Thread by @hlgriffin

@ACNAtoo survivor & advocate @Weejenbug just released this statement regarding her experience of spiritual abuse in @StewartRuch's @MidwestAnglican . It is one of the most concise & clearly written case studies describing power dynamics & spiritual abuse that I have ever read.

https://twitter.com/Weejenbug/status/1415435602359685124

Why is this being shared publicly? The survivors get to decide what to share and to whom. They have all fulfilled the requirements of Matt 18 for addressing grievances & have reached the stage in which their concerns will only be taken seriously by @The_ACNA if shared publicly.

Is this the only way we plan to do things at @ACNAtoo ? Absolutely not. If enough volunteers join us to share the load, we hope to establish safe ways for people to quietly report their experiences of abuse on either the parish, diocesan, or provincial level & seek justice.

We hope that as we begin to talk w/ @The_ACNA bishops & they earn our trust over time with actions that demonstrate & fulfill their good intentions (which are not in doubt) that the ACNA will within 5-10 years be one of the safest & healthiest denominations in North America.

Very few people *intend* to spiritually abuse people. The older & healthier I get, the more I realized how many times *I* have spiritually abused people that I loved & was trying to help with all of my might. I didn't mean to. I didn't know I was doing it. It was still harmful.

As we become people who can see our mistakes, we become people that can move to repair them. Our communities don't always have the capacities to support the full repair of relationships, especially if there is a power imbalance in the damaged relationship(s).

I can't be the one to lead someone through the process of healing if I am the person in authority that unintentionally wounded them through my blindspots, lack of wisdom, & immaturity. That only reinforces the power imbalance.

It doesn't mean no repair is possible- only that it is limited. Perhaps you've been in that situation yourself as a person in spiritual authority, especially if you've tried to offer support & care for people who are normally marginalized in churches.

If you are trying to help people that no one else in your community is trying to help, you are going to make mistakes that no one else in your community is trying to make.

What sort of 3rd party wld you go to if you were seeking help in repairing your mistakes in that scenario?

Most white evangelical churches have an extremely limited range of people they are capable of supporting.

If you're already white, middle class, and presentably well-functioning, you'll probably be okay.

If you have a practical need that can be met with the resources of the community & they are generous, you'll probably be okay as well.

If you are someone with complex trauma & undiagnosed autism like me when I was a young adult, there's rarely much help available.

By the time that I was nineteen, I had experienced a range of church environments seeking help that wasn't available.

People like me don't usually "get better," and I required a great deal of emotional energy & skill & community capacity to help.

My experiences of churches or college ministries at that point ranged from a well-intentioned SBC church full of very kind people who didn't know how to help me & wouldn't have known where to go to become people that could help if the thought had occurred to them to seek training

In retrospect, I think my youth group leaders went to seminary because they recognized that they were in over their heads with our youth group.

They probably went to school thinking they would learn how to minister to people in pain, but their seminary wouldn't have been able to equip them with any tools or practical wisdom that wasn't already available to the pastors in our community, who also trained there.

That environment wasn't so much spiritually abusive as spiritually impoverished.

The harm done was mostly the harm of overpromising on what Jesus could do without seeking to know him well enough to learn how he helped people.

That leaves people in shame b/c they think they *should* be able to get better with the help that's available.

It also can breed an unhealthy complacency in the community. It rarely occurs to people that very few people in the community are actually getting better.

This is partly because the standards of maturity are so low. It didn't take much skill or training in practical wisdom for the "healthy" members of the church to get to where they are, so they assume that everyone else shld be able to get there if they "just choose" to trust God

My next church experiences were far more damaging. My hometown in Florida had a reputation for generating cults like most Florida communities generate strip malls.

I joined a charismatic house church in my midteens that had too many authority issues to make a really good cult.

That was my first experience in what I would describe as a deeply spiritually abusive environment.

Why was I drawn there? It mirrored my family dynamics.

The leaders also thought God was much bigger & better & more willing to help than the SBC church I grew up in, & I knew I needed help.

I wasn't going to get better unless Jesus showed up and helped me. This was obvious to me.

Big trauma requires a big God.

