Have you been hurt by the church? Maybe you have experienced abuse at the hands of clergy or a minister? Or maybe you are part of a marginalised group often discriminated against by the church. This episode with Sam and Jane, Religious Trauma therapists is for you.
Today’s episode is a double whammy, because Religious Trauma is the speciality of both host Sam and guest Jane.
In today’s episode we explain what religious trauma is, how it presents and what some of the causes are including spiritual bypassing. We discuss why lived experience is so important in the religious trauma space. We both share parts of our own stories and talk about the impact on the queer community.
Sam Sellers
Sam is a Queer Therapist specialising in Religious Trauma – currently offering therapy locally to Goulburn, NSW and online worldwide (except US & Canada)
Working from a trauma informed and lived experience stance, and understanding the profound impact that religious experiences can have on individuals, Sam is here to provide an accepting and non-judgmental space to explore your inner world.
Sam will be releasing her new workbook “Embracing Queerness and Faith” early 2024 which she is hopeful will bring an internal sense of authenticity and freedom to many.
You can connect with Sam on here on her website or use her contact form
Or via social media – Instagram & Facebook
Jane Kennedy
Jane Kennedy is a Sydney-based Counsellor. She has lived experience of religious trauma and is committed to supporting people as they leave church and/or faith.
She brings language and framing for the complexities of religious trauma to the counselling space and together we have begun to create a network of other Australian and New Zealand therapists to broaden knowledge among those working with affected clients.
Jane has written her story, an e-book, The Sentimental Non-Believer, on Loving & Leaving God. Her course, Freedom from Religious Trauma will be available in 2024.
To learn more about Jane and her practice via her website – https://janekennedycounselling.com.au/
Or connect with on social media – www.instagram.com/janekennedycounselling
Our latest episode is now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. And guess what? The transcript is available below for your reading pleasure. Happy listening!
Transcript
SAM SELLERS:
[00:11] Hello and welcome to Inside the Therapy Room. I’m your host, Sam Sellers. I’m a registered therapist, a wife, and a firm mama, and I am passionate about breaking down the barriers and stigma attached to therapy. I want to begin by honouring the traditional custodians of the land we live and work on. Today, Jane is on Wangal Land and Sam is on Gundungurra land. We pay our respects to the elders’ past, present, and emerging, for they hold the memories, the traditions, and cultures of our First Nations people. We must always remember that the land below our feet is, was and always will be Aboriginal land.
[00:51] Today’s episode is a little bit different. Today, I get to talk about my niche, religious trauma. Before I tell you about my guest, let me tell you a little bit about me. I’m currently living and working in Windy Goulburn in New South Wales in my private practice, Anchored Counselling Services. I am equal parts professional and compassionate, with a dash of sarcasm and humour that make the therapeutic journey even more relatable and enriching. I also have an incredibly cute and furry co-therapist, Naya. She is a sweet and intuitive Cavoodle who loves hugs and kisses. I specialise in three main areas, relationships, the LGBTQIA plus community and today’s topic, religious trauma.
[01:54] I work from a trauma informed and lived experience stance, and I understand the profound impact that religious experiences can have on individuals. They had them on me. And I am here to provide an accepting and non-judgmental space to explore your inner world. I will be releasing my new workbook, Embracing Queerness and Faith, early 2024, which I am hopeful will bring an internal sense of authenticity and freedom to many. I have asked Jane Kennedy to join me today, my new friend and fellow therapist. Jane is a Sydney based counsellor. She has lived experience of religious trauma and is committed to supporting people as they leave church and or faith. She brings language and framing for the complexities of religious trauma to the counselling space. And together we have begun to create a network of other Australian and New Zealand therapists to broaden the knowledge among those working with affected clients.
[02:50] Jane has written her story in an eBook form, The Sentimental Non-Believer on Loving and Leaving God. You can find that on her website. Her course, Freedom from Religious Trauma, will be available in late 2023. Tune in to hear us share about what religious trauma is, about working with those who have lived through it. We share a little bit about our own stories and the impact on the queer community, what it’s like inside our therapy rooms and what myths we would love to smash about religious trauma. We hope you enjoy joining us inside the therapy room.
[03:30] Welcome, Jane. How are you going?
JANE KENNEDY:
Good. I’m excited to be here.
SAM SELLERS:
[03:34] I’m excited to have you here. This one is going to be good fun. And I say good fun in that it is not necessarily what we’ll come across as a fun topic, but it’s good fun for us to chat about. This one will be a little bit different, I guess, in terms of structure that the other episodes have had. So, today we’re chatting about our niche, which is religious trauma, and everything that sort of falls under that gamut, which is wide and complex and multifaceted. But let’s start with how we met because we are fresh friends. So, how about you sort of kick us off with how we met?
JANE KENNEDY:
[04:18] Yeah, sure. So, earlier this year, I was thinking, I honestly think I could count on one hand, the number of therapists working with religious trauma or spiritual abuse or in the space where people have left church or walked away from God and struggling. I really think I could count the number of therapists in Australia and New Zealand on one hand. And so, I did that exercise, and I think there was about six or seven. And so, I went and did a bit of a search through some of the counsellors in Australia, the Facebook groups, and things that we’re all a part of, the support groups, which are fantastic. They’re such good networking spaces. And I found you. And so, I got in touch and said, “Hey, let’s be friends.” And we’ve done a lot of hours of talking, and we’ve shared our stories and the way that we work with clients and the areas of this big, big topic that we’re passionate about.
