Reclaiming Our Power: Healing from Religious Trauma
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 08/11/2023We talk often about agency in our house because therapy! If you aren’t familiar with the concept of agency, think of it as the control we have over our own lives, our faith in our ability to make our own decisions, and our ability to handle a wide range of situations. It’s our agency over our own lives that helps keep us psychologically stable as well as flexible with the world around us. It’s like our own superpower. Too often, the church, especially fundamentalist churches and high-control religious communities, squelch our agency. They take away our power, and they hinder our ability to believe that we can, in fact, think for ourselves and have power over our own lives. After all, the crux of “high-control religion” is the control.
Reclaiming Our Voices: Healing from Religious Trauma
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 01/11/2023As an adult who has reclaimed her voice, it’s baffling to me that the church I grew up in screamed as loudly as they could that we were supposed to “be like Jesus,” yet they ignored the character of Christ and how he related to, interacted with, blessed women and utilized them in his ministry. There are entire books written on the culture of Jesus’ day. If you haven’t spent some time researching what life was like, the cultural norms, and the laws related to men and women of that time, I would highly recommend it. It’s so eye-opening, and it helps in our understanding of the different texts and letters that have become our Bible today. Too often, our churches have a laser focus on Paul’s letter to a specific church while ignoring the actual works, words, and relationships of Jesus. That is highly problematic.
Reclaiming Our Minds: Healing from Religious Trauma
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 25/10/2023Life is different here in the 21st century than it was in the previous centuries. We have biblical commentary, Greek and Hebrew translations, and scholarly articles at our fingertips. Within a matter of minutes, I can have tabs open with 5 different Bible translations, 3 different bible commentaries, and an array of blog posts, sermons, and articles on every topic imaginable. Years ago, I had a pastor who stole all his sermons from online, and I could sit in the service on a Sunday morning and find his sermon within the first five minutes. On a side note–I wouldn’t suggest this. In the past, our access to information came through physical books and scholarly articles in libraries, and our blind trust was in the leaders of our churches. I was an adult when it occurred to me that much of my spiritual formation was influenced by white men without so much as a high school diploma who had never been out of the state and rarely crossed county lines. It was sobering.
Reclaiming Our Worth: Healing from Religious Trauma
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 18/10/2023If I asked you to think of someone who made you feel small, unworthy, and even broken right now, I’m pretty confident most of us could think of someone: A coach A teacher A parent A frenemy A sibling A partner For some of us, just the thought of that person’s words and treatment is enough to make us shudder and trigger our PTSD. These are the people we try to avoid–the people whose words and treatment of us we are still attempting to heal from and seeking therapy for. Despite the fact that we desperately try to avoid this behavior and these relationships in our personal lives, some of us are sitting in churches every Sunday or have this mindset that constantly reminds us and reinforces to us that we’re broken and unworthy.
