Survivors Discuss Podcast

Content warning: discussion of child sexual abuse material, conversion therapy, and various kinds of spiritual & mental abuse.

In episode two, I (Shari), Cait, and Clare talk a little bit about the difficult in trusting one’s choices after surviving spiritual abuse.

I would be in situations where I would have an opinion on how something should be done and then somebody else would come along and have a different opinion, and I would immediately go. Okay I’m wrong. You’re right, Let’s do it. You’re away like there was never any Discussion or question I Just knew I was automatically wrong. This other person was automatically right.

Shari A Smith, Survivors Discuss Episode 2

Because I had been taught to look to others, particularly authority figures, for the truth or guidance on the path of righteousness, I never had a chance to learn how to trust myself or my own intuitions in life.

I know that I am not alone. So many of us, who have survived spiritual abuse and toxic religion, have been groomed into not trusting ourselves and to always look to someone else to have the answers to everything in life.

God did design us to think for ourselves. That’s one reason the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was present in the garden. God simply did not design us to think by ourselves. It is not irrational for very limited, contingent creatures to depend on the guidance of an omniscient, self-existing Creator to know how to live. It is eminently reasonable for us to trust in him with all our heart. That’s wisdom; that’s sanity. What’s irrational is for us to lean on our own understanding. That’s foolishness; that’s madness.

Jon Bloom (Desiring God), The Insanity of Trusting Yourself

Friend, while God recognizes our skills and capacity, He also recognizes our inability to do some things. These are some reasons why we should put our confidence in God alone.

JB Cachila (Christianity Today), Why You Should Never Trust In Yourself, But Always Trust In God

So let’s get into it, shall we? I want to take a brief look at some of the ways that toxic religion grooms people, particularly women, into distrusting themselves.¹

1. Sin Nature Makes Us Untrustworthy

Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. - Romans 8:7-8

Here is something that was impressed onto my understanding of self and spirituality from my earliest memories: I had inherited a sin nature from Adam and Eve². My body, including my brain, is susceptible to sin, and there is nothing that I can do on my own to be good; I am dead in my sins and the only good in me is that which comes from the blood of Jesus. ³

This doctrine has enabled many churches and Christian leaders to hold an extreme amount of power over their followers. If someone is told that their struggles are due to their sin nature, they will be desperate to find a way out from under that burden. This is when abusive Christian leaders, counsellors, and pastors can step in and give them the formula (that they came up with) to holiness.

This power has led to punishing women for their husband’s sin:

…church leaders said Hinkley violated her membership covenant with Village Church by having her legal marriage to Jordan Root annulled without seeking reconciliation after he confessed to her that he is sexually stimulated by little children and had viewed child pornography throughout their courtship and marriage. Root was not disciplined because he repented and entered counseling, but his access to children was restricted.

…In February Karen Root (who later returned to using her maiden name) notified church leaders she was withdrawing her membership. The elders refused to accept her resignation and put her under church discipline for spurning their attempt at pastoral care.

Bob Allen (Baptist News Global), Man Confesses To Child Porn; Church Disciplines His Wife

This power has led leaders to force LGBTQIA+ people into heavily abusive conversion therapy practices:

“Conversion therapy did indeed break me. But I also thought it was remaking me…

And after about 20 gruelling fortnightly sessions… I was still attracted to men. But just like 2 Corinthians 5:17 had promised, I felt I was more in Christ, the old me had died. Or at least shrunk so much he might as well have been dead. 

In hindsight, my Living Waters guidebook was nothing short of a death manifesto, a long winded oxymoron to help me find God’s love through self-hatred. An instruction manual on ways to self-harm, but wrapped up as love and delivered with kindness.

Patrick McIvor (KitKennedy.com), How I Survived The LGBTQA+ Conversion Movement

And power to prevent people from accessing to basic mental health tools like therapy (with a trained and licensed professional) and medication:

The Komisarjevsky family was involved with a conservative, strict church that taught separation from “the world.” According to the Hartford Courant online, “Their church rejected psychology, psychiatry, or any kind of mental health treatment, and so did Komisarjevsky’s parents.” The children did not receive sufficient mental health treatment once the sexual abuse was discovered.

Just before turning 15, Joshua set a boarded-up gas station on fire. He was hospitalized in a mental health ward because police recognized that he was depressed and suicidal. He had also begun experimental drug use. Joshua was receptive to counseling treatment and medications at the time; however, his father did not want him on medication and instead sent him to a faith-based residential treatment program.

JoyS, Tragic Misguidance: Gothard’s View On Mental Heath Treatment and the Petit Family Murders

2. Feelings are deceptive

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
- Jeremiah 19:9

Raise your hand if you grew up with this prooftext being used to teach you that you cannot trust your feelings.