[05:19] And since then, we’ve started a religious trauma therapists resource group in Australia and New Zealand. And I’m excited to be broadening that base of therapists who are working in this area. And I think there’s about 45 that have joined that group now.
SAM SELLERS:
[05:39] It’s a good mixture of people who are already working in that space and people who are wanting to learn more about that space and being able to recognise some of the things that might show up in clients.
JANE KENNEDY:
[05:58] And in Australia, New Zealand, as we’ve talked about with the group as well, the situation, the context is so different. The religious landscape in Australia is so different to North America, or even the UK. And we have our own way of thinking and talking about church and God and religion, and it really deserves its own focus.
SAM SELLERS:
[06:25] Yeah, I think whilst we sort of can see the impact that religion has on politics, it doesn’t have the same intertwined notion that it does over in the US. And even just things like the language are different. You know, you always tend to say we don’t even use the word evangelical very often. It’s to be Pentecostal or charismatic. So, I think even just having language that people relate to more that speaks to their experience is sort of adding to that collective shared experience over on this side of the world. It’s much more specific.
JANE KENNEDY:
[07:06] Yeah. And as we know, there’s just so much need and people that are looking for somewhere to go to be able to process it.
SAM SELLERS:
[07:14] I sort of decided to pull Jane on for this episode because I didn’t want to be sitting here chatting with myself. It’s much easier to have a conversation and the more people that can get into the rooms of getting help for this area, the better. Tell us a little bit about what religious trauma is.
JANE KENNEDY:
[07:36] Sure. So, if we pull it back a bit, I guess trauma is anything that overwhelms our ability to cope. So, it’s a response to an event. Something happens and it’s overwhelming. It’s more than we can handle. Could be a one-time event. It could be an ongoing inability to be anchored in safety. And so, a trauma response is not the thing itself. It’s what happens inside us because of the thing that happens to us. And it’s an inability to be anchored in safety. So, religious trauma then is the inability to find safety within a belief system, a faith context, and or a religious community. And again, it could be the result of a one-time event. And there’s certainly in recent years we’ve heard of so many one-time events through the Royal Commission into sexual abuse in religious institutions. Or it could be an ongoing exposure to unhealthy or toxic beliefs and practices. It could be the disconnection that happens from the pain of leaving the community. It’s super complex. But it’s trauma that has, I guess, a religious foundation or a religious root.
SAM SELLERS:
[09:00] I love, is it Gabor Mate? He says that trauma is what happens inside of you, not what happens around you. And so, I think it’s important that people make that distinguish between the difference because abuse is not the same as trauma. Even though they often get used interchangeably, they are different. But there is a, what’s the word, trendy? Let’s go with trendy. There is a trendy terminology that tends to get thrown around in terms of this space. And that’s deconstruction or reconstruction. And I think it is a little bit different to religious trauma. I think it tends to, from what I’ve found in people that I’ve worked with, it comes from there being a disconnect with what they were believing. Suddenly something has happened, again, as a one-time thing or something ongoing that has caused them to go, “Hey, maybe I need to look at this a little bit differently.” And so, deconstruction gets, it’s a very Instagrammable word.
JANE KENNEDY:
Yes. Understandable.
SAM SELLERS:
[10:17] Yes. There is a lot of people on Instagram, on TikTok who are talking about deconstruction. But whilst it might be social media, trendy or things like that, it’s a real experience. And it can often be quite a painful experience for people to start essentially consciously dismantling their belief system that for some they might have had their whole life. And so, that doesn’t necessarily come out of something that would be considered traumatic, but the process of deconstruction and what that entails and the impact that that can have on your family, on your community, your friends, that process of deconstruction for some people is traumatic. So, whilst they can be one in the same, they do have different facets about them. And deconstruction doesn’t look the same, I think, here in Australia as what it does in the US. I think the same sort of thing, it just looks a little bit different. The way that it’s spoken about is a little bit different.
JANE KENNEDY:
[11:31] And I think I refer to religious trauma in, I guess, the way I write and as you know, I’ve got an online course that I’m developing at the moment, and I refer to religious trauma. I feel like naming it as trauma, it locates it firmly within that space. It’s something that was overwhelming. It was too much, too soon, too hard. We didn’t cope. But often we hear spiritual abuse, we might hear church hurt, adverse religious experiences the pain that comes from leaving a church community. There’s lots of different terms for what is essentially the same thing. And I think whatever lands for people is okay. For me, I frame it as religious trauma.
SAM SELLERS:
[12:17] I guess people might be thinking, okay, well, what does that even look like? So, what are some of the things that might get that response for some people? And we know that it looks different for everybody, and what might be traumatic for one is not necessarily traumatic for another, but there can be some common threads. Let’s start with that. What might be some of those common threads?
