Untangling the Truth from the Lies (Part 3)
Finding healing following religious trauma and spiritual abuse
As with any journey of healing from hurt and trauma, the process of finding hope and healing following different experiences of religious trauma is filled with twists and turns and a whole lot of emotion. The untangling and the process of fitting our story into God's much greater story comes with a whole lot of grief, anger and other emotions over the deep hurt of what we have experienced. In this final part of the series on Untangling the Truth from the Lies, I hope to explore what it means to grieve well over the loss we have experienced and to express constructive anger for the injustice of what happened.
Grief
Many of us think of grief in the context of loosing a loved one, a job, or other significant losses. However, there is a grief that we hold when it comes to what we never had, a deep sadness over the way that our needs of love, support, encouragement and validation were never met. It is a sorrow that has been tucked away into the deep dark corners of our souls. It has been pushed down each time we felt that we were being let down by our parents as they didn't support us with our big emotions; tucked away a little bit tighter as we were berated for our failures and swallowed down when we were bullied or told off for not keeping the unwritten rules of what it means to fit in to the community. It is a grief that has piled up over years of continued unmet needs as the people who are called to show God's love and care to us (parents, church community, spouse, church leaders) failed, leaving us with the deep shame of feeling unlovable no matter how hard we hustle to prove that we are worthy.
As we come to understand our grief and trauma more clearly, we start to experience this exquisite and complex emotion more and more. It is as if the process of untangling the truth and lies reaches into the places where we had tucked this pain away and gently nudges it into the light.
As we hold our grief and give it a voice for the first time, we continue to gain further insight and perspective over what it is that we have lost. We understand more deeply the way that our needs were unfulfilled and recognise the lack of safety and security that defined our life for such a long time. We understand more clearly the way that our abuse lead to a loss of personal agency and start to recognise how the high control environment we were raised in conditioned us to fit into a certain mould rather than grow into the person that God created us to be. As we untangle the truth from the lies we come face to face to the things that we never had, seeing more clearly how those who scripture commands to love, protect and nurture us failed, and how so much of what was normal for us should never happened.
Anger
Right alongside the grief over the things that we lost or never had, is the anger over the injustice of what we have experienced. What we know as our normal, the story of our lives, is far from normal and should never have been that way. When it is spiritual abuse, the extent of that injustice reaches ever further when we understand how those in control of shaping our story had access to God’s word telling them the truth of how things should be. That those who are commanded to love and protect us failed is wrong and that they became those we needed to be protected from is a deep injustice. That God has been grossly misrepresented to us through it all is a terrible offence not just toward us but also God.
It is likely that the narrative our abusers told around our trauma and abuse would have minimised and dismissed our pain and we would have internalised the ideals they promoted. The continued punishments for not fitting into the layers of coercion and control and the ongoing abuse as we struggled to meet a impossible and shifting standard all worked to build a belief that there is something deeply wrong with us. After being accused, manipulated and gaslit for a time, we begin to do the same things to ourselves, internalising a deep shame as we accuse ourselves for the abuse we are facing. The process of untangling what has happened and clearly seeing the truth of everything helps us to see that we are not worthless and deserving of the abuse we received but that the way that we were treated was so terribly wrong.
With clarity, comes anger. Anger says: my abuse was wrong. It turns to face what has happened and points at the different ways we were mistreated and responds to that. For some of us, that anger has been simmering for years as the pain and hurt we were subject to continued to pile up but we didn't have the voice to say how wrong it all was. For others of us, the narrative our abusers told means that we never allowed ourselves to even consider being angry.
As we continue to heal and process our trauma, it is a long journey of learning how to voice our anger while making sure that it doesn’t consume us or those we love. The process of giving our anger shape and voice can be incredibly overwhelming and intimidating. We want to be able to grow in expressing our anger in a way that is not destructive or punishing towards anyone around us, but in a way that it is constructive, directed at the sins and wrong that we have experienced and driven toward creating something good.
Voicing the emotions
Anger that is not felt or processed, quickly shifts and changes into something darker and corrosive that will eat away at our soul. It is important that our healing process allows for the space and opportunity to be present with the emotions that come and to give them voice and expression. You most probably haven't had a lot of space or opportunity to give the grief and anger much expression because of the way that the wrong you faced was presented as coming from or on behalf of God. As you learn the truth, I pray that you may be able to courageously give these emotions the voice they need.
As you turn to face the emotional turmoil inside and give voice to the emotions that have been silenced for so long, do so with a deep knowledge of who God is. There is so much pain attached to his good name, so much heartache and confusion because of the ways that he has been misrepresented to us and to safely and wisely give voice to all those emotions is best done when we truely know who our God is.
Psalms of Lament
One such way that we can give our emotions a voice in a way that is grounded in knowing who our God is, is through the form of lament. There are many great psalms of lament found in scripture where the psalmist shows us what it means to pour out our hearts to our God and to find refuge and security in him as we face troubles. They are all worded in such a way they do not contain many specifics and we can take our own experiences and read them into the words of scripture.
These psalms also offer a great format for us to be able to write our own lament. Expressing the truth in the form of a lament provides us to connect together the truth of what we have experienced, the truth of what we are feeling following those experiences and the truth about who our God is. It is at that intersection that we learn what it means for our God to bind up our wounds and heal our heartache (Isaiah 61:1-3).
