What It's About

TRIBEWORK is about consuming the process of life, the journey, together.

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The necessity of sanctuary in recovering from spiritual abuse


When you’re in the midst of being spiritually abused, your faith takes such a hiding that you wonder if you’ll ever recover.  Indeed, recovery is tantamount to impossibility when faced with the kind of environment that breeds the spiritual abuse in the first place.  Whilst there, not only can you not see the wood for the trees, but there is no hope for recovery when you’re senses, emotions and mind are continually punch drunk, when your entire being is hypervigilant to the maximum, when your body wears the visceral scars of existential trauma in the living shades of what feels like a spiritual death.

The solitary hope in recovering from spiritual abuse is getting out of the environment and getting into a safe and healing one.

Only once a person is free from the bonds of the abuse can a person reconcile just how deeply entrenched they were.  It can take months and even years in many cases to see with the full vision of insight, the fuller magnitude of the deceptions wrought, and the damage done.  Only once a person is safely removed, or they safely remove themselves, from such a toxic environment can a person begin a journey of seeing the actual travesties with ever increasing wisdom of hindsight.

Truth is more resplendent the further the disaster zone is viewed from.

Spiritual abuse is not just using Bible verses out of context, weaponising the Word of God.

It does not just comprise gaslighting.

It isn’t just someone saying, “God is on my side, and not on yours; I’m right and you’re wrong, and this (and that) is what God is saying.”

It isn’t just dominating a person with spiritual concepts.  

And it isn’t even just lording doctrine over a person or people. 

Spiritual abuse is all this and more.

Even if it is these things and so many more, there is something deeply cutting in psychological abuse that cuts to the heart of the spirit in an individual, rendering mortal wounds to the soul.  Indeed, perhaps it would be fair to say that any psychological abuse that impacts on our spirit is a form of spiritual abuse.  Whenever a person bosses another person persistently, they do damage to the other person’s spirit, trauma does result, and the body and being of the person who is abused is impacted existentially.  There is no doubt about it!

Sanctuary is only found well away from an environment that was so toxic.  It is hard to comprehend just how damaging it was — especially so while you’re in it — not simply because you’re not allowed to think that way, but also because cognitive processes are thwarted.  Only upon arrival in a safe environment can one truly look back.  People can only see the truth from such a protected, unhindered vantage point, where there is freedom to ponder and where there is spiritual freedom for God to reveal what only God can reveal.

But it often doesn’t get better straight away; it usually gets worse for a time.

This is because, as we begin to see the truth unfold there is an inordinate anger, which is indignation — it’s both appropriate and necessary, but it often doesn’t feel helpful.  Given that people are in a full-blown grief process by this stage, there are dark and depressive days, just as there is bargaining with God about the redemption of faith.  People usually seriously doubt faith that seems completely lost is even recoverable.  Of course, the effect of the gaslighting causes us to deny many realities along the way.

All this is required, this grieving of the loss that was the abuse that was done, before a resounding and steady truth can finally be accepted across the board all the time.  The work can often be incredibly slow and painstaking.

The solitary hope in recovering from spiritual abuse is first getting to a safe place.  From there the process begins, and it is aided all the more through a gentle and continuous process of therapy and safe pastoring.  Indeed, as we talk ‘environments’, the care we receive is an inherent part of it; that, and the abuse desisting.



Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.