Healing from Spiritual Abuse: The Hidden Gifts of Your Recovery Journey

Elisha's Space: You didn't leave the church, the church left you long before you ever walked out that door. And I need you to hear me say that before we go any further today, because so many of you have been carrying guilt about leaving, about asking questions, about finally saying, this doesn't feel like love. And today we're going to talk about what happens on the other side of that, not the easy version, the real one Welcome to Elisha Space. I'm Elisha, a counselor, author, and entrepreneur, and your guide here on this podcast, where we talk about things that the world doesn't always make room for. Healing, faith, the complicated, beautiful, painful in-between places. If you're new here, welcome home. And if you've been with me for a while, I see you. I'm so glad you're back. Today's episode is one I've been sitting with for a long time. I've had this conversation in my therapy room dozens of times and every single time I do, I watch something shift in the room. We are talking about spiritual abuse recovery and specifically, we're talking about the gifts buried inside that journey. I when you're in the middle of it, the word gift feels almost offensive. So before we get there, we're going to go through the pain together first because I will not bypass what you've been through. Not today, not ever on this podcast. So settle in, grab your journal. And before we do anything else, let's breathe. I want you to notice right now, where you're holding tension in your body. Maybe it's in your chest. Maybe your shoulders have crept up towards your ears. Maybe there's a tightness in your throat that shows up every time someone says the word church. Just notice. We're not pushing anything away today. We're just noticing. Now let's breathe together. Inhale through your nose for four counts. One, two, three, four. Hold for four. one two three four and exhale slowly through your mouth for six one two three four five six let's do that one more time inhale two three four hold two three four exhale two three four five six good you're here you're safe and whatever feelings come up today. They're allowed to be here too. I want to start by saying something that I don't think it's said enough in Christian spaces. Spiritual abuse is real. It is documented. It is devastating. And it's not your fault. Dr. Diane Langberg, one of the most respected trauma therapists working in the Christian space, described spiritual abuse as the use of sacred texts. God's name or spiritual authority to manipulate, control, or harm another person. And what makes it uniquely wounding is that it doesn't just hurt your mind or your body. It goes after your soul. Clinically, what we often see in survivors is what researchers now call religious trauma syndrome, a pattern of symptoms that looks a lot like PTSD, complex trauma, and sometimes crisis of faith, all layered on top of each other. You might be experiencing hypervigilance around anything that feels like church, shame that has no clear origin, difficulty trusting your own perception of reality, which we talked about in our episode on spiritual gaslighting. You might have lost your community overnight. You might have lost your identity because for so many of us, especially those of us who grew up in high control environments. The church was our identity. And you might be grieving a version of God that you've had to release. Not because God failed you, but because the image of God you were given was weaponized against you. I want you to notice where you felt that in your body right now. That's not weakness. That's your nervous system telling the truth. I want to tell you about a woman I'll call Miriam. Miriam was 34 when she first came to see me. She had spent the previous 12 years in a church that she described as her whole world. She led the women's ministry. She tithed sacrificially, even when it meant choosing between groceries and the offering plate. She believed in the deepest places of her heart that she was exactly where God wanted her. And then she asked a question, a theological question, a genuinely curious, sincere question that challenged the leadership's interpretation of a particular passage of scripture. And within six weeks, she had been shunned. People she had known for over a decade stopped returning her calls. A leader told her, and I want you to hear this, a leader told her that her questioning spirit was evidence of a Jezebel influence in her life. When Miriam sat across from me, she wasn't angry, she was confused, which is one of the hallmarks of spiritual abuse. It doesn't usually feel like abuse right away. It feels like your fault. She said to me, Elisha, I don't even know who I am outside of that church. And I'm terrified that if I'm not who they say I was, I don't know what's left. Can I tell you something? In that moment, in that question, the healing had already begun. She just couldn't see it yet. There's a pattern throughout scripture we need to talk about because think the Western Christian Church has done a tremendous disservice in how it's taught us to read these stories. Moses, 40 years in the wilderness not as a punishment, but as preparation. Elijah running from Jezebel, exhausted, suicidal, hiding in a cave. And what does God do? He doesn't send fire, he sends a whisper. He says, what are you doing here, Elijah? And then bread, rest, go back. Joseph, thrown in a pit by the people who were supposed to love him most, betrayed, sold, imprisoned. And the scripture says, with language I want you to hold on to, but the Lord was with Joseph in the pit, in the prison, in the place that looked like abandonment. Paul writes from prison. John writes from exile on Patmos. The wilderness is not the end of the story in scripture. It is almost always the middle. And here's what I want you to hear as a