Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

Holy Hurt

Holy

Hurt

Understanding Spiritual Trauma

and the Process of Healing

Hillary L. McBride, PhD

S

© 2025 by Hillary L. McBride

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

BrazosPress.com

Ebook edition created 2025

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 9781587436598 (paperback) | ISBN 9781587436604 (casebound) | ISBN 9781493449583 (ebook)

Collage and cover design by Courtney Search

Some names or details of the people and situations described in this book have been changed or presented in composite form in order to ensure the privacy of those with whom the author has worked.

The author is represented by the Christopher Ferebee Agency, www.christopherferebee.com.

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and postconsumer waste whenever possible.

To all our younger selves,

who needed to know then but can finally learn now:

you can listen to your body,

you can trust yourself,

and you are good at your core.

Contents

Introduction    1

1. The House Is Haunted    7

Mihee Kim-Kort and K.J. Ramsey on Defining Spiritual Trauma    33

2. Shards of Glass    39

J.S. Park on Fear-Based Spiritual Trauma    64

3. Pulling Back the Curtain    67

Preston Hill on the Systems and Process of Spiritual Trauma    87

4. All in the Family    91

Alison Cook and William Matthews on Learning to See Patterns That Perpetuate Spiritual Abuse    114

5. How We Feel    121

Laura Anderson on Power, Control, and the Savior Complex    145

6. Seeing and Believing    149

Alison Cook and J.S. Park on Healing    178

7. Mending and Meaning    183

Roberto Che Espinoza on Communal Healing and Belonging    216

8. Unsettling Ourselves    219

Mark Charles on the Legacy and Healing of Spiritual Trauma    235

Conclusion: Grief Is a Form of Hope247

Acknowledgments    253

Introduction

A few years ago, I found myself walking through a hardware store looking for a gardening tool. I had snaked my way through at least forty-two aisles, dragging my fingers along the metal baskets protruding on both sides of me just to hear the musical tones this created. It was taking forever. But that was the point. I was on an escape mission—otherwise known as an extended break—from writing the script for the Holy/Hurt podcast, which was seven months overdue.

On this Friday morning, I had set aside time to finally dig into the project in a way I hadn’t yet been able to commit myself to. But instead, I found myself magically transported to the hardware store looking for a very specific kind of spade. I wasn’t avoiding only the writing. I was avoiding the email from my producer that had been sitting in my inbox for weeks, politely checking in to see how the project was going. I was avoiding talking about any of this with my therapist. This was my way of putting off remembering the stories connected to my own spiritual injuries, and the questions those memories brought to the surface.

There I was in aisle forty-two when Undone (The Sweater Song), the punk rock anthem by Weezer, came on. All I could do was throw my head back and laugh. If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away . . . I’ve come undone.¹

Tears rolled out of my eyes into my ears as I sang along, far louder than was normal in a public place. I couldn’t escape the irony; unraveling was exactly what was happening inside me. These were my words, or the words I had been avoiding saying until that moment. A man walked into the aisle and turned on his heel as soon as he saw me. I’m sure I looked slightly unhinged.

I was there searching for a garden tool because I was afraid to pull on anything connected to my own experiences of spiritual trauma. I knew I couldn’t write about spiritual trauma in any depth—couldn’t read the research, tell the stories, or talk about the healing—without touching the places inside me connected to it all. I was afraid to pull the thread because what if, at the end of it, there was nothing left? What would it cost me? What would I lose of what had been familiar, of what had kept me safe?

I laugh-cried all the way home. I had processed various other traumas before, but this one had always been easier to talk about at a distance, when it was an idea, another person’s story, a patient’s healing journey that I could witness from the other side of the couch. But this seemed to strike deeper at my core, almost as if pulling on the thread of the memories would unravel my essence. I had no idea how much avoidance there was inside me related to these wounds, how much dissociation was masking my fear, until I saw month after month flipping by on the calendar and the project I had originally been excited to work on seemed uncharacteristically impossible to begin.

