Holy Hurt Quotes

“I don’t want to diminish the suffering involved in believing you are both evil at your core and powerless to do anything about it. It creates a distress and inner conflict that can torment a person their entire life…

…It doesn’t help that the system or person who promises to help in this toxic dynamic is usually also reinforcing the idea of the continual badness of people.

Said another way, this is like a doctor providing a medicine that both causes and treats a wound at the same time. The cure is also the cause of the harm.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“In spiritual environments of high control a person is often told they are bad to their core. An evil lives inside them and they are powerless to stop it from taking over and ruining their life and causing eternal suffering UNLESS they are rescued by someone outside themselves. A system, a doctrine, a right way of believing.

All three roles are represented, the victim, the persecutor and the rescuer. When we are in these spiritually abusive contexts there is still a triangle created, but people are told both the victim and the persecutor lives within them. That leaves a person trapped. At war inside themselves. The only way out of the conflict, to quell the storm inside, is to have someone to swoop in to rescue them.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“The hero child is groomed from childhood to have the pressure of eternity placed on their shoulders. The souls of others become their responsibility. Ingenerating and venerating a compulsive drive to rescue.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“We teach people to hate their humanness and praise them, calling it righteous because we believe got hates their humanness too. We offer people chronic guilt, shame and fear of hell and celebrate them as signs of spiritual maturity.

We stoke in people an inner critic and tell them it’s the voice of god.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“When are an adult if we have had a secure and safe upbringing and healthy relationships, someone telling us that we are bad might sting or cause confusion or it might strike us as outright ridiculous.

But if someone tells a child the same thing as their world is developing and they lack any other frame of reference, the words shape their development from that point on.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“For a lot of my students and clients the biggest spiritual belief they have that they have a hard time letting go of is that they are bad. It’s a kind of learned spiritual helplessness and they’ve learned to outsource their spiritual or moral discernment to a spiritual authority...

… Then some people say, hold on this is weird. There is this nudging process of spiritual exploration where they eventually realize “that was silly, I’m not spiritually evil, my intuitions for flourishing are good.” Then they come to this new level of satisfaction. But a lot of times their spiritual and religious communities can’t hold that kind of growth. That is a disorientation of its own. They end up becoming spiritually exiled. They have to find new communities.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“Whether or not it manifests in clinically acute ways, and no matter the cause, the belief that a person is bad, untrustworthy and broken at their core is one of the most destructive things a person can be told or can come to believe.

In many faith communities and belief systems this idea of being unworthy is so reinforced that it does not register as foundation-ally destructive or a feature of physiological abuse. Telling people they are broken at their core is a sure way to create people that FEEL they are broken at their core. Feeling bad, wrong or fractured at the core of who we are is a defining feature of spiritual trauma.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“Whether or not it manifests in clinically acute ways, and no matter the cause, the belief that a person is bad, untrustworthy and broken at their core is one of the most destructive things a person can be told or can come to believe.

In many faith communities and belief systems this idea of being unworthy is so reinforced that it does not register as foundation-ally destructive or a feature of physiological abuse.

Telling people they are broken at their core is a sure way to create people that FEEL they are broken at their core. Feeling bad, wrong or fractured at the core of who we are is a defining feature of spiritual trauma.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“We go along to get along, but the cost is agency, the sense of a robust intact self with opinions, intuitions and autonomy.

People may be told that the self is undesirable and to be spiritually mature and thus respected in the community, and safe for eternity, they must die to self. Distancing themself from any thought, behavior or person that might draw them away from adherence to the way of being expected of them.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“When we feel awful the only explanation in the minds of many for why we FEEL awful is that we ARE awful. The echo of the anthem from many faith communities ringing in our ears. If we had tried harder, had more faith, prayed more or said the prayer correctly we wouldn’t feel this way.

Our anxiety, shame or self hatred is used as proof that we need saving, that we are bad, that we can’t trust ourselves. Not understanding what is happening to us which can lead to self blame is part of how the problems in these systems continue. Thus understanding itself can be part of healing.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“I was taught reverence for the sound of a preacher’s voice and the pages of my Bible, but I was never taught to reverence the sounds of my own body and soul.

– KJ Ramsey”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“Silence can soothe us and silence can scar us. I was raised for reverence, to sit still and silent in church, and to give people in leadership, especially men, unquestioning respect and honor for their God-given authority. I learned to raise my voice when grace amazed me, but relegate it into silence when harm alarmed me.

Silence is the arbiter of scarcity, the force of coercion and control that those who hold the most power wield to maintain the status quo. If power can only be held in the hands of a few, then pleasing them is what buys us belonging. So we learn to fold our hands and cross our legs and put a smile across our faces to hide our heart’s frown, all the while absorbing the bad, bad news that God is actually a power who must be pleased and love is just a reality we receive when we are good enough. I was taught reverence for the sound of a preacher’s voice and the pages of my Bible, but I was never taught to reverence the sounds of my own body and soul.

– KJ Ramsey”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“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 can you pin point 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?”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“One of the most most damning and destructive parts of spiritual trauma is the way that the diminishment of humanness is handed down as spiritual maturity, and it’s actually more a perpetuation of dominance and control than love. Our spiritual communities and spiritual practices are more a manifestation of control and certainty and upholding a power structure than being fully human. There is a deep mistrust of the very things that would tell us something is wrong because we’ve been taught that not listening is actually holy.

- KJ Ramsey”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing