Messages that Hurt

“Every hour that we are awake, we are told twenty-two times that we are not rich, thin, young, beautiful, ripped, or stylish enough.”

When I first came across this quote in the book Healing Spiritual Wounds, I had one of those Wait! What? moments. There was something altogether unbelievable about what I had just read. The idea that we are riddled with advertising and messages in an attempt to get us to buy another product wasn’t new - if anything, twenty-two messages seemed a little low. My pause for reflection was about what those messages say to us about us.

You’re not good enough.
You’re worthless.
You don’t matter.

How overwhelming!
How discouraging!
How damaging!

Even if this number is remotely true, it’s no wonder that so many people struggle with shame and unhealthy ideas about themselves. We are constantly being told that we are not enough. Maybe we resist for a while but for many of us a sense of learned helplessness can set in. It can feel futile to resist. Worse still, the incessant repetition of these messages means that these harmful ideas have a way of wedging themselves into the deep-down circuitry of our brain – the place where assumptions come from. A place that can be incredibly difficult to change.

Once these messages lay down their deep, spindly roots, they begin to reproduce. Negative notions of ourselves have a way of coloring the way that we interact with our partners or loved ones. If our own childhood was blanketed by an ever-present shame, our default may be to replicate that shame in the lives of our own children. What is meant as a simple complaint from our spouse about something we do at home, can devolve into an all-out war triggered by deeply-rooted messages from some other time in our lives. Though they’re often the loudest and boldest, it would clearly be unfair to ascribe all of the blame for these ideas to advertisers and their ulterior motives.

One of the sources of shaming messages that I often see in my practice is a person’s faith community. It doesn’t much matter if that faith community is an active part of an individual’s life or if it is represented by internalized messages from the past. A structure that insists that there is a god who demands that people comply with strict codes of belief or behavior or face eternal punishment is often the birthplace of many damaging messages. Do right or be punished. You’re only accepted if you believe or do as we say. Women are second-class citizens and have to be sure never to cause a man to stumble by wearing too much makeup or clothes that are overly revealing. Sexuality is sinful and shouldn’t be thought about.

For so many of us, the faith community is the place where we find a sense of identity. We share our lives with those who believe like us and approach life as we do ourselves. It is important, though, to know that this identity is not always healthy. Complicating things is that we’re taught that faith communities are good and have our best interests in mind. Often, the belief is that God called these communities into existence to do some sort of sacred work on earth. But what happens when we hear these messages over and over?

God loves you when you do good.
You do not deserve God’s love.
You are weak, but God is strong.

These messages are just like any other negative message that we might hear. When they settle in and we rehearse them over and over, they become our truth. Along with doctrines of the universe and eternity,  we can adopt the tangential beliefs that we are frail, dependent, not-good-enoughs. Despite our communities’ best efforts, we can come to accept devastating ideas about ourselves and our value as human beings.

As a therapist, I am constantly listening for the messages about ourselves and others that have become deeply embedded in our brains. What are the ideas about what it means to be you that you carry with you every single day? I am weak. I am not worthy. I am not a good person. My value is conditional. These are not messages that are helpful or healthy. These are messages that are limiting, controlling, and worthless.

What is is like to recite these ideas about yourself?

I am valuable.
I am loved just as I am.
I am enough.

What surfaces for you as you say these words? Do they resonate? Even if it feels awkward, is there some part of you that wants these things to be true? Do you feel a sense of warmth or a sense of emptiness?

How you experience these questions will say something about what you believe about yourself. If you’re able, make rehearsing these phrases a part of your daily routine. The only way to extract the negativity permanently is to replace it is positive, healthy messages. If you’re not able to say these things about yourself – if it feels untrue or inauthentic – maybe it’s time to find a trusted confidant, a friend, or a therapist to begin processing the difficulties and working towards fostering a deeper sense of self-compassion.

If the beliefs about yourself and others were reinforced by a spiritual community, maybe it’s time to reconstruct your ideas about God. As the author of Healing Spiritual Wounds asked, “What’s the point of religion if it doesn’t bring you hope?” Questions like these may be disruptive but, when they’re processed in a place of safety, they can open up new ways of seeing the world, others, and ourselves that can help us believe in ourselves again.

How to Heal from Spiritual Trauma

Faith is an important element of many people’s story. Whether you were raised in attending church or in a home that was more secular, our histories often contain elements of faith or spirituality, even if those definitions vary wildly from family to family. For some, spirituality speaks to the sense that we are all connected and that there is an energy – some would say a divine energy – that flows through all of the natural world. For others, the idea of faith evokes images of an old man in the sky character who is wholly responsible for creation and punishes those that would defy him.

