I’ve been reading The Congruent Life by Chad Jarnigan lately, as part of a search I’ve been on for churches that could actually be safe places for religious trauma survivors. It’s a follow-up to my last post. The book centers on contemplative practice — centering prayer, silence, returning to God’s presence.
But as I am working through the reflection exercises, I keep coming back to what the book hasn’t talked about yet — the fears running in the background in my own life that come up whenever I enter a church. As I journaled and worked through the questions at the end of the chapter, I gained deeper insight into these fears.
I was surprised by a simple insight I came to – contemplative practices can actually bring up trauma. And if you carry religious trauma, some of what surfaces in the contemplative silence, in all likelihood, could be about church itself — the very room you are sitting in, with no place to put it. What can the individual sitting in church, and the others there next to them, do to help?
And what I’m realizing as I write this is I haven’t known what to do, and neither have others — even those in these environments who might even want to help. I don’t think this is about unwillingness or even ignorance. I think it might just be something many people aren’t talking about — especially those who are inside the church.
They’ve done the work on other things
Some churches are doing real, meaningful justice work for underserved communities. This work matters so much, and I’m not trying to take anything away from it. It’s all needed so much. But what I do want to say is religious trauma hasn’t had the same reckoning inside religion that other issues have.
Recently, I had a conversation with a priest I like and respect about how religious trauma survivors need support — because we’re an underserved population too. I asked him: What about those in our communities who are poor in spirit — the ones harmed by the church itself? What is the church doing to accommodate them? He was talking about people in our community facing something more immediate: food, shelter, clothing, opportunity. People who need real, practical help right now. That’s true, and it matters, and I told him so. I meant it.
But I noticed something happening to my own question while we talked. I wasn’t just naming a need — I realized, on later reflection, that I was testing something: whether there was a place for religious trauma survivors to be recognized in the church. The truth is, I’d like to think I might be able to be part of what a church like theirs is doing again — sometimes helping others, not just receiving. But my own fears keep surfacing in church, and what I was really looking for in that conversation was to be seen and heard. Maybe reassured that I could find understanding there. Maybe even a role in helping.
But in that moment, it felt like there were more pressing things on the table. And I understand that — I have a roof over my head, I have the means to take care of myself, my needs aren’t as urgent as the ones he was describing. What I don’t think he understood, though, was that I was actually trying to find out if there was a place for people like me. People who might want to take part in some small way. But who couldn’t feel safe doing that without some acknowledgment of our own religious trauma first — and maybe even some responsibility taken by the institutions that caused it. I’ll be honest, I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet. But conversations like the ones David Ruybalid is having with survivors online are a good place to start.
At least the priest didn’t avoid the subject. He listened, he validated what I said, he responded. But his conclusion was a bigger picture — capitalism, the way the whole system wears people down, spiritually and otherwise. He wasn’t wrong. I believe that too.
But it wasn’t what had happened to me. What happened to me had a name, a room, a specific silence afterward. Capitalism didn’t do that. A church did. And somewhere in his answer, my story got folded into everyone’s story — something we could stand next to each other and point at, instead of something we’d have to face each other about.
I don’t think he meant to do this. I think it’s just what happens when a true idea gets used to explain something, instead of sitting inside it with someone.
What it actually looks like…
This priest was different from some others I’ve talked to. In the past, when something surfaced, I’ve been told by people in ministry to keep coming back, keep trying — with no real solution offered, just more of the thing that was hurting me. This priest wasn’t like that. He understood my pain, because he is a survivor of religious abuse, too. He’s the same person who once told me I didn’t have to come to church out of obligation — and hearing him say that brought me so much relief.
So this isn’t about him failing to listen. It’s about something bigger than any one conversation. What some of us need is the kind of invitation David Ruybalid is offering — religious institutions that are actually open, actually looking for ways to help, actually willing to take responsibility for some of the hurt even if they didn’t specifically cause it. I believe there are a lot of us out there who could find real relief if institutions like his started doing that.
Why this matters for the people leading these spaces too
I have a friend becoming a deacon. And she’s been one of the people in ministry who I can honestly say knows how to do this better than most. Because she knows how to listen without judgment. Knows how to reach out when I’m quiet without pushing. Being a part of her preparation process of becoming a Deacon has caused me to think about all the people stepping into ministry who are going to sit with someone like me eventually — someone whose deepest wound is religious in nature, surfacing in the very kind of room they’re trained to hold space in. And they can learn a lot from my friend.
