My Story of Spiritual Abuse
Hi Friends,
A friend shared this article by Judy Wu Dominick with me, I resonated with every part of it, and felt I needed to share it here. This will most certainly make The Vault, as having such a detailed account of Spiritual Abuse is extremely important for understanding—developing language and knowing we are not alone.
However, fare warning, much of what is contained in the article might be triggering for someone who’s experienced abuse in a church.
I’ll repost a portion of the article here, and link to the full article at the end. (Reposted with Author’s permission). —Katherine Spearing
Introduction
It’s difficult to write about abuse of any kind, not only because it requires engaging with painful memories, but also because it’s hard to capture its complexity. For years now, I’ve wondered how to tell a story in which fruitful transformation and painful betrayal are deeply intertwined, and where the heroes and the villains are the same people. I haven’t known how to tell a story in which I was not only a victim of an abusive spiritual system but also, at different points, an active participant, a resister, a deserter, a survivor, and increasingly, an overcomer. I suppose that’s why it’s taken me six years to make sense of my time at Renovation Church, my family’s church home in Atlanta from June 2012-June 2014.
In the years since our departure, I’ve cycled through feelings of powerlessness, pain, grief, and anger. These emotions have been difficult burdens to bear, especially as a survivor of childhood trauma. Much of my 28-year journey toward maturity in Christ (I surrendered my life to Christ when I was 19) has involved growing in the capacity to be ruled by the love of Christ instead of by incurable wounds. A central aspect of that has been learning to pray through strong emotions like hatred and anger as thoroughly as possible when someone sins against me. So that’s what I’ve done.
Until now, I haven’t considered the possibility that there was anything else I could do. I had even convinced myself I was at peace with it. My body, however, tells me something different. Every fall, around the anniversary of the most traumatic events, I’ve experienced an immune-related illness that lasts for weeks to months. Two years in a row now, the illness has rendered me homebound for a month. In 2018, I ended up in the emergency room. I’ve come to believe that my health problems reflect something Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk wrote, “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.” (Van Der Kolk, 2014, p. 233)
In my capacity as a writer, I spend a great deal of time and energy reading, thinking about, and writing about justice, injustice, the plight of the weak and vulnerable, and the responsibility of the strong. This work is an expression of how God has wired and gifted me. And continuing to maintain my silence about what happened to my husband and me at Renovation Church is now untenable.
Why Go Public?
Breaking silence on abuse doesn’t necessarily mean going public about it. It can mean something as discrete as confiding in a single trusted friend. In many cases, it’s not even advisable for survivors to publish their stories in this manner. What, then, is the rationale for going public?
In my case, the decision to go public about the spiritual abuse I experienced at Renovation Church is based on five things:
It involves a public figure.
People who are public figures have public personas from which they derive power, favor, and status. When they exercise power in abusive, idolatrous, or unjust ways from important spiritual positions, then the status, favor, and power afforded them via their public personas end up being used in service of that abuse. (Crouch, 2012) The result is that the power of the abusers’ victims shrinks in proportion to the degree that the public’s emotional investment in the abuser’s public persona increases. The primary way available to “the little people” to offset this power dynamic is to bring to bear – in the public sphere – credible testimony about the actual person and about things that take place beyond the public gaze.
The importance of credible testimony.
On-the-record testimonies carry weight that anonymous and non-specific testimonies cannot. Plus, the latter can play into abusive spiritual systems’ claims that negative statements about them or their leaders are merely “satanic attacks.” Credible testimony is all the more important in this case because the public figure I will be writing about has created a public persona around social justice, reconciliation, church planting, and making disciples, and his words are often quoted by people engaged in the work of justice, mercy, and discipleship.
I’m telling my story so that other survivors can find the words to tell their own stories and begin their own healing process.
“Finding words where words were absent before, and, as a result, being able to share your deepest pain and deepest feelings with another human being… is one of the most profound experiences we can have. Such resonance, in which hitherto unspoken words can be discovered, uttered, and received, is fundamental to healing the isolation of trauma – especially if other people in our lives have ignored or silenced us. Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.” (Van Der Kolk, 2014, p. 235)
I would like to see the abuser repent.
Repentance would include his vacating all positions of spiritual authority, submitting himself to a season (at least one year) of professional counseling, finding non-ministerial employment, growing in self-awareness, and making things right with the people he has wronged.
I made reasonable attempts to seek repentance and reconciliation privately, but these attempts resulted in additional trauma.
Between December 6-20, 2014, I attempted to reconcile privately with the abusive person in both a 90-minute one-on-one phone conversation as well as in a series of electronic message exchanges that followed. It was in the context of these good-faith attempts that the most egregious deception and manipulation occurred, creating additional trauma that was even more hurtful than the original. He has had six years to repent and make things right, but he has chosen not to. Meanwhile, the spiritual and emotional well-being of others has continued to be seriously undermined.