JANE KENNEDY:
[12:39] I think the common threads can be, it often starts with doubts and questions and cognitive dissonance. So, maybe there’s a leader or somebody that you really respect who turns out to have been sexually abusive, or there’s been unethical practices or financial misappropriation or other dodgy stuff going on. And that kind of rocks your world a little bit and the foundations might start to shake. And then you might witness things happening to people that are not okay. There might be exploitation of Bible college students, for example, or volunteers or people are not treated well. In fact, they’re treated badly. People can have a sense, and this is certainly true for me, that their belonging to that community is transactional. So, “I’m only valuable here while ever I contribute. And if I’m not here, I’m not visible. If I leave, it’s as if I was never there.”
[13:40] And that can be really, painful when you realize that a place that you have given your time, your money, your energy, you’ve raised your kids, you’ve met your partner, your best friends, your families there. You know, I don’t know how many times I have heard, “you have to be planted in the house of God to flourish.” And so, you plant yourself deeply, firmly rooted there. But really, that belonging was only ever transactional. So, you can start to have those sorts of, I guess, realizations or the lights start to go on. I think one of the first things for me was the concept of hell just became really, traumatic, like literally traumatic. The pain of that, the fear would become overwhelming, not just for myself, but for people that I loved. The idea of a literal hell became something I could no longer countenance.
[14:32] The idea that my LGBTQIA plus friends couldn’t be themselves, the truest version of themselves and the pain of deconversion practices and the pain of not being able to marry your partner in the same place that other people can marry their partner. I mean, there can be so many different things. There can be a person that is groomed by a minister. There can be the gaslighting, the spiritual bypassing that happens. There are so many reasons why people start to just feel unsettled and the foundations just start to give way. And so, then once that happens, you then go, “yep, what do I do now?” You know, like “where do I belong? Where do I fit? If I don’t belong here, then where is my community? Where are my people? Is God even real?”
[15:27] And it’s like when a kid finds out that the Easter bunny is not real, they’re like, “wait, what about Santa Claus?” You know, it’s like everything, all the threads just start to get tugged on and the whole thing unravels.
SAM SELLERS:
[15:39] I couldn’t resonate with the hell conversation and concept. One of the things first things that I started to sort of unravelled my validity, I guess, around the Bible as a Holy scripture was the concept of predestination, and there was just something about the idea that we are all predestined one way or another to heaven or hell. And I sort of went, well, then what on earth is the point? Like, what is the point of everything in regard to that? And that was a real turning point where I was like, that’s pretty shit, to be honest, like that’s a really shit concept. And so, I guess conservative or rigid binary sort of thinking is another strand as to what can cause those questions and that doubt.
[16:38] And often in an environment where questioning and doubting is seen as a weakness and seen as somehow not allowed because you are then not strong enough, you’re sort of, there is that concept that questioning is dangerous. But the dissonance that happens for queer people who grew up in the church or who were in the church is probably one of the most painful things that I have ever had to sort of wrestle with internally and still wrestle with internally, because that doesn’t just go away. The ability for people, for doctrine, for scriptures, and rituals and belief systems and all of that that comes under the banner of organized religion for that to completely rupture someone’s sense of self is excruciating.
[17:39] I think this is probably a good point to sort of say Jane and I specialize in this area because we have lived it as well. This is not something that we just sort of opened a book and went, “Hey, this looks interesting, let’s do that.” We sort of, in the same way that in a lot of these chats that I’ve been having, people’s specialisations tend to come organically out of your own lived experience, for us it is no different. But I viscerally remember I sort of had to tell the elders of my church that I was dating a woman, which did not go down, suffice to say, very well. But I remember having essentially been kicked out of the church and about six months later, sort of coming back after moving away for a bit. I still at this point did not have a bad relationship with church despite that, I think I was very much in a little bit of denial.
[18:41] But I very much remember coming back to visit my family. We were going to go to church that Sunday to visit people that I still very much cared about and was told quite literally that I was not welcome and that if I was to show up, that I would be heaping judgment and unhealth and sickness, not only on myself, but on everybody in the church, because I would be tainting the whole lot of people by just walking through those doors. And I thought, “Oh, that’s strong.” You know? It is just like the fierce hate. There’s the saying that there’s nothing like—
JANE KENNEDY:
There’s no love like Christian hate.
SAM SELLERS:
[19:32] Yeah, exactly. But you hear about stories, and you sort of know that Christians can be incredibly judgmental and have strong opinions about things, but until you’re on the other end of that, you don’t quite realise what that hate feels like. I remember thinking that it was a little bit like having one foot on either side of the Grand Canyon and just feeling like someone was just like ripping me apart straight down the middle.
JANE KENNEDY:
Oh Sam, I just feel that.
SAM SELLERS:
[20:07] The pain and the grief that came was just overwhelming. So, the way that it presents is very different for everybody, but I think the grief is that invisible thread that pretty much everybody, regardless of the reason why you left church, what happened when you’re at church, the grief that comes is that invisible thread that connects everybody. I’ve not met a single person who has either done their process of deconstruction, whether they have left the church, still are a part of the church, Christian, not Christian, anything in between. I’ve not met anybody who has not experienced a sense of grief through that. So, yeah, I think that’s probably one of the most potent threads that sort of connects everybody.
