The Language We Didn't Have
As a teenager, Father’s Day always meant one thing–church camp.
It was the day we would load up in vans and head south to a Christian college campus where we would live in dorms for a week, eat terrible food, spend hours a day in church services, have forced quiet devotion time, survive on very little sleep, and spend our afternoons in group bonding activities like going to the public pool as long as we had tshirts to wear over our swimsuits so we wouldn’t be stumbling blocks for the boys.
Emotions ran high throughout the week, with every service encouraging us to be in the world but not of the world, to see every one we met as the mission field, to avoid temptation, to give our lives to Christ, or to rededicate our lives to Christ after our failures during the year.
Thursday nights were charged. Since we left on Friday, Thursday night’s service was always heavy on the emotion–specifically fear and guilt. Youth leaders sat anxiously with us, trying not to let us see who they were watching, hoping and praying would go forward during the time of invitation.
There were so many tears. By the end of the night, everyone was crying, completely overcome with the intense emotion in the room.
And, that’s just one of the church camps I attended.
When I was in fourth grade, I went to another one with my best friend. While we were able to bunk together, the camp assigned us “families” for the week. We had to spend all day with them, even eating meals and recreation time. The only time I was able to see the one person I knew at the camp was when I was sleeping. While this alone was horrible, the pressure to get baptized was so intense, I left convinced I wasn’t going to heaven because I didn’t get dipped.
This is real.
Then, there are the other camps I attended as a teenager–ones where the theme for the week was “Survivor,” and I watched a girl stand with one foot on a can so long she should have gone to the ER. Or there was the “milk challenge,” where campers were challenged to drink an entire gallon of milk in an hour and not throw up. Finally, there was the push-up challenge, where campers had to hold a plank for as long as possible to win points for their team.
I can’t forget the “family time” that was used as a time for campers to “memorize scripture”–which really just meant learning it long enough to rehash it to a staff member so you could get your points–and for corporate prayer–which really just determined who were the better Christians by who could pray the most elaborate prayers.
And, at the time, I thought it was great. Life-changing even. An absolute “must” for any true Christian teen.
It would be years before I untangled all of this and even longer before I had both the language and the courage to openly talk about it.
Like many of you, I grew up learning the language of the church and never learning the language of healthy relationships.
Damaging behavior and programming was shrouded in phrases like “he meant well,” “hate the sin; love the sinner,” and “they just want to bring them to Jesus.”
As long as the behavior was covered in the language of discipleship, the damage was ignored.
We Learned the Language of Church
One of the most disorienting parts of untangling all of this for me was that I had spent my entire life writing over emotions, damage, and experiences with church language.
Fear was “conviction.”
Pressure was “accountability.”
Shame was “holiness.”
Obedience was “spiritual maturity.”
Exhaustion was “commitment.”
Conformity was “unity.”
Manipulation was “discipleship.”
It wasn’t that I was lacking discernment. I was lacking language.
I couldn’t heal what I couldn’t name.
For years, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what to call it.
Once I began reading about spiritual abuse, religious trauma, and healthy relationships, I realized many of the experiences I had normalized weren’t isolated incidents. They fit patterns other people had already identified and named.
Having language didn’t instantly heal me, but it gave me a place to start.
As I began untangling my experiences, I discovered there were entire fields of study devoted to understanding the kinds of harm that can occur within religious systems and faith communities. The things I had experienced weren’t unique, and they weren’t simply evidence that I was “too sensitive,” “bitter,” or “looking for reasons to be offended.”
Researchers, therapists, pastors, and survivors had already spent decades developing language to describe these experiences.
I don’t share these frameworks so you can diagnose every difficult church experience as abuse or trauma. Not every hurtful experience rises to that level. I share them because many of us have spent years minimizing, spiritualizing, or explaining away real harm. Sometimes healing begins when we finally have words for what we’ve lived through.
Spiritual Abuse
Even in the 1990s, David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderen began defining and developing a framework for identifying spiritual abuse.
They defined spiritual abuse as a misuse of spiritual authority that causes harm or trauma. Spiritual abuse occurs when spiritual authority, religious beliefs, scripture, or the threat of divine consequences are used to control, manipulate, shame, or coerce another person.
Intentions matter, but they do not erase impact. Even when the stated goal is spiritual growth, if the result is fear, dependency, shame, coercion, and/or a loss of personal agency, the behavior has crossed into spiritual abuse.
Religious Trauma
Marlene Winell is known for her research on Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS)–a condition describing the trauma responses that emerge from rigid or punitive religious systems and the psychological harm often experienced when leaving high-control or fundamentalist religious environments.
RTS is not isolated to a single event, but instead is the culmination of years spent in environments that taught fear, shame, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hypervigilance, and/or the suppression of one’s identity and instincts. It often shows up as guilt, anxiety, identity confusion, and social isolation.
Religious trauma isn’t simply one theologically flawed sermon, one guilt-filled night of church camp, or one over-the-top altar call. It’s a combination of all of those experiences. It’s ten years of emotionally manipulative church camp Thursday nights. It’s Sunday after Sunday of hellfire and brimstone sermons. It’s class after class of control.
Healthy Relationships and Boundaries
One of the most surprising discoveries in my own healing journey was realizing that I knew far more about being a “good Christian” than I did about what healthy relationships actually looked like.
Many of us are more versed in church language than we are in the language of healthy relationships because we learned what it meant to be a “good Christian” before we learned what healthy relationships looked like.
As an adult who has benefited greatly from therapy, I now understand healthy relationships require:
Consent
Mutual respect
Freedom to ask questions
Appropriate boundaries
Repair when harm occurs
The ability to disagree without fear
Just to name a few.
If a relationship requires silence, fear, compliance, or self-abandonment just to survive, something unhealthy is happening.
Even in a church.
Especially in a church.
Naming It Is Not Betraying God
For years, many of us avoided using these words to define and describe our experiences in faith communities:
Fear
Manipulation
Abuse
Coercion
Trauma
Control
We worried that naming them would define us as “bad Christians” or be a signal we were betraying our faith communities. We were convinced that naming the harm would be dishonoring God, that speaking honestly would somehow cancel out or invalidate the good things we experienced.
This was the tension for me.
While I had some really terrible and traumatic experiences in the church and definitely at church camp, I also had great experiences and amazing memories.
This is what makes naming spiritual abuse and religious trauma so difficult. Most of us aren’t trying to reconcile an entirely bad experience. We’re trying to reconcile a mixed one.
The same church camp that left me terrified of disappointing God also gave me friendships I still value. The same church culture that taught me unhealthy lessons also introduced me to people who genuinely cared about me.
Healing required me to stop treating those realities as mutually exclusive.
I’ve had to accept that these two truths can exist at the same time. Telling the truth about both does not make me weak, contradictory, or a fraud–it makes me honest.
Honesty is where the healing begins.
You don’t need to exaggerate what happened. You don’t need to justify your pain. You don’t need a jury to unanimously agree your experience was harmful.
You only need the language and the courage to tell the truth about what happened because what we cannot name, we cannot heal.
If you’re reading this today, I don’t think the goal is necessarily to confront anyone or publicly revisit every painful experience you’ve had. For many of us, the first step is much quieter than that.
The first step is often simply telling ourselves the truth.
It’s looking honestly at our experiences and giving ourselves permission to acknowledge both the good and the bad. It’s recognizing that harm does not become healthy simply because it happened in a church, and it does not disappear because someone had good intentions.
Take some time to sit with your story. Name what happened. Notice what still hurts. Pay attention to the places where church language may have covered over real wounds–not so you can stay angry or build your identity around what happened to you, but so you can begin healing from it.
Reflection Questions
What experiences from my faith journey have I struggled to name honestly? Are there places where I have used church language to explain away fear, shame, pressure, or hurt?
What messages about God, myself, or other people did I learn from these experiences? Which of those messages still influence the way I think, relate, or make decisions today?
What would it look like to tell the truth about both the good and the bad? How might acknowledging the harm without dismissing the positive memories create space for healing?
I write in two spaces. A Seat at the Table is where I explore faith, healing, and making room for honesty after it’s been made complicated. Ink & Intention is for writers who want to show up with clarity, discernment, and integrity—especially online.
I’m also the author of Breathing Again and several guided journals, and I work with writers who want thoughtful, grounded support as they find their voice and shape what comes next.
If you’re a writer looking for thoughtful encouragement, practical strategy, and honest conversations about the writing life, you’re also welcome to join us inside The Visible Author Facebook Community.
If something here resonated, you’re welcome to explore more at your own pace. You can find everything in one place at KristenNeighbarger.com.