I won't go into details here because this thread is already getting too long, but after two years they told me that I must not be really "saved" because I wasn't getting better.

It made me suicidal.

How much more did I have to "mean" the "sinner's prayer" before I finally meant it hard enough for God to zap me into salvation so the pain could stop?

How many times did I have to say the prayer in the bathroom mirror after the leaders had prayed for me in the living room?

I didn't know what good, skilled, wise help looked like. I just knew I needed it, and I was already trained to gravitate toward abusive & critical people.

Good help could have been close by & I wouldn't have known where to look for it & how to recognize it.

Even fairly soon after I got out of that cult-like group, I understood that these weren't Big Bad Evil Bad Guys.

That's what we think "abusers" are like when we think of the word "abuse."

Someone who is not like us. Someone who is malicious.

Someone who is not sincere like me

That's not how it works. Very few people who spiritually abuse others are malicious. They are just unhealthy & overconfident & have too much power relative to their actual maturity & skills.

The people that spiritually abused me were trying to help me.

There was nothing wrong with their intentions. They put more energy in trying to help me in two years than most churches would dream of giving.

They just didn't know what they were doing, and they didn't know that they didn't know.

I had to be "not saved" because I wasn't getting better with the help that was available. In their minds, I should have been getting better with the help that was available because they were sincere and trying so hard.

Surely God would honor that.

If I hadn't landed in my little Anglican charismatic church when I was nineteen, I don't think I would be alive today.

I was already suicidal, though I couldn't bring myself to kill myself because I thought I would go to hell (a special teaching of my culty house church).

I was such a vulnerable person & didn't have the social skills to read people well or understand their intentions. I was desperate for help.

It's a miracle that truly hardened predators didn't prey upon me.

I think autistic & being willing to say anything as long as it was true was probably a protective factor.

Predators don't like prey that will tell, & I would have told.

One of the things that helped me transition out of the culty house church was my involvement in a Pentecostal college ministry, Chi Alpha (XA).

The leaders were incredibly accepting, merciful, & kind. They made me feel like part of the community & that I had things to offer even if I wasn't all better.

They didn't know how to give me in-depth help, but they gave me real acceptance.

They gave me back a sense of dignity

A year into college, I had a friend that had similar struggles to me, though not as severe.

If I was a category 5 hurricane of pain, trauma, & social misattunement, she was a mildly destructive tropical storm that would have maybe knocked down the lawn furniture.

In retrospect, we both had anxious attachment styles & were constantly trying to please God by being more sincere because we tacitly believed that if we trusted him more, we would stop struggling & sinning.

This only made us more anxious.

This friend started to get better over one semester. The difference was noticeable. She was peaceful and joyful & didn't seem compulsive.

Like a lot of students at my college, she had learned that the Anglican priest that taught Old Testament & New Testament was safe to spill your guts to if you needed to talk about painful & shameful stuff.

Students would make up lame excuses to visit him in office hours about "a paper" & then started telling him about their anxieties & fears & struggles.

He listened. He prayed. He was kind.

He otherwise had no idea what he was doing.

He knew that though, so that made his mistakes easier to deal with.

He knew that Jesus knew how to help, so it was okay if he didn't know everything yet himself.

That Anglican priest and his wife were like my parents to me during my very extended twenties. Their church became my family.

They loved me well. They sought training to learn how to help me & others like me.

God used them to save my life.

They also made lots of mistakes. In retrospect, I would call some of the things they did spiritually abusive. None of those mistakes were malicious in any shape or form.

Those mistakes were less damaging because we were all growing together.

I knew they didn't know everything because they were very open about not knowing everything.

Because they were always seeking to grow & to learn new things, they grew in wisdom & could recognize their earlier mistakes, apologize, & repair the relationship.

I've had some of the best church experiences of anyone that I've ever met. For the most part, my church family was a healing community.

Not everyone's experience there was as helpful as mine. I was very desperate & knew I needed help.

That's not a fun place to be, but it can help make you teachable & give you a lot of compassion for other people's mistakes as long as they are trying & growing.

I wish everyone I know could have a church like that or healthier.

All my life, the thing that I've wanted most is to help other people the way they helped me.