Creative Expression
As we continue to lament for the things that we have lost, there are not always the words to express the extent of our pain and heartache; the depth and breadth of what we are feeling can be impossible to hold, let alone capture with mere words. Art, music and movement can become a powerful way for us to pour out our hearts without engaging the language centres of our brain. Creative practices and expression are a God-given gift for safely processing and feeling some of those incredibly heavy emotions.
As images bearers of the Creator, we all reflect that creativity in different ways and will find ourselves excited by or drawn to different forms of creative expression. A part of the healing journey and way that we find wholeness following trauma involves giving our emotions and experiences voice and expression.
Below is a collection of different ideas and activities for you to reflect on and find what resonates for you.
Visual Arts
Create an abstract painting using a range of colours and textures to reflect different emotions.
Draw or paint a symbolic image of something that reflects your experiences
Use old magazines, birthday cards and print outs to create a collage filled with texture and depth that reflects your emotions or the journey you are on.
Shape clay, paper mache or wire into forms and reflections that symbolise resilience or renewal.
Hands on creativity
Create a piece furniture or a household object out of wood as something to reflect where you are in your journey.
Plant something in your garden in memory of what you have lost.
Tend to different house plants as a reflective practice of nurturing growth.
Pull out the weeds in your garden reflecting on the way that it represents the removal of wrong beliefs and thought patterns.
Build something in your shed or back yard (a rock wall, restore a car, a veggie garden, build a circuit board or restore furniture) as a way to be busy with your whole body and let the emotions move through you.
Creative movement and embodied expression
Dance. Put some music on and move with the rhythm and tunes you hear, let the music guide the way that your body moves and use it as a way for your emotions to flow and be released.
Take a mindful walk in nature. Use this time to prayerfully reflect on your emotions and the beauty in the plants, flowers and views you see around you.
Use intentional breathing and connected meditations to reflect on who God is and what that means for you. If you are feeling brave connect this with intentional movement such as yoga or even weightlifting.
Music
Spend time playing an instrument. If you already play an instrument, spend time channeling your emotions into the music either by improvising melodies or playing a song that really resonates.
Write a song, use the melody and music to give shape to your emotions, if you are inspired add in the words that reflect what is going on for you.
Sing. Find songs that resonate or give expression to what you are feeling and sing them out loud. It is helpful to build out a playlist on Spotify or whatever your chosen music provider is.
Tactile and playful creativity
Use play dough to create shapes or symbols that reflect emotions or moments along your healing journey.
Make a model or something out of lego which can be something that visually represents your emotions or just something you enjoy where you are busy with your hands and mind.
Knitting/Weaving/Crocheting as a meditative practice that can represent your journey or be a project that keeps your hands busy as you feel some of your emotions.
Do some colouring as a soothing and meditative practice to support you as you feel your emotions.
Words and Storytelling
While it can be so powerful to find ways to not engage the language centres of your brain, there is a lot of value that can be found in using words creatively to capture and express your emotions.
Write a raw, expressive poem that captures how you are feeling. Consider writing a "letter to my anger" an "ode to grief" or a "conversation with what once was."
Start a journal. Use different prompts to let your anger and grief flow onto the page or retell and reframe your experiences with what you now know.
Write your story. Slowly start to go through all of the things that have happened to you.
Letter writing. Write a letter to God, your past or future self, or the people who hurt you (not that you ever have to send it).
Bearing witness
As we find healing and give our emotions a voice, it is important that this is not something that is done in isolation. A lot of emoting will happen in the security and privacy of our own space or as we spend time communing with God. At the same time, hurts that happened in the context of relationship and community require relationship and community for healing. As others bear witness to the hard and horrible things that we have experienced, the isolation of our big emotions slowly lifts.
This healing will come in a range of different contexts that allow us to speak the truth of what happened and have others witness it and encourage us with the comforts and truths of scripture. This includes the more in-depth reflecting and processing that is found in the structures of counselling and therapy, the shared understanding and experiences that can be found within a support group, the experience of true belonging with friends who accept you the way that you are and the conversations that grow out of that, finding a church community where you are welcome and feel safe, and other relationships that we find along the way.
Community and relationships are such an important part of the healing that is found in giving our emotions a voice. Feeling our grief and anger in the context of relationship reminds us that we are not alone and there are those around us who are there to help carry and support us as we continue to integrate the difficult parts of our story into our lives.
Ongoing Journey
The grief and anger that we carry are big and painful and as we take the time to feel and give them a voice, we start to grow and find healing. This is not a simple, quick process that is over after we have given ourselves the time to sit with and feel all the emotions a few times, it is a journey that takes place in a way that is not linear or formulaic but is filled with waves of different emotions that we need to ride.
The deep hurts of what has happened may never leave us. Rather, the process of sitting with, feeling and giving a voice to all the emotions that come in response to that pain gives the opportunity and perspective we need so that we can grow through our. All the emotions, especially the deep grief and anger are necessary for us to grow and integrate our experiences into who we are today.
As we continue to understand the truth of what has happened, who we are and who our God is in the middle of it all we learn to see how our pain falls into that and has a become a part of the person we are today. We learn that the deep, dark and hard parts of our story are important and the steps that we take in integrating them into our lives allows us to gain agency over our own lives and grow into a deeper relationship with God.