I asked my therapist during our session that week if we could go somewhere new, somewhere I was so reluctant to go that I’d convinced myself I didn’t need to go there at all. That was also the week I could finally sit down at the computer and begin to write. When my avoidance began to thaw, underneath it I found painfulness. Getting close to tender places allowed me to get close to my heart, and what I found was not only pain but also courage and creativity. Numbing one meant numbing both.

•••

In working on this project, first in the form of collecting ideas for the Holy/Hurt podcast and then in writing this book, I found more threads to pull than I knew were there. I have lost count of how many times I felt the squeeze in my chest while I was working, or the bottom of my stomach seemingly drop out of my body. How many times I felt the urge to set the entire project aside, and with it all the painful places it connected me to inside of myself. But being connected to myself, pain and all, was the only way I wanted to write this, knowing that this material might cause similar discomfort for you too, knowing that you might also be picking this up because you found yourself in some metaphorical hardware store doing anything you could not to pull on those threads. As I confronted my self-protective measures—all my avoidance and dissociation around these pockets of pain—I understood again how the strength of our defenses against discomfort is equal in measure to the intensity of the discomfort we are defending against.

The more I came to understand how painful spiritual trauma is, the more I wanted you, reader, to feel accompanied in exploring it. I wanted you to know that the places you are about to go I have been willing to go as well. I hope that in the moments when reading this book feels challenging you can imagine me there with you, walking this path alongside you, and that this helps to dispel the feelings of aloneness that rise up for you. Whether through writing, reading, or speaking to these injuries living inside us, to turn toward them at all is to see a glimmer of the courageous self who lives inside, who knows there is more for us on the other side of looking at what was previously unbearable to acknowledge.

To give you a better sense of what is coming, I want you to know a few things before we go any further. First, this book was created for those with lived experience of spiritual trauma. What has been used to hurt you in the past can come with significant and sometimes surprising physiological reactions when you encounter the same words, behaviors, or processes in the present. With this in mind, I made the decision not to use prayer, references to Scripture, or explicitly Christian language. I don’t know what specifically was used to harm you or how the legacy of that harm still lives in you, so I cannot guarantee that reading this will feel easy. But I do want you to know that there will not be any altar calls or surprising prayers and that I trust you to know when you have had enough or need to take a break. If you are not sure about that, your body will tell you. If the only thing you take away from reading this book is that you got to do so in a way that allowed you to trust yourself more, I will be so grateful.

Second, if you are actively part of a faith community or find yourself within the Christian tradition and are reading this to better understand what spiritual trauma is and how it impacts those around you, I am so glad you are here. You might notice that although this book is about spiritual trauma, spiritual practices and theological or religious ways of making sense of pain and trauma are decidedly absent. I hope based on the previous comment that this makes sense. Although some of the material may be uncomfortable or new to you, I invite you to stay through the discomfort, take breaks as you need, and hold a posture of openness and curiosity. I believe that your ability to learn about spiritual trauma will help you create healthier communities and love your neighbor with more compassion and wisdom. It is so important you are here.

•••

This book emerged out of an audio project I did with Sanctuary Mental Health in late 2023. An important part of that project was the audio-recorded conversations I had with colleagues, experts, and friends about spiritual trauma, which were included in each episode. Through these conversations, which represent different experiences and perspectives, not only did my understanding about spiritual trauma become richer, but I found myself less alone. I imagine you might feel the same way, so I have included portions of these interviews at the end of each chapter. Because the text was taken from recorded audio conversations, minor changes have been made to the original interviews in the interest of readability. Each of these people has so much more to say than is captured here, so please seek out the other places where their voices can be heard.

1

Weezer, Undone (The Sweater Song), track 4 on The Kitchen Tape (1992 demo tape).

one

The House Is Haunted

Shortly after my parents were married, they moved to the West Coast. Both of them left behind big families who farmed in the prairies. When they started life over out West, they joined a warm church community off a central Vancouver thoroughfare. There were choirs with royal blue robes, youth groups, barbecues in parks, all-hands-on-deck musicals at Christmas, and a community that continued to grow as the families that belonged to it did too. A new building was built with the pulpit at the very center of the building, a signal of what mattered most to that church: the Word of God.

