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.
