The Spiritual Iceberg: Unpacking Hidden Traumas in Faith Communities

Elisha's Space: Maybe you left a church. Or maybe you're still sitting in one every Sunday and something inside you keeps whispering that something isn't right, but you can't name it. Maybe you grew up being told that your body was dangerous, that your emotions were weakness, that your doubt was sin. And you prayed and prayed and the shame just got louder, not quieter. Maybe no one ever hit you. No one screamed at you. There was no dramatic moment, just a slow erosion. And now you sit here wondering, was that even real? Did that actually hurt me? It was real. It did hurt you. And today we're going to name it layer by layer, all the way down. Welcome to Elisha Space, a sanctuary for healing growth and for the kind of honest conversations that actually change things. I'm Elisha, your host, a counselor, an author, and someone who has sat in the same stuck places you have. If you're new here, welcome home. If you've been listening for a while, I see you and I'm glad you're back. Today's episode is practical, clinical, but pastoral. And it might be one of the most important conversations I've had on this podcast, because we're going to talk about the spiritual iceberg. You know what an iceberg is. 90 % of its mass is hidden underwater. The 10 % you see, that's the part people talk about. The big obvious things. The abuse they can point to. The pastor who crossed a line. The cult they eventually escaped. But the other 90 %? That's what we're diving into today. The hidden layers of spiritual trauma that don't get named, don't get validated, and don't get healed. Because most people don't even know they're there. We're going to go layer by layer, surface to bottom, and we're going to call it what it is. So stay with me. Before we go down, I want to say something important to you. Spiritual trauma is not a rejection of faith. It is not a reason to abandon God. It is a wound that happened in the name of God. And wounds need tending, not dismissal. The research is clear. Religious trauma, specifically the kind rooted in shame. fear and authoritarian control activates the same neurological pathways as other forms of complex trauma. Your nervous system does not distinguish between a fist and a theology. Both can put you into survival mode. Both can dysregulate your body's capacity for safety. Knowledge isn't just power for trauma survivors. Knowledge is safety. And the church, broadly speaking, has not been good at this. The conversation has moved too slowly. Too many people have walked out of faith communities carrying invisible wounds, told to just forgive and move on, while their bodies held with their minds were not permitted to process. So we're going to process it together right now. Let's look at the iceberg. This is the part of the iceberg that's visible. It's what people point to, what makes headlines, what survivors feel permission to name. So this layer is toxic leadership. The top 10 % above the water line. Toxic leadership, spiritual abuse. This is the pastor who rules with fear. The elder board that functions like a tribunal. The leader who uses scripture as a weapon. pulling verses out of context to demand submission, to silence questions, to protect their own authority. The National Association for Christian Response defines spiritual abuse as a form of emotional and psychological abuse characterized by a systematic pattern of coercive and controlling behavior in a religious context. If you grew up in a church, where the pastor's word was essentially God's word, where to question leadership was to question God himself. You experience this layer and your nervous system remembers it, even if your conscious mind has minimized it. The tell-tale sign, when you set across from that person, your body went quiet. You stopped breathing normally. Your thoughts went foggy. You chose your words very, very carefully. That was not reverence. That was a fair response. And here's the theological refrain. Authority that cannot tolerate question is not authority. It is control. Jesus invited Thomas to put his hand in the wound. He did not shame him for needing to verify. The tip of the iceberg is visible, but it is far from the whole picture. Let's go deeper. and just below the surface. often invisible to anyone who didn't live inside a specific evangelical world. Purity culture. If you're not familiar with the term, purity culture refers to the set of theological and social teachings most prominent from the 1990s through the 2010s. That centered sexual abstinence the primary marker of young person's worth before God. The true love weights movement, purity rings, modesty culture, the teaching that your body, particularly if you were a girl, was a stumbling block, a danger, a vessel that could be used or saved. I want to be direct with you about what this did to an entire generation of women. It taught you that your body was the problem, that your sexuality was a threat to boys, to the community, to your own spiritual standing, that if something happened to you, if someone touched you without permission, the first question to be answered was, what were you wearing? What did you do? How did you invite this? That is a wound. And it is a wound that sits deeply in the body, not just the mind. Clinically, we see it show up as body shame, sexual dysfunction, inability to feel safe from physical intimacy, and a profound disconnection from one's own physical self. Because you were taught systematically that your body was not to be trusted. The body God made, the body He called good, let me say that again, God looked at what He made, including your body and called it good. Not dangerous, not shameful. Good. Stay with me. Now we're going deeper into the layers that are harder to name because they were dressed in language that sounded holy. Spiritual bypassing. This term comes from psychologist John Wellwood, who coined it in the 1980s to describe the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and fundamental human needs. In a Christian context, it sounds like this. Don't dwell on the past. God has forgotten your sins. Why can't you? You need to have more faith. If you really believed, you wouldn't be anxious. Just give it to God. Stop trying to hold onto it. Joy is a choice. Choose joy. These statements feel spiritual. They sound like scripture, and some of them are scriptural, pulled out of context and used as a lid on your grief, your anger, your very real, very embodied suffering. Spiritual bypassing teaches you that feeling is faithlessness, that your nervous system's distress signals are spiritual failures. And so you learn to override them you perform peace You perform joy you smile on Sunday morning while your body is screaming This is not healing This is suppression with a Bible verse on top And here is what the research tells us Suppressed emotion is not processed emotion. It is stored emotion and stored trauma lives in the body. It doesn't disappear because you prayed hard enough. His peace is not dependent on your circumstances being resolved. It is a regulated nervous system and the presence of a safe God. That is not visualization. That is physiology. And we can get there, but not by bypassing the very real work of feeling what needs to be felt. Deeper now. Shame based theology is different from conviction. I want you to hold that distinction carefully because it matters. Conviction in the biblical sense is the Holy Spirit pointing you towards truth, towards wholeness, towards repentance that leads to restoration. It is directional. It moves you toward God. Shane based theology moves you away from yourself, from God, from others. It tells you that you are fundamentally irrevocably broken, not just that you have broken things. It makes you the problem, not the behavior. It sounds like you are a worm. You are nothing. You are desperately wicked, not as a starting point for grace, but as a destination. a permanent address. If you grew up in a tradition that preached the wrath of God more than the love of God, if your first theological framework for yourself was condemned. Your nervous system formed around a threat that never went away, because the threat was you. This is where we see the highest rates of anxiety and depression in religious populations. When the source of both the wound and the supposed cure is the same institution, when God is framed as both judge and rescuer, and you cannot access the rescuer without first surviving the judge, you develop a chronic low-grade terror that cannot be prayed away because prayer itself becomes contaminated with fear. Your nervous system learned to brace and it has been bracing for a very long time. I want us to pause here for just a moment. If you've been listening to this episode and your chest has been getting tighter, if something in your body is starting to activate, I want you to know that that is not weakness. That is recognition. Your body knows what your mind is hearing. Take a breath with me. Slow inhale through your nose, hold and exhale through your mouth. You are not in danger right now. You are in a safe place. Learning the name of something that happened to you. Naming it is not re-traumatizing you. Naming it is the beginning of healing. Stay with me. We are going deeper. But I promise we're going toward the light. If this episode is resonating with you, share it. Text to one person you know is sitting in a faith community. wondering why they feel the way they feel. This conversation could be the one thing that gives them language. Let's keep going. Here is a layer that doesn't always get called trauma, but I'm calling it trauma today. The prosperity gospel, transactional faith, the theological system that teaches. If you give enough, pray enough, believe enough, obey enough, God will bless you with health, wealth, and protection. And if you're suffering, you haven't done enough. This is the theology that weaponizes your pain. When you were sick and the healing didn't come, you were told your faith was insufficient. When your marriage fell apart, even though you prayed every day, you were told you must have opened a door to the enemy. When the business failed, when the prodigal child didn't return, when the depression didn't lift, the message was clear. You failed God first. This creates a particularly insidious form of self-blame that is clinically indistinguishable form from the cognitive distortions we see in complex trauma, personalization, catastrophizing, and a hyperactive internal attribution of all negative events to personal failure. You are not responsible for every storm. Joe wasn't either. And God is not a vending machine. Your suffering is not a receipt of your inadequacy. It is the human condition. And God meets us in it, not after we've performed our way out. This one is important. and it is one of the most common things I see in my counseling office. Spiritual gaslighting. Gaslighting, the term borrowed from the 1944 film, refers to the manipulation of someone into questioning their own reality. Spiritual gaslighting adds a layer. It uses scripture, pastoral authority, and theological language to do it. It sounds like this. misremembering what happened. You need to be careful. Unforgiveness can open spiritual doors. The enemy is using your emotions to mislead you. I don't think that's what the Holy Spirit is saying to you. Let me tell you what he's actually saying. When a spiritual authority tells you that your perception of your own experience is wrong and frames their correction as God's correction, you are being gaslit. The effect on the nervous system is profound because now there is no safe reality. Your internal compass, your body signals system has been labeled as spiritually untrustworthy. So if you stop trusting yourself, you outsource your reality to whoever ⁓ is ⁓ at front of the room. And ⁓ when person is wrong, or worse, when they are harmful, you have no internal resource to recognize it. This is one of the ⁓ primary ⁓ that people in abusive religious systems long after the evidence is clear that they need to leave. Reclaiming your own perception is not rebellion, it is healing. We're near the bottom now. This layer is the one that surprises most people. Because it doesn't involve the leader, it involves the people. Betrayal trauma from community. Psychologist, Jennifer Freyhead, developed betrayal trauma theory to explain why we sometimes don't recognize or remember abuse perpetuated by people we depend on. The closer the relationship, the more our survival It's tied to the person who hurt us. The more our mind protects us from fully processing what happened in faith communities. Your church was not just a social group. It was your people, your family, often literally your entire social world. Your children grew up there. Your friendships were there. Your identity was threaded through those walls. And when that community closed ranks, when they protected the leader who hurt you, when they chose the institution over you, when they cut off relationship because you asked one too many questions, that was betrayal. Not just interpersonal betrayal. existential betrayal. The people who were supposed to be the hands and feet of Christ chose the institution over the image of God in you. That wound is deep and it often produces grief that looks like depression, isolation, and an inability to trust any community again, sacred or secular. You are allowed to grieve it. Grief is not faithlessness. love with nowhere to go. This is where the clinical and the spiritual converge in the deepest way. Some of you grew up in a theological framework where God was primarily experienced as threat, not shepherd sentinel, the God who was counting your sins, watching your thoughts, ready to withdraw protection the moment you stumbled in your nervous system, particularly if this framework was present in early childhood. When the nervous system is still forming, adapt to it. Your parasympathetic branch, the rest and digest system, the branch that creates felt safety, never fully developed a foundation, because the environment it was forming in included a God who was never quite safe. This is not a theological statement. This is developmental ⁓ one. We know from the research of Bessel van der Kolk, Pierre Levine, and Stephen Porges that early chronic threat, regardless of its source, shapes the nervous system's baseline. When threat was spiritual, the result can be a person who cannot feel safe anywhere, including in prayer, including in scripture, including in worship, because those things were present when the threat was active and so the very practices that are supposed to bring peace activate instead the threat response. If you have avoided church, avoided the Bible, avoided prayer, not because you don't believe, but because your body reacts to those things with anxiety or shutdown, this is why your vagus nerve does not have a theological filter. It remembers context. This is not a faith problem. This is a healing problem. And healing is possible. almost to the bottom. This is the layer. that most people are never given language for because it is so complete, so total, that there is no witness to it even from the inside. Identity dissolution in high control religious environments. And this does not have to be a cult. This can be any community with high conformity, pressure. There is a process often gradual, often in invisible by which your individual self becomes absorbed into the collective identity your preferences your doubts your dreams your body signals your personality all slowly slanted down not by force but by a thousand small moments of correction redirection and reward for conformity you are told who you are a servant a vessel a soldier of God a daughter of the king. These are beautiful identities, except when they replace, rather than include, your actual self. And when you finally leave, or when the system finally collapses, you discover that you do not know who you are outside of it. What you like, what you need, what you want, what you believe, when no one is watching. That disorientation is real. It is one of the most found forms of loss I witnessed in my clinical work because it is not the loss of a relationship or a community or belief it is the loss of self and the rebuilding is slow it is patient and it is holy work the bottom of the iceberg, the part that was there before you were born, generational spiritual trauma. We know from the field of epigenetics. particularly the work of Rachel Yahuda at Mount Sinai that trauma leaves biological markers on gene expression that can be passed to the next generation. just need to at family systems. The grandmother who could not speak of her faith without fear. The grandfather who left the church in silence and never explained why. The mother who performed religious compliance while her body was somewhere else entirely. The father whose spirituality was rigid because rigidity was all that had ever been modeled for him. You did not inherit only their eye color. You inherited their nervous system patterns, their unspoken rules about God, about authority, about the danger of being too much in the presence of spiritual leadership. And here is what I want you to hear. You are not just healing for yourself. You are the generation that names it. You are the truth teller in your family system and the work you do. In a counselor's office, in a podcast like this one, in prayer, in somatic practice does not end with you. It changes the inheritance. That is not small. That is everything. So we've been all the way down layer by layer and I don't want to leave you there. I want to give you a framework, the REST, R-E-S-T framework for beginning to process what we've named today, not to rush healing, not to fix what took decades in an afternoon, but to give your body a place to start. are regulate before you can process spiritual trauma cognitively your nervous system needs to know it's vagal toning practices humming slow exhalation cold water on the face grounding through the feet signal to your parasympathetic system that the thread is not present right now right now you are safe e experience somatic honesty Notice what this episode brought up in your body. Not what you think about it. What you feel in it. Is there tension in your chest? Tightness in your jaw? A heaviness you can't quite locate? Let your body be a witness, not an enemy. S. Surrender. Not spiritual bypassing. Not give it to God and stop feeling it. True surrender is bringing your full felt reality, the grief, the rage, the confusion, into the presence of a God who is safe. Lament is biblical. The Psalms are full of it. You are allowed to bring all of it. T-Trust, not the blind trust that was weaponized against you. Earn trust, the slow incremental rebuilding of a relationship with a God who is not the same as the leaders who represented him poorly. This takes time. It takes a witness. And it is worth it. Let's close this together. Father, you know everything we need today. Every layer. You were there for all of it. I am grateful that you made these bodies, but you knit together the very nervous systems that we're learning to regulate. You are not the source of the harm that was done in your name. You are the healer of it. For every listener who has been told that their doubt was set, that their body was dangerous, that their pain was a reflection of insufficient faith, meet them here. Let them feel, maybe for the first time, that they are safe with you. and for the ones carrying the weight of generations, the unnamed trauma, the inherited fear. Let today be the beginning. Let them be the ones who change the inheritance. His peace is not dependent on your circumstances being resolved. It is a regulated nervous system in the presence of a safe God. Amen. If this episode helped you, share it. Text it to one person you know who is sitting in a pew or sitting far away from one, wondering why faith has left such a tender place in them. They need this conversation too. And if you'd like to go deeper with me, if you're looking for a counselor who understands the intersection of trauma and faith, visit my website at www.RestoringUYOUChristianCounseling.com. I work with clients who are doing exactly this work. You don't have to figure out which layer you're in alone. And if you're new to Elisha Space, welcome home. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a review if this episode gave you something to hold onto. It helps this conversation reach the people who need it. Until next time, you are not too much and you are not too far. and you are not alone.