When I reflect back on my childhood years, this church is a central feature. I never knew a time without it. Because of the distance between my parents and their families in another province, this community was in a sense the most tangible expression of family we had. At birthdays and Christmas, their cards and gifts filled our home. Their poppyseed cake for dessert midweek anchored us in place until we saw each other again. I’d have one auntie’s hand smacking my hand away just as I found the stash of cookies in the church kitchen while another auntie was sneaking the very same cookies to me through her billowing skirt pockets when no one was looking. This was my family.

Then, half of them were gone. It seemed as though this happened overnight, but I can’t remember if that was the reality or just what it felt like. My confusion reflected the chaos around me, and I felt the loss of a rich relational world that seemingly collapsed overnight. I never saw some of those people again.

If you were watching a movie of my memories of that place and those people, this is where the film would take on a distinctly dull tone—as if everything was covered by a thin layer of dust—the laughter sparse and muffled, the voices garbled, and the whispering constant but indiscernible. Nearly half the people in our congregation left at once, and the cavernous sanctuary was left dotted with the fragments of community. Fabric samples were picked for the drapes that would cordon off the unused pews where our bustling church family once sat.

As an adult, I had conversations with my parents and learned just how much they protected me from at the time. I learned what had occurred when I was too young to know the details but old enough to feel the chaos in my body. The pastor had been grooming and sexually abusing women who went to him for pastoral counseling. When his actions were exposed, he admitted to other church leaders what had happened. Yet when it came time to tell the congregation why he was no longer the pastor, he changed his story and denied it all. For the women who survived the abuse and had to witness his reversal from private admission to public denial, it was undoubtedly horrific. The community began openly debating the truthfulness of the women’s claims. Those enraged by the accusations were unaware that the sister, mother, or daughter sitting beside them in the pew had survived the trauma. Many members were simply unwilling to accept the truth of what had happened.

The horrors of clergy sexual abuse are profoundly complex; the fallout can take years to navigate and leave multiple layers of wounding. This is always the case when abuse happens at the hands of the people we trust, who are supposed to protect us and who represent a God who is all present, all knowing, all powerful. As I made sense of this story, the layers of wounding were never in question for me. I see survivors of sexual abuse in my practice all the time, including sexual abuse that occurred within the church. It makes me think of these women, whose names are still unknown to me but who I grieve with and for all the same.

It took me years to understand that the rest of the community faced a trauma of their own. The congregation was left with two opposing stories: one from church leaders telling them that their pastor had been sexually abusing women, the other from the pastor, who claimed he was being wrongfully accused. No matter what they believed, they lost some part of their security and their identity. Someone they trusted to care for their community, someone they trusted to tell the truth, had lied.

The pastor left, as did half the congregation who believed him. This included family members of the women who had been abused. Not long after he left, the pastor died, and he took with him any opportunity to know more about what had happened. What did not die with him was the legacy he left behind: the loss of trust, the covering up of sexualized violence, the trauma caused within the communal body. All of us were hurt by the unwillingness to name what really happened out loud and to heal the systemic wounds.

This story is painfully unoriginal and just one example of the insidious forms of abuse that can happen in spiritual communities, some of which occur more commonly but that are harder to name and point out as wrong because there are no laws that defend us from them. But we are getting better at naming what was previously unnamable. There are more spaces, better language, enhanced research, and an increased willingness to talk about what spiritual abuse and trauma mean and to find ways to heal from wounds that occur in communities of faith.

Our wounds, whatever they are, are made more powerful by the silence around them. The naming of what has hurt us, how we have hurt others, and how those hurts still linger is the very undoing of the cloak that keeps the pain unseen and unaddressed. And this—the naming, the unveiling, the unsettling—as painful as it is, is central to how we heal.

What Our Bodies Have Always Known

When I started thinking about this project, I did a search for existing academic literature on religious abuse and trauma. I reviewed all the articles unearthed by our most powerful search engines—anything with the words spiritual trauma, spiritual abuse, religious abuse, religious trauma. I found just over a hundred academic articles, about sixty book chapters, fifty dissertations, and twenty-four books. The earliest piece of literature was published in 1991. Researchers were catching wind of the need to study, theorize about, and write about ritual abuse, cults, and trauma that comes from abusive spiritual communities. Not long after my initial search, the number of published pieces started to climb.

