviness and the gravity of what spiritual abuse does.

And I’ve been speaking on this, and I’m sure you have, too, and I think we all have the same ideas about when we talk about spiritual abuse. It is the most devastating abuse, and that’s, again, I’ve said this before, but not to diminish sexual abuse, domestic abuse, any of the abuses. But this one underlies all of them.

Rachel:
Yes.

Ann Maree:
And it has God at the center of it.

Rachel:
That’s right.

Ann Maree:
And when that is threatened, when that relationship, which was why we were created, to have relationship with Him, when that relationship is bumped, if you will, with spiritual abuse, it’s seismic.

Rachel:
It is seismic.

Ann Maree:
And that’s the feeling I’m hearing when I hear you tell us all these wonderful, well, wonderful in the sense that it’s helpful, attributes and characteristics and even the healing process.

And I hope our audience hears that and doesn’t, like, you and I, I know, well, I don’t know if Julia would do it, but I’m ready to be done within minutes of harm, of any kind of harm. I hope our audience is recognizing just the gravity of the healing and what it’s going to take. And what it’s going to take to unravel all of the things that were so bound up in that abuse, in the spiritual abuse that they’ve experienced.

So, well, thank you.

Rachel:
Yeah, and I think I would just say, like, I know we’re coming to a close, so you can take this out, but my friend Jill Dyer and colleague, she always says, “When we enter these healing waters, it’s so important for us to hold onto divine love.”

Julia:
Mm.

Rachel:
Like that tether and anchor. Even if we can’t say God for a season because maybe that’s been so weaponized, but maybe we can, right? Like, we can say, “I know something of the God of love. There’s a thread here. There’s a tether.”

That it’s just so deeply important for us to get to hold onto that. Because I do believe in the depth of my being that the God of love, who has overcome death, but is well acquainted with death, is capable and with us, and will continue to give every good gift we need to heal and to mend, and to be, in some ways, as much as it’s risky to play with this metaphor, to be born again.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Rachel:
To be nourished, to have our nervous system rewired back to a place of grounding and safety and a reprogramming of our minds to know what trust is and to be able to discern with wisdom and to see truthfully.

And so I wouldn’t be here talking to you, there’s no way in heck I would be stepping into this work if I didn’t believe that was true. Because you’re right, it’s a profound, profound, holistic wound.

Julia:
Mm-hmm.

Ann Maree:
Yeah. Rachel, you do have a big, beautiful heart.

Julia:
Yes.

Rachel:
Thank you. Thank you.

Ann Maree:
And thanks so much for taking time out to be with us, to entertain all the questions we thought we were going to ask, just to give us insight into that great mind that you have. Not just a big heart, you also have a great mind.

Rachel:
Thank you.

Ann Maree:
Anyway, thanks for being here.

Rachel:
Yeah, it’s good to be with you.

Ann Maree:
Safe to Hope is made possible by donors who believe faithfulness means protecting survivors and honoring the dignity of their stories. Their support allows us to remain independent, trauma-specialized, and committed to truth-telling without pressure or performance. We are deeply grateful to our donors for their partnership.

If this conversation stirred something for you, please know you do not have to carry it alone. Support resources are listed in the show notes, and you’re welcome to reach out in the ways that feel safest for you.

Safe to Hope is a production of HelpHer. Our executive producer is Ann Maree Goudzwaard.