I certainly did. I remember a time when this verse brought great comfort to me because I believed I couldn’t trust my feelings. If I was intrinsically untrustworthy because I was blinded by my own sinful and wicked heart, then I no longer had to be responsible for my life. However, since God was perfect and holy, He could be trusted. So all I had to do was step back from my own life and let “Jesus take the wheel.”

This is why Proverbs 3:5-6 became my “life verse” (remember those?):

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. - Proverbs 3:5-6

In this passage from Proverbs, I found a sense of guidance;  there is an idea here that if I trust in God, and hand over all my decision-making responsibilities, I would lead a safe life. 

If we allow ourselves to believe that we are somehow good enough or wise enough to lead our own lives, then surely our sinful and wicked hearts will lead us astray. But if we take a step back, then we can hand control to our lives, hearts, and souls to someone else. We never have to worry about trusting ourselves, because we know we can't, but that's okay! We have God, church, and church culture to do all the thinking for us. 

Now the weight is getting a bit heavier. I'm not only holding onto ingrained beliefs that my sin nature makes it impossible to trust my ability to reason and make good and righteous decisions, but now my emotions are also suspect. If my heart is desperately wicked, how could I ever trust it when my anger shows up in response to harmful teaching? My anger could, very easily, be my sinful and wicked heart rebelling against God. 

3. Women Are Easily Deceived

 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. - 1 Timothy 2:11-14, KJV

This idea that men must be the head of the church and home for the spiritual safety of women and children was a staple in my home growing up. 

I was taught to believe that poor little Eve was the person who was deceived and due to her ignorance in the garden of Eden, all women, in all times, and in all places are by nature susceptible to the devil’s lives.

(Let’s just ignore the fact that Adam knew it was wrong to eat the fruit but willfully did so anyway, which should make all men, in all times, and in all places willful sinners incapable to leading their wives, but I digress…)

Because of this creation story, I was led to believe that only my father or male pastors could divine spiritual truth and keep me from wandering off the straight and narrow path. A woman who may or may not have existed millennia ago, and who believed a lie the moment an omniscient God seemingly disappeared, means that I, as a woman in the 21st century, could not trust her own thoughts or feelings.

But why should Eve’s being beguiled in the Garden of Eden cause Paul to say that women should be silent in church? The answer must be that women in general have a tendency to be more easily duped than men. Because of this tendency, they are not to be teachers, or preachers, or hold an office (which implies authority) in church. The Bible does balance things out. The very fact that Adam was not duped, but sinned against God fully knowing what he was doing, means that he was more culpable. Adam is more responsible for the sin by which the world fell than Eve, and, in fact, it is usually called “Adam’s sin.”

Peter Ditzel, The Role Of Women In The Church

So now, I was fighting against three layers of spiritually abusive teaching:

1. Because I am human, I was born with a sin nature. That sin nature means that I am desperately wicked and prone to make all the wrong choices if I were allowed to think for myself
2. My feelings cannot be trusted. They are inherently deceptive and wicked, and the more space I can get from my feelings, the better.
3. Due to my XX chromosomes and female body parts, I am intrinsically incapable of leading my own spiritual life. I will always need a man to be my spiritual leader and keep me from deception

Is it any wonder why so many of us struggle with trusting ourselves? We were set up for failure.

The good news is that we are not stuck. We can learn to trust our thoughts, our intuitions, and our feelings. We are fully capable human beings and we have the ability to make good decisions. We can learn how to listen to what our bodies and our feelings are communicating to us.

It won’t be an overnight process. Rewiring our brains takes time and effort, but it is doable. Here are a few tips that may be helpful. These are merely suggestions and are not prescriptive. We all have to find our own way through this life, so just take what is helpful:

1. Start small. Choose a low-stakes item. What brand of toothpaste do you want to buy? There is no wrong choice, only what YOU want and feel would be good for you. Buy yourself some clothes that make you feel good in your own skin.
2. Therapy (with a licensed professional) is also helpful for working through whatever obstacles you may have to overcome to learn how to come back to yourself in this way. Reclamation Collective is a great resource for finding therapists trained in religious trauma.
3. Find community that doesn’t hand out formulas, but embraces whoever you find yourself on your journey and supports where you are trying to go.

Do you have anything you’d add to this list? What has been helpful for you in learning to trust yourself as you heal from high control religion?

---

1. Scriptures used in this post are not a judgment on the verses themselves, but rather an analysis on how Bible verses are being used to groom people into toxic and abusive situations. ↩︎
2. Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned – Romans 5:12 ↩︎
3. Side note: years ago, I wrote an entire post about the abusive nature of this theology here ↩︎