Finding Safety from Abusive Parent God
What did YOU need to feel safe enough to begin to change?
Today’s post is a short-ish reflection on my own experiences, but my primary focus is that I want to hear from you about a) what you needed to feel safe enough to begin healing your religious trauma, and b) what you think you still need to continue that journey. You can keep these questions in mind as you read the essay!
As a therapist, I’ve worked with many individuals who are stuck in situations that are in one way or other actively causing them harm. It’s often kids and teens who live in a home that I can see is hurting them, but sometimes it’s partners in relationships that they feel they can’t leave (most often due to kids).
In any of these kinds of situations, the initial work in therapy is not going to be doing some deep processing and healing of past traumas – because the traumas are nowhere near past. Rather, our first steps (as I conceive of it) will be around: slowly raising insight (along the lines of helping them realize “hmm, the way they’re treating you? That’s not super great”), increasing their sense of resilience (“I am strong enough to withstand this, regardless of what they say about me”) and eventually, when possible, increasing their sense of empowerment to change or leave the situation.
And as much as I’d like these people that I work with and care about to GTFO of these harmful environments, it’s often not possible – at least not yet. They might be a minor, financially dependent, or have a lot of inner conflict about leaving. We always have to work with people where they are, not where we wish they’d be.
Let’s relate this to religious trauma. As I wrote about last week, the God that I grew up believing in — who I was told was all powerful and all loving — had a secret side that no one seemed to be talking about. The same God that we called all loving, whose nickname was Abba or Father God (or for cringey evangelical prayers, “Daddy God”), also was willing to do horrible things to his children if they didn’t believe the right way. It’s being an abusive parent, plain and simple.
Except it’s not plain and simple at all – not while you’re in the thick of that theology, and everyone is telling you that believing in eternal conscious torment for nonbelievers is The Only Right Way to believe. (Also, you have to question just how much they believe in the lure of their belief system if these are the threats they have to resort to in order to keep people in the fold??)
My first step of the little process I described above was gaining some insight that maybe literal hell + unconditionally loving and all-powerful god was just really not making any sense. I began to realize “Hmm, the way the god they describe is treating us? That’s not so great.” But when you’re blindly following, you literally have NO IDEA because you think this is the only thing you can believe.
Step 2: I started to develop a tiny bit of trust in myself. A part of me began to believe that I wasn’t bad or a horrible Christian because I was asking a couple questions that some Christians didn’t want me to ask. I was able to find some answers that I knew felt a lot better than what I had been given. I still was toeing all the party lines of Christianity itself, but I could branch out beyond my Baptist-ish upbringing.
For instance: in college, as part of a secret [liberal] book group with a couple of friends from the conservative Baptist campus ministry (hence the secretive part), we read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. “Ol’ C.S.,” as we nicknamed him, is an evangelical darling, but it seems evangelicals missed the part where Lewis suggests that hell is not a place God sends us, but rather a place we lock ourselves into, with a door to leave from if ever we choose.
Once I let myself think of hell as a place people might lock themselves into instead of being sent to for punishment by God, the next theological concept I started to dig into was the notion of universalism. This was in the early 2010s, right after Rob Bell’s Love Wins (2011) had come out and was creating a lot of shock waves in the Christian world. Bell basically never cites specific theologians, but much of what he says is based on things other theologians have said before him.
I discovered I was *maybe* allowed to believe a theology that said Jesus came to redeem the WHOLE world, not just those who said a little prayer while believing the right things. Later on, I expanded my notion of universalism to be much less Jesus/Christianity-centric, and more the “many paths” thing. Later later on (i.e. including now), I don’t even know if heaven or an afterlife is real, but I’m not going to argue anyone one way or another.
In terms of step 3 of my little process: the empowering oneself to change the environment or leave? I guess I GTFO so far that I’m probably best described as a person who isn’t a Christian anymore but still goes to church sometimes (spouse is a pastor and I want to support him, but also, there are some really cool churches doing cool things). You do you: I truly want people who land in all kinds of religious (or not) spaces to feel comfortable here.
Obviously, there was a lot between the start of my process and now that I’m not even touching on, but one major change is that I’m not afraid anymore of the questions. I don’t feel personally threatened if someone believes (or doesn’t believe!) in heaven OR hell. I don’t feel worried that God will be upset and send me to the Bad Place. I’m just a whole lot less worried in general.
I have a much deeper sense of safety now in my spirituality. One that anxious evangelical me never dreamed I could, and most definitely not as a person who no longer identifies as Christian (something else I never ever ever dreamed would happen to me). And that feels really good.
If you’ve been here longer than a minute, you know I LOVE hearing from my readers and engaging with your comments. So I want to hear your thoughts! What did you need in your spiritual journey to begin to create a little space for healing? What drew you to a newsletter centered on religious trauma? How did your journey begin? And…(I trust us to treat each other with all the kindness and gentleness we all needed at various points in our journeys): If you feel like you’re just beginning, what do you still need to create a sense of safety for yourself so you can begin healing?
Please press the “heart” button if you liked this post and I’d love it if you shared this with someone you know who is working through religious trauma!
Thank you for sharing this framework and some of your journey Christine. I think my process is looking very similar to yours. The thing that bothers me so much is that most Christians I know, my good friends, get around the sticky issue of hell by believing what you mentioned from The Great Divorce - that hell is a place people lock themselves into, or choose for themselves, rather than a place God sends them to punish them. So God is supposedly honoring their free will. It's also a view supported by Timothy Keller who for some reason is the most popular theologian among my church friends. But they stop there - they don't consider how this applies to people who, for example, never heard about Jesus. Did those people "choose" not to believe in Jesus? No, they just never had the opportunity. Lewis, Keller and others have a cop-out workaround for this - God deals with them in a different way that we might not know of, God always operates with love, his ways are higher than our ways, etc. I used to be content with that answer - with trusting that God wouldn't send someone to hell just because they never had the opportunity to believe in him in their life. But then my coworker and friend, who was an atheist (I don't believe in a god, he told me once) and one of the most altruistic people I ever met, who devoted his life to the peace process in Colombia and to creating better opportunities for underprivileged communities, died in a kayaking accident. And while it took me a year or so to realize it, that was when I stopped believing in hell - or in a loving God who could send anyone to hell. Because I couldn't continue to worship a god who would send my friend to hell just because he chose not to believe in any god. And now I see a good friend of mine grieving the sudden loss of his mother to covid, and torn up with anxiety about whether she was a believer or not. He often says, I just hope she is with Christ right now. I see that and I think, I can't continue to believe in a god who tortures his children by allowing them to suffer mental, emotional, and spiritual angst over whether their own parents will be burning in hell for eternity because they didn't believe. I just can't. I'm still in church, still haven't gotten "TFO" but I think what I needed to start to feel safe again was to begin to entertain the idea of universalism like you. That's where I'm at. Sorry for the long comment - your post just unleashed this from me, haha, and I feel like this is a safe space to share.
Krispin always points out that victims of abuse or trauma are the types of people who might engage in self-sabotaging behaviors, which means even CS Lewis’ view of hell is really violent! Basically blaming folks who already feel heaps of shame that yeah, THEY are locking themselves out of God’s love, and it’s all their fault. None of it really adds up, and all I can see is how these views harm vulnerable people 🥺