The 1990s were not that long ago, and the dramatic increase in academic and theoretical discourse suggests we are gaining better language to define what spiritual trauma is, how it occurs, and what to do about it. Research and science are at the forefront in many fields of academic inquiry. I know from colleagues doing stem cell research, cognitive neuroscience, and biomedical engineering that there are treatments the public is as of yet unaware of coming for myriad illnesses and diseases. But in the social sciences, and psychology in particular, it seems academia is often the last to know what the bodies of people everywhere have been telling us for millennia.

Spiritual trauma didn’t emerge in the 1990s, nor did it emerge when White evangelical Christians started talking about it. It has always been here. Spiritual trauma is the result of conversion therapy and what the queer community has faced in faith communities. Spiritual trauma was the outcome when parents of children with disabilities were told the disability existed because they sinned; when Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in church-run residential schools; when clergy sexually abused children and the people in power hid it; when Christians owned slaves and used biblical proof texts to justify their tyranny; and when White Europeans, bolstered by colonization and the Doctrine of Discovery, stripped untold numbers of communities of their ancestral knowledge and spiritual traditions in the name of evangelism. Spiritual trauma has been with us for as long as religion has existed. Spiritual trauma has been with us for as long as people have used power to dominate others in the name of God. Spiritual trauma has been with us for as long as anyone has been told they were broken from the start.

The academic and clinical communities are just now catching up. Awareness allows us to name things, to put language to what bodies have always known and felt. This is part of how we heal.

I started speaking about spiritual trauma publicly when I was halfway through my doctoral degree. As a therapist, I have specialized in trauma: understanding it both theoretically and academically as well as working with it in my practice. It was in my practice, while treating clients with trauma, that I first started to hear stories about how the lines began to blur between their trauma and their spirituality.

In some cases, people came in with clear-cut stories of hurt. Someone had abused them and had done so in the name of God. Now they couldn’t sleep at night, didn’t want anything to do with God, would rather die than step foot in a church, and felt dissociative and detached from their body except for when they were panicking and in a state of terror.

But more often than not, I encountered people who had symptoms in the present that they could not trace back to anything in particular. After all, how do you pinpoint something that was woven into the very fabric of your development? How can you talk about a thing that hurt you when you were told that doing so would be a sin and would cause eternal suffering? How can you name a wound when the source of the trauma cut you off from knowing you were wounded in the first place?

As stories of spiritual trauma were coming out in therapy sessions, I began to reflect more on times when I had incurred hurt and—even more challenging for me—times when I was a part of hurting others. I set out to learn more, heal more, and help others do the same. This is a collection of things I have learned, things I am still trying to understand, and an acknowledgment of the voices who have guided me along the way.

I know that some of you reading are part of a church community, walking alongside others who have spiritual trauma or trying to navigate your own. Some of you reading have found that the only way to retain a sense of spirituality and relationship with God is to leave the communities and buildings that remind you of how you got hurt. And for some of you, the thing that has saved your life is getting as far away as possible from anything carrying a whiff of the religious or spiritual. I had all of you in mind as I pulled together this collection of ideas and conversations where you could be understood, heard, considered, valued, and treasured, regardless of what you believe, what you have experienced, or how you identify yourself.

To trust me to do that, you might want to know how I understand myself. I am a White, cisgender woman, an uninvited guest who has settled with my husband and daughter on land first occupied by the Coast Salish peoples. I have disabilities, but not ones that are visible. I am highly educated, trained as a psychologist, and I am within the broader community of folks who want to keep learning from the person of Jesus and how he lived in the world. I find that the word Christian means very different things to different people, and I am increasingly aware that for some the word itself is connected to trauma, so I use it sparingly, wanting to privilege the reality of the people who have been harmed by a legacy of in-group bias or a sense of rightness. Those who identify as Christian have a great responsibility to own the harm done to others in the name of God and to devote themselves to learning from and treasuring the people who have been called other by those with the most wealth, power, and