My new first choice book for spiritual trauma
Yesterday, I got a message from a member of my former Buddhist community, “Can you recommend a book? I’m still trying to understand what happened.” This woman left the community at least eight years ago. She was never in the inner circle or close to the leaders. She may not have taken the vows that granted access to the higher and more coercive levels of the community or been singled out by the leaders. Yet here she is, eight years later, trying to understand what happened. I recommended Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary L. McBride.
As someone who has never been a Christian and works primarily with clients from other spiritual backgrounds, I have longed for a recovery book that is focused on the nuances of recovery from spiritual trauma without being limited to one tradition. Holy Hurt comes pretty close. Upfront, McBride tells readers she won’t use prayer, references to the Christian Bible, or explicitly Christian language in the book. Though the book references God throughout—and some interviews with experts, such as Laura Anderson and J.S. Park, bring in more religion-specific details—it is a fantastic match for Christians and former Christians (as of this writing, it ranks third in the Christian counseling category on Amazon), while also being flexible enough to meet readers from different traditions where they are in their recovery journeys.
The stories McBride tells in Holy Hurt aren’t trauma vignettes, which can be hard for survivors to read. They are relatable, everyday moments, sometimes funny, that introduce us early on to a deep and wide view of spiritual trauma. I was particularly struck by her story in chapter one: “The House is Haunted.” McBride describes a childhood where the church was a central feature, an extended family joined together by food, ritual, and care, that splintered when the pastor’s grooming and sexual abuse of young women was revealed. She writes, “Then half of them were gone…My confusion reflected the chaos around me, and I felt the loss of a rich relational world that seemingly collapsed overnight. I never saw some of those people again” (p. 8).
McBride points out how painfully common the story is; the pastor denied it, and half the congregation left with him, including family members of the women he abused. By sharing her experience as a community member, not one of the women groomed by the pastor, she lays the ground for the book: that spiritual trauma is pervasive, insidious, and wide-reaching, and it may be affecting you more than you realize.
In some cases, people came in with clear-cut stories of hurt. Someone had abused them and had done so in the name of God…But more often than not, I encountered people who had symptoms in the present that they could not trace back to anything in particular. After all, how do you pinpoint something that was woven into the very fabric of your development? How can you talk about a thing that hurt you when you were told that doing so would be a sin and would cause eternal suffering. How can you name a wound when the source of the trauma cut you off from knowing you were wounded in the first place? (p. 12)
Holy Hurt doesn’t shy away from the ripple effects of spiritual abuse, which is why the book is helpful for people like me, who were in the inner circle of a high-demand group and experienced clear-cut abuse directly, and people like my Buddhist colleague, who were on the margins and just aren’t sure what happened.
One of McBride’s strengths as a writer is bridging the academic and the visceral, research and everyday life. In one chapter, she tells the story of how a shard of glass got lodged in her finger while washing dishes, stayed there for nine months, and then finally popped out while reading her daughter a story in the back seat of a car. She uses the finger injury as a metaphor for spiritual trauma: the hidden and dismissed aspect of it, how even if it is denied by a whole community, our bodies still know when we have been hurt. That story leads to a rich, but digestible psychoeducation section on the emotional, physical, social–relational, and spiritual symptoms of spiritual trauma, as well as somatic memory. Then McBride brings it home to the reader’s experience again,
My writing about this might feel energizing for you; You may finally be understanding some things about someone you love, or why something that is painful for you creates no reaction for anyone else. Or you might be experiencing a flood of fear, and it is hard to keep reading. All these reactions make sense as a part of human experience in general, but they also speak of who you are as a person and what you’ve lived through. (p. 61)
I was pleased to see McBride tackle topics that are often avoided: how spiritual bypassing keeps people from recognizing harm in themselves or others, and why it is so hard to dismantle in therapy. She also covers why people stay in abusive systems, the healing role of witnessing, and how McBride herself has struggled to relate to Christianity’s legacy of trauma through colonization and white supremacy. The interview with Native American activist and pastor Mark Charles on that topic was my favorite in the entire book.
My favorite chapter is “Mending and Meaning,” which starts with a story of McBride making a pact with the moon, morphs into Judith Herman’s three stages of healing, and ends with a three-page poem–manifesto for the spiritual trauma survivor, which is a triumph of the book. Here are just a few lines from that section:
You may need to re-learn or learn for the first time that this life is yours. This body is yours. Your choices are yours. Being responsible for yourself is an honor because caring for you and loving you, even when it is you loving and caring for you, are sacred work. (p. 191)
Because of its warmth and gentleness, I feel comfortable giving this book to someone fresh out of an abusive group, and because of its breadth and depth, I think it is also valuable for people who have been out of or questioning their spiritual backgrounds for a long time. Holy Hurt is a small but mighty book that cares for the reader throughout. The weave of storytelling, research, interviews, and practices is like a nest that keeps the reader safe as they heal. The book covers a lot of ground, remains engaging from start to finish, and continually calls readers back to their own embodied experience. I recommend it for people who have experienced spiritual trauma, therapists, and all who care for and support this population.