JANE KENNEDY:
[21:06] It was for me, absolutely. The grief of losing the community, of losing the magical kind of Disneyland thinking that I grew up with, of that this is this kind of amazing, perfect place, and wanting so badly for it to be a certain way. And, the church I grew up in was big and flashy and successful and shiny lights and amazing music and all of that. Well-known leaders all over the world, like all that kind of thing. And so, when that starts to kind of unravel and you start to see, it’s like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the dog pulls back the curtain and Dorothy’s just like “wow.” And I think the closer you get to church leadership, the more you see that there’s a little guy kind of just making it all happen.
[22:01] But that was devastating to me to start to see the chinks in that armour. I’ve been part of three churches over a course of maybe 30 years, or maybe 25 years. And each one of those churches, the closer that I have come to the core of the leadership, quite honestly, the uglier it’s been. And that was devastating. And I didn’t see a lot of it at the time either. And the more I look back on it now, I just think, ugh. And you develop a critical mind. You start to think differently and see differently and have experiences outside of the bubble. And then there’s that grief of, “Oh, how could I have been so stupid?” And you feel dumb, and you feel duped. You just think, “how could I have been a part of that with my time and my money?” But we want belonging, and we trade just about anything for belonging.
[22:49] So, I think there’s a grief of that. And then for me also, after leaving church, I still maintained my faith. But then after a time, I just found I couldn’t. I just found that the label Christian had too much baggage. And that it was too connected. The way that I had known God was too connected to my experience of those churches. And so, then I grieved God. There are times now when I still feel that sadness. I still just go, “Oh, I lived with this intimacy.” That sense, that being, that is just so close. And I grieved that as I have grieved a pet or a loss of a friendship. It’s real grief. It was my whole worldview.
[23:35] And I did some study into religious trauma recently and read a paper by Michelle Punchoke, and she talks about the shattering of the self. And I experienced that. And I think it’s interesting because when people do dumb shit, you can forgive it, you can work with it. There’s not much that somebody could do that you wouldn’t be able to work with if there was acknowledgement and honesty and transparency and a sense of responsibility, accountability. “I messed up. That shouldn’t have happened. I made a mistake. We’re going to rethink this whole thing. We’re going to do everything we can to make this church a safe place. We’re going to open our books and show you, our finances.” Whatever it is. But I think the thing in each of the three churches and in all the stories that I’ve heard from so many other people, so many other people, is that pain of when they double down and you feel like you’re being gaslit. And there’s no sense of responsibility. And they’re being persecuted, or you just don’t understand the full story or whatever.
[24:52] But it’s just these trails of destruction in the wake of those sorts of leadership and that sort of leadership and those sorts of churches. And it’s devastating for people.
SAM SELLERS:
[25:05] Absolutely. The blindness of some leadership is astonishing. But it can go even further in that rather than accepting responsibility, they don’t just double down on it. They can make it your fault. Somehow them mistreating people or appropriating finances or whatever it is, is somehow your fault because you have hate in your heart or the devil’s got his claws into you or all of that sort of pseudo spiritual language that makes it the victim’s fault. It makes it your fault. And so, then not only are you questioning them, but you also start to question you. And as soon as you start to question you, then it starts to unravel even further because then you have that sense of self-trust.
JANE KENNEDY:
Shame. Deep shame.
SAM SELLERS:
[26:10] Absolutely. I know that something that we have often spoken about, and I’m sort of going to hand the mic to you in this regard because we’ve often talked about it, is the visceral anger that is felt throughout people, particularly people who have left the church, is huge. But I think there is also, and this is often where our conversation leads, which is that that anger just sits there, and it doesn’t go anywhere. And that anger can turn into cynicism or ridicule or mocking. And we sort of go, how does this help me? How does this help anybody else? How is this any better than the hurt that other people are inflicting?
JANE KENNEDY:
[27:01] Yeah. And I think it’s why I felt so strongly earlier in the year about creating the sorts of resources that I needed to heal once it all started to unravel around me and to find the healthy therapists working in this space, and to create more and more awareness. Because I think it took me 10 years to really come to a place of feeling at peace and feeling free and feeling settled in myself. But over the course of that time, there was nothing. And even in the research I was just talking about, I did a full literature review. And there’s not a lot of empirical evidence either. There’s not a lot in the academic space. There’s more and more coming up, but wherever you look there’s not a lot out there that really supports people to reconcile a lot of this and to be able to process and manage their anger, and to know what to do with it when it just is so completely crazy making.
[28:05] And I wrote my story of coming out of it last year. I set aside some time to just kind of space it all out. And one of the things I was writing about is often we want to kind of flick our hair dramatically in the wind and throw a match and walk away like in the movies and just burn the whole damn thing down. You know, like you just want to see it burn. And it’s infuriating, and the one or two people that you have, maybe that you can kind of just completely let loose and just say whatever you’re thinking and feeling, you can create a storm of drama around it. And the anger is real, and the anger is valid and it’s an actual human response to being treated like shit and to being seen other people abused and exploited and for feeling foolish that you were part of something and that you helped prop it up for so long.
