What is Spiritual Trauma?
Spiritual trauma is felt as disconnection from God, but there is a path through it.
The world is a wonderful and hard place.
You do the work every day of caring for yourself and others in many ways – nourishment, gathering, quiet, labor, errands, sorting data, making choices. Being human takes energy, effort, and tenacity.
Spiritual practices and communities are meant to bolster our sense of meaning, to help us feel less alone and less burdened by the daily work or the hard stuff of life. Spiritual communities are meant to give us energy. Through sacraments, words of hope, and a place and people to lean on, we grow no matter the terrain of our life. Life becomes more navigable with these things. The spiritual practices and the support of a spiritual community tie us to daily, weekly, yearly reminders that God has not forgotten us, God is present with us in all of life.
Spiritual trauma is disconnection
Spiritual trauma is when something disrupts our sense of connection to God. It may be religious trauma, when a religious system or organized teaching robs our agency, our sense of self, or brings us fear rather than connection with God. But spiritual trauma is broader also. It doesn't need to be a perpetuation of abuse directly from a spiritual system itself, but might be abuse by someone we trusted which then impacts our view and attachment to God.
Spiritual trauma can be a slow distrust creeping in but feeling as though we have nowhere to go with our questions and so we feel isolated and far from support. Our sense of spiritual safety is especially eroded when the center of our worship life or spiritual community harms or disappoints us.
There may be accountability needed which never comes. There may be harm wrought left unnoticed. There may be silence when there should have been justice.
Spiritual trauma often comes from disappointment in the practices or the people that once represented God to us, explicitly or implicitly. We are left whispering or crying out:
"Where have you gone, God?"
"I thought you were on my side, God."
"You could have protected me God."
"Why does evil win, God."
All of these are natural questions, often cited by humans across the centuries of sacred and secular literature. It does not make us feel less frustrated or alone when we ask them. When they crop up, we need a season of healing. God invites us to a season of healing. We often try to find a way around this healing, reasonably, because getting closer to pain and fear never sounds like a good idea. We also sometimes have no language for what we have experienced or a place to say it.
The way is through
And the path is forward, but we need a little bit of a guide.
Yet, here is the impasse to our healing: God as Guide was a risk. People or things that represent God were also a risk. But we are spiritual creatures and we cannot unspiritualize ourselves into something safer. The work and wonder of spiritual trauma is finding a new path with people, words, and practices that honor the risk.
I want to invite you to honor that risk within yourself on the pathway out of spiritual trauma below.
In some situations, hiking is safer with a buddy system so we don't feel lost or there is someone to notice if we need a hand up the hill. You might walk through the pathway with a companion.
And in some situations, having someone who has walked the trail before and has a bit of expertise about the trail is a good idea. I want to invite you to a spiritual trauma webinar for A Pathway Out of Spiritual Trauma. In this webinar we will cover the five trail markers, providing psychological and spiritual information and a gentle, experiential practice through the pathway.
There is hope on this path, keeping us connected to God while being honest about hurt, harm, and being human. Start with step one and give your soul space to heal.
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Follow Heidi on Instagram, Substack, and at heidigoehmann.com for more on spirituality and hope and healing in mental health
Provisions for the Road
Church hurt can cast a long shadow...
If religious spaces or leaders have hurt you, or you work with those who have been hurt, this webinar is for you!
- Saturday, October 24
- Time: 9 AM Pacific | 10 AM Mountain | 11 AM Central | 12 PM Eastern
- Cost: $25 (or Pay What You Want)
Trauma-Informed & Faith-Grounded: Taught by a licensed mental health therapist who is also a Christian, and theologically grounded. Heidi will give you clinical tools that are rooted in theological soil and respectful of your agency, doubt, and story.
Food for Thought
Things the team found interesting this week, no endorsement implied.
We Had Hoped
By Nathan Ryan at Mocking Bird
"The gospel isn’t a list of rules or disciplines or life hacks; it’s not a code of morality or a philosophy; it’s a balm.
It seeks to heal us, first, by validating and sanctifying our God-given sense that life is, indeed, a story — that it does, in the end, make sense. The gospel affirms our storytelling nature, then unveils the truth:..."
This is a great read for anyone tired of trying to make their life into a story worth telling.
Hello, a way through
By Liv Booth on Substack
“Every time it storms I’m lost.
But we’ve made it through before!
The energy, the risk, the cost.
But we’ve made it through before!”...
Visions from Julian
by C.S. Lewis on C.S. Lewis Official Substack
C.S. Lewis reads Julian of Norwich for the first time. Half the post is Julian's text, half is Lewis thinking out loud: "Now that is a good turn given to [the Christian] view of the whole created universe: for to say that it is bad, as some are inclined to do, is blasphemous and Manichean—but to say that it is small... that seems just right.
