I just wanted to thank you for this series. Not only did I find a link I needed to see concerning possible issues with one of my kids, but I found encouragement for myself as well.
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I've seen the No Longer Quivering blog, where many women have completely lost their faith over patriarchy, and I so grieve over this (and feel rage over the cause). I even began wondering, as those women did, what exactly was "real", and whatwas a head game. But my faith is rooted in the fact of the Resurrection, the fulfilled prophecies of scripture, esp. the return of Israel to her homeland, and the fact that the Bible would never have been produced by mere human beings, and that no other religious book in history has had as much scrutiny or opposition. Feelings cannot go that deep and thus survive the onslaught of doubt and suffering; but indisputable facts are an anchor that nothing can shake.
How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?
Summary of Thoughts to Consider Related to Bible Study as You Heal From Spiritual Abuse
What you’re experiencing is perfectly normal, given your experience.
You have been deceived by subtle teachings that you failed to identify as problematic because you were manipulated through a very complex, gradual and subtle process of exploitation. Either by intent or by way of their own earnest belief, teachers passed off false doctrine to you as legitimate doctrine.
Expecting that knowledge of the Bible, intellect, pure motive, and the Holy Spirit will make you impervious to the social, psychological and spiritual manipulation of a cultic church or thought reform program is naïve. These systems use crafty and subtle needs that exploit human tendencies and emotions, usually by offering a very desirable solution to a complex problem. We are especially vulnerable after major life changes such as a new job, a profound disappointment like the death of a loved one, or a move to a new place which makes access to your previous support systems more difficult.
This experience shakes your confidence on a very deep level. If you are experiencing doubts about your own ability to discern what Scripture means, remind and encourage yourself that this is a very healthy and very self-protective response. Your brain is doing exactly what God designed it to do: survive and heal. This process of recovery takes time, usually about two years at a minimum. Remind yourself of this.
How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?
I’ve received a surprising amount of feedback about these posts, and I have concerns (as I stated in the first Bible study post) that it may come across that I am encouraging people not to read the Bible or that I was avoiding the sorting out of my own understanding of doctrine. Actually, I did little else. At this time in life, while waiting for the babies to come that never did, I worked doing temp jobs in nursing in Texas (where we lived at the time). I could make much better money, it was generally part-time work, and I felt that it would not require me to ever choose between a job and a baby. When I was not busy with this, I was basically working through these doctrines. I would like to take this opportunity to explain this a bit more, as I seem to improperly given some the impression that I may have avoided this work, when I was actually consumed by it.
How I Dealt with the Aberrant Doctrine: More Clarification
I received this note today:
“I have read through your latest series and am just amazed. Our experiences were just the opposite! Because there was so little bible study [in my church], there was more proof texting and topical stuff which is so easy to twist that I went into deep study to find out what a Christian was supposed to look like from the Word. I had no idea...because my paradigm had been warped based on what I saw supposedly godly people in power do…
I look back and realize I was a zombie. But a zombie that just immersed myself in the Word. What it did was clean out the wrong teaching and replace it with truth.”
I would argue that I was absolutely not doing the opposite but that I was doing it in a different setting. For me, as one who was already immersed in the Word, this context became unsafe. I had to go to a different setting and context. I did that from within the safety of understanding the behavioral aspects of what happened to me because of my own intense self-doubt. (Here follows the bulk of the response that I wrote to her, though I've filled in some details.)
How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?
Grieving, Mourning and Sifting Through the Rubble to Pick Up My Scattered Pearls
Before I walked out of my cultic church for the last time, my daily study started either with translation of three verses of the NT from the Greek Majority Text. I then usually had something that I wanted to look up in the OT. (I varied my reading habits, and this is what I was doing at this particular time when I left the cultic church.) I incorporated music and prayer into this time, too. Well… Everything but prayer became difficult in a way that I’d never experienced before. I tried to replace this lack of study with sermons on tape, but I quickly realized that this was part of why I was in so much trouble. I’d meditated on someone else’s teaching of the Word, hearing their twists on it before going before the Lord myself. So much of my problem involved my past acquiescence to someone else. Rather than putting the Word myself into my heart and mouth, I’d allowed so many others to go up into heaven to bring it down for me. This became instantly unsafe.
Though very difficult, I started singing a chorus from the cultic church that echoed the words of David’s Psalm every time I tried to study:
I find that this is a problem for others as well. Some of the leaders in the patriarchy movement boast excellent credentials and demonstrate excellent skill in expository teaching. If someone with a couple of PhDs cannot properly exegete the Word, and if these well-trained and knowledgeable leaders had fallen into error, teaching falsehood, what chance did I stand? How could I discern anything if I’d failed to discern the falsehoods in their teachings before? Here was a wolf that I couldn’t spot to save my own life, and I was fairly good at spotting them, I thought. For all of my diligence and study, I felt as if I knew nothing. Everything felt altogether unsafe, and it hurt right down through into my bones. If I had been beguiled by these teachings, how could I trust anything?
Feeling Alienated from My Connection to God through the Bible
After studying a year of Greek, I was very disappointed. I found no theophany. A year of Greek taught me how to use the Bible Study tools properly and key terms frequently used in basic doctrine, not much more. This was a disappointment, as it did strip away some of the mystique that I felt about Bible teachers. It introduced a new element of uncertainty, so the outcome of study did the opposite of what I had hoped. I wish that I’d understood something that I failed to grasp then, partly because I was still looking at the Gospel like a formula.(“Do A, B and C and you will get D, the higher life and anointing.”In homeschooling, you get perfect kids and eternal families.) I wish that I understood and appreciated the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer in concert with the study of the Word.The Spirit illuminates our study. But I was still working these things out in my own mind as I shifted from the vicarious faith that my mother gave me into a faith of my own on my own terms with God. Bible study was still, partially, a means to an end for me.
How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?
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Facing Reality
Eight or nine years after I’d left my abusive church, I started to feel comfortable and looked forward to reading and even studying the Bible. I’d kept at it, though I look back and wish that it had been easier much sooner.
Unlike the person who comes out of patriarchy, I found that I could not identify the cultic shepherding church as the single root source of my problems. When I “went back to my roots,” I also found serious flaws and painful problems in this doctrine of Word of Faith as well. Spiritual abuse forced me to come to terms with the anti-intellectualism. I had to come to terms with the doctrines I’d accepted because I was told to accept them.
For those who were in healthy churches with completely sound doctrine, their process will likely be easier.
I also learned that much of my zeal was motivated by my selfish desires to be noticed by those in the church. I was looking for something outside of my own heart to satisfy me.
I desired to find acceptance that I so longed for in my flesh. I’d been looking for something that would heal my very broken heart so that I could be that integrated person and incredibly effective Christian that I’d always dreamed I would become. I had to reject the burning zeal that I thought was coming from my desire for God but was quite often my own willfulness to somehow make God do what I wanted Him to do. I thought that true zeal involved extremes, something that paralleled the drama that I always felt in my home and in my church.
Along with the realization and repentance for my desire to serve the church, a desire that eclipsed my desire to serve Jesus, I had to come to terms with my true motives. The Word does work in our hearts and minds, but it is not the panacea of a magic pill to make me more spiritual. The Word is not part of a static formula, and I had to wait and grow. There was no fast-track to higher living. Maturity in Christ comes about by discipline and perseverance. Jesus was not the “cosmic bellhop.” If I lived my life and never saw divine healing and remained ill the rest of my life myself, I’d have to accept this and rejoice in the Lord, either way. I would have to love the Word all the more, without expectation. I could not go sit on God’s lap like a small child who sits on daddy’s lap only to get the candy that they know is waiting in his pocket.
Why You Can’t “Just Snap Out of It!”
I would later learn something that gave me much comfort. In Bessel Van der Kolk’s lecture entitled “The Body Keeps Score” that he presented in 2007, I heard him explain what happens to the brain when a person experiences the ongoing process of PTSD. Through advances in brain imaging that are now available, we have learned that the PTSD brain floods certain areas of the brain with large amounts of blood and increases metabolism there while other areas shut down.