[29:06] So that I will never begrudge somebody their anger or their rage at wanting to burn it all down. But I think the thing is we can’t live there. We can’t stay in that place. We have to feel it. We have to allow it to work its way through our bodies. We have to know where does it show up in my body? Where am I feeling it? Is my neck tense? Have I got indigestion? Am I getting migraines? You know, is my back sore? Like where am I actually feeling this? How is it affecting me in an embodied way? And then how can I also process it in an embodied way? And I have stomped through the bush. I don’t run, Sam, but like on my walk sometimes I’ll just run for like 100 meters and just ride my bike really fast. I’ll do whatever I needed to do to process that anger.
[30:00] But I think on social media, I see a lot of that stuff. And I have a giggle sometimes like you watch some of the memes, they’re funny. But I’ve also had to unfollow a lot of it because we can’t live there. We can’t live in that space of just constant, particularly I feel uncomfortable when it is pulling people down and mocking people. I think there’s a difference between holding people to account and being actually critical. So, it’s a nuance. It’s a dance for me still when I feel angry about how do I process it in a healthy way? And how do I move to the other side of that anger and be able to protect my peace? Because I can’t control the shit show. I can’t control a lot of the stuff that’s going on, and we’re seeing mega churches imploding and we’re seeing all kinds of things coming out in recent years all over the place. We have no control over any of it. And all we do have control over is how we protect and tend to our own arts and find freedom.
SAM SELLERS:
[31:10] I think I also follow a lot of those accounts. And I think for me, I need to balance that. I need to balance those sort of funny, humorous posts with content that is helpful for me as well, because if that’s your only input that’s coming in, it changes your output. It changes the way that you respond to it. You’re not actually moving. It’s like that game stuck in the mud, did you ever play that?
JANE KENNEDY:
Yeah.
SAM SELLERS:
[31:46] Like, it just reminds me of that game where you’re like stuck and you can’t move and you’re just waiting for somebody outside of your control to release you from that position. And you can’t do that. You need to take control of what you can control. And that’s the information or the messages that you are receiving inward. Because until you do that, you are just stuck in that same cycle. You’re just on that hamster wheel that you said that you wanted to get off or that you’re so desperate to get out of. Something’s got to change for that to happen.
[31:25] Which I think is a really great transition into the conversation around what is it like in the room for somebody who is exploring some of this. And I think you’ve already touched on a way that we both work, which is that you cannot avoid the physiology, the physical reaction and sensations and the way that trauma shows up in the body. I don’t think you can talk about any trauma, to be honest, without addressing what that looks like physically for you.
JANE KENNEDY:
[33:32] Whatever we feel, any emotion we feel, we experience it in our bodies. It’s not happening somewhere else.
SAM SELLERS:
[33:11] And I think that that’s a really hard concept for people who are not in the therapy world to get. I sort of describe it as a little bit like, people sort of get the concept of muscle memory, like you haven’t done something for years or you haven’t heard a song for years, but somehow you just know the words off by heart. I find that with Spice Girls music. But I think it’s a hard concept for people to understand if they’ve not actually studied it.
JANE KENNEDY:
[33:41] No, I think it can be as well. But the way that you can heal through somatic or bodily or embodied exercises is so powerful. I think also when you think of trauma as it can be a bit of an overused term that doesn’t really have a lot of meaning. “I’m so traumatized” or whatever. But I think if we think of trauma, it can be a worldview. It can live in our psyche or in our bodies, in our person as a fear, as a way of seeing and thinking and believing. And it can be debilitating. It can stop us from moving forward. It can hinder our relationships. And so, it’s complex.
SAM SELLERS:
[34:30] Absolutely. And I think particularly with religious or spiritual trauma or anything in this sort of world, I think you can’t avoid the spiritual realm just because that’s hurt you or something in that world has hurt you or has been traumatizing. It can’t be avoided because it’s the part of you that you sort of… I think it was one of the things that I was really afraid of was sort of, I don’t want to talk about my spiritual life because my spiritual life holds a lot of grief at that.
JANE KENNEDY:
Baggage. Yeah.
SAM SELLERS:
[35:05] And I was so afraid of it. I was like, “This is what’s caused so much pain. I’m not looking at that. I can’t look at that. That’s terrifying.” But you can’t avoid it. You can’t avoid it because part of managing this is developing a sense of, we all have a spirit and how we hold that is different to the next person. But I think it’s a part that needs to be looked at and that takes a lot of wrestling and not physical wrestling, internal wrestling. Although I’m not opposed to physical wrestling, if that’s what we need to do. And for me, it was a lot of pulling apart of harmful doctrine and going, “what is the context around this?” Because I just could not grapple with the fact that surely there has got to be another way to look at this. Surely there has got to be different context.
[36:09] And so, I think religious trauma therapy doesn’t always look like sitting there talking. For me, some sessions are sitting there with a client and just going, “Let’s research it. Let’s look it up. Let’s look at different things. Let’s pull it apart. If it was completely up to you, what would you see it as?” I remember one of the biggest questions that my therapist asked me was, “Well, if you had your way, what would God look like? What aspects would they have? What purpose would they serve?” All of that sort of characterisation stuff. And I remember sitting there going, “I have no freaking idea.” And so, sometimes I think it’s not just challenging, but it’s looking at things that you would never have looked at before from an angle that you had never seen before or even considered.
