In the introduction to her book, A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts, Katherine Spearing writes:
The absolute best description I’ve ever heard on the impact of spiritual abuse came from another survivor. They said, “It’s like a thousand tiny paper cuts until eventually you bleed to death.” A paper cut is frustrating and painful, but no one will rush you to urgent care over it. Nobody will bring you a casserole or write you a sympathy card. One or two cuts might not be enough to cause alarm, but if you receive a thousand of these cuts over an extended period, eventually these minor cuts will consume your whole body. It’s why when somebody asks me, “What exactly is spiritual abuse?” I have to share a few stories, coupled with information about the abuse and all the work it takes to recover, to really explain it to someone who hasn’t been there. Sometimes, you feel pressure to tell them the most sensational stories just to keep their attention. (p. xvii)
Katherine Spearing has made a significant contribution to the conversation around spiritual abuse with this book, offering readers a clear and empathetic understanding of the experience. She is the founder of Tears of Eden, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting survivors of spiritual abuse. However, she has recently stepped back from that work to focus on her one-to-one client work, although the site remains active. She holds a Master of Arts in Religion and Culture and is a certified Trauma-Recovery Practitioner, credentials that have shaped her approach to healing and advocacy.
Spearing’s engagement with these issues extends well beyond writing. She also hosted the podcast Uncertain, which tackled the problem of abuse within church communities. In this book, she draws on her own journey through abuse and recovery, sharing both the hard work of healing from trauma and the ways that experience has prepared her to walk alongside others facing similar challenges.
Spearing opens Chapter One with a discussion of power. She states that “misuse of power is where abuse occurs. To understand abuse, we must locate the center of power. Who has it? How are they wielding it? Are they aware of the impact of their power?” (p. 2). This framing becomes the lens through which Spearing examines every abusive context she encountered: her father’s household, the cultic community her family inhabited, and the churches where she later worked. The specific setting changes; the dynamic does not. She goes on to describe her family’s drift into the Christian patriarchal movement, including how, shortly after she turned sixteen, her father decided his daughters should not attend college, since their ultimate destiny was to marry, have children, and be a “helpmeet”—that is, a servant—to their future husbands.
There is a growing body of literature about the extreme patriarchy movement, written by women who have left and subsequently deconstructed their faith. Notable examples include A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings, Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West, and Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. These books share a great deal in common—the stories are all harrowing—yet there are meaningful differences in how each author’s life unfolds; for instance, Westover’s family is Mormon rather than evangelical Christian. Spearing is an excellent writer, and her contribution to the genre is significant.
Spearing continues in Chapter One by describing what happened after she escaped the extreme patriarchy movement and her father’s control, moving outward into more mainstream evangelical churches. She writes, “When I tell my story, most Christians are appropriately appalled at how much control my father had over my life. With a growing awareness of cults and an increased understanding of the trauma caused by spiritual abuse, most churchgoers don’t have difficulty acknowledging my upbringing as abusive” (p. 6–7). However, she goes on to describe how she encountered more subtle instances of gender and marriage hierarchy in many mainstream church teachings, as well as highly controlling behavior from a mission team leader that ultimately prevented her from returning to the mission field. What she describes in this chapter is something akin to Steve Hassan’s Influence Continuum©. While identifying her family structure as cultic is relatively easy—daughters forbidden from higher education, kept at home in domestic servitude until their father could arrange a suitable marriage—the subtler forms of spiritual abuse embedded in the toxic beliefs and practices of some churches and missionary organizations are far harder to perceive. These subtler injuries are precisely what make up the titular “paper cuts.”
At the beginning of Chapter Two, “Control,” Spearing offers a helpful account of how cult leaders gain and maintain authority. Clearly, she has familiarized herself with the cult literature, and she lays out a concise explanation of how such leaders, like her father, operate. Throughout each chapter, she uses episodes from her own story to illuminate how spiritual and cultic abuse functions. Much of this consists of recounting what her life was like living under her father’s roof as a teenager and young adult.
People in that stage of life are working to resolve the developmental conflict of identity versus role confusion, and to do so, they need the freedom to make some choices of their own. In the extreme patriarchy setting, young women are not permitted to grow up and become financially independent adults. They are expected to move directly from being under their father’s “covering”—his authority—to being under their husband’s. Thus, a woman who does not marry until she is twenty-five or even thirty years old would be expected to remain at home with her father until then. In this context, she is in perpetual training for her future role as a wife and is expected to develop skills suited to domestic life. Working outside the home is generally frowned upon, unless the work is something like babysitting or serving the church. Spearing was bright and wanted to attend college after finishing high school, but her father regarded it as a waste of time and money. Fortunately, she had the opportunity to travel to Guatemala for six weeks at the age of nineteen, and that experience made an enormous difference in her life. She says as much herself:
“If he had any intention of maintaining control of me, keeping me fearful, submissive, and exactly where he wanted me, he should have never let me go to Guatemala” (p. 23).
While attending a language school in Guatemala to improve her Spanish, Spearing encountered people from outside the Christian patriarchy bubble she had inhabited, and this was a revelation. The school introduced her to young people from other faiths and cultures who were, to her considerable surprise, good and trustworthy. Although she returned home to her parents after those weeks abroad, her mind had opened to the reality that a world existed beyond her family and the narrow brand of religion they practiced. Even so, it took several more years before she finally left home at twenty-six, and it is fair to wonder whether that departure would have happened at all without the Guatemala trip.
In a pattern familiar to those of us who work with former members of high-demand, cultic groups, after leaving her family, Spearing found herself working in ministry in a succession of abusive churches. When people raised in trauma-inducing environments make their way to marginally less abusive situations, they are often inured to mistreatment and slow to recognize that a new situation, while perhaps not as severe as the original, is still unacceptable. The abuse arrives, as the title suggests, like a thousand tiny paper cuts—and it remains harmful regardless of its relative intensity. Spearing does an admirable job of describing her healing process: getting in touch with her anger, making use of therapeutic interventions from her various therapists, and continuing to evolve after finally breaking free from the abusive churches where she had worked.
The book is helpful on several levels, though Spearing does not tell her story in a linear fashion which makes it somewhat harder to follow. For example, she recounted leaving the abusive church where she worked at age thirty-four before she described leaving her parents’ home at twenty-six. The book’s underlying structure is thematic, and she uses episodes from her life to illustrate those points. That approach works, but her life story is compelling enough to stand on its own, and I would have preferred to read it in chronological order with her life story as the organizing structure, and her insights on spiritual abuse attached to her story as she went along.
Another observation is something I also encountered when reviewing Laura Anderson’s When Religion Hurts You (Anderson also wrote the foreword to Spearing’s book). These are challenging books for practicing Christians to read. In an ideal world, no one claiming the name of Christ would abuse their authority or take advantage of vulnerable people. In my view, Christians are called to manifest what the Apostle Paul describes in his letter to the Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22–23, NRSV). None of us embodies these qualities perfectly, of course, but they represent what we ought to be striving toward. The reality, unfortunately, is that a significant amount of abuse occurs in the name of Christ, and those of us who care about how Christianity shows up in the world must be willing to face that honestly. This acknowledgment is uncomfortable, and for some Christians these accounts may be genuinely triggering. Yet I believe engagement is necessary. If we look away, how do we learn what we need to know so that fewer people suffer in this way?
For all these reasons, I heartily recommend A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts: The Subtle, Insidious Nature of Spiritual Abuse and Life on the Other Side by Katherine Spearing to everyone who is concerned about the problem of spiritual abuse.
