What Is Religious Power and Control?
This post grew out of personal reflection work using Claude Sonnet 4.6 after reading Chapter 3 of Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary L. McBride. The discussion questions from her companion Brave Book Conversations A GUIDE FOR PROCESSING HOLY HURT IN GROUPS invited self-examination about religious power and control. What came up in that process became the foundation for this post — shaped from lived experience into something that might be useful for others on a similar path.
There is a particular kind of weariness that comes from spending your life managing other people’s emotions. You may not even recognize it as exhaustion at first. It just feels like being responsible. Being nice. Being good.
But underneath the goodness is often something older and more pressed down — fear. Fear of consequences. Fear of losing what you have. Fear that if someone is unhappy with you, everything could be lost.
This is appeasement. And for many survivors of high-control religious environments, it isn’t just a personality trait. It was a survival strategy that the system itself required.
How Environments Create This Pattern
Appeasement doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It is shaped by the environments we inhabit — and sometimes those environments begin long before any church involvement.
Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner had a useful way of explaining this. He said we don’t grow up in a bubble — the world around us shapes us at every level. The people and world around us shape who we become — starting with our family, then spreading out to our neighborhood and community, then to our culture, and finally to the bigger systems of power that run our society. When every layer of your world — family, community, culture — is built around control, you learn early that the safest way to survive is to make yourself small, go along with what you’re told, and keep the peace.
For example: imagine a child who grows up in a strict religious home where questioning is discouraged. Her church community reinforces the same rules. The school she attends is run by the same organization. Even the broader culture she lives in treats that religion as the norm. Every ring of her world is sending the same message — don’t ask, don’t push back, don’t trust yourself. By the time she’s an adult, shrinking and complying don’t feel like survival strategies anymore. They just feel like who she is.
For some survivors like me, the pattern began at home not church — in a family system just trying to survive, where there was no room for a child’s full expression, needs, or voice. The church didn’t create the wound. It found it and deepened it. It offered belonging, identity, and spiritual meaning — and then used those things as leverage.
The Duluth Model and Religious Control
Laura Anderson’s Religious Power and Control Wheel gives survivors a map for what many have felt but never had words for. To understand how religious power and control operates as a system rather than a series of isolated incidents, Anderson’s wheel breaks it down into interconnected categories.
Isolation. There was a name for it in the churches I was a part of — being “unequally yoked” with unbelievers. People outside the faith were someone we shouldn’t get too close to because they might cause a person to stumble. Information was something to be cautious about, too. Broader ways of thinking about religion were discouraged. I was once gently chastised for promoting the book The Shack by William Paul Young on my personal social media and accidentally on the church’s page that was linked with my own. After a phone call from an elder asking me about it, I felt like I’d committed the unpardonable sin. Not because he was overly demanding, but because I felt so much pressure to please others. The system’s beliefs were presented as the inspired words of God — and anything that might cause others to stumble shouldn’t be encouraged. I was mortified by the thought of harming another believer and was careful not to do it again.
Loss of Autonomy. I learned early — in Sunday school, in sermons, in the quiet disapproval of others — that I could not trust my own inner voice. My heart was deceitful. My flesh was weak and wanted to sin. These weren’t conclusions I came to myself — they were words handed to me so early I eventually stopped questioning them. My ability to think critically, trust my instincts, or make my own decisions wasn’t something I was trusted with. For that, I needed the guidance of spiritual leaders — or my husband. Early in my spiritual life I was introduced to the story of Adam and Eve — and the clear implication that woman was the one who caused man to sin. That story followed me everywhere.
Sexuality & Gender. From the beginning, the boundaries were clear — women were not permitted to teach or hold any position of authority over a man. I remember going to my pastor with genuine concern about whether teaching teenage boys crossed a line. I wasn’t being forced — I wanted to make sure I stayed within my place. The rule had become my own. Modesty was emphasized, with the responsibility placed squarely on women’s bodies. How you dressed was not just a personal choice — it was a moral obligation to the men around you. I still remember listening to men share about their experience at a Promise Keepers meeting — how they had broken into small groups and made commitments to hold one another accountable. The stumbling they were guarding against wasn’t their own choices. It was us. Our bodies.