JANE KENNEDY:
[37:03] And you’ve got to meet people where they’re at. So, I think it’s when they come in, I see people who are still Christians who identify as believers. But they’re just going, “I don’t know what to do with my anger” or “I don’t know how to report this thing that happened to me” or “I don’t know how to talk about this” or “I’ve just kind of had the realisation as a woman in my sixties that sexual assault in my teenage years was not okay.” And so, there’s all this pain that’s gone before. But I think it’s often also with trauma, there are so many layers to it. And so, the way that the brain stores memory with traumatic incidents, it can come up years after the fact. Sometimes it’s not even part of the conscious awareness. And so, there can be so many years in between an event and a memory. And so, somebody might come in saying, “I’m still a Christian. I still have a relationship with God, but I’m just really trying to reconcile this thing that happened that I’ve only really just acknowledged happened. And how do I process that? What do I do with that?”
[38:19] So, I think it’s just meeting people wherever they’re at. I had someone come in last week who told me about exploitation as a volunteer. And they just told me about this really awful set of circumstances that happened over a prolonged period. And then looked at me and went, “is that legit? Is that a legit reason to be in counselling?” Yes, it is. So, I think it’s just meeting people where they’re at, wherever they’ve come from. It’s multifaceted.
SAM SELLERS:
[39:00] And I think that legitimacy is really important because there is still very much a narrative that this is not a thing. I actually had another therapist try to convince me that religious trauma doesn’t exist, that it’s just people using the church or people in the church using doctrine or the Bible, or rituals or traditions to hurt people. And I sort of go, well, that’s not quite accurate. That’s a very simplistic way of looking at it. And it is still happening. I had someone that I used to sort of do a college thing with, and she sort of shared this post only today about how to not let your love of God falter when people hurt you, that that’s not God hurting you, that that’s people twisting it and hurting you. And I couldn’t go past that without saying something. I try not to do that sometimes because I sort of go “people need to find that themselves,” but I sort of went, “you know what? That is a really invalidating way to look at it. It’s actually really damaging.” I actually said it has the air to it of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and I sort of go, “well, sure, there’s still a gun there with a bullet that is actually doing the hurting as well. And the guns wouldn’t be able to be weaponized if they weren’t weapons.”
[40:38] So, those harmful doctrines and traditions and belief systems and things like that can’t be weaponized if they’re not harmful in the first place as well. And it is often mentioned by very prominent leaders in the Christian space sort of going “Churches are full of fallen people” and it sort of is used as a bit of a cop-out. You know, “It’s not the church’s fault that people are hurting you. We’re not going to take any responsibility for that.” So, there is still pretty much this narrative that it’s not a thing. So, it makes it really difficult for people to be able to get the support that they need around this very, very real and legitimate trauma and grief and pain, when the messages that are being received constantly is, “Oh yeah, but it’s just somebody, it’s just a person hurting you.”
JANE KENNEDY:
It’s gaslighting.
SAM SELLERS:
[41:41] Yeah, and that spiritual bypassing that you mentioned, “Maybe God’s just using this as a way to teach you something” or “It’s all part of God’s perfect plan for you.” And that sort of narrative, whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with believing that, we don’t then use that as an excuse to bypass people’s hurt and people’s pain.
JANE KENNEDY:
[42:04] And that toxic positivity, I think, is crazy making as well.
SAM SELLERS:
And that’s not church specific.
JANE KENNEDY:
[42:12] No, but it is characteristic of church as an institution, generally. And of course, there are exceptions. And you and I are not anti-church and we know of healthy churches and healthy denominations that are doing whatever they can to be safe and accountable. But I think that sense of spiritual bypassing that doesn’t allow for negative emotions, it doesn’t allow people to actually sit in their pain and feel it. We’re always kind of trying to bypass to the sunny side and the positive spin and, “Oh, but look at it like this.” And it’s invalidating. And it’s hurtful because you’re just saying to people, “your needs don’t matter.” And that’s already communicated to us because we’re not allowed to question things and we’re not allowed to have needs. And there’s a sense of disdain and shame attached to actually asking for what you want or what you need, or to question something or to have doubts. And so, it’s really invalidating.
[43:18] The church is, in my experience and in the countless stories that I hold of others, has not been a safe place for people to be able to say, “this is the truth of how I’m feeling right now.” And to be able to just sit in that. This actually makes me think of a really beautiful example. I used to work in the humanitarian space and for a long time I worked with the International Arm of the United Church. And the way that they partner with their global partners around the world is beautiful. It was really healing for me to be part of their church for a long time as I was coming out of a very unhealthy experience of church. But I remember visiting partners in an Indonesian province once with the president of the United Church, who at that time was a man, a beautiful man.