In the PTSD brain, encouragement and exhortation have a very different affect than they do in the normal brain. When the normal person hears encouragement, several different areas become very active. The pre-frontal cortex (the problem solving area) becomes active, and the part of the brain that says “This applies to me; They are talking about me” floods with blood, indicating high metabolism in that area where those processes are located in the brain. In the PTSD brain, something very different happens.
In PTSD and the depression that results, encouragement and praise affect the brain in a very different way. First, the anxiety centers become very active, and the encouragement is not trusted. Rather than feeling more at ease, the brain of the person with PTSD goes into survival mode. For some, areas of the brain that activate during antagonism flood with blood. The depression has already caused a dulled response in the critical thinking area of the pre-frontal cortex. But most interesting, the area of the brain that activates when a person realizes that information applies to them remains completely inactive. Someone could tell a person with PTSD that they are a new creation in Christ, that they are precious to God and are seated in high places with Jesus. But the part of the brain that says “This applies to me!” never activates. The brain cannot realize what is really being said. Physiologically, the brain cannot comprehend personal encouragement when it is stuck in a loop of the survival response.
This indicates that some significant healing must take place before the encouragement can be received. Spiritual healing comes about in stages. They don’t happen quickly or overnight. Physical activity, mindful walking which activates the medial pre-frontal cortex which helps to naturally heal the basal ganglia, and therapies like EMDR all help heal the mind and brain, correcting these metabolic problems without drugs. As Daniel Amen explains it, the brain is the hardware of the soul. Healing the brain helps the mind and the soul physically recover from trauma. Taking this into consideration can help those in recovery and those ministering to them understand that there are physical miracles taking place as well as the healing of the soul and spirit.
I had not planned to write this post, but the subject has come up in conversations and correspondence with others many times since I started this blog, and I realized that I never actually blogged about it before. This previous post touched on Bible study after spiritual abuse, and I found that I had quite a bit more to say about the subject from a personal perspective. I’ve been reluctant to share my personal experience, as I have concern that many readers will interpret what I did as a standard of sorts. For the Christian, the path to wholeness comes through knowing Jesus, and the primary way we know Him comes through reading His Word. Jesus is the Living Word. I want the reader to read, hear, and know well that I would have done anything to be able to read and study like I had before the crushing blow of realization of spiritual abuse knocked me flat. I had to develop an entirely new relationship with the Word and Bible Study (based upon purer motives), and this did not come easily or quickly for me. Why the Bible Meant What It Did To Me Personally, as a very troubled little girl with intense school phobia and other painful issues early in childhood, church became my refuge. I learned at a young age that if I wanted to improve my state, the best thing that I could do was study and memorize the Bible so as to best know Jesus and be “rooted and grounded” in Him. So it was easy to study because I loved Jesus so much! I could not get enough, and I started staying upstairs with the adults for the sermon when I was about eight or nine years old (instead of going to “children’s church). I love the Word because I love Jesus, and it is a joy to study. I had no idea how powerfully the realization of the spiritual abuse I’d endured would later challenge my love of Bible study.
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was a head game. But my faith is rooted in the fact of the Resurrection, the fulfilled prophecies of scripture, esp. the return of Israel to her homeland, and the fact that the Bible would never have been produced by mere human beings, and that no other religious book in history has had as much scrutiny or opposition. Feelings cannot go that deep and thus survive the onslaught of doubt and suffering; but indisputable facts are an anchor that nothing can shake..jpg)
was a head game. But my faith is rooted in the fact of the Resurrection, the fulfilled prophecies of scripture, esp. the return of Israel to her homeland, and the fact that the Bible would never have been produced by mere human beings, and that no other religious book in history has had as much scrutiny or opposition. Feelings cannot go that deep and thus survive the onslaught of doubt and suffering; but indisputable facts are an anchor that nothing can shake.