No one who is that desperate to be helped should be left in their pain the way I was for years trying to get help at churches in which their people had little practical wisdom.

When I moved away, I still ended up accumulating people who were like me when I was younger. I had no church community in my area that could help them.

I did the best I could, but I was still pretty screwed up myself.

I knew to keep pursuing healing and to deal with my own stuff first (good things that I was explicitly taught by the people who helped me), but there's only so much you can do as one person or as a married couple.

I can't tell you how much it makes me angry to know that the church COULD be a place of healing & to see so few churches in which people are motivated to seek to become places of healing.

They usually are content with what they have.

Even if hardly anyone gets better

I probably knew just enough about how to help people to do some real good.

I also knew too little, so I did some real harm.

To me, it's the worst feeling in the world when you realize that you've hurt someone you were trying to help.

For the most part, the people that I help are very kind to me when I make mistakes.

I'm good at apologizing. I repair what I can. When I grow more and see more layers to my mistakes, I apologize for the new layers that I can see.

I didn't know that I was autistic until I was middle-aged (a very common scenario for autistic women who can speak), but I knew I made a lot of mistakes that I didn't mean to make.

I've had a lot of practice at apologizing.

It's been good for me.

I also think that the people that I try to help had a lot of grace for my mistakes because they knew I loved them & knew I was trying to help.

Some of them had been abandoned or written off for years by their families & their churches.

When you've been shamed & rejected for years and someone is willing to commit to you & stick with you for the long game, it's easy to forgive them as long as they are people who know to apologize.

But what if you don't see your mistakes?

What if you don't know your limitations?

I don't always, and you don't either.

What if you've been awarded a Maturity Badge by your community & you have a lot of gaps in your formation & skills, just as you have a lot of impressive strengths?

What if your church is legitimately doing better at helping people than 90% of other churches?

What if the Holy Spirit is showing up & healing people regularly because we know God still does things like that, so we hold still long enough & ask the Holy Spirit to come and the Holy Spirit does because God wants to help hurting people.

What if you thought that the regular presence of the Holy Spirit (who is rarely invited anywhere in white churches- let's be honest) was a sign that you were doing something right other than just asking the Holy Spirit to show up?

What if we start to assume that the presence of the Holy Spirit is an endorsement of our maturity & the maturity of other leaders who taught us to be so mature & wonderful?

What if we thought the presence of the Holy Spirit was an endorsement of the health of our church?

We might forget that we have blindspots.

We might get overconfident in our own wisdom & discernment.

We might overestimate our skills & practical wisdom.

We might underestimate our mistakes.

We might stop being teachable.

We might become dangerous and not even know it, because we are probably still sincere & well-intentioned.

We might not understand our own limitations because we have spent so much time around a limitless God that we have come to tacitly assume that we must be limitless in our abilities as well.

If someone told us that we had harmed them & we didn't see it, would we believe them?

We don't know what we don't know.

If we know that, we can pray regularly that God will protect people from our under-construction zones where we might harm them if they accidentally step out of our zone of safety.

We can ask God to show us our mistakes quickly & continually send us to help to grow so that our blindspots get smaller & smaller.

We can invite the wisest people we know to speak into our lives & give us feedback if they think we're being unsafe.

We can be mindful that the people we endorse as wise are people that probably share our same formation &therefore might share the same blindspots.

Being mindful of this, we can spend time regularly w/ people who are not in our tribe who are not as impressed with us as we are.

We can order our lives in such a way that we can continue to pursue training so that we are always growing our range of theoretical & practical knowledge & growing in the range of people we can help.

We can set good boundaries with people we mentor so that we are as clear with them about our weaknesses as possible.

We can ask them to tell us when we hurt them & ask us not to absorb our mistakes out of a desire to protect our feelings b/c they know we mean well.

We can look for signs that indicate that we are outside of our range of safety and competence.

Are we worrying a lot about the person we are trying to help?

Do we resent them or feel overwhelmed by their needs?

Are we afraid for them & afraid of the harm they will do to themselves & others? Do we respond to that fear by becoming controlling or critical or trying to Make Them See?

Those are all signs that we have reached the edge of our range.