[44:10] And I remember we went to visit one of the projects where there was women telling us about the trafficking victims that they served. And so, they were telling us just these harrowing stories that were really, really heavy. And when we came back to the event we had happening that night beforehand, some of the partners we were with just said, “I found that really overwhelming. Would it be okay if we could come together to pray?” And so, the president was there, I was there, there’s maybe 20 other people there. And there was this woman who just started to almost to wail. And she just said, “God, where were you when these people were being trafficked? Where were you? Why didn’t you protect them? Why did you let this happen? How is this possible?” Like the grief and the wailing and the lament that came up was so powerful.
[45:07] But I will never forget the way that he just held that space. He didn’t come in and try to sort of go, “Oh, but God is good all the time” you know? like “you trust him in life and you trust him in death” or any of those other kinds of platitudes that try to fix things. He just let it hang in the air. Just let it be there.
SAM SELLERS:
[45:29] And it’s a really great example that it’s not simple. It’s not fancy. It’s not hard to do. Like it’s hard to watch at times to see other people in pain, but there’s no fancy formula to it. It’s not as though this is something that is complex or you need multiple year trainings to be able to do, to just allow people to sit in their pain is sometimes enough. You don’t need to say anything.
JANE KENNEDY:
Be present.
SAM SELLERS:
[46:04] I think one of the other biggest things in terms of not just being in the room, but I guess finding somebody who works in this space. For me, it was vital that that person had lived experience in this area. I think there are many, many things that therapists can work with and you don’t always need lived experience to work with that. But for me, I didn’t want to have to educate my therapist. I wanted them to already know the harmful doctrine and scriptures that I was talking about. I didn’t want to have to sit there and walk them through it as well. And that’s not everybody’s need, but I think it’s okay to want somebody who has been through it. Obviously, you want them to be trained. We’ve had many a conversation about this. You also want them to be well-trained because we know that lived experience is not enough. I think it’s such a crucial aspect, which I think it’s why the group that we’ve created is being really great because it’s just a bunch of really well-trained, great people and great therapists in their own right, and this is just a part of their story, but it means that they are seeing it through a different lens than somebody who had maybe never stepped foot in a church before and would not understand some of the terminology, even just on a really simplistic surface level, some of that terminology that you’re talking about.
[47:42] So, I think that that’s a really important aspect for people to feel like it’s okay to want to find somebody who has walked that path as well.
JANE KENNEDY:
Absolutely.
SAM SELLERS:
[47:55] I think it’s time to get to what is generally my favourite part of the episode. Let’s smash some myths because I think there’s too many out there and we had a bit of a chat beforehand in regards to what we thought this might look like. And the instant thing that I thought of when it came to what do I want people to get out of their mindset in terms of this, is that any sort of experience with religious trauma or any decision to deconstruct does not have to equal deconversion. You don’t have to leave the church, you don’t have to leave your beliefs behind, you don’t have to do anything. The point is to explore, and it doesn’t that black and white thinking, so to speak, you want to allow for the grey.
[48:56] So, I think there is that assumption or that myth that if you are deconstructing that you have walked away or lost your way, but that’s not everybody’s experience. There are people like, I think you said it in one of our many emails that go back and forth, that you can be a Christian and not go to church. And it’s so much more complex than that. It’s not a this equals this scenario.
JANE KENNEDY:
[49:30] Yeah, and there can be healthy faith spaces. There can be people still going to church that are allowing their beliefs to unravel and it takes a couple of years and maybe they stay and maybe they go. The idea of looking at the impact of faith or church, even starting there and just being allowed to look at the impact it’s had on your life, particularly the older you get or the longer that you’ve been in it, is that permission giving is often what allows people the freedom to explore and to question. And so, I think in the therapy space, in the room, in the online room, in my case, it’s really about that permission to bring whatever it is you need to bring. I’ll meet you where you are. You don’t have to go from church pastor to atheist.
[50:32] The binaries that we’re so used to living within in fundamentalist and conservative churches and belief systems is what I think people still in it assume happens outside of it as well. One of my former pastors actually made a tweet about it not so long ago, but I don’t know how many times I have seen people still in it who will say, “Well, they can’t really have known God. They can’t really have been committed.” And it’s one of the things that has made me just want to scream at times, because I could not have been more committed. My relationship with God was the most important thing in my life. It informed everything I did.
[51:21] It informed the fact that I didn’t have sex before I got married who I married, the way I dedicated my children to God on the stage, the type of friends I had, the way that I would talk about my faith at every turn, the way that I positioned myself as helper and saviour of the lost. And in my every career, I’ve had three now, every different thing I have done as a vocation has all been about service. It was everything. It was the entire fabric of my being, which sounds dramatic, but it was my whole identity. And so, to walk away, it is absolutely devastating. And I think the way that people come back from it is unique to their story. It’s unique to them.
[52:12] And there is no expectation, certainly in the therapy space, that they be anything other than who they are right now on that journey of whatever that looks like. And then if that ends up at atheism and all out activist, whatever, accountability, whatever it might be holding the church to account, or somewhere in between, yeah, that’s okay. There are no expectations.
SAM SELLERS:
[52:38] And I think it’s probably an important note to make that this is not just specific to Christianity. Deconstruction or religious trauma is not Christian specific. It’s just our stories are from a Christian perspective. So, it’s what we know. But I’ve had Mormon clients, and there is a wave of people online who are coming out of Islam or Judaism.
