Then, on Tuesday, five Swans players were stood down by the club over a breach of standards for the rest of the season. This happened after three women, who’d been part of their post-match partying, reported the players’ behaviour to police.

There’s much that’s already been said about the epidemic of male violence in this country and the way that is usually handled. And, about the entitlement held by some men over women’s bodies, more so it seems when their services are paid for.

But what felt so familiar to me this week was the deep disappointment and confusion, the cognitive dissonance and anger we feel when people, groups and institutions we belong to, care about and feel proud of, let us down.

Over the last few days I’ve read and heard words like “empty, incredibly sad, mad, angry, ashamed, betrayed and frustrated.” I’ve heard and felt these before.

Nostalgia without the fondness.

I remember the morning Brian Houston told the church about his father Frank Houston’s “moral failing”. More than 20 years ago now the scene is still etched in my memory. A few days earlier a friend outside the church had told me about a website that had outed Frank as being abusive. Being the loyal soldier I was, in the days before smart phones or social media, I called Brian’s PA and told her what I’d heard.

As he walked into the service that morning Brian looked over and gave me a nod. I felt proud to have been part of what I saw as protecting the reputation of the church and therefore the gospel, as I had been overtly taught to do.

We heard him talk about how finding out about his father’s failing had been devastating for him, like “planes crashing into the twin towers of his heart”, using a recent metaphor of the time.

The details of the failing weren’t described, rather, spoken about with innuendo. I could not have imagined it involved pedophilia, multiple victims, threats and many decades. Having been part of the church since age 13 and grown with it from 80 people into a megachurch, I felt for Brian and supported him in what must have been a difficult thing to share publicly. He told us he feared his kids would lose their faith, that his father had been stood down from ministry. The signs were there but it would be years before I understood the very dark reality and the ways in which Brian sought to cope, and the ways in which the leadership of both the church and the wider movement sought to keep it quiet.

I wish this was the only example of the porous structure. Deconstructing church as an institution came long before deconstructing faith for me and was destabilising to say the least. I was able to keep church and God separate for some time. You can download my story here if you’re interested.

Since then I’ve come to understand terms and concepts from Jennifer Freyd’s1 work like “betrayal trauma”, “betrayal blindness” and “institutional betrayal”.

Let me break them down for you and see if you recognise your experience. They’ll apply if you’re a Swan’s fan or recovering from the pain of being disillusioned (and so much more for so many of us) by a faith community.

Betrayal trauma

The core insight from Betrayal Trauma Theory is that it isn’t just the event or relational rupture itself that causes us injury (we know trauma is subjective), it’s also about the relationship to us, of the person/group/institution that caused it. If we depend on them for security, identity, care and safety, this deepens the impact of trauma.

Betrayal blindness

This is the cognitive dissonance I talk about with people in counselling all the time. We’re trying to hold two impossible things together. “This person/institution is good, safe, trustworthy” and “this person/institution has harmed me or let me down.”

The dissonance becomes part of the injury and causes confusion, numbing and difficulty trusting our own perception. Conscious awareness of betrayal or breach of trust is harder to acknowledge if we are dependant on the person/institution for social and spiritual connection or our sense of identity. It becomes easier to minimise and diminish what has happened as an adaptive strategy.

Institutional betrayal

When we experience harm and an institution covers it up, down plays it and/or seeks to protect itself and its reputation over the people it’s meant to represent and care for, Freyd’s research shows this makes the impact of trauma worse. It’s what we experience, as Peter Levine says, “in the absence of an empathetic witness”.2

This is so common in religious institutions and so very damaging. It can have a vicarious effect on people who see it happening also, not only the people who directly experience it.

And it’s common in the boys’ clubs too, we see it in sport. All. The. Time.

Over the years I’ve heard so many people say, see this is why you need to keep your faith in God not the church. That’s never really made sense to me. We’re taught we are the body of Christ, literally our bodies in church are him. And we use words like “family”, the sign on the damn door says, “Welcome Home”. How can we NOT feel betrayed and disappointed when our sense of belonging, identity, purpose, community and connection to place is part of this group?

That last sentence applies to the AFL also. A sports club is central to where home is, it’s cross-generational and represents childhood memories, tribal identity and social life. This week, after some clunky language like the situation the players “found themselves in”, the Sydney club moved quickly to acknowledge the breach; apologised and affirmed their commitment to do better. The players received a consequence for their actions and may still face police charges. Let’s hope it helps to shift cover-up culture and a changing public conversation.

This is light years ahead of the way of accountability in faith groups I know of and hear about on my blue lounge every week. #notallchurches of course, many are working to be safer, but most.

Regardless, it still stings. We ache to belong as humans, we’re wired for it. And we want to admire talent and respect leadership. It’s a shock when the curtain is pulled back and we find the structure doesn’t hold.

All of which to say, be kind to yourself if this is you. Trust can be so hard, these examples are not evidence that you’re somehow stupid or naive to hand yours over, just that you have hope that it’s possible to belong to a group that genuinely cares about and represents you. There’s nothing stupid or naive about that.

And if you need individual support, please reach out.

Warmly,

Jane

If you’d like to connect with me you can leave a comment here, visit my website www.janekennedycounselling.com.au or find me on Instagram.

I work on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Inner West and see clients there in-person and online Australia & New Zealand wide.

If you subscribe to The Sentimental Non-Believer you’ll be prompted to a link to download a free copy of my eBook of the same name, which is my story of leaving high-control religion.

Subscribe now

‘Done’ refers to a category of people who have had enough of organised religion. They’re different to ‘nones’ who have never been part of a religious system or worldview, and they are working to untangle themselves from identity formed within these.

‘Dones’ may still hold a sense of spirituality despite leaving religion, in fact the data indicates they do, and they’re figuring out how to carry their disillusionment and rebuild their idea of Self.

They’re showing up more and more in survey data such as the research Van Tongeran conducted across the US, Netherlands, Hong Kong and New Zealand, and I suspect we’re about to meet more of them in the upcoming Australian Census.

If you had to guess, what percentage of the Australian population do you think identifies as being affiliated with a religion?

At the last Census in 2021, it was 53 per cent. The ‘no religion’ category rose to 39 per cent up from 30 per cent in 2016 and for the first time since data has been collected those identifying as Christian fell under 50 per cent, to 44.

Younger people are more likely to tick ‘no religion’ and it will be interesting to see how the numbers change in this category from 2021 in the data collected in the coming weeks.

New to the 2026 Census.

After the 2021 Census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics acknowledged that gender identity data had not meaningfully been captured and have included better questions in the upcoming 2026 survey. Broader options to describe sexual identity will also be included.

So this is the first time we’ll be able to cross reference religious affiliation and people who are LGBTQIA+.

This matters for our understanding of religious harm and spiritual trauma among the queer community and it matters that religions and denominations will be able to see those who remain affiliated.

It will give us an important, albeit still incomplete, picture of queer Australians and religion. I’m hoping it will open up a conversation about both, the harm experienced in faith contexts and some taking back of harm by those LGBTQIA+ folk who still hold on to a faith they were told they weren’t worthy of.

More about the ‘Dones’.

Back to Van Tongeran’s Dones. The increase in people who fit this category is clear and reflects the loss of trust so many of us feel in institutions and how much more broadly we now experience the world. The landscape of religion is changing, people are walking away and seeking new ways to find meaning, deepen connection and experience flourishing.

The Dones were often central to their (our) congregation’s life. They gave money, served in leadership, committed time and the faith community was central to their week. The Dones haven’t slipped out from the back row, they were up the front.

Why we leave, according to the research.

Cultural Stagnation Van Tongeran says this is when we learn and grow and realise our religion no longer reflects our values or understanding of the world.

Religious Trauma I may know something about this one. This is when our experience of religion causes us or others harm and we just can’t be part of it any longer.

Simplistic views of suffering Often something seismic happens to us, people close to us or in the world around us and our religion can’t hold it adequately or explain why life can be so cruel and unfair. The answers don’t feel big enough.

The problematic label More meta, this is when we no longer align or agree with what religion stands for, or when we no longer want to be affiliated with other religious people as we feel as though we aren’t like them any more.

How we leave. These are Van Tongeran’s four D’s.

Disbelief We lose belief or doctrinal conviction. The intellectual and theological ground shifts. What you once believed no longer holds. This is often where the process begins, though not always. For me the belief in a literal hell started to feel distressing.

Disengagement The doing of faith or religious practices falls away. This can be before or after the believing does. We can withdraw, stop praying or engaging without this being conscious. I realised one day it had been months since I’d read my bible.

Discontinuance We stop attending, serving and belonging. Perhaps it’s just a Sunday here or there, until it feels permanent. This is often the most painful dimension because it’s where the relational losses happen. We experience huge shifts in community, friendships and the social world built around the institution.

Disaffiliation We stop calling ourselves Christian, Muslim, Jewish. We perhaps tentatively at first (it took me years) depart from religious identity in how we speak and this is often the last thing to go.

All of this matters because people are seeking connection, spiritual practices, experiences of awe, answers for hard questions and places to find meaning. And we don’t know how to find them separate from religion. Not really.

In these lands now called Australia - unless we are part of an Indigenous community, a cultural diaspora group or a family where belonging, creativity and curiosity are fostered - religion has been the only other avenue.

This matters also because this ache often can’t be explained by a client in a counselling session and many practitioners are feeling it too, perhaps without language to express it or support others.

So what now?

I don’t really know how to neatly wrap this up. It’s a tension we will have to live with for some time until new ways to connect with one another emerge.

Leaving my faith community, and then later my faith, left a gaping, painful wound I didn’t know how to talk about or find support for.

I still feel great nostalgia for the connection I once felt, the rhythms of life I once knew and the worldview that felt so secure.

So many people have said to me over the years that I could just go back. I could “return to my first love” and reconcile to God. If only it were that easy, but everything has changed.

Community for me now is smaller, much less frenetic and becoming more local.

Spiritual practices for me now are nurturing and meaningful and found in everyday things I can do to ground and remind myself to stay in my body when life is overwhelming.

Wisdom is found in stories, hearing how people have been where I am at this age and stage and continued on.

Experiences of awe are found in nature, stargazing, walking into canyons, listening to the thousands of cockatoos that fly over my house twice a day.

So while I may be Done with religion, I have created a life worth living on the other side. Let’s see what the Census shows us this time next year and, beyond that, consider what this means for how we relate to one another and seek to find answers and meaning in an increasingly complex world.

I’d love to hear if this resonates with you or if it sparks some new thoughts.

Warmly,

Jane

If you’d like to connect with me you can leave a comment here, visit my website www.janekennedycounselling.com.au or find me on Instagram.

I work on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Inner West and see clients there in-person and online Australia & New Zealand wide.

If you subscribe to The Sentimental Non-Believer you’ll be prompted to a link to download a free copy of my eBook of the same name, which is my story of leaving high-control religion.

Subscribe now

Repetition allows the brain to anticipate and amplify pleasure and reward. Lyrics and melodies can become an emotional anchor as we know well from the ways church worship was an environment that drew us in and kept us going back for more.

This album has that familiar pull. I find myself singing one liners from the songs and letting them settle in as my imagination makes meaning.

Perfume + Milk is sultry and raw. It takes me right back to the many, many times over decades that I tried to make sense of my internal world and begged God for reprieve from grief and pain, fear and panic. I’d been taught to expect miracles, to receive instant healing, to have faith and trust in the Lord with all my heart.

I never really knew what that meant, to trust with all my heart1. The verse goes on to say I should ‘lean not on my own understanding’. To ‘acknowledge Him in all my ways’ so that He would ‘make my paths straight’.

My brain would fire off connections every which way at that verse. I would repeat over and over I trust you I trust you I trust you and wait to no longer feel fear. I would assume that if my paths didn’t feel straight it meant I wasn’t trusting enough. I would try harder. I’d reject my own understanding which meant repressing the emotions that were confusing me.