Why do we still hang out in that danger zone outside of the range of our competance?

Because we want to help people. Because we want to spare them pain.

Because we think if we don't help them, no one else will.

Because we may look around us & know that even though we aren't much, we may actually be this person's best option.

But what if we aren't? What if we are trying to rescue people b/c we don't actually trust that God can help them if we don't help them now.

What if we have a hard time trusting God to take care of other people in places where parts of us don't really feel like he took care of us?

What if parts of us need this other person to be okay so we can know that we are going to be okay?

Most people that I know who are wise & skilled at helping people in deep pain learned those skills from receiving skilled help when they themselves were in deep pain.

They are what Henri Nouwen called "Wounded Healers"

The longing to be healed and the joy of experiencing progress in healing gives such great hope.

To see other people who have been in deep pain begin to receive healing after years of being stuck is the greatest joy I personally know.

I'll drop anything to go to that party.

But we are always still under construction.

The range of people that we can help safely may be ever-expanding if we remain ever teachable, but it will always be a limited range.

There will always be under-construction zones.

There will always be the potential for system overload.

We will always be dangerous for some people, even when we have become safe for most people.

It's a good thing to pray regularly to ask God to show us our limitations.

It's good to ask God to let us make the failures early so we can know that we need to be cautious & seek wiser supervision & a higher capacity team that can help share the laod.

I've learned that I can't help women that remind me of my mother.

My mother loves me as much as she can, but she's a very wounded person.

She didn't have access to the type of help that I did when I was young. I've always known I could have become like her.

I've always longed to be a part of a community that could help someone like her.

I would give anything for that.

I will do anything I can to be a part of building a community that has that type of wisdom & skill & capacity & hope & trust in Jesus.

I often wonder who my mother could have been if she had met people who knew how to help when she was younger.

I don't think she had to become the way she is now.

I haven't seen anyone like her get better.

It doesn't mean that they can't, but it's more help than we know how to give. I could take decades to cultivate a community with that kind of capacity & practical wisdom.

Because it's so hard to help someone like her, I try to help people before they become like who she is now.

Sometimes I can be helpful there. Most of the time, the help that I try to give is more than whatever harm I will unintentionally inflict.

That's not a happy thought, is it?

It's almost certainly better than anything else that is available to them.

This is heartbreakingly sad, b/c I'm junior varsity squad at best.

I'm much better at finding good language to describe what far more skilled people are doing than I am at helping people myself.

I've learned that if someone seems wounded in a way that is similar, though less advanced than the way my Mom seems wounded, I need to be on a care team and I need to not be in charge of that team.

Whoever is in charge needs to know my strengths & weaknesses.

At this point, I also know that I don't need to help women that are wounded in similar ways to my mother who also have young kids, even as a member of a well-supervised team.

At some point, I will lose my ability to be patient with the mom if she is narcissistic enough to be neglecting or harming her children as she pursues her own fantasies of specialness.

It might take years, but it will happen because narcissistic people take years to help.

That's the way it goes.

Until I get much further along in my own healing, I can't be on that kind of care team.

It's not safe for me. It's not safe for them.

The time you spend trying to help people that are out of your range is time you are not spending getting healing for the wounds that generate your own rescuing tendencies.

It's time in which you are not training to become someone that may *eventually* be able to help them.

Sometimes the best way we can help people is by knowing our own range well enough to know that it's not safe for us to try to help them.

Let the longing come up. Tell Jesus that you're afraid of what will happen if someone doesn't try to help them now.

Sit w/ the grief & anger

Let it become a hunger & thirst for righteousness that will one day be filled by Jesus if we hold still long enough to let him do whatever it will take to make us into someone that can help.

Let him heal the parts of you that don't trust him to help the people you love most.

Jesus, help us.

Protect us from people that aren't safe for us.

Protect other people from us in ways that we aren't safe.

Do whatever it takes to make us into people who can help.

We need you.

*ask THEM not to absorb our mistakes, rather.

It's horribly sad when you realize that people won't tell you that you've hurt them b/c they are protecting your feelings and/or protecting themselves from the emotional labor of making US feel better about hurting THEM.