JANE KENNEDY:
Jehovah’s Witness
SAM SELLERS:
[53:15] Yeah, Jehovah’s Witness, particularly. And so, it is not Christian specific. It is just that that’s where our stories are. And so, it’s the language that we naturally speak. And I don’t think either of us claim to speak about other people’s experiences in different faiths that we don’t know, and we don’t understand. But yeah, I think it’s important for people to know this is not just one religion. It’s much bigger than that. I think if we were to sort of get more in depth than we already have, I think there is a systemic issue that is much bigger than just religion, organized religion. There is a systemic and intersectionality sort of perspective that needs to be taken into account as well.
[54:10] What a great chat. I mean, like we sort of said, it’s not necessarily a fun topic, so to speak. But I think its good fun talking about it.
JANE KENNEDY:
[54:27] I think there’s energy for it. We love it. And I have energy for it because it’s such a tender space for me, and I just want people to know that they can be free. And to work towards whatever I can to create the spaces and resources and connections and networks to be able to do that. So, yeah.
SAM SELLERS:
[54:49] And I mean, by the time this probably comes out, we will have been knee deep in it. But we are about to launch a support group called Reformation for those in Australia and New Zealand, which I think is going to be a really needed space. I think that intention for people to be able to ask questions, to just be that space where their voice can be heard and their voice can be believed and not invalidated, I think is going to be a really wonderful space.
JANE KENNEDY:
[55:27] I think it’s so terrifying to even just say things out loud sometimes when you start to doubt and start to question. So, yeah, I’m really looking forward to opening that up. And also, as we’ve talked about with the therapist resource group, to be able to share some of their resources and point people to people like Meg McGowan in New Zealand who’s working with purity culture and sexual freedom. And there’s so many fabulous people in that group whose resources we can share as well and just start to create an Australia, New Zealand kind of centric platform. Is that the right word?
SAM SELLERS:
Yeah.
JANE KENNEDY:
I don’t know, space for people.
SAM SELLERS:
[56:13] Whatever the term is, it’s going to be great. And I mean, while we are here, I guess we have some fun things coming out eventually. We’ve talked a little bit about our stories today, but I am potentially an insane person and I’m doing two podcasts at once. So, that’s fun. And it is going to be a little bit different to this one. I think it’s very much going to be around giving people a platform to share their story, to share their experience and not necessarily for that to be a hate fest or anything like that. We certainly don’t want it to have that feel. It doesn’t even need to have any specifics around places or events or situations, but it sort of was born out of the concept that to be seen is to be understood. And I think there is a lot of power in hearing people’s stories and for you to feel seen and for you to feel validated and acknowledged and heard through somebody else’s story.
[57:25] And so, my dear wife is going to be joining me on that. We’ll obviously share more of our story throughout it, but we’re going to get wonderful people like Jane back again to share more about their story. And I think it’s going to be really great. That’s not going to be Australia and New Zealand specific, which means that we are going global, which is great because I think that despite the differences there are still a lot of similarities as well in terms of experience, in terms of feelings and the way that trauma manifests in people. So, you’ve got a course coming out eventually. I don’t know when this is going to be up, so I don’t know whether it will be out in time, but you’ve got a course in the making.
JANE KENNEDY:
[58:19] You never know. Yeah, hopefully by the end of the year.
SAM SELLERS:
[58:22] Yeah, which is going to be great. And I also have a workbook in the making on sort of integrating queerness and faith and that those two things do not need to be mutually exclusive. Very much just working on just even reflecting about that. You don’t need to come to any sort of decision, but the process of reflection and exploration and curiosity is sometimes enough. I am very much sitting in the grey in terms of spirituality and I’m okay with that because I think coming from a very rigid conservative church, openness and curiosity and exploration are all the things that I were not afforded the luxury of in that space. And so, I think being able to have that, even if it is a self-paced workbook, is going to, I hope, be very valuable to people. So, I think there is exciting things happening on this side of the globe in terms of people and resources and places for people to go. I think it’s exciting.
JANE KENNEDY:
[59:40] Yeah, me too. And I think my experience of church also is that anybody doing anything, there’s a lot of gatekeeping around it. You’re only allowed to promote the work of the church leaders or the front person. And so, I’ve always wanted to be intentionally the other way. I want to support everyone doing good stuff and share the love.
SAM SELLERS:
[01:00:04] Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And on that note, I think we’ve talked enough.
JANE KENNEDY:
We have.
SAM SELLERS:
[01:00:10] But with all of these episodes, I just hope that people land in the rooms, whether they be physical or virtual, that they need to land in with the people who have the skills, the knowledge and the experience to work with them in an effective way so that their therapy experience, whether it be their first or their 10th time, is a positive one. Whenever somebody walks through my door, I just want them to feel valued and to feel seen. And so, I think if we can get more people through the door having positive therapy experiences, that’s going to trickle through generations. And all of a sudden, we have generational healing, not just generational trauma.
JANE KENNEDY:
Beautiful.
SAM SELLERS:
Thank you so much.
JANE KENNEDY:
It’s my pