Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Understanding Emotional and Spiritual Abuse
CW: This article addresses and describes trauma, domestic violence, and abuse in various forms.
If there is one takeaway for those who have not experienced abuse in their own life, it’s that abuse thrives in secret. No one knew about what happened in my home, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. It took me a while to even name my experience as abuse. It often takes a long time to have the courage to name abuse when your abuser is a family member or someone you love.
That’s what’s so dangerous about psychological and spiritual abuse: the effects are invisible, or at least hidden from the public eye. There aren’t bruises or broken bones. But whether physical or not, the consequences of abuse run deep. If you’ve been abused, you might experience anxiety, depression, fear, and shame. You might feel like you are going crazy. You might feel unworthy of love. If you survive and escape, you could struggle to make decisions on your own or have a difficult time building relationships of trust. In other words, abuse of any kind can result in trauma, and healing from abuse is healing from trauma. Recovery takes a long time, and it takes a community of loving support.
According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), at least one in four women and one in nine men experience domestic violence (this includes physical violence, sexual violence, as well as stalking by an intimate partner). In addition, nearly 50 percent of both men and women experience psychological abuse from an intimate partner at some point in their lives. Abuse happens often, it happens in secret and behind closed doors, and it happens in the church. For those who have not experienced abuse, it can be difficult to accept this reality. We want to think the best of everyone in our community. But ignoring and refusing to recognize what is a reality for many people, regardless of religion, means we become ill-equipped to truly serve those who are suffering.
When I was experiencing non-physical abuse, I didn’t know how to describe what I was experiencing, and I didn’t know about the resources available to me. I didn’t gather the strength and resources to leave home until I was twenty-five years old, and there are years of my life I will never get back. I hope that in my speaking up now, I can help those who aren’t able to speak up for themselves or those who still live in fear.
What is abuse?
Abuse takes many forms, but ultimately, it is about denying and disrespecting a victim’s personhood. When an abuser targets someone, whether through physical or psychological abuse, they count themselves as superior and righteous in relation to their target. Abuse is about power and asserting that power over someone the abuser regards as inferior or weak. Abusive behavior is meant to keep victims easy to control.
An abusive person is difficult to spot. They can seem like the friendliest, most charismatic person you know. They can be intelligent and successful, leaders in their community and church. But in private, they are manipulative and lacking true empathy. They know how to play the part to make outsiders like them, but their victims see their dark side.
Here are a few brief (not comprehensive) definitions of the different manifestations of abuse:
Physical Abuse is physically harmful behavior, including aggression such as hitting or strangulation and/or the withholding of medical care.
Sexual Abuse is non-consensual sexual activity and coercion. It is important to remember that this can happen even within a marriage.
Verbal Abuse is using words to degrade, dehumanize, and disempower another person, including name-calling and verbal threats.
Emotional/Psychological Abuse attacks someone’s sense of self and sanity, including manipulation and control, jealousy, blaming, and creating an environment of chaos and unpredictability in order to control the target.
Financial/Economic Abuse can be the controlling and manipulating someone’s income and finances, such as allowing only limited funds for necessities and/or spending large amounts of money on non-necessities. It can also include preventing someone from being able to work.
Spiritual/Religious Abuse can include using religion and religious texts to shame, manipulate, and justify abusive behavior. It can also include preventing a victim from practicing their own beliefs.
What can abuse look like?
Control
Control speaks directly to the motivation of any kind of abuse. It is about power, and abusers will do almost anything to maintain their sense of power over their victim and control every aspect of a victim’s life, from relationships with family and friends, to daily activities, to access to information from the outside world.
Manipulation
Manipulation includes lying, twisting the truth, creating a facade (being two-faced), using persuasion and trickery, and using both positive and negative emotions to keep victims under control. Abusers use these kinds of tactics to manipulate someone’s emotions. Abusive anger and threats are meant to keep someone afraid. When abusers flip to positive emotions and even displays of affection, they aren’t sorry for their bad behavior; they are making their targets feel bonded to them to avoid losing control.
Gaslighting, otherwise known as crazy-making, is a kind of manipulation used to make the survivor feel as though they are “crazy.” For instance, an abuser might say something one day, only to pretend like they never said it the next. Or an abuser might pretend like their rage of anger the night before never happened. Abusers then use words to make their targets feel like they must be imagining things.
Playing the victim is a kind of manipulation in which an abuser garners pity and sympathy by acting as if they are the true victim. This kind of manipulation is not always an act; abusers tend to be paranoid, believing that everyone is out to get them, that no one is on their side.
Winning allies is a manipulative tactic that abusers use to support their position in the abusive relationship. This can vary in different relationships, but it can include turning children against their mother by mocking her in front of them or disrespecting her, calling her weak or stupid. It can also happen when the abuser intentionally damages their victim’s reputation by spreading rumors and gossiping about them to their friends and church family. This keeps the abuser in control because it decreases the number of people who believe the survivor in favor of the abuser, leaving the survivor abandoned with no support.
Threatening Environment
While many abusive relationships include verbal threats, all of them create an environment of threat, whether vocalized or not. Everything survivors do is under the threats of their abusive partner (or parent, etc.) because their abuser’s potential of harming them is always a risk. A survivor must constantly take into account their abuser’s reactions in order to prevent an outburst. Survivors will often refer to this as feeling like they’re “walking on eggshells.” Living in this kind of environment is exhausting.
Lack of Conscience
Difficult as it might be to understand, abusers often do not have a fully functioning conscience. This is why they seem to lack empathy with their victims and why they don’t usually completely apologize for their behavior. Some abusers have personality disorders, such as narcissistic personality disorder. It is important to understand this because some abusers will never sincerely be sorry. Unfortunately, this lack of conscience means abusers have no qualms about faking a charismatic, friendly persona in public, making it challenging for others to recognize them for who they really are.
How can abuse affect survivors?
The direct result of any kind of abuse is dehumanizing the victim. Much abuse results from misogyny and the disrespect of women as equal human beings. The consequence is victims feeling unworthy of love and losing their sense of self. But abuse doesn’t just happen to women. While most domestic violence cases involve women as victims, this is not always the case, and no matter whom abuse affects, it is just as damaging. It’s also important to understand that the effects of trauma manifest differently for every survivor.
Mental Health
The effects of abuse can be immediate as well as long-lasting. Because psychological abuse attacks someone’s ability to think for themselves and make decisions, it can take years to recover, and many survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For me, I experienced suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety while living under the abuse. When I finally got out, I experienced difficulty making decisions for myself (having never been allowed to). The panic attacks that started during the abuse continued long after I escaped. I had a lot of emotions that I didn’t know how to describe, and it often felt like I had conflicting emotions at the same time. All of this confused me and made me feel like I was losing my mind. I had to relearn how to trust people and how to take care of myself. After being devalued and dehumanized, it is challenging for a survivor to heal. The symptoms of trauma are signs of how the body and mind fight to survive. These symptoms don’t make survivors “broken”—they actually reveal how they were able to use coping skills to survive. After prolonged abuse, it takes time to reverse the fight-or-flight responses that inhabit the body during traumatization.
Physical Health
Physical abuse is obviously a threat to the health and well-being of survivors, but psychological abuse can also have a physical effect on survivors. Abuse creates a lot of stress, and it can even lead to headaches, nausea, extreme fatigue, and chronic physical pain. Many survivors develop anxiety and eating disorders. Mind and body are connected, so any abuse to the mind also inevitably affects the body.
Spiritual Health
When abusers use religion as a weapon, it can affect how a survivor interacts with their religious community and can devastate their idea of God as loving. Survivors need to be supported in their journey, whether or not they decide to continue in their faith tradition.
Domestic violence and abuse are all too common. But the evangelical church often struggles to know how to deal with it. Often, survivors bear a double burden: both the weight of the abuse and the lack of support and understanding from their religious community.
To really help, we can become educated on the issue of abuse, what it looks like, and how it affects survivors. Both abuse and trauma are difficult to see and understand for those on the outside of the relationship, and victims often don’t reveal their entire experience unless they feel safe. If we haven’t experienced abuse ourselves, learning about the experience of others will grow our empathy and make us more able to help those in need.
Supporting survivors means believing them and never blaming them for the abusive behavior they experience. Telling someone to just “be more submissive” or “be more respectful” only minimizes the pain they experience and adds more false guilt.
Instead, we can support survivors in very practical ways. The National Domestic Violence Hotline has some suggestions: “People in abusive relationships often feel like they have little control over their lives. . . . Let them know you believe they are the best person to make the decision that feels right to them at that time. Let them know that you trust them to know what’s best for themselves. This will place power back in their hands!”
I used to feel so powerless, like I had no say over my life. But over the years before I was able to leave my situation, a few people had mentioned that it was okay for me to make decisions, talking to me like I was a person with options and not the trapped prisoner I felt like. This made more of an impact than those people ever knew, and I am so grateful for those words of empowerment.
Other ways the Hotline recommends helping include letting survivors know they have a friend, not being judgmental, being supportive of survivors’ decisions, inviting them to activities without their abuser, helping them create a safety plan, giving them phone numbers or resources, and remembering that you can’t force the survivor to make certain decisions. It’s also important to remember that living in an abusive relationship can be dangerous. If a survivor tells you about abuse, ask them what the best way to communicate with them would be in order for them to be safe from their abuser, as sometimes abusers have control over the phone, etc. Calling the police may be an appropriate response (and it definitely is if there is immediate danger to the victim), but it is important to work with survivors in order to respect their boundaries and wishes.
One of the most helpful things for me was gaining knowledge about abuse through finding and reading online resources, realizing that I wasn’t alone in my experience, that I wasn’t crazy, and that the abuse wasn’t okay. This gave me the courage to find an escape. Finding a few people who supported me and helped me find my voice was lifesaving.
For survivors . . .
You are not alone.
You are worthy of love and support.
You have inherent value and dignity as a person.
You do not deserve to be abused, and it is not your fault.
You have the power to think and to make decisions for yourself and for your safety.
Other Resources
The National Domestic Violence Hotline | www.thehotline.org | 1-800-799-7233 | 1-800-787-3224 (TTY) | Text “START” to 88788
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence | https://ncadv.org/
Women Against Abuse | https://www.womenagainstabuse.org/
Flying Free, resources and small groups for abuse survivors | https://www.flyingfreenow.com/
Cait West is a member of Tears of Eden’s Editorial Board. She focuses on writing about the patriarchal movement and how patriarchy influences Spiritual Abuse. Find her at caitwest.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @caitwestwrites.