Most pastoral care training covers grief. General listening skills. Basic counseling. It doesn’t necessarily cover what to do when a practice like contemplative prayer activates someone’s nervous system, or when what’s surfacing is specifically about spiritual abuse. It doesn’t always teach the difference between I can hold this and this needs a referral, and that’s not a failure; that’s wisdom.
Nobody can hold everything. Not a good deacon, not a good pastor, not a good friend. The healthiest version of ministry I can imagine includes knowing your own limitations — and having a real relationship with trauma-informed therapists and peer support so that “this is bigger than what I can hold here” is something that can be said out loud, without it meaning the person gets turned away.
What I’m actually asking for
Not blame. Education. Awareness. I don’t think a lot of people running these spaces are unaware on purpose. Maybe they haven’t been told, in plain terms, that people like me are out here, saying this. Or maybe they just don’t know how to respond.
Either way — silence, or an answer that doesn’t quite land — the awkwardness isn’t a personal failing. It’s a gap. And gaps can close, once they’re named and taken seriously.
If someone in your church starts to feel like there’s something wrong with them, like they’re too much, like they don’t belong in the silence you’ve made — that’s information. Not about them. About the room. And a room that can hold space might just bring the healing that’s needed.
What might actually help
The same care churches have brought to race reparations and LGBTQ inclusion could be brought here too. Teaching. Training. An honest reckoning that this harm happened inside the tradition — and that repairing it is part of the same work, not a separate, quieter conversation.
Really listening to survivors means not listening to fix, or to fill a silence, or to offer a verse before the whole story’s been told. It means staying present, even when it’s raw, even when there’s no clean answer to hand back. It means asking tell me more instead of already knowing what to say.
That’s a different skill than comfort. Comfort wants to solve. Listening just wants to stay.
Naming limits honestly is part of this too — being able to say, I care about this, and I also need to be honest about what I can hold.
Support outside of Sunday services matters — therapists, support groups built for survivors of religious harm, people who already understand this. Communion doesn’t have to happen in a sanctuary. Sometimes it’s a smaller room, a smaller group, no expectations attached.
No pedestal. No performance. No one person carrying what a whole community should be sharing the weight of.
Just people willing to sit in it together, honestly, for as long as it takes. This is where it starts.
And it might just be the way we’re able to help others with immediate needs, together.
Some questions worth sitting with
If someone in your church reached out after something painful surfaced, would you know what to say? Would you know what you couldn’t hold, and be able to say that honestly instead of going quiet? Does your church have language for religious trauma the way it has language for other harms it’s taken seriously? If not, why not? Is there a place in your community where someone could say church itself is where I was hurt and be met with real listening instead of defensiveness, minimizing, or discomfort disguised as change of subject? When someone brings you their specific pain, do you have a framework ready before you’ve fully heard them — and would you know the difference between explaining someone’s suffering and actually sitting inside it with them? Who is doing the work of holding people like this right now — and are they trained for it, supported in it, or just absorbing it because no one else will? If real communion doesn’t need a sanctuary to happen — where else is your community actually building it?
I know this is complicated. I’ve turned it over more ways than I can count, looking for the simple version, the one clean answer. But some of what I’m describing doesn’t have a name yet — there’s no training built for this the way there’s training for grief, or crisis, or loss. So every part of understanding it takes longer, because there’s no shortcut, no shelf to pull it off of. Underneath all of it, though, it’s simpler than it looks: I lost a community, and a family, and a way of being close to God that I haven’t found again. Everything else — the questions, the frameworks, the searching — is just what it looks like to keep standing and look directly at that anyway.
A note on how this piece came together
This post started as a journal entry after working through questions from the book The Congruent Life, and it went through a lot of drafts before it looked like this — paragraph by paragraph, working through it with Claude as a thinking partner.
That process usually looks like this: I bring the raw material — a conversation, a memory, a feeling I can’t quite name yet — and we sit with it together until the language catches up to what I actually meant. Sometimes a line needs cutting because it says the same thing twice. Sometimes it needs slowing down because I moved past something important too fast. A few times in writing this one, I had to stop and ask myself whether what I’d written was actually true to what happened, or just the version that felt safer to say. That’s some of the hardest and most honest work in this process — being willing to go back and get it right, even after I thought it was finished.
I’m a writer, a trauma recovery practitioner, and the founder of A Liminal Space Coaching, where I do peer support work with survivors of religious trauma and high-control religious systems. Writing has always been how I translate what’s hard to say into something someone else might recognize in themselves. This piece is part of that same work.
If you have thoughts you want to share please reach out to loriwilliamsliminalspace@gmail.com.