If you have found yourself on the other side of spiritual abuse, then you know how hard it is to extricate from the community or relationship in which you experienced spiritual abuse. You know because you have become so accustomed to who you are when you are in the midst of abuse that you find yourself reverting back to communities and relationships that have the same sort of rhetoric as the community within which you experienced spiritual abuse.
It’s much harder to do the work of becoming the person you were created to be.
It means you have to go back to those dark places and dark experiences of spiritual abuse. It means you have to ask yourself if the guilt and shame, anxiety, pride, and exclusion are symptoms of spiritual abuse or something inherently a part of you. It means you have to fight to create new thought patterns, new self-talk, and new ways to look at the world.
It’s much harder to do the work of becoming the person you were created to be.
But when you do the hard work of fighting through what you were taught in a unhealthy community of faith, then you can see the transformative power of God’ love in yourself. You become a living testimony to what God can do. You become the safe place for others to come and heal and hope for wholeness.
It’s much harder to do the work of becoming the person you were created to be.
And sometimes you will be tired and worn out and you will fall back into the same patterns or abusive relationships or abusive faith communities or you yourself will become someone who used spiritual abuse to exert power over someone else. Thanks be to God that the journey of becoming the person you were created to be is full of forgiveness and others who are on their way to wholeness.