Economic Control. Tithing may not have been called mandatory, but the message was consistent: the first ten percent belonged to God. Bring your tithes into the storehouse. The verse showed up regularly, and its weight was hard to ignore.
Spiritual Abuse. Church leaders had authority to decide how public sins would be handled. Your choices, your mistakes, your private struggles — none of it fully belonged to you. Failure to comply carried real consequences. I watched it happen to someone I loved — a family member whose relationship the church had deemed sinful. Two church leaders showed up at her home to confront her. Not long after, she withdrew her membership and stopped coming. The message was clear — comply or be pushed out.
At the time, I believed this was right. I was so shaped by the system that I genuinely thought church discipline was an act of love. I couldn’t see the damage from inside it. I apologized to her later. But the damage had already been done. It wasn’t until I found myself confessing my own so-called sin — what I now understand was actually an experience of abuse — that I finally understood how she must have felt standing in that living room with two men telling her who she was allowed to be.
Minimizing, Denying, Blaming. When something felt wrong, the framework was already in place to explain it away. Your discomfort was reframed as spiritual weakness. Your questions were evidence of a wavering faith. The problem was never the system — the problem was always you.
I didn’t have a word for it then. But I remember a Bible study where the pastor recounted a story about a group of people in a car who misheard something he said and it spiraled into a major argument. The lesson, as he told it, was about the danger of mishearing — of letting your perception lead you somewhere false. I filed it away without thinking much of it. It wasn’t until later, when I brought a concern to him about a man who had made me uncomfortable, that I felt the full weight of what that kind of teaching does. My concern was minimized. My perception was quietly questioned. I left the conversation doubting myself instead of the situation.
That’s how it works. It rarely happens all at once. It accumulates in small moments, in gentle corrections, in the steady message that your instincts can’t be trusted. Over the years those interactions added up in ways I couldn’t even see — until I looked back and realized they had kept me inside an abusive system for a decade, convincing me the whole time that the problem was me.
Emotional Abuse. Shame was the air you breathed. You were a sinner, just like everyone else — and that reminder did its work quietly, eroding your ability to trust your own experience, your own perception, your own sense that something wasn’t right.
All of it pointed to the same conclusion — I needed help. I was bad. My longings and emotions couldn’t be trusted. And that belief created something the system depended on: my dependency on others to tell me what was true.
Emotional abuse is when someone consistently causes you to feel bad, unloved, or worthless. What made it so hard to recognize was that they also said they loved me. They offered hugs and prayers and presence when I was in distress. The comfort was real. But it always came with a solution attached — trust and obey God. And the God they were teaching me about required their guidance, because I was too weak and too broken to find my way on my own.
So I learned to survive the only way that brought relief — by appeasing. By being good enough, compliant enough, grateful enough. By making myself small so the shame would quiet down.
Each of these tactics reinforced the others. That’s what made it a system, not just a set of rules. And that’s what makes it so hard to name, even long after you’ve left.
Appeasement isn’t weakness. It is a rational response to a environment where the consequences of disapproval are real and significant.
When the Broader Culture Is Also the System
It would be easier if control only lived inside churches. But many survivors are discovering that the same dynamics they escaped in high-control religious environments are reflected in the broader culture around them — particularly in the United States right now.
Economic instability, shrinking social safety nets, threats to healthcare and housing, erosion of women’s rights and bodily autonomy, political polarization that punishes dissent — these are not separate from the conversation about religious trauma. They are the macrosystem pressing inward on the same person who already learned that survival requires compliance.
When your food, shelter, safety, and stability depend on systems you did not choose and cannot easily exit, appeasement becomes not just a personal pattern but a structural reality. The nervous system that learned to manage others’ emotions in a high-control church is now navigating a culture that rewards compliance and punishes those who step out of line.
This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for clarity. Naming the system accurately is the first act of resistance.
What It Looks Like Now
The institution may be gone but the nervous system remembers. Appeasement in daily life can be subtle. It might look like monitoring someone’s mood before deciding whether to speak. Changing your behavior to avoid someone’s reaction. Carrying burdens alone so others won’t be overwhelmed. Hiding your real life from people who wouldn’t understand it.
It can even look like self-improvement — reading, learning, growing — while quietly doing it all in service of managing how others see you.
Recognizing the pattern is not the same as being able to stop it overnight. Especially when real dependencies are involved — financial, relational, structural. The goal isn’t to blow up your life. It’s to slowly, carefully begin to build the conditions for more freedom.
So where do you go from here? If any of this has felt familiar — if you have recognized yourself in these pages — I want you to know that there is a way forward. Not a quick one. Not a straight one. But a real one.
It starts with language.
Freedom often begins not with leaving but with words. When you finally have a name for what you experienced — religious trauma, coercive control, spiritual abuse — something shifts. You are no longer confused about why you feel the way you feel. You are no longer wondering if you are too sensitive, too broken, too faithless. You are oriented. The map doesn’t fix everything, but it tells you where you are. And that matters more than it sounds.
Then comes the grief.
Leaving a high-control system isn’t just leaving a set of beliefs. It’s losing a community, an identity, a way of understanding the world and your place in it. The grief is real — and it deserves to be honored rather than rushed. For a long time I tried to skip past mine, to get to the part where I felt better. What I’ve learned is that agency begins when you stop having to pretend the loss doesn’t hurt.
Learning to trust yourself again.
So much of what the system did was teach you to override your own signals — your discomfort, your doubt, your longing, your anger. Recovery involves slowly learning to listen to yourself again. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But turning toward your own inner experience with curiosity instead of suspicion. The voice inside you that said something isn’t right was telling the truth. It was always telling the truth. Learning to trust it again is some of the most important work you will ever do.
Finding safe people.
You cannot heal in isolation. But after years inside a system that controlled your relationships, finding safe people takes time and practice. A therapist who understands religious trauma. A peer support community of people who have walked a similar road. Even one person who can hold your story without flinching. You don’t need many. You need real ones.
Separating what is yours from what was handed to you.
For many survivors, the question isn’t whether to believe anything at all — it’s learning to tell the difference between what feels genuinely true and what was institutionally imposed. That is slow, tender work. There is no timeline for it. But here is what I know: that work belongs entirely to you. No leader, no system, no authority gets a vote in it anymore.
And then there are the people still inside.
This may be the hardest part of all. When people you love remain in the system — family members, old friends, people who were once the center of your world — you are caught between your own emerging freedom and the grief of watching them stay. You cannot rescue anyone. You cannot argue someone out of a system they aren’t ready to leave. But you can remain present. You can keep the door open. You can refuse to let their staying define your leaving. Your freedom is not a betrayal of them. It is an invitation — even if they aren’t ready to accept it yet.
Hope is not a feeling. It’s a decision.
Hope in this context isn’t optimism. It isn’t pretending everything will be fine or that the damage wasn’t real. It’s the quiet, daily decision to keep moving. To trust yourself a little more today than you did yesterday. To keep building a life that belongs to you. To keep believing — even on the days when it’s hard — that what was taken can, slowly, be restored.
You are allowed to trust yourself again. That is not a small thing. For many of us, it is everything.
Recognizing religious power and control for what it is — a system, not just a bad experience — is often the first step toward trusting yourself again.
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
If you are somewhere in this story — just beginning to name what happened, somewhere in the middle of untangling it, or further along and looking for a place to belong — A Liminal Space was created for you. It is a peer support community for people navigating the aftermath of religious harm, facilitated by someone who has walked this road herself. There is no pressure here to be further along than you are. No one will tell you what to believe or who to become. This is simply a space where your story is welcome, your questions are safe, and you are not alone. If something here stirred something in you — whether recognition, grief, anger, or relief — I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment below, or come find us at A Liminal Space where this conversation continues.
You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to heal at your own pace. And you are allowed to be in the company of others who understand.
Questions for Reflection and Empowerment
- Where in your daily life do you notice yourself monitoring others’ emotions before your own — and what are you afraid would happen if you stopped?
- What is one area of your life where you have more agency than you are currently using, and what would it look like to use it?
- What would it mean to trust your own perception — even when the people closest to you don’t share it?
Resources
- Holy Hurt by Hillary L. McBride — a clinically grounded and compassionate guide to understanding and healing spiritual trauma
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker — essential reading for understanding fawning and appeasement as trauma responses
- When Religion Hurts You by Dr. Laura Anderson is a clinically grounded guide to understanding and healing from high-control religious environments.