counselor and as a person of faith. The things that grow in the wilderness cannot grow in the comfort of the garden. They require the desert heat. They require the silence. They require the stripping away. The spiritual abuse you survived, the confusion, the grief, the reconstruction, is not evidence that God abandoned you. In many cases, it is evidence that he is doing something in you that the institution never could. Now, I want to be very careful here because I don't believe in what I call spiritual bypassing. I am not going to stand here and tell you that God caused your abuse for a reason. He didn't. Abuse is not God's design. It is the failure of broken human beings who misused authority. But God's redemptive capacity, his ability to bring beauty from the wreckage of what others have done. That is real. And that is what we're talking about today. I've identified five gifts, and I use that word carefully, that I see consistently in my clients who are further along in their spiritual trauma healing journey. These are not things that show up immediately. They are gifts that are forged, not found. But they are real, and I want to name them today. The first hidden gift is discernment. One of the devastating effects of spiritual abuse is that it hijacks your ability to trust your own perception. Gaslighting, being told that what you feel isn't real, that what you heard wasn't said, that your boundaries are rebellion, all of that erodes your intuitive knowing. But here is the gift on the other side. Survivors of spiritual abuse develop what I can only describe as a finely tuned radar, a capacity to read environments, dynamics, and relationships with extraordinary accuracy. You notice red flags that other people walk right past. You ask questions that cut straight to the heart of the matter. You are not easily fooled, not because you're cynical, but because you learn. at a very deep level. In Philippians one verses nine and 10, Paul prays that believers would love that abounds and knowledge in all discernment. The Greek word here, estasis, is often translated perception, a kind of knowing that comes through experience. You didn't choose the school you attended. but you graduated. And what you carry now is capacity that the scriptures actually celebrate. The second gift is the capacity for genuine healthy boundaries. And I want to pause here because I know many of you were taught that boundaries are selfish. That submission means boundarylessness. That saying no is the same as saying no to God. Let me clearly say. that is a distortion of scripture. It is not theology. It is control. In my practice, I use what I call the SAFE boundaries model, which stands for safe. space, access, frequency, and emotional labor. These four dimensions help us identify where our boundaries actually need to live and why. And what I see in survivors, especially those who are 12 to 18 months into their healing journey, is a stunning ability to articulate their needs, to name what they will and will not allow. not from a place of fear or guardedness, but from a place of self-knowledge and God-given dignity. You know what it feels like to have your access violated, to have your emotional labor extracted without care or consent. And because you know that, you hold your boundaries not as walls, but as what they actually are, doorways that you choose to open. A woman I'll call Danielle, she came to me 18 months after leaving a high control ministry where she had been told, that questioning her pastor was equivalent to questioning God. When she first walked into my office, she apologized for taking up space, literally apologized before she sat down, before she spoke for existing in my room. A year and a half later, she sat across from me and said, I turned down a volunteer role at my new church last week, not because I don't care. but because it wasn't the right time and I knew it. And I said no and the sky didn't fall. She laughed when she said it. That laugh, that's the sound of someone discovering their own worth outside of what she produces for an institution. That's a gift. The third gift is the one that surprises people the most because the assumption inside and outside of Christian spaces is that if you leave a church, especially under painful circumstances, you're probably done. with faith altogether. And some of you have walked through seasons where that felt true, and I honor that. But what I see most consistently in my clients is not the death of faith. It's the death of a religion, of the performance-based, fear-driven, leadership-driven spirituality that was handed to them, and the birth of something far more intimate, a faith that lives in your body. not just your doctrinal statement. A God who is allowed to be complex, who can hold your anger, who doesn't need you to perform. Thomas doubted in the room with the risen Christ and Jesus came to him. Not to the one who had all the answers, to the one who said, I need to see for myself. Your deconstruction, if you've walked through it honestly, hasn't taken you further from God. It's removed the layers of human agenda that were sitting between you. And what's on the other side? That's yours. No one can take it again because this time it was built in the wilderness. Gifur is the one that connects to something I talk about a lot in this community, the truth teller community. High control religious environments silence voices, particularly the voices of women. You were taught to defer, to soften, to couch your perceptions and apology, to make your truth palatable to the people who held the power. And here's what that kind of sustained silence to you neurobiologically. It suppresses the activation of the brocus area, the part of your brain that processes language and speech. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score writes about how trauma survivors often lose their ability to articulate their experience because their nervous system learned that speaking was dangerous. But the flip side of that, the gift, is that when you finally do find your voice, it carries weight that a voice that was never silenced simply doesn't have. You speak from the bottom of things, from experience, from suffering, from survival. And when you speak, even in a small room, even on a podcast that's just getting started, even in a journal that no one else reads, you carry the authority of someone. who has paid for every word. That is not a small thing. In Isaiah 61, the prophet describes the mission of the anointed one as proclaiming freedom to the captives. I believe that includes you, and I believe it includes your story. You don't have to be silent anymore, and the way that truth emerges from you, carefully, hard won, built on years of discernment, that is a gift the world needs. The fifth gift is perhaps the most quietly powerful, a compassion that is rooted in shared suffering. The word compassion comes from the Latin compassio, to suffer with, not to observe suffering from a safe distance, to enter it. This is what makes you, you listening to this right now, an extraordinary friend, advocate, parent, spouse, colleague. You don't flinch at the presence of other people's pain. You don't rush to fix it or spiritually bypass. You stay because you know what it's like when someone doesn't. In 2 Corinthians 1, Paul writes, God comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. You are not just a survivor. You are becoming equipped. And the very thing that tried to break you is being woven into something that will help someone else find their way through. Okay, let's talk about what to actually do with this because I am a counselor and I will never leave you with beautiful words and no path forward. I want to walk you through a framework I use with clients and spiritual trauma healing, which I call the CALM, C-A-L-M, protocol, Claim, Acknowledge, Lament, Move. And I am going to give you a journaling prompt for each one. See for claim, claim means naming your experience without minimizing it. So many of us have been trained to soften our own stories, to say it wasn't that bad, or they meant well. And while forgiveness has its place, and we will get there, the first step in healing is naming what actually happened. For your journal prompt, write the sentence, what happened to me was, and complete it fully. Don't edit, don't soften. This is between you and God in your journal. Let it be true. A, acknowledge. Acknowledge means bringing your grief into the light. Grief is not a failure of faith. Grief is love with nowhere to go. And in spiritual abuse recovery, there is so much to grieve. The community, the certainty, the version of God you knew. sometimes even the version of yourself. For your journal prompt, list everything you lost. Make it concrete, not just my church, but the Sunday potlucks, the mentor who stopped calling, the prayer language you share, the sense of divine purpose. Let yourself name every single thing. L is for lament. Lament is probably the most underutilized spiritual practice in the Western Church, but it is all over scripture. Over a third of the Psalms are laments. Job laments. Jeremiah laments. Jesus cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Lament is not unbelief. Lament is the honest cry of a heart that has not given up. With your spiritual practice, this week, read Psalms 22 slowly. Read it as a prayer, not an exegesis exercise. Let yourself be in it and then, if you feel ready, write your own limit in your own words to a God who can hold everything you've been carrying. And ⁓ for move. Move, and I want to be clear, this is the last step, not the first. Because too often we try to move before we've claimed, acknowledged, and lamented and then the movement is just avoidance wearing a self-help costume. But when you've walked through those first three, you are ready to begin identifying the gifts. And I want you to try this. For your journal prompt, write these sentences. Because I survived this, I now know how to. Because I survived this, I am no longer afraid of. Because I survived this, I have the capacity to offer someone else. Let the gifts name themselves. They are already in you. We are just bringing them into light. Before I let you go today, I want you to hear this and I want you to hear it as someone who has sat with hundreds of people in the wreckage of spiritual harm. The healing journey from spiritual abuse is not linear. It doesn't follow a neat 12 week program. There are days when the grief comes back like a wave you thought you had passed. There are Sundays that still feel complicated. There are hymns that hold both beauty and pain in the same chord, and that's okay. You don't have to be finished to be healing. You don't have to be resolved in your theology to be loved by God. You are allowed to be exactly where you are. wounded, questioning, courageous enough to keep going and call that the beginning of something sacred. So your challenge is simple. Choose one of the journaling prompts I gave you, just one, and sit with it for 15 minutes. No pressure to arrive at an answer. Just create the space for the truth to surface. And if you feel moved to share what comes up, I read every comment, every message. You are not doing this alone. I love you. I'm praying for you. And I'll see you next time on Elisha Space. If today's episode resonated with you, would you take 30 seconds to leave a review? It helps this podcast reach the people who are sitting alone in their car, trying to figure out who they are on the other side of something that hurts. Your review is how we find them. Subscribe, share. And if you're not already in the community, come find us. The links are in the show notes. This is Elisha's space, and this space was always meant for you.