Being a part of a faith community can have many positive benefits. We are inherently social beings and joining with others who share our beliefs can be enriching. It can increase our social bonds. We form relationships with others who can come alongside us when we need help. Knowing that there are those who share a similar outlook on the world as our own can help to validate our experiences. Awe and wonder, as is experienced in the worship of God or when we engage in a set of contemplative practices, have been shown to make important contributions to our overall sense of well-being.

It’s important to know that not all communities are healthy, safe spaces. In their unhealthy state,  communities like these can become oppressive or damaging. Depending on how a community interprets and practices a particular set of beliefs, a person may be exposed to harmful guilt and shame. People may be told that they’re not good enough in their current state and need to repent or risk burning in hell. Research has shown that if we believe in a god that is angry and frightening, our stance toward the world will likely be one of anger and fear. In the unhealthiest of faith communities, those in power might even take advantage of others for their own gain, justifying the experience with belief or scripture.

In the clinical world, trauma is not a word that is used lightly. However, when it comes to experiences like these, we can certainly become traumatized. When painful or frightening situations are intense, and outside of our control, our bodies have evolved techniques essential to our survival. These are most widely known as our fight or flight responses, however, that doesn’t capture the whole story. Without our awareness, we go through a sequence of responses that increase in intensity. The first is a social response. In times of fear, maybe we scream or yell. We engage in some social interaction as our first attempt to stop the situation. If that doesn’t work, our bodies move into preparations for fighting or running away - this is the classic fight or flight that you may have heard of. Adrenaline, cortisol, and other chemicals are released and surge through our bodies. If we cannot fight or flee from the problem, our final response is to freeze. It is in this final phase that we often hear about people who dissociate from reality and have an experience of observing themselves and whatever is happening to them. At each level of response, our brains process information differently. We store memories in a way that is optimized for identifying potentially similar threats more quickly in the future. Sometimes, this even means that the memories are incomplete. The particular characteristics of these memories are often what we think about when we think about trauma. Smells, sounds, or objects associated with a traumatizing event can trigger our body’s response sequence as if we were experiencing the event all over again. In these situations, our brains have filed some component of the memory away as being a threat all on its own.

Our bodies are sensitive to threats of any form. This sort of survival response and the subsequent potential for trauma can result from a psychological threat or a threat to our membership in a community in the same way as it would for a physical threat. Trauma is the experience of being in danger and unable to get away.

Spiritual trauma occurs when we have one of these experiences within a spiritual community. One example is from members of the LGBTQ community who are raised in the church. Commonly, they are told that their attractions, their sexual identity, is wrong and sinful. They receive the messages that God must have made a mistake when God created them. Now,  in order to stay within a community that has been an important part of their lives, they have to displace a core part of who they are. When a person is constantly invalidated like this, it can become traumatizing.

Another unfortunate but common example is when people are the victims of physical abuse that becomes justified with beliefs and biblical references. Most often, this takes the form of a father or husband justifying his role as the head of the household and exerting power to ensure that all other family members are submissive to him.

These and dozens of other experiences can be traumatizing in and of themselves. However, many people add that their interior space often does not feel safe either. For those that believe in God, if God knows their heart and mind, then it might also be sinful to question the correctness of what is happening. There is always someone watching. Many people who experience this kind of spiritual trauma do not know what it means to have a place of safety, even in their internal world. When everything is judgment, it can feel like a part of you has to die in order to protect yourself as a whole.

HOW TO HEAL
It can feel cliché but healing begins with recognizing that you have experienced some sort of trauma. Ultimately, healing is about the integration of those internal parts of your that had to be exiled in order to keep you safe. It is about allowing the disintegrated memories to be relieved of their traumatizing power. So much of your story has to be deconstructed and reconstructed in a way that brings life rather than fear and anxiety.

As good as this might sound, it can feel disruptive. For many people, learning to see the world through a different faith-lens can feel scary, especially if you have been told that you must believe a certain way or risk eternal punishment. This is why safety is critical to this work. Finding a therapist who can help you hold your difficult questions and experiences in a way that allows you to grow is essential.  This person should help equip you with tools to manage the trauma response when you feel it arising as well as helping you to reprocess the experience. It might also mean evaluating what it means to leave a spiritual community and a therapist can help you navigate the anxiety that might arise when a decision like this is the right one to make.

Healing takes time and effort. But we can heal from traumatic wounds, even spiritual ones. We can learn to see the divine in an entirely new way.