Would straight paths mean that I would prosper? My marriage would be healed? Shame would lift? Mental illness vanish in the people around me? Did it mean everything would work out, or that if it didn’t, I’d be ok? I wondered how that was different to people who didn’t trust in God. I didn’t really see much difference in people’s life experience either way. We’d say, ‘I don’t know how people live without Jesus’, but in truth I wasn’t ready to process then, I knew plenty who did and were doing just fine.

Despite my questions I would continue to return to my hope and belief that I was held and safe even if I didn’t understand how, or what that even really meant in practical terms. And when life was deeply painful I assumed it was because I was doing it wrong and that this hardship was my lot. I learned to shame myself and internalise abuse or rather I was taught to. Forgive, cover, keep short accounts of sin, speak life not death, don’t cause division.

Leftovers from the 80’s evangelicalism I was formed in also had me going down the front at the end of youth meetings tearfully proclaiming I’d be prepared to die and be martyred for Christ should the need arise. That leaves you with a weird sense of existentialism that can negate the right to a peaceful life.

A line from Perfume + Milk echoes another I would sing over and over trying to settle myself. Florence sings of her healing journey all shall be well, all shall be well. After losing all five of his children in 1873 Horatio Spafford wrote the well known and much loved hymn, ‘It is well with my soul’. When sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot you have taught me to say, it is well with my soul.

I mean. All of his children. His wife was with their four girls who drowned at sea and somehow she survived. I can tell you right now I would not have. But that song used to stir something in me. Whatever my lot! You have taught me to say! I used to belt it out. I had a bespoke artwork made, the words beautifully painted on wood. It is well with my soul. But so often it really wasn’t.

So why does it pull me in when Florence sings it? Perhaps it’s a reclaiming on the other side of faith deconstruction, perhaps it’s still alive in me, that hope. As I sing along I land on the line before: the one pink ribbon that holds me together and I imagine it, that pink ribbon. Delicate, feminine, whimsical. Not particularly useful in holding together anything heavier than a child’s ponytail or a wrapped gift. But its softness is somehow all I need now.

I’ve lost trust in God and many people. I’m disillusioned with systems and institutions I grew up believing were there to support me. But wonderfully, against all odds and being taught my whole life it was dangerous and fickle, I have learned to trust myself.

It’s something I talk with people about all the time now. How do we do this when we’ve been taught we are nothing without God and our every move is scrutinised by those in authority over us? We also learned to surveil ourselves preemptively and so finding a gut instinct or confidence in our own decision making can be excruciating.

But creating soft and compassionate conditions for Self trust can get us there.

Let’s start here:

What do you know without needing to wrestle with knowing? I like apples, always have. The crunchier the better. In our new home in the mountains we’re 20 minutes away from an apple orchard which fills me with delight. I don’t have to decide whether or not to reach for a box of apples straight from the tree, I know it will be a good decision. And, if it happened that there were some bug-eaten or mushy apples in that box, it would still be a good decision. If life got busy and I left the box in the back of the fridge and forgot about it, it’s ok, because I have permission not to get it right all the time, for things to happen and be imperfect.

Can you list similar decisions that come from you, your Self, without doubt? Can you notice these in your day-to-day and reflect on how they feel? The ease they come to you with.

Then what about low-stakes decisions where the outcomes won’t be dire but may require some discomfort? Speaking up for yourself in a work situation or at home where you may not have before, for example. This tends to push us a bit further but we often know what we need, we can trust how we feel around certain people and how we don’t like being treated or spoken to. Can you stay with that longer than usual? Feel the rush of energy that surfaces, imagine how you’d like to be treated or spoken to? Honour that?

I think the duality of high-control religion often muddies this for us. We became so used to binaries, black and white, certainty and needing permission to do anything that we can still become frozen with fear.

I think we also feel like we can’t make mistakes lest we summons a curse, but perhaps we can lean more gently towards our human-ness. Allow for and expect mistakes as part of this experience. Practice being ok with that.

There is a therapeutic modality2 that so beautifully illustrates who we are as parts and also how at our Core, our Core Self, we are undisturb-able. We are compassionate and clear, grounded, confident and curious. Imagine if we could be with the parts of us that are scared we will mess up, are still indoctrinated to some degree, are wobbly and afraid of judgement, losing community, and being shamed.

These are not bad or failed parts or even parts that need to be healed necessarily. They are always with us but become less reactive the more compassion we show them. Imagine saying to those parts of us so scared to trust ourselves that we can hold them and keep them safe. Imagine developing our Core Self to be able sweep up and gather the scared parts and nurture them into courage.

This has become a spiritual practice for me, post-religion. Integrating these parts into my sense of Self. I love working with clients to do the same. It can be so powerful.

You are good at your core. You always have been. You can be trusted.

I think Everybody Scream has been so compelling for me these past weeks because the lyrics speak to a woman who trusts herself. She is alive and powerful.

I’ll leave you with this imagery from Sympathy Magic.

And a light coming in the window just so / The wind through my fingers / the only god that I know / And it does not want me on my knees to believe / Arms wide, head high, aching aching aching and / Alive!

Warmly,

Jane

And speaking of machines - I don’t use AI to write here. There’s something that feels dirty about that to me. I want AI to do my admin, to organise and automate things in ways that free me up to be more present to my life. To do the things my divergent mind finds overwhelming. Writing is a pleasure and a release and a connection, both to you and back to myself. Which is why I’m a bit scattered in being as consistent here as I’d like to be. I need headspace, quiet and flow time to write, all precious commodities. I feel badly about that at times but then remind myself I’m not a robot.

If you’d like to connect with me you can leave a comment here, visit my website www.janekennedycounselling.com.au or find me on Instagram.

I work on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Inner West and see clients there in-person and online Australia & New Zealand wide.

If you subscribe to The Sentimental Non-Believer you’ll be prompted to a link to download a free copy of my eBook of the same name, which is my story of leaving high-control religion.

Subscribe now

I don’t think we recover from trauma, not really, even though we use the term recovery. I use the term, often, along with healing, but I wish we had better, more granular language for it. What I think is really happening is, like in heat, storms and heavy rain, we learn to drive to the conditions. We expand, shape shift around it, hold it differently, adapt to who we are having been changed by it.

This is especially true for complex trauma, or C-PTSD. Unlike a one time event that we can isolate and frame in its beginning and end, complex trauma was/is ongoing and can be a bit stickier to unpick. It’s complex in part because it happens in contexts where we should have been safe and may have also included positive experiences. Its edges are blurry, it’s relational and often loaded with shame. It’s not as well understood as the trauma that comes from a one-time event and has been misdiagnosed and pathologised.

Like most medical science, the physiological workings of trauma itself haven’t been studied extensively in women. The vast majority of research has been done on war veterans, despite the fact that women are twice as likely to develop PTSD. So we’re still evolving in our learning about what trauma is, how it works in our bodies, how subjective it is and what is actually effective in processing it1.

Clinicians who diagnose (counsellors don’t) and who work with people who’ve experienced religious trauma, may name it Religion-Induced PTSD/C-PTSD, or use Marlene Winell’s term Religious Trauma Syndrome (tbh: I’ve never loved “syndrome” as a frame, though Winell’s work is seminal in this space). We see the residue in the counselling room, but religious trauma is still emerging in the literature and has to-date mostly produced small scale and qualitative studies on its impact. So understanding what trauma looks like, as it relates to harm experienced in faith communities, is also taking time to make it into the mainstream conversation although we seem to be gaining traction quickly. Many of us are working to increase awareness and provide language for the experience of religious trauma for survivors and practitioners.

And then we add neurodivergence.2 The experience of those with ADHD and Autism specifically, as well as that of Highly Sensitive People (HSP) can be indistinguishable from the experience of complex trauma. Challenges with emotional regulation, executive function, working memory impairment, and time-blindness as well as sensory sensitivities, social exhaustion, rigid coping routines (predictability as safety), and interoceptive disconnection can look the same. That last one, a nervous system term, just means when your therapist asks where do you feel that in your body? - you haven’t got a damn clue. Jenara Nerenberg’s Divergent Mind is probably the best thing I’ve read in understanding this. Have a look at the footnote below.

The most nuanced position in current literature is that these aren't competing explanations and it may not really matter what the cause is. A brain wired at birth and a brain wired through experience - we know that trauma changes the brain and nervous system - look largely the same. Innate neurodivergence increases vulnerability to relational trauma (through mis-attunement, masking, and social rejection), and trauma amplifies neurodivergent traits, making the two neatly entangled in many people's histories.

What my bones know, by Stephanie Foo wrecked me when I read it last year. I have always felt, my whole life, a humming, a sense that I was going a bit crazy. It felt like my clothes were on fire but people were telling me was that I was being dramatic or overly sensitive, that I just needed to try harder, or that I was lying about my experience. It set me up nicely for decades in high-control religion and well worn patterns of freeze and fawn that my nervous system used as survival mechanisms to make it through. It’s a hard memoir to read but Foo’s exploration of complex trauma is so helpful and affirming.

I’ve been called boring and high maintenance as I’ve tried to be ok in overstimulating environments that were making my head feel like it’s exploding. I’ve been exhausted by things others seem to just do as a normal part of their day without needing recovery, for as long as I can remember. I’ve been told to just have a coffee and push through which I did, to my detriment for many years until I collapsed. I do not function without sleep and find changes to my environment and routine unsettling. It takes all my strength to string a sentence together under a fluorescent light. Like so many of you whose internal worlds I get a glimpse into, I’ve spent many years shaming myself and internalising my inadequacy. Nature, stillness, movement, beauty and connection are my only real remedies for all of this and it’s noticeable how not-ok I am without them.

Was my brain/body wired this way from birth or through experience? I may never know.

Dr Ingrid Clayton whose work on Fawning has been so helpful for me, wrote a piece recently on the cost of being everyone’s safe place. It landed for me because this is what I’ve also done and what many of us also do. I don’t mean in my work, the safety created there is by design and with intention, I mean the lifelong habit of being available for others at the expense of my own needs. Of absorbing stories and picking up every change in mood or body language, reading the room with hyper vigilance. Clayton says “If I stay attuned to you, I don’t have to risk asking whether there’s room for me. If I stay in the role of helper, witness, or container, I don’t have to confront the vulnerability of having needs, limits, or a desire for mutuality.” I feel every word of that, it is such a painful part of recovery (there’s that word again) from relational trauma.

I love the work of Linda Tuxford-Adams at Neurokindred who runs a group called Stay Blasphemous, for “autistics with religious trauma”. Complex trauma, religious trauma as an extension of that, and neurodivergence create a particular intersection that’s worth naming. Michelle Moseley also works in this intersection and trains therapists in understanding it.

What my bones knew, always, was that somehow I was experiencing the world differently and it felt hard but like it must have been my fault. And because I learnt to fawn to stay safe, and diminish my own needs, it has taken me till mid-life to allow myself to believe that’s not true.

Therapy is a lot of things. It isn’t always accessible for people and it’s a blunt instrument as a stand in for community and everyday connections. But it has helped me see and understand the impact of childhood and developmental trauma, significant harm that shaped me within a faith and church system and then the acknowledgment that my brain/body is divergent.

I can now drive to these conditions with better control of the road. In many ways it’s given me clarity and feels like relief. I have options to create more capacity in my day-to-day and language to communicate what I need and what I’m experiencing. Finally.

So many of us fit this picture. Do you? Does this resonate?

I’d love to hear about your experience if so.

Warmly,

Jane

If you’d like to work with me, you can find me at janekennedycounselling.com.au.

I have a new course coming out soon called Freedom from Religious Trauma. You can find out more about it here.

The line up on my e-reader and the pile on my nightstand are always good indicators of what’s happening in my internal world, my work and my curiosities on any given weekend. I love to read, but need a good mix. I want to be delighted, amused, taken somewhere I haven’t been and when learning, I want clear framing and good research. I look for interesting thoughts and connections on Substack.

I’ll give you the list but also a few highlights. I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these too and what’s on your nightstand.

Let’s start with Delight:

I found myself completely invested in the life of a hare a few months ago. Recommended by Padraig O’Tuama, whose writing I also love and who I would listen to while he spoke literally anything, this book is so tender and well written I couldn’t put it down.

I spent some time with Padraig’s book, In the Shelter, as I started preparing for my new online resource for recovery from religious trauma, coming out next year. It’s a contemplative and beautiful read. Lyrical and poetic.

Memoirs:

The Heart Shaped Tin: On Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects, by Bee Wilson was human and lovely. I read What My Bones Know by Steph Foo. This book impacted me deeply and sent me to my journal to reflect on what my bones know.

Others included The Audacity to Be Free by Hana Assafiri of Melbourne’s Morroccan Soup Bar, The Tell by Amy Griffin, Gutsy Girls by Dr Josie McSkimming, Awake by Jen Hatmaker ( I loved this), All The Way to The River by Elizabeth Gilbert (also loved the truth telling in this and wrote about it here).

And the most recent memoir I read was the delicious Destination Moon by Lune Croissant owner Kate Reid.

As you know, I work primarily with people recovering from harm in religious spaces and cults. Here are the books I read from that category:

Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Dr Hillary McBride, Excommunicated by Craig Hoyle. Take Back Your Life by Dr Janja Lalich, Cult Trip by Anke Richter and Cult Bride by Liz Cameron. I also read BaptistLand by Christa Brown, Physically In Mentally Out by Bethany Leger and Apostate. Stories of Deconversion by Sarah Bacaller.

And, I was thrilled to write the foreword for Holy Hell: Saved So Hard I Needed Therapy by my friend and RTC team mate, Elise Heerde.

Therapy reads included:

Havening resources Fifteen Minutes to Freedom by Harry Pickens and The Science of Miracles by Dr Robin Youngson. I re-read both The Wisdom of Your Body by Dr Hillary McBride and the excellent Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. I read An Autobiography of Trauma by Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody and The Internal Family Systems Workbook by Richard Schwartz, which I really liked and have recommended to clients. My most helpful new read was Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves – and How to Find our Way Back by Dr Ingrid Clayton.

Other reads:

I realised I only read one fiction book, The Italian Secret by Tara Moss. Good for mindless checking out and a bit of revisionist history.

I’m learning so much about perimenopause that I wish I’d known 15 years ago. These are must reads. The New Menopause by Dr Mary Claire Haver and Unbreakable by Dr Vonda Wright which is what I’m reading right now.

On Substack:

This is a another mashup of people whose work is interesting to me on the levels of religious trauma, community building, repairing relationships and understanding how systems around us are collapsing. Sarah Wilson’s work This is Precious is important on that last topic but not for the faint of heart. Rest first.

I subscribe to Tia Levings’ Well Trained Wife, Clare McIvor’s Exvangelical Explainers, Shane Meyer-Holt’s Untethered, Christabel M-G’s Rich Queer Aunties on relational repair, Rosie Spinks’ What do we do now we’re here? and Esther Perel’s Entre Nous - On rethinking our relationships and rebuilding our communities. I also get Padraig O’Tuama’s thoughts on poetry in my inbox each Sunday. As mentioned, I would listen to him read the alphabet (his Poetry Unbound podcast is here), but also love to read his words that slow me down and make me pause to consider things like the use of simile as an expressive tool (when’s the last time you considered that?).

Summer reads I’m looking forward to:

Simply More by Cynthia Erivo, The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune, Guts by Melissa Leong and Jacinda Adern’s memoir which a little bird tells me I’m getting for Christmas. I’m also hoping for this one. I love a recipe book that weaves in storytelling.

Happy Reading! I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these and what’s on your list.

Warmly,

Jane

If you’d like to connect or you’re interested in counselling, you can get in touch here.

I’m a religious trauma therapist working on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Inner West. I see people in-person and online across Australia & New Zealand. I work with Havening Techniques as my main trauma recovery modality.

I’m a Co-Founder of The Religious Trauma Collective / Australia and New Zealand.

She’s been in our orbit since the days of Eat Pray Love when we watched Julia Roberts follow her journey from New York to Italy, India and Bali. I was annoyed at her then, I was going through a divorce and identified more with the one being left than the one doing the leaving. But still, I envied her ability to leave and find adventure. I understood that pull of the world and the way travel helps us disconnect and wished I could go too. It seemed indulgent and liberating.

I’ve followed her work since then, she’s a beautiful writer and an interesting person. I was blown away by the truth telling in her new book and while our stories are very different, ooft, she’s a fellow codependent and articulates what it’s like to come to understand, and then own, that part of her. I won’t spoil it for you, but there’s nothing quite as brave as telling people about the darkest and most shame filled moments of your life and the ways you participated in them.

She writes about the AA type groups she attends and the way they all start with recognising and admitting that your life has become unmanageable and you need support. I struggle with the language of higher power1 and the rigidity of the AA model and many of my clients do too. But what does work for us all is coming to this admission - what I am doing is not working and I need to heal in community.

I remember my therapist telling me in one of those, “I’m going to hold your hand while I say this” type voices, that I may benefit from reading up about codependence. She talked to me about how we actively abandon ourselves when we have a history of trauma and how common it is for people in coercive environments (hello high-control church context). It came after many sessions where she would ask things like “why is that your responsibility?” or “how can you prioritise yourself more?”. We would talk about healthy boundaries and conflict and I would note how that made me want to throw up. There were suggestions when I left the humanitarian sector burnt out from trying to save the world, that I take a year off any sort of volunteering, serving or giving of my energy to a cause. Both financially and with my time. What??!!

Like Liz, my identity was completely caught up in helping, serving, giving and loving - at the expense of my own wellbeing. When I did allow rest, I would collapse. I couldn’t find the middle ground. Nothing was too much, “whatever it takes” kept me on the treadmill.

So What is Codependence?

It’s not the opposite of independence. It’s not being needy or clingy. It’s saying “I can’t be ok if you’re not ok”, or “I will choose you over me every time.” It’s, as my therapist gently pointed out, abandoning ourselves in our relationships and often in our work, because we haven’t experienced what it’s like to safely ask for what we need.

It’s so, so easy to fall into codependence in a faith community. We can go from I am wanted, I am needed to I am exploited2 in a heart beat. High-control faith spaces are porous. Boundaries don’t really exist and conflict is unhealthy, it often looks like shaming and manipulation. So we keep trying to please and make things right, earn approval.

Codependence is a relational survival strategy where our worth, safety, and identity are tied to meeting the needs, expectations, or rules of others. It often develops in families or communities where love feels conditional. In high-control religious settings, this pattern can become spiritualised and reinforced as “obedience”, “service” or “holiness.”

Common indicators include:

• People-pleasing and difficulty saying no.

• Over-responsibility for others’ emotions, choices, or spiritual lives. (This starts to look like control).

• Anxiety when you’re not meeting expectations.

• Confusion about who you are outside of roles and rules.

Shared Dynamics of Religious Trauma and Codependence.

• Loss of self: Both involve outsourcing your identity to external authority.

• Conditional belonging: Love and acceptance depend on sacrifice, service, or conformity.

• Suppressed needs: Emotions and boundaries are dismissed or labeled as selfish.

The High of Helping - Serving, pleasing, and being needed can create a kind of emotional high. We may feel temporarily powerful, worthy, or indispensable. We’re celebrated for pushing through, praised for our commitment to the cause and enjoy being seen as capable, helpful and easy. Beneath it is an addiction to validation. Just like other addictions, it leaves us drained, resentful, and hungry for the next hit of approval.

Service vs. Servitude - It’s crucial to reclaim the difference:

• Service: freely chosen, life-giving, values-driven. It strengthens both you and others.

• Servitude/codependence: acting through fear, obligation, or addiction to approval. It empties and diminishes you.

Healing and recovery invites us into service that flows from freedom, not compulsion.

Why It Feels So Uncomfortable - Beginning to break codependent patterns often feels wrong, even selfish. Saying “no,” resting, or prioritising your needs may trigger guilt, shame, or anxiety. That’s because your nervous system has learnt to associate self-abandonment with safety and belonging.

• You may fear rejection or punishment.

• You may grieve the loss of relationships that only thrived when you over-gave.

• You may feel restless without the buzz of being busy, helpful, or pleasing.

• You may find it outrageous that such selfishness is being suggested. Sit with how it all feels.

Recovery Requires Practice - This includes intentionally choosing new patterns until they become embodied habits:

• Pausing before saying yes.

• Setting boundaries. (These aren’t about cutting people off or dropping them, but finding ways you can love yourself and the person you’re helping).

• Checking in with your body about capacity.

• Choosing activities that are nourishing, not just productive.

• Allowing others to solve their own problems. (Where this feels impossible, allowing it more often that you are now. Or waiting to be asked, perhaps rather than swooping in to save the day, as I may have some experience with, eek).

Each small choice teaches your body that safety can be found in authenticity, rather than self-erasure. We can learn to give and be generous, kind, loving and involved in service from our overflow and wellbeing, not at the expense of our wellbeing.

Questions As We Rebuild Identity after High Control Religion.

• When do I feel most myself, apart from others’ approval?

• What truly brings me joy and give me energy, not just relief from guilt?

• Where in my life am I still abandoning myself to keep the peace?

I’m pleased to say it is possible to recover from how mortifying it is to realise this is you and to make these changes. It’s not easy and like so much of what we have learnt in service of our survival, un-learning is the work of our lives. But with awareness and support, things can change and we can let go. And rather than being horrified, our loved ones will adapt. They’ll probably even be relieved we’re being real and releasing control.

A great book to read on this is Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie.

Take care (of yourself first),

Jane

If you’d like to connect or you’re interested in counselling, you can get in touch here.

I’m a religious trauma therapist working on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Inner West. I see people in-person and online across Australia and New Zealand. I work with Havening Techniques as my main trauma recovery modality.

It reminded me of what it’s like to be caught up in the momentum of a cause or a group you’re part of, which unsettled me a little. It’s hard to go against that momentum.

The post tugged at me and I couldn’t quite shake it. So I write to process. I also allow myself the occasional rant, not to be argumentative for sport but because disagreement was unsafe for me growing up and my critical thinking brain took longer to kick in. She’s here now.

The post stated, “The local church is the hope of the world.”

What’s your first response to that statement? Mine was to wonder where that leaves those of us who can never be part of a local church again. Are we without hope?

The post went on to say that the church is messy and human and growing and learning. It was passionate in its plea that we don’t give up on the church because even though she is imperfect, she is God’s idea. It was here that I felt like I’d been gut punched.

Perhaps I can present it this way. Say you have experienced abuse from a caregiver who over the years has created an environment of control. You are loved but you are told you’re really lucky you are loved because you were born full of sin. There are many behaviour and belief-dependant rules for how you have to live. You are family, you belong, but only if you adhere strictly to these rules. This abusive caregiver tells you this is how it must always be and you mustn’t deviate, or the consequences will be eternal conscious torment when you die but also a life of loneliness and curses while you’re still alive.

Within this controlling environment you learn to suppress your desires and this includes your voice. When you experience abuse in its various forms; mental, emotional, physical, financial, sexual and spiritual, you don’t speak up because you believe that somehow what you went through was your fault, you got it wrong, the abuse must have been warranted, maybe it wasn’t really that bad.

Eventually though, you find the courage to leave, you hear others telling their stories and you limp away. You steady yourself. You realise what you went through is very, very common. You start seeing a therapist (shameless plug) despite having being told this will lead you away from God’s will. You’re anxious. You feel broken but start to find a way to heal, all the while wondering if healing is possible.

You then hear people talking about how your abuser and the environment you were in are the hope of the world. Look, they’re not perfect and they’re human like everyone else and there’s pain in every community, but don’t give up on them!

They’re God’s idea.

Ooft.

Perhaps I sound unfair, because it’s true right, that there are no safe communities or groups, just those that are safe-enough for us to be part of.

But imagine, if people within that abusive environment were able to name the harm you had experienced, take accountability for it, grieve your experience, be clear about their part in it and support your recovery, whether you stayed or left.

Imagine if they were able to say; this group can point to hope but we know it has historically also been a place of devastating pain for many. We’re so sorry and we want to make it right. We know it will be risky but we’ll work to earn your trust.

Imagine if they changed their systems and structure, were willing to lose money and reputation and let it all die even, so that something healthier could come to life in its place. Rather than alienating you and let’s face it, using manipulative language that feels like gaslighting, laid down their defensiveness and said, we want to find a way to be with each other so our welcome doesn’t cause harm.

Perhaps they went easy on their way being God’s idea, allowing you the freedom to find God in other places.

I’ve known and been part of churches like that. They’re remarkable and usually small, embedded in their communities and without a lot of posturing. At the Religious Trauma Collective’s event this year we did a panel asking Does the Church have a Future?, with people I respect who are trying to make the sorts of changes than mean people can remain and there can be repair. I’m so glad they exist, but they are very much the exception to the rule.

So I guess this is why the post sat so uncomfortably with me. Not the writer as much as the widely held sentiment. It suggested the local church was the only hope for the world. It was giving #notallchurches vibes.

Which leads me to question, has the church ever been the hope of the world? The whole world? Everywhere? In multi-faith cultures and Indigenous tribes? During the crusades and colonisation? And sure, the church has done a lot of good throughout the generations, no doubt, but so have the congregations of every world religion and many secular movements.

When I used to hold this belief it was, the church is the hope of the world because it points to Jesus. The world needs hope = Jesus provides that hope. But hope for what is what I’m curious about now.

If it’s salvation from hell, that’s one thing we’ll disagree on straight up. I believed that for decades so I get it, but what else? Certainly the way of Jesus is worth emulating but many people are like Jesus - justice seeking, engaged in advocacy, powerful, gentle, inclusive, generous - without being religious or attending church.

If it’s meals and care packages, local communities themselves often provide these connection points. Mothers’ groups, school groups, book clubs, sports clubs and other places to belong like your pilates class or special interest groups notice if you don’t show up, might organise a GofundMe if you got sick. My partner is a cyclist and many mornings a week he rides with generations of people who care for each other outside of the 5am circuits.

We ache for this sort of connection and certainly we grieve it when we leave church. But it is possible to find in other ways, for this I am grateful.

It’s not the same you may argue and you’re right, it’s not. You may decide being part of a local church is safe-enough for you given your own experience and how you benefit from the social connection and support. But to suggest that we should stay because, despite her imperfections the church is the hope of the world, sounds like bypassing to me, without naming harm and the responsibility to do better.1

The lack of accountability, the defensiveness, the consistent othering of those outside, the insular nature of it all and prescriptive ways that belonging is required - are some of the reasons I can’t be part of church anymore. Even the healthy ones ended up being too triggering for me. The reminders of church life adjacent to abuse and control without repair, were too much. I’m now rebuilding my sense of spirituality in other ways, with hope.

I don’t want to take belief or belonging away from anyone or shame people’s connection to a local church, that’s not my intention. My beef is with the grandiose language that rather than being hopeful as I am sure was its intention, deeply hurts and excludes.

People are good everywhere - and they’re imperfect everywhere. The difference is that groups other than church don’t usually require such intense membership criteria or carry such dire consequences for misalignment. And I can’t think of many others (that aren’t cults) who claim they’re the hope of the world.

We know that rates of church attendance are declining in Australia and less than half the population identifies as Christian. I can’t help but wonder if this might be different if, like my friend Shane Meyer-Holt says, the casseroles came without the coercive control.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for being with me during my small rant. What do you think? Do you have these sorts of reactions?

The local church can be a hopeful place, yes. And hope can be found in many other places too.

Take care and if you need to process some of this on my blue velvet lounge as many others have before you, you know where to find me.

Warmly,

Jane

Quiet is always my way back. After deleting the social apps from my phone a few weeks ago, I feel like I can breathe again. My imagination is returning and it feels good.

A while back I listened to a podcast episode from Experiential Anatomy. It was called Grieving the death of God. One of the hosts Jamie Lee Finch, recounted what the shift in faith we call “deconstruction” had meant for her, and said “God died within me”. She spoke about how she’d been wanting to talk to her friend, psychologist Dr Hillary McBride about this phenomenon. She opens up the conversation and Hillary says, all we have are our ideas of God, what we know about God. These ideas are handed to us, often with certainty, in line with the systems we find ourselves in as we develop our view of the world and it’s completely appropriate that these should change and die across the lifespan.

Subscribe now

The part of me that still feels the residue of defensiveness for the Christian faith felt uncomfortable with this. If felt like she was saying that none of it was real or that it was subjective, which of course, it was. What we have are the ideas we were shaped by and formed relationships with, perhaps went on to explore further in adulthood, or to reject. There are so many ideas of God throughout the world, and we have the ideas that fit our time, life stage and context.

This is important because there’s really no such thing as an individual, we are formed in groups, communities, societies and cultures. We are highly impressionable beings because belonging is key to survival and usually our developmental experience is key in shaping the way we see God and our relationship to other humans in light of this.

What’s interesting to look back on from the vantage point of my fifties is viewing the ways I needed the certainty of the system for connection and community, but how the religious tradition I belonged to stunted my growth. It didn’t allow my ideas of God to change or evolve. It also told me I needed to be part of the group to flourish in life and anything outside of it would do me harm.

So I had to keep my ideas of God fixed to the narrative I was given and had inhaled voraciously, as a 13 year old desperate to be known. I loved my ideas of God, they were mixed in with my dreams of having a father and being held in unconditional love. How beautiful, who wouldn’t want that? I romanticised my ideas of God, memorised and made art from the most poetic, sweeping language the Bible has to offer. His banner over me is love, he knit me together in my mother’s womb, he counts every hair on my head, he died for me so I could live.

These ideas made me feel like I mattered, that I was important to the God of the universe who was interested in my feelings, my day, my pain. I had an enormous container big enough to hold the trauma that felt overwhelming but I had no language for and someone on my side whose name was the prince of peace, the healer, the provider.

I loved what we used to call the presence of God, I would lose myself in it for hours, it felt light and peaceful and shifted me out of my unhappy home life into something cosmic, epic, wonderful and full of hope.

I can still feel the longing of that teenage girl and young adult woman as I write those words. It’s a powerful ache I see in people every day in the counselling room.

And we do see in the academic literature1 that some people are more likely to experience a real, felt sense of God that is undeniable. Whether we attribute spiritual experiences to science or natural phenomena or accept their mystery, they have been reported and studied for millennia. That was me, I would be moved to tears when I prayed and lifted my hands in worship. I would feel a lightness and floaty sensation in my body, I would notice the heaviness shift, I’d move from anxiety and pain into peace.2

It’s also not insignificant that my childhood was spent following my spiritually seeking parents around Sydney’s alternatives-to-the mainstream religious scene. Before his early death, my father was a regular speaker at Joel Goldsmith’s Unity meetings and I was a wriggly four year old. Then after, my mother took me to ashrams and Siddha Yoga centres, rebirthing weekends and transcendental meditation workshops.

I like to say I come by my woo woo honestly, however weird it seemed as a kid. Particularly against the backdrop of Christianity that was assumed in wider society and certainly at my Anglican school.

So as I rebelled against my mother and joined a pentecostal church in my teens, I was primed for spiritual experiences. I felt God because I was told this is what it felt like, I knew God was real because my ideas about God were connected to this faith-based practice. This was my evidence and I could not be swayed.

My ideas of church morphed and changed first in my twenties and this led gradually to a disintegration of my ideas of God over many years. Dis-integration is such a good word for this experience. We are taught that what we know of God is unchanging, fixed and certain. It is integrated into who we are and how we see. A dis-integration of this knowledge leads to what feels like free fall.

Things no longer added up and made sense because the scaffolding was crumbling and then crumbled. God as I had always known God had only been true and real within that scaffolding. Without it, I had so many questions and couldn’t settle. I called myself a progressive Christian, a follower of the way of Jesus, then spiritual but not religious. My ideas of God were morphing, changing, dying.

A few years ago when I came across the work of Michelle Panchuk3 on the shattered spiritual self, I sobbed. She writes that religious trauma can be genuinely incapacitating. All this time after my faith deconstruction researching this particular rupture, my heart broke wide open again. The grief of losing God had indeed felt like my self, my sense of who I was and the way I belonged in the world, had shattered.

I had spent years trying to find new solid ground. I found ways to calm myself and feel ease through meditation, somatics, sound therapy, music and contemplative practices. I met up with people on a similar path trying to find community. These were all hit and miss without an overarching why, that sense-making that’s required for us to exhale and feel like we can frame our experiences in a this-is-how-the-world-works type of way.

Until I realised with some horror, that actually we can never know how the world works. I’d tried to replace my certainty from one system with certainty from another. I looked around for the leaders and the voices of calm and wisdom and over time found my own voice. I gradually understood that no one has certainty, we only have the illusion of it. It’s why capitalism is so intoxicating, we are literally being sold a dream and also why we find ourselves now witnessing capitalism and its systems collapsing all around us as we realise it can’t deliver. Another idea of god that needs to die.

And there is so much grief in this. Grief reorients and repositions us, it feels like losing a limb and we need to accomodate the loss in our everyday-ness, in the same way. To learn to live with adaptations and enlarge our perspective on the only way we’ve ever known how to do something; new ways to pray, new words for this experience, new ways to connect and relate to others, new experiences to be had outside the group that once told us how we should live.

For me, there is great relief in having found ways to expand my body’s capacity to feel emotions of all kinds because what I’ve described above is at its core anxiety and fear. It’s the need for security and promise that everything will be ok. We build all kinds of distractions to dull our knowing that everything may not in fact, be ok.

But everything is ok in this breath, if we can look around us and the cat is napping, the heater is on and something is cooking in the kitchen, we’re probably safe. We can grow into new ideas of God and perhaps they will help us ease into this reality and learn to be more vulnerable with others on whom we are inter-dependent, learning to be ok together. Perhaps we will find new ideas of spirituality, of what it means to be human.

I don’t have the answers but I know what I experienced was real. It helped me find comfort and a way to steady myself during difficult times and what is so hopeful now is that this is still possible, even without the faith scaffolding that held it all in place.

It also helps to understand that the nervous system responds to music and movement, repetitive motions like swaying, lifting and waving our hands, co-regulation with others doing the same, and to safe affection and attunement. Play, hugs, time and attention. This is how our bodies are wired to feel, to process big emotions and let them resolve, alchemise.

The presence of God I experienced was my nervous system recalibrating, feeling, regenerating. It was real. To take it further into therapeutic understanding, the insecure attachment style I had developed as a safety measure early in childhood meant I was looking for safe and secure attachment. I found that, insofar as that’s possible, in God. And I lost that when my ideas of God died.

Recovery from this kind of loss and the harm experienced in faith spaces, is grief work. This feels uncomfortable and is unavoidable. But our bodies know how to heal from trauma and grief in the same way as they know how to heal from bruising. Grief feels like a bruise doesn’t it? It’s tender and easily felt. It needs its own sort of care and time for healing.

It’s safe for your ideas of God to shift, change and die, many times even. Perhaps they will be reborn and reimagined and perhaps not.

Back to the podcast episode, Hillary says the most painful part of this process is that we think this shouldn’t happen.

Let grief crack you open, allow the tears, the anger, the rage the heaviness and let it change you. When this is witnessed by others, a friend or a therapist, even the earth or the inside of our car, we can start to heal.

Take care,

Jane

If you’d like to connect or you’re interested in counselling, you can get in touch here.

I’m a religious trauma therapist working on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Inner West. I see people in-person and online across Australia and New Zealand. I work with Havening Techniques as my main trauma recovery modality.

Subscribe now

Here’s a few ways I’ve dulled the noise and found my rhythm again:

Slowing everything down. Eating, moving, typing, walking.

My son left his …

Read more

Monica faced a long and expensive legal process, was let down over and again by people she trusted, struggled to pick herself up, moved overseas to study, couldn’t get a job, was continuously hounded by the press and then went to ground. She became a meme in pop culture before memes were a thing.

She emerged publicly in 2014 when Vanity Fair gave her the opportunity to write this piece on Shame and Survival. It starts with her recount of being asked, while being filmed for a documentary, how it felt to be known as the “blow-job queen”. Shocked, realising how naive she was to think she may be taken seriously, she held her own and answered, pointing to the more meaningful issues she had wanted to address for the show, like male dominance in public life. She then says it probably cost her another year of therapy.

She became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. She wrote this essay in 2018 giving her take on the #MeToo movement.

She writes about the #MeToo collective as a shared experience and notes the power of a social media hashtag, comparing it to the loneliness of what she went through; years before social media and in the very early days of public access to the internet. Support would come slowly through letters in the mail, along with threats and vitriol.

For the same 2018 Vanity Fair piece, Monica spoke to psychologist Jack Saul, founding director of the International Trauma Studies Program and author of Collective Trauma, Collective Healing. “Collective trauma,” he told her, “usually refers to the shared injuries to a population’s social ecology due to a major catastrophe or chronic oppression, poverty, and disease. While the events of 1998 in the United States do not fit neatly into such a definition, they may have led to some of the features we often associate with collective traumas: social rupturing and a profound sense of distress, the challenging of long-held assumptions about the world and national identity, a constricted public narrative, and a process of scapegoating and dehumanization.”

This is where I see parallels to religious trauma. We see so many stories like Monica’s in faith groups. We have untouchable demi-gods for pastors, often with celebrity status, systems that run on the need for them to be right and people trying to stuff their cognitive dissonance into tightly sealed boxes. If scandals are suspected or come out, whole communities can lose trust in those who were meant to be shepherds; there’s a shattering of the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. There are ruptures.

Often very tight-knit faith communities feel the distress of the changes to their social ecology, they’re torn between wanting to maintain the reputation of the faith, the denomination and their own group, and wanting to support victims. So often though, so often, they go the way of scapegoating and blame. They double down. It’s too hard to acknowledge the demi-god could have been wrong, or at fault. Narratives are tightly controlled by the ones recounting them, the ones with the microphones, resources and power.

Even now, despite the 2013 Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, churches and faith groups are still not set up well to navigate these ruptures. Very few responded well at the time, often feeling attacked and persecuted and what we’ve seen since feels like the bare minimum for becoming safer, and still without clear lines of reporting when laws are muddy, like when those in power groom adults.

So people who have experienced harm, abuse, betrayal and excommunication are left out in the cold shivering, often with NDAs and a dynamic mirrored by the legal system. There’s nowhere safe enough to process what just happened. They often feel powerless, they blame themselves and don’t know how to move forward.

This is especially true when, like for so many of my clients, their abuse was connected to their jobs, their work experience, their internships, their studies and their vocation. They don’t know anything else, have no other skills and can’t go back. Institutional betrayal breaks trust in systems, they start to see coercive control everywhere.

Counsellor and academic Jaime Simpson recently released research into adult experiences of grooming and abuses of power in Australian churches. The findings are sobering and she is speaking up for changes to laws in Australia that would make abuse of power by clergy illegal.

What we see in the research and in the counselling room are people who feel broken; both being blamed and at times perhaps having been the ones doing the blaming when they saw it happening to others. Both full of shame and knowing that what happened to them absolutely should not have. Rebuilding of identity is a huge part of my work with clients, finding out who they are now on the other side of all this. Picking up the pieces and bravely finding a way through. Holding the both-ands.

In Monica’s 2015 TED talk she shares a bit more of her story (she’s funny), and calls out shaming, noting the devastating impact it can have. We see this cruelty in faith communities too - look what you’ve done, you caused him to sin, you’ve brought down the man of God. The line that I loved in Monica’s talk that stayed with me - you can survive it.

Shame is insidious, the shame of religious trauma, brutal. Akin to a shattering of the self as I often quote from the literature.1 But, you can survive it.

And, it turns out, you don’t have to be good, you don’t have to “walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”2 You don’t have to earn favour or prove your worth. You are already good, you always were. You can rebuild, you’re worthy of a beautiful life, one that is meaningful to you.

It was Monica’s new podcast that sparked my curiosity to get caught up on the last few decades. It’s called Reclaiming.

It was good to listen to the first candid episode, where one of her team, who was a child in 1998, interviews her on what it’s like to reclaim her life over and again.

She’s adamant, “you can insist on a different ending to your story”. If that feels hard to believe possible, you can borrow my belief that it’s true.

If you’d like to connect or you’re interested in counselling, you can get in touch here.

And if you’re a therapist wanting to get a better understanding of the impact of religious trauma, you can download my new look eCourse here.

Take care,

Jane

Subscribe now

“It’s Easter Sunday as I write this, and I have woken up realising the heaviness I often feel didn’t hit me this year. In the early days of leaving church, it was painful, and the grief was raw. Then as I started to feel less connected to the story itself, it felt awkward and unsettling, like I’d forgotten to be somewhere and wasn’t sure what to do with myself and my melancholy.

I always loved the Easter weekend. It felt like family, the pastors would throw eggs into the congregation and kids would be in the service, running around and dancing to the songs. The stage always looked so beautiful, and the creative team would prepare something special. I was always a weepy mess. There was a rhythm to it, Friday was reflective, Saturday we talked about the space we called the now-and-the-not-yet, Sunday we celebrated.

There’s something lovely about this time of year in Australia. The light is changing, daylight savings makes the days shorter, the oppressive heat of summer is giving way to cooler evenings. I start thinking about soup and baking bread.

Easter was such a tender time, I was deeply grateful and viscerally felt the enormity of Jesus' sacrifice for me, despite being innately sinful and damaged, it was unbelievable to me that I was loved so personally and unconditionally. That grace could be mine was a miracle. Having done the work, I now see a little girl who lost her dad and whose home life was lonely and volatile. She wanted to be part of something where she was seen and loved, where she belonged to a tradition. I still love a tradition.

I was transfixed by the Passion of the Christ movie when it came out. That image of Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ feet covered in dust moved me to the core. I thought of it every Easter after that and could place myself there, imagine myself as her wanting to touch his feet and be near him.

Subscribe now

But as I gradually moved a little further away, I became sensitive to the violence of the cross and started to find the imagery distressing. Increasingly I needed beauty to fill me up and ground me. I couldn't relive that sort of trauma over and over and could only connect with resurrection Sunday when all was right with the world once more and it felt safer.

I was developing cognitive dissonance with the message that God had to kill his son, the ultimate blood sacrifice, because he loved us all so much. It started to become horrifying, and I couldn’t make it make sense or line up with the father God I had crafted in my imagination to replace my own.

For many years after leaving church the kids and I would go on Easter Sunday, not to the Mothership but to one of the campuses where we didn’t really know anyone. The tradition still felt powerful and rich, the evocative imagery, the music and ritual. Then a few years ago we stopped going. We didn’t really decide not to go, it sort of just happened. We began to talk more openly about what spirituality meant for each of us and they now have their own grown-up version of what it means to be a whole person.

There are elements of church and Christianity, at least the Western version, they have outright rejected, and other parts that still hold great tenderness. I have owned and apologised for my part in their experience of this particular brand of Christian identity being imposed upon them. I now love talking with them about ways of being spiritual and how we show up and find connection in the world.

I realised I valued rest and family and friends more than needing to be in church at Easter. I needed that time to lift my face to the Sydney autumn sun and just be. Still beloved and valued, not despite my sinfulness but because of my humanity. Innately worthy of love and belonging.

This year I made pumpkin fruit cake identical to the one my mum and much loved, stand-in father, Uncle George, made several times a year in batches. It was everywhere that cake, gifted at Christmas, piled up in the freezer, brought out on ornate trays for guests. It felt good to connect to a happy childhood memory.

I also made pan de yucas, a South American staple. They’re little balls of ricotta and cassava flour baked till they’re stretchy. Ideally you dip them in hot chocolate with chunks of mozzarella. I roll them in butter and flaky salt when they’re just out of the oven. My mother-in-law taught me to make them more than 20 years ago and the tactile mixing and rolling calms me. My kids love them.

I meditated, walked in the bush and spent time with friends. I chatted on the phone with another, and we talked about telling the truth in relationships and how transformative that is. We each said how grateful we were to be known and loved so well by the other. My partner sanded and painted an old table for me to use as an office desk. My son made me laugh.

The melancholy comes and goes now, and I can sort of just observe it. I can have compassion for the person I was and seek out connection and joy in new rhythms. When I feel it rising in me, I have learnt to bring myself back to the present moment and remind myself that I am enough”.

Subscribe now

We looked to God for certainty, comfort, solid ground and to be the one who would make things right and lead us into all peace. God could be trusted to heal, protect, bless and provide favour for those who trusted him. Who wouldn’t want that? And how exactly are we meant to be ok without that?

We endure, and are surrounded by, immense suffering. I was grateful as my marriage ended to still have my certain and intact faith. The do this, add that, trust this formula, to get to the answer to it all. It allowed me to feel held when I was grieving and scared about my future. But I’ve had plenty of very big life moments since without that certainty and continue to learn from my many clients who have also.

Unknowing a formulaic God requires a deep breath and a reframe. As Debie Thomas writes, “Who knew that my life with God would actually be one long goodbye? That to know God, I would have to unknow God? To shed my neat conceptions of the divine like so many old snakeskins, and emerge into the world bare, vulnerable, and new, again and again?”

I don’t have a label or a box, a name or a gender for God these days, or a framework for belief. I loved the God I was sold and grieved that God, the one I had created in my heart and mind as the father substitute I craved; I separated him from the institution for many years and held on. But I came to realise I couldn’t know that God while ever the association was there. The association with violence and tribalism, fixed thinking, blessing and favour only for some, and just the overall exhaustion that came with holding all of these things in tension while I propped up the system, made it too hard.

I sometimes ask people I respect, the ones pushing back against injustice, colonialism and the church as an institution, how do you stay Christian? They are gracious with their answers and at times I envy their ease, my desire for belonging to a group, still so strong. It’s not convoluted or complex for them, the connections to all the parts that don’t make sense or have been co-opted by fools seem easy to let go of, or at least don’t distract from the reason their faith remains. The fools and clunky parts irritate me still, given enough exposure.

My un-knowing of that God was gradual but permanent. God for me, now, is found in nature, in beauty of any kind, in stillness, in the life force of gardens, by looking up at the night sky. And movement. Somatics have given me a portal back to what I once would have called the presence of God, which is something I deeply missed.

Subscribe now

I remember the first time I knew I’d be ok. I was travelling for work. Early one morning before leaving for the regional office I had the joy of working from regularly in Bali, I went to a sunrise yoga class. The setting was dreamy, workers moved slowly picking tropical flowers for morning offerings, the birds were singing in the trees, I could see the biodynamic gardens that provided produce for my colourful breakfasts and the breeze made the humidity feel bearable as we moved through the asanas. I was new to yoga then, nervous that what I’d been conditioned to believe was true, that it was somehow demonic. But it felt peaceful, beautiful, nurturing and like I’d found how to be in my body for the first time since I was a child.

And what surprised but comforted me was that feeling. It felt like what I’d loved about collective worship. It felt like that same coregulation. It felt like being home.

It occurred to me with relief and some amazement, that this feeling I’d always thought was unique to my pentecostal church experiences, was available to me here, and any place I was able to be still and slow enough to connect with my breath and what was happening in my body. I found this so comforting.

Bayo Akomolafe says, slowing down is to meet the sensuous, which is a line that delights me. That has been true for me, is my expression of spirituality now, and where I am able to anchor myself. A sensory connection to what we call the ‘core self’. Grounded, courageous, creative, connected and clear. I know that may sound flaky, I would have rolled my eyes reading that once too. But I know how to settle and connect to myself now. It’s why I love Havening techniques and talk to all my clients about what it means to be embodied, to ask, where am I experiencing emotion, how do I know what it feels like to be centred and come back to centre. Could there be ways to do that with intention?

And that’s how I find myself staying steady and being ok (ish, none of us are really ok right now) with chaos and collapse, rapid change and dislocation. I’m learning how to feel the fear and grief and find my back to centre.

We never really had certainty. We had the idea, the promise of it. And perhaps like placebo, that doesn’t really matter. If it works, is of comfort, it’s good. It’s never my intention to take that away from anyone. This journey away from faith and/or God is complex, but if you need to let go, you can be ok with not knowing how everything is meant to work or what will happen next. Often our fear of what is on the other side keeps us holding on even when the old framework no longer serves us.

I’m reminded of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. He writes, “…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Living the questions, living everything evokes curiosity. Un-knowing God even in a time of crisis can lead to peace. Or if not peace, ease. Relief, that we don’t have to uphold the formulas any longer, perhaps.

Spirituality without belief, or a certain, religious framework may seem too ethereal, like it’s hard to hold or be held by. Against these odds, and some pretty serious chaos outside, I feel more grounded and connected than ever. My capacity to hold the grief of change has enlarged, I’m settling into not knowing how we’re going to figure it all out. And, it feels more spacious, like there’s more room to grow and change.

What does spirituality feel like for you? What does it look like? Do you give it a different name? How does it ground you when the world is on fire? I’d love to hear your answers to these questions, we are adaptive and creative beings.

You may not have a Balinese garden sanctuary to escape to (I still go there in my mind, often) but you have your incredible imagination and the natural world. You can create emotional and senseational places to find ease. Your nervous system will follow. Your body can remember how to unfurl.

Jane

You can get in touch here for counselling support. I love working with people on this journey.

Subscribe now

Belle’s story was on the periphery of my memory and I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which she had lied and profited from a fabricated cancer diagnosis.

Fascinated from a psychological perspective and drawn in by the human element, I couldn’t look away. I don’t know for sure what may be underlying her behaviour pathologically, but what seems clear from the story depiction is that she felt alone, unseen and unheard, perhaps without purpose, untethered. (Shout out to Kaitlyn Dever for her excellent Australian accent playing Belle!).

Like many high-control systems and rigid beliefs, the cult of natural healing and certainty through secret, alternative knowledge was clearly intoxicating for Belle. Either that, or she saw its vast potential for personal gain. Perhaps it was both, but power, money, status and validation must have all seemed pretty appealing for the small town girl desperate for a place in the world. Championing a cause where she was able to be the hero and experience people’s gratitude and admiration must have been irresistible after she had her first taste. No wonder she started to believe it all herself.

And this is what it’s like to be part of something you benefit from in this way. Propped up by a larger system and ideology, belonging feels so good. Shared values and people-just-like-us1 reinforce the confidence that all will be well, great even, we’re armed with the truest facts, we know we’re on the right side of the argument, sure of the outcome.

Functioning within these systems - systems like, you knew where I was going, high-demand faith spaces - is to move within a reinforcing loop. We drink our own Kool Aid and believe all kinds of things, sincerely, so we can have certainty, direction, safety, a role in the community, a place to fit. The sign on the door says Welcome Home and the relief is palpable. But woah, can it be dangerous.

Which brings me to Mike Guglielmucci. I grew up listening to Mike’s dad, Danny, preach at our church. He was a regular visitor to the pulpit and was dynamic and fun, he seemed kind and genuine.

I liked it when Danny came to town and, as was the landscape of the then Assemblies of God (now Australian Christian Churches) community within Australia, we knew the key players and their families. In the days before the internet, these were the celebrities in our world, the preachers and the worship leaders, the ones who led and taught us and drew us into the global web of believers and new waves of what God was doing on the earth. We followed their rise and fall, whispered behind closed doors under the guise of prayerful concern when marriages ended or things were covered up, or where there were whiffs of scandal. So anyone who’d been around for any length of time would’ve been paying attention in 2008.

My church deconstruction was underway by the time Mike confessed to faking cancer, though it would be some years before I had words for the cognitive dissonance I was feeling and I continued in ministry. Mike’s song, “Healer”, platformed first by PlanetShakers on their 2007 album, ‘Saviour of the World’, then later by Hillsong, was a banger in the Christian worship scene. It was a beautiful song, a powerful declaration.

Unbeatable with the video optics2 of Mike onstage performing it with an oxygen tube in his nose, the small tank accompanying him, it was goosebump inducing. We knew of his leukaemia, felt the pang of compassion, believed with him for a miracle. Prayer vigils were held, people rallied.

Despite my wavering faith in church at that point, my connection to God was still strong. As you can read here, that disconnection was a gradual unravelling.

Looking back, reflecting on the way the Australian Pentecostal machine ate up Mike’s story with frenetic energy, the promise of the next big thing, it seems so clear. Obvious, that a story like this could create hype, waves of emotion and attention, sales, attendees, glory to God; Mike himself must have known how obvious, and been able to see the pathway. The son of a well known pastor, already singing and writing songs in church, with a platform so ripe for the picking, it could help him divert attention from his shame over, what he would later reveal publically, a crippling porn addiction. And of course there must be so much more to the story that we don’t know.

How tragic, that purity culture demonises (literally) and forbids normal, developmental sexual curiosity, that when someone is struggling with where the boundaries begin and end there’s nowhere to turn to make sense of it. I bet Mike was one of the guys at summer camp being told masturbation was a sin and looking at porn would make God angry, open him up to the devil. We all know what happens when there’s “sin in your life”. So where was he meant to go within this system, now as the pastor’s son in his twenties and thirties, as the addiction continued on? To be open about it and seek support for whatever else he was hiding, would be to risk it all, vocation, relationships, reputation.

Just as Belle must have found people’s attention and validation of her cancer story hard to resist, Mike must have too. What a clever, roundabout way to say, please see me, hear me, help me.

How devastating for both of them these needs weren’t able to be met in healthier ways without the life-altering consequences.

Of course, Belle Gibson and Mike Guglielmucci should be held accountable for their behaviour. I’m not sure that’s been adequate or especially rigorous in either case. Belle still has hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid fines and hasn’t, at least publicly, apologised to the people she hurt. Mike was stood down for a time then was “restored”, which is such a loaded Christian term for allowing people who have deceived and abused others back on the platform, and he now has a leadership role of a charity.

I believe people can be supported to be well and deserve to go on to live full lives, insofar as that is possible after deceptions like this. Belle doesn’t seem to be willing to surrender to this process, while Mike reportedly sought psychiatric help. But I’m not sure anyone in a leadership role who acts in these ways should ever return to spiritual or leadership oversight. Become a florist, work in an office job maybe.

While accountability is necessary, I also feel deep compassion for people like these two. Desperate for belonging and love and seeking to find it through manipulation, control and diversion, the only ways that felt accessible to them, in systems that treated them like commodities in the end. Narcissistic behaviour is going big because you feel so small. The compartmentalism and splitting must have been intense and painful.

Is there a moral to the story? I’m not sure. We gobble up sensationalism like the dopamine hit that it is, often irresponsibly. Human behaviour is fascinating and story is how we connect to each other.

If there is a moral, perhaps it’s in examining with curiosity, where we seek and find belonging; having compassion for the parts of us that want/ed it so badly we’re willing to trade just about anything to get it and keep it.

You have always been worthy of belonging just as you are.

There’s nothing you can do to earn worthiness. You are enough, valuable, innately deserving of love.

We’ve all faked it somewhere along the way. It takes courage to ask for what we need in healthy ways and be able to trust people with our vulnerabilities. I’ve had to learn to do this as a fawner from way back, never safe to speak up in a dysfunctional, violent home and then part of a high-demand system that spoke for me. This is a skill we can learn, we can tolerate the discomfort of being truthful and trusting others.

I love supporting people to do this in healthy, brave ways, figuring out who to trust and where the risks are worth taking. This is such a big part of recovery from religious trauma.

Be kind to yourself.

Warmly,

Jane

You can get in touch here for counselling or a chat.

I believed in the mighty power of God to protect his own from Satan who was roaming the earth seeking to trick me. I believed the earth was 6000 years old. I believed in a literal heaven where we sang worship songs for eternity with the faithful, and a literal hell, a place of eternal conscious torment for unbelievers; and in the skies turning red when Jesus returned on a white horse. I believed one of our pastors who told and retold the story of how he raised someone from the dead.

Less dramatically, (and with a great deal of nostalgia), I remember the tenderness of belief in God’s presence, of being known. His eye is on the sparrow the Bible says, he was always there to watch over me. It settled and calmed me.

As wild as it is to write these things now, I needed it all to be true so badly. I have a complicated relationship with the way it was exactly what I needed and caused me immense harm.

I’ve quoted trauma expert Gabor Mate many times, he says we trade authenticity for belonging. I had no true sense of who I was in my magical thinking but I was desperate to belong. I learnt to shape shift and created a God of my imagination, as everyone who believes in a god of any kind does.

We can’t know for sure if gods or deities, spirits or the supernatural are real and so we take ancient texts and frameworks for belief, the words and practices of those who have gone before us, and live by them. This has cultural, community and power dynamics of course, and aligns with who we want to be in the world, how we want to be loved and accepted and where we want to feel safe. It’s often many generations strong and grounds us to place and people.

Subscribe now

To say I created a God of my imagination may sound patronising to those who remain in their faith, but it’s not my intention to be condescending. Rather, to acknowledge that’s what we all do, and it doesn’t make God any less real or powerful to our brains and bodies. We are hardwired for spirituality.

But it does mean that God often looks like us. We create systems and frameworks that suit our ideologies and allow us to hold onto power in an uncertain world. We find ways to justify this and believe we are on the winning side. Certain people/groups become scapegoats. Issues that aren’t issues become obsessions for Kingdom purposes. Influence is sought to usher people in, alignment with the powerful (or those deemed strategic for the cause) is important.

It’s why it’s so painful when cognitive dissonance sets in and things no longer make sense. When critical thinking no longer allows us to overlook people’s dignity and treat them as projects for salvation or service. Or when we can’t hold on to faith that everything will be ok when everything is not ok. It is well with our souls until it really isn’t.

It has not been well with my soul these last few weeks. I’ve felt the heaviness of global events in ways that have caused me to want to run and hide.

In my years of magical thinking I would have known I was going to be ok because I was one of the favoured ones under God’s protection. I was safe under angels’ wings and could trust God to provide all I needed. Without this assurance I still sometimes feel vulnerable and scared. But I now know this was magical thinking. It was created.

I know this because what I once believed doesn’t hold up.

I know this because there are people of faith whose way of being in the world is so different, healthy, generous, loving. Their God looks like them in this way.

I also know I can create something new. Something life-giving and generative. Something softer and less about white-knuckled control.

How I Use Magic Now.

I call it magic because that’s what it feels like to create a reality. Extra ordinary, yet so available. It’s wondrous that we can create our worlds with our thoughts and imaginings. It’s powerful. We do it every day. You’re doing it now as you read and interpret my words.

Try this. Imagine spending hours making a beautiful meal with love, only to have it smash on the floor along with thousands of shards of pyrex as it slips out of your clunky oven mitt. (I would cry!).

Now try the opposite, imagine the gorgeous table you’ve set, perhaps there’s flowers in a vase, and you’re serving that beautiful meal made with love, to your people. What was different? Where did it change in your body? What did you notice?

I felt my shoulders drop and a warm feeling in my chest at imagining the second example. Our nervous system follows our thoughts, which is why presence can be such a useful skill. Being here now rather than somewhere else in our minds in a hypothetical future, or a painful past, can make our bodies feel grounded and steady.

Magical thinking for me now is about going smaller, the bigger the overwhelm. The world is going through labour pains as systems and institutions are failing, as the planet is dying and we are feeling the impact of power shifts. I find this terrifying and hopeful. I hope we are being birthed into something new and more aligned with our goodness.

Of course there has always been cycles of death and rebirth and powers that marginalise and oppress. There have been horrors and hatred and “wars and rumours of wars”. I’ve worked in conflict zones and seen apocalyptic damage post-disaster. But when we see ourselves, (not just others in far away places), reflected and impacted in new ways that feel out of our control, things can get scary quickly. We saw this during Covid and we’re seeing it now.

The recent work of Sarah Wilson is not for the faint of heart. It has been clarifying for me in terms of what matters. Read with care. She references becoming Islands of Sanity amidst of the chaos. I want to be an Island of Sanity. Calm. Measured. Able to regulate others as needed. Able to regulate myself. Turning towards love. I want you to be an Island of Sanity too. This is our work.

Outrage and fighting online (and IRL) is a distraction. Arguing and feeling overwhelmed is the point. If we are foggy headed and angry we find it harder to come home to ourselves. We are useful to their cause as we doomscroll and become dysregulated while they create a world in which power is only for the rich and people who look like them.

I said the antidote is getting smaller. I didn’t mean by suppressing emotions and being small, but by putting your device down and looking around your physical space. Are you objectively safe right now? Ground yourself in that safety with a few deep breaths or by moving your body around. You may have heard me say before, my mantra is often, right now, in this moment, I’m ok.

Who is your community? It will become increasingly about geography I think. How can you create new relationships, look out for people, allow them to look out for you? How can you do this in spaces where you live and work?

What regulates you in your space? My yellow lamp makes me happy, the rosemary bush I propagated from my mother’s garden makes me smile. Lighting a candle makes me feel contemplative. Today I bought rocket and basil seedlings for my garden and settled myself with their earthy smells.

Magical thinking now lets me daydream about walking in Switzerland in spring, about swimming way out to sea with dolphins, about learning to renovate the old chairs that sit in my garage. Imagination, play and daydreaming use the part of the brain that shuts down anxiety. As Bayo Akomolafe says, the times are urgent, let us slow down.

Slowing down and being grounded is how we will respond and find solutions to our biggest challenges. Community is where we find connection and the courage to be seen. We are not discounting our reality, rather creating the conditions to be present to it. So we can ask, and answer, as Deeper Iyer suggests, what’s my role today?

Other Helpful Things…

I highly recommend Beyond Anxiety, the latest book by Martha Beck. I downloaded it, then bought a hard copy for myself and one for my daughter. I’ve been telling my clients about it.

She encourages us to imagine our anxiety, whether it’s existential or personal, as a creature. A sweet, vulnerable creature that feels scared. How would you approach that creature? Would you raise your voice and tell it to harden up and stop feeling anxious or would you stroke it gently perhaps and get down on its level, speaking with soft tones?

She also references Internal Family Systems which is a beautiful approach to therapy that assumes the truest parts of us are Compassionate - Calm - Connected - Clear - Curious - Creative - Confident and Courageous. When we work with our anxious parts from these C’s, our truest parts, we can more safely feel our emotions from there.

If you asked your anxious creature what she was feeling, she may say scared or sad, powerless or angry. Your C’s can calmly, compassionately, courageously be present for these feelings. Perhaps with a side of curiosity that could lead to creative ways to respond. We blend our ‘parts’ in this way, the parts feeling scared and the parts feeling like you could be an Island of Sanity. We become more integrated.

Another summer read was Focussed Forward. Navigating the Storms of Adult ADHD. Therapist James Ochoa describes the emotional distress of ADHD as Emotional Distress Syndrome, with intensity of feeling likened to PTSD, but without an event. A creative antidote he uses personally and in his practice is creating an emotional safe place in your mind.

He goes deeper into the neuroscience of imagination to settle us, anytime, anywhere. Try it now - imagine your emotional safe place, it can be real or made up, it can have all your real or dreamt-up favourite things, the best food, the comfiest chairs. The most wonderful friends. Go into as much detail as you can access. You could have gentle, talking elks wearing flower crowns that serve you sparkling water in crystal glasses hanging from their antlers. Anything is allowed, everything is possible here.

Mine has an open fire and an enormous window overlooking a majestic lush expanse of fir trees and wildflowers. There’s an incredible sunset and the music I hear is from a live band gently playing stringed instruments and percussion at the bottom of the valley. Its effect on my body is like bubbles in my blood stream. I’m smiling and laughing with friends. Then as the northern lights dance around the sky, I sleep deeply, waking to a generous breakfast, coffee made just how I like it. I look out at the early morning sun as the steam rises from my cup and relax as I inhale the crisp morning air. I grab a book and settle in to an enormous, cobalt-blue velvet recliner. This beautiful place also cleans itself.

Now that’s magical.

If you’d like to work with me in counselling you can get in touch here.

Go gently into your imagination.

Warmly,

Jane

PS. Havening Techniques® are a powerful psychotherapy tool I use to help settle anxious parts and heal trauma, allowing us to be Islands of Sanity if you will. If you’d like to know more you can read here.

I remember the ache, the grief and the sense of dislocation when I realised I was approaching my first Christmas as a non-believer. Sentimental, nostalgic, with great affection for parts of the Jesus story, but a non-believer all the same.

I remember the gifts, the pavlova, the social calendar and the smell of the freshly cut tree; but despite the busyness, it was quiet. God had stopped speaking.

Which is to say, I had stopped speaking to God.

Not on purpose or with dramatic flair, but gradually over time, God as I had always known him, became distant. It was Father God who had first been so tender and compelling for me, as a teenager desperately seeking that protector role as a buffer for my violent home life and salve for my loneliness.

Then, Jesus as defender of the oppressed and marginalised became the one who I followed into saviourism as I joined teams of people feeding the homeless and ending poverty in far away places. The presence of God, the Holy Spirit, was called the comforter and with the promise I would never be alone, I was able to make my way in the world with strength and deep gratitude for the way I was held.

If you had known me then, you would have known how real it was for me, how important my worldview and calling was. What could make me let go of this, my identity as beloved and chosen, a child of God, part of the global body of believers, clear about my purpose and my eternal destiny?

Subscribe now

As strange as it sounds, I can’t really pin it down; not exactly. There was no defining moment. Except that the justice orientation that made me want to follow Jesus - the revolutionary, subversive, brown-skinned Rabbi who spoke truth to power and corrupt systems - wouldn’t allow me to overlook the damage being done in the church. And it was the church as a system at first. The power dynamics and rigid dogma that ‘othered’ people and was very certain about who was in and out, had made me feel good because I was ‘in’. I belonged. But when I realised this same system was hurting people in devastating ways and I saw that pain up close, I could no longer be part of it.

I stepped out tentatively, very much afraid, unsure of where my belonging would now be found. I stepped back in, tried to be ok, and then out again. And then, no longer ‘in’, I became one of the pariahs, disloyal, not to be trusted. As I often write about this time, despite formative years of community, summer camps, church family, intimacy, day to day connection - when I left, it was as if I was never there.

But I still had my faith - God was still close. Jesus was still my example. The Bible promised the Holy Spirit would lead me into peace - until I didn’t. It all started to feel triggering, anything that reminded me of my decades of church membership and ministry started to cause reactions in my body. I couldn’t attend church anywhere, even very different, healthy faith communities weren’t right. The Bible and Christian music, once daily touch points and guides, became too connected. They were now uncomfortable reminders, awkward and painful, confusing and eventually unfamiliar. I started to grieve. I was losing God.

That first silent night felt heavy and sad. I envied the progressive Christians who could separate the tenderness of it all from the toxic systems it resides in. I sometimes still do. I had become someone for whom Christmas was a break from work over the summer, a holy time reduced to presents and meal prep. Would I still put out my mother’s nativity scene and order a 1tree? Was that now allowed? How should I talk to my kids about this shift? It was like night and day, like living in a new culture where I didn’t speak the language or have any translators. Only a few guides had been there before me and I could only find them through books and podcasts, I didn’t have people up close to share my discomfort and displacement with.

But then language for what I was going through became more accessible, I started to realise that wrestling with my faith was something many had done before me throughout history. I learned there are many ways to be a person of faith and connect with the divine. My friends started to have questions too and some of the systems and ways of being that had always felt sure, started to implode around us.

I grieved the God of My Imagination. And though it took me many years and is still not something I can define, I have since found spirituality in new ways. I posted this week on Instagram about the parts of the Jesus story I still feel connected to as Christmas approaches, but I had to sift through the wreckage of years of grief and anger to be at a place where that sort of reflection feels safe.

I now feel at ease. I’m content in my unknowing, like this sentiment from Sarah Southern; “Lately, I’ve felt a quiet contentment. A distilled sense of optimism even. I am unhurried. I am strangely calm. I’m eager to learn but not so eager to know or return to a certitude that could buckle beneath me. I have no desire to return to evangelical madness, high on Jesus, oblivious to a rotting infrastructure.”

All of which to say, you have time. It’s ok to be exactly where you are on this path. Whether God is still speaking or you’re in the wilderness, you’re ok. It all belongs. It will get easier, the way will become clearer.

It’s my privilege to walk with people through their own silent nights. Both in the reconditioning and sense-making of thoughts and long-held beliefs that no longer serve you and, in trauma healing.

I’m ok now with Christmas being about a break from work over summer. The fun parts are the food and the gifts and being with my people.

If it still feels hard for you, breathe, drop into your body. Can you find ways to nurture yourself? Permission to rest and take the pressure off. And of course, Christmas can be hard for so many other reasons too. Reach out and connect where you can.

Warmly,

Jane

PS. If you need to feel like you’re not alone in this experience, head to The Religious Trauma Collective. You’ll find books, articles, podcasts and practitioners working in this space.

PPS. If you’re a therapist wanting to better understand your clients’ stories of religious trauma, this will help.

But, where do you feel this last week in the world, in your body? Can you locate it? Is your jaw still clenched, your heart still heavy? I still feel tears spring to my eyes. I’m still sad. I’ve screamed into a few pillows.

Can you draw an imaginary line to locate what’s underneath your emotions? So much deeper than political alliance, there are tender wounds being pressed on. Reactions to authoritarian tactics on a grand scale, so familiar to those who have experienced coercive control.

Is it the chill of seeing a perpetrator of abuse rewarded for his behaviour, of not being taken seriously while he is revered? Is gaslighting making you full of rage perhaps? Do you feel powerless?

Maybe you’re freezing up at the rise and influence of Christian nationalism in US politics and its impact on Australian culture. Dr Laura Anderson and Clare McIvor write about this particular element. I find it very triggering.

Do you feel fear setting in about the impact on the climate, increased violence, social polarisation, grief at the lack of nuance we see and our inability, it seems, to have human conversations in human ways? I do.

And, on conversations, whose voices do you hear popping up in your thoughts? What have they led you to believe about yourself in light of our rapidly changing world? Who are you arguing with, in imagined ways, constructing the perfect hot-take, mic-drop lines after the fact?

I’ve seen a lot of urgency around, it’s so familiar to me after many years in church ministry where everything was a spiritual battle, and then later, working in disaster response. We go towards the fire, we mobilise, speak quickly and write in ALL CAPS, we prepare to act.

Despite all this urgency and all these emotions, I’m also curious, what is it you’re trying not to feel?

We don’t tolerate complexity very well do we? More than one thing being true or possible at the same time, multi-faceted. Particularly those of us from Western cultures that haven’t learnt to sit, share a meal and reflect before running into battle. We don’t sing, dance in lament or wail together, or seek elder wisdom like Indigenous cultures do. We want the answers we think are found by having power and being ‘right’. We see the world as we are, Anais Nin said. We urgently want things to be different. I know I do.

We also don’t really like to feel our feelings.

I’ve been referring to The Change Triangle recently in client sessions, having remembered this model when thinking about ways to be more grounded and able to feel emotions of all kinds. Our most openhearted selves, the best of us, is:

Calm, Curious, Connected, Compassionate, Confident, Courageous & Clear.

So by asking, what is it you’re trying not to feel?, I meant, are urgency, anxiety and reactivity, defences or inhibitory emotions, blocking you from feeling what is underneath?

Are you trying to feel Calm or Courageous but can’t access these because you’re so anxious? Where are you on the triangle right now? Which pointy bit? Take a minute to check.

To reach our most open hearted state we must be able to feel our core, survival emotions. But we’re quick to block them with defences (hello doom scrolling) and inhibitory emotions like anxiety and shame. (Not your fault, we are conditioned this way.)

We’re trying to control the uncontrollable in the effort to avoid feeling our deep sadness, anger or grief. And because urgency lacks wisdom, longevity and creativity (much needed for problem solving), we then collapse under the weight of it all.

Laying down our outrage and urgency can feel weak, like we’re giving up, but we eventually burn out from being this wired if we don’t allow ourselves to fuel our activism with rest and restorative practices. If we try to do it alone. If we don’t locate and feel the driving core emotions underneath this anxious energy.

We are built to feel these BTW. Our core emotions are survival instincts, we can handle feeling them, it’s just that at times, we’d rather not.

You might have noticed joy and excitement as being on the core emotions list. Unsurprisingly, these are often blocked by inhibitory emotions too. Joy can be hard to feel, to just sit with, when we’re always thinking about the next thing to go wrong.

We can learn to feel joy, even when the world is on fire.

We need it especially when the world is on fire. It’s a survival instinct in this way.

If you were sitting on my blue velvet couch, I would say, “it’s safe to feel your feelings, your body is made to feel”. You would then be free to tell me that sounds nice for other people, but doesn’t apply to you. Or, to sob for a bit. We’d then talk about your nervous system and the ways you respond and react to stress and trauma.

We’d look at your defences and inhibitory emotions and what they’re blocking you from feeling on your way to being more open hearted.

We’d talk about dropping into the body. We might do some Havening Techniques and breath work together for awhile.

I’ve learnt to draw strength from peoples who have lived, or are living with, the reality of oppression, marginalisation and abuse and know something about rest and recovery, feelings, community and the long game. I saw impossible friendships up close during my time in the humanitarian sector, people from warring tribes and cultures who have determined connection is more powerful than division. This doesn’t mean they hold hands and forget or that there isn’t accountability for wrongs, rather reparative justice and community-based healing becomes possible. Solidarity under a common oppressor can be forged.

There are so many wonderful resources, these are a good start:

Sand Talk. How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.
Cole Arthur Riley’s, This Here Flesh.
Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kamingsky (my God this is incredible) & Tricia Hersey’s We Will Rest. The many beautiful conversations hosted by Krista Tippet on OnBeing podcast over the years help too. She says hope is a muscle.

You’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed. Reach out and connect. We heal from urgency and find safety, always, with other humans. We only need one or two, it’s how we strengthen our hope muscle.

As we get more comfortable with feelings of all kinds, we can learn to tolerate complexity, go towards it even, with less reactivity. In time with wisdom. We can learn to live with each other in new and generative ways, we must. I’m on this path with you.

Warmly,

Jane

Havening Techniques®1 as a psychotherapy for treating trauma, intrigued me at first, then drew me in and now makes me feel so hopeful that healing from deep wounds is possible.

It’s not that I haven’t believed this before, just that it feels more accessible. And the part I think I love the most, it feels like a homecoming. Like science and modern therapy are catching up with what Indigenous cultures have always known, that touch and movement heal us.

While training to become a therapist, I learnt tools to ground and settle myself when things feel hard and overwhelming, painful and triggering. Triggers happen because of events we’ve experienced that were too much, too fast or overwhelming in the moment - and the way our brain has filed the memory of these events. They stay close to the surface and can feel when we’re triggered, as if they’re crashing into the present and happening now. Core beliefs that have developed over time, I’m too much, I’m not enough, or the panic and shame that can come out of nowhere can be connected to these triggers. I’ve learnt to work with my body to soothe the sensations these cause and expand my capacity to feel them.

What Havening has changed though, is the intensity, frequency and impact of these triggers. I can think of events that once caused distress and could take me out for long stretches of time, and they’re like talking about what I had for breakfast. They’re just things that happened. I find this incredible.

The body-brain connection is often missing in trauma counselling, certainly the way I was taught and what I hear from clients who say, I’ve never heard this before. We can’t out think triggers and we can’t reframe our thoughts to feel better when it’s our bodies that are reacting. We experience emotions in our bodies, they’re physiological. We can bring in our cognition and use modalities like 2CBT & DBT and others to support us when we’ve learnt to notice and feel into our bodies.

How do you know you’re anxious? Your heart rate is up, you’re shaking, your breath is shallow. The alert system of the brain initiates a cascade responding to stimuli that sets it off; a smell, a place, a song, a person. This cascade works with the autonomic nervous system to flood the body with stress hormones to respond to threat. It releases glucose into the bloodstream to make us run faster from the tiger, our digestion clears out, we don’t need to eat in survival mode; or it protects us by shutting down with a massive headache or immobilising us frozen in place so the tiger thinks we’re dead, and moves on.

This reaction is necessary and quite incredible really. It’s needed for survival in the moment and is designed to resolve quickly. But trauma encoding happens when that moment isn’t resolved in an embodied way. We get ‘stuck’ there and in time our nervous system can’t tell the difference between a tiger and a loud noise.

Havening can heal our brain-body at the place of the cascade. It can stop the on ramp for that process. That’s the part that feels like a miracle for me.

Initially, my skeptic was present because I have been burnt. I’ve had powerful sensory experiences over the years that I would still call spiritual, but I’m wary of miracle claims and those full of charisma telling me to lay down my doubts and just have faith. I’m wary of hype-driven encounters with something I’m told will change my life in an instant. I’ve been on both sides of these encounters. And, I’m wary of being asked to do odd things with my body, (like the time a church elder made me cough out a spirit of offence. Story for another time perhaps).

So I read everything I could find, evidence-based and anecdotal, and I trusted my therapist to take me on the journey. I’ve used Havening for grounding and regulation and offered it to clients. Now I’m able to take the journey further for trauma processing too.

Tangentially, but related, I used to be a massage therapist. Lomi lomi massage was the most beautiful. Generous and nurturing strokes from the sole to the neck in one movement could create a powerful healing experience.

Havening Techniques, also known as Havening Touch, create a safe haven, a healing environment in a similar way. Repetitive movements that you do yourself or I could do for you - you can choose from rubbing your hands together, downward shoulder strokes, tracing above the eyebrows and the action of wiping away tears - in a guided way, while naming emotions and doing exercises to distract the brain, can result in the memory centre filing distressing events where they belong, in the past. Not, as live events crashing into the present and causing distress.

If you named your reactivity at a 9 or a 10 before the exercise, this process can take it down to 0. Here’s an illustration of how.

This can work with traumatic events, core beliefs, phobias, anxiety, depression or any others areas where we feel stuck or that become debilitating.

As I often write about, therapy is woefully inadequate for the connections we are really craving, the ways we want to be held by those around us as we feel and heal. We need systems to change, workplaces, relationships and institutions to be kinder and more accomodating of neurodivergence and trauma and the need for rest and recovery. But while we work for these, therapy is what we have now. And, including psycho-sensory modalities feels closer to who we are as humans than many of the clinical ways we ‘do’ therapy and healing, at least in Western cultures.

I’m excited about working with clients through Havening, about the shifts I can see already as I start to introduce the concepts and movements and prepare my existing clients to try this powerful modality. Many of whom have experienced religious trauma and the impact of leaving high control religion and cults.

If you’d like to learn more you can get in touch here. It’s my privilege to work with people in this way.

Warmly,

Jane

November 2024

It’s also why we can experience what Michelle Panchuk refers to as the “shattering of the self” when it unravels like a ball of string being tugged at a little, and then a lot.

My father died just before my sixth birthday. So when I wandered into church looking for connection and belonging as an almost 13-year-old, God as Father filled that ache for me in many ways.

I was always uncomfortable with any version of God that was presented as wrathful or angry. I needed God to be soft and loving, full of grace and forgiveness and I compartmentalised my thinking. 

Whenever God was referred to as judgemental, jealous or unable to stop people from going to hell, I sort of closed my ears. I was fervent in my storytelling of a good God, a kind and generous God, an awesome God. This was in lieu of my own worthiness. As the lyrics go, “you are good, you are good when there’s nothing good in me” (apologies for the ear worm). I had a beautiful box I was able to fit my beliefs into snugly.

As a teen in the 80’s, pre-internet and with not much else to do in the suburbs of Sydney, church became my whole world and was a wonderful, life affirming escape from an abusive home life. I was there twice on Sundays, at youth group, prayer meetings, creative ministries nights, summer camps. It was my social and relational centre. Which was on purpose. We learnt the world was peripheral to the church and that was my reality. School and family life didn’t come close. I was taught rather, that these were my mission field, ripe fruit for salvation.

My belonging in the much loved and only community I knew, was tightly woven with my belief in God as father and friend, the one who knew and loved me, the one who counted my tears and was always faithful.

So it was devastating as I, like Dorothy, pulled back the curtain and saw the little men controlling the illusion, creating God in their imaginations too.

Their God was often a bully, judging and speaking down to the people they happened to judge too. Their God was homophobic, jealous for power, controlling, accepting only of certain types of bodies. Able to justify so much through carefully manipulated passages from scripture.

Their God didn’t look much like Jesus, but was who they needed him to be. It was so painful to realise the God of my imagination didn’t really, in the end, have much in common with theirs at all.

And so the veneer crumbled, the system had no had room for my insistence that it wasn’t okay to call a cry for human dignity the “social gospel” with a smirk and a condescending tone. I paused and caught my breath, but when I’d regrouped I found I no longer belonged.

The God of my imagination remained. I was grateful for the comfort this brought during some dark days and hard times. But like the ball of string, the shape of my certainty changed, became smaller, until it was unrecognisable.

I realised there were too many layers still connecting my imagined God and the structure I had known him in - stuck together like the pages of a book that dries after falling in water. Stuck in ways that couldn’t be pried free.

I would need to create a healing story.

And that’s where you’ll find me still. Creating a spirituality of my imagination. A story of new anchors, or ‘creativity’ as one of my clients says, she can’t yet bring herself to use language of spirit.

A healing story that is bigger, more expansive and generous than the one I knew.

One that has connected me with my body perhaps for the first time since I was a child. How it feels, what it’s telling me, how it wants to move. This has been so nurturing.

One that allows the full breadth of emotions, not just the positive ones.

One that has time and moves slower.

One that is open and curious.

One that is slowly, still, rebuilding community and places of belonging.

One that is free (er).

I don’t have a name for these imaginings and my beautiful box is more of a place holder these days. I miss the certainty and the grief was costly. I’m still learning to find and use my voice, often looking over my shoulder for permission or reprimand.

My Self still sometimes feels the impact of being shattered, but my healing story is being written, holding the stories of so many others and coming to life.

If you’d like to work with me you can get in touch here. It’s my privilege to support people to navigate the impact of religious and spiritual harm.

Jane

She was dissing people speaking about her area of expertise as though she was the only one allowed to speak …

Read more

I can only imagine what a relief if would have been to know there were people close to home experiencing the same thing and find connection and solidarity in that.

So all these years later, it’s a great feeling to have just launched The Religious Trauma Collective (Australia & New Zealand). Counsellors Sam Sellers, Elise Heerde and I have been working on it for months and now it’s here.

We know what it’s like to feel the ground moving beneath us after leaving church and/or God. It can be painful, unsettling and disorienting. We can get lost in the rubble.

We also know what it’s like to have to look really hard to find the right therapist/practitioner to support naming and navigating the experience of harm done in faith settings.

It’s harder in our part of the world, harder if you’re queer, harder if you’ve experienced abuse or you’re marginalised in any way.

Much of our understanding of religious harm, religious trauma and spiritual abuse comes from North America. And while these resources helped us enormously and gave us language to use, we would love to have had more stories and support that felt more like our experience. 

So many of our clients and others on what can be a very lonely journey, have expressed the same sentiment. Where do I find people who understand? Is “evangelical” the same as “Pentecostal” or does it mean something different? And so on. Australia and New Zealand are, for the purposes of census data and within pop culture, largely secular nations, so coming out of high control or high demand church/religion, can feel like being a stranger in a strange land.

The Religious Trauma Collective (Australia & New Zealand) is a place to find a collective of others, a practitioner or a podcast, a book or an article to help make sense of your experience. 

Whether you are still a person of faith, progressive where you were once all in, wanting to burn it all down or somewhere in between, you’ll find support for your journey.

We have resources from Australian & New Zealand (and international too) voices and a growing list of A/NZ practitioners, many of whom have lived experience of harm in religious spaces. In time we’ll offer events and training but we’re excited the collective is now here.

Love you to follow us on Facebook or Instagram and if you’re a practitioner working in this space you can join us here. Or just follow along here.

We love the idea of community, connection and hope that things can be different.

Healing is possible.

In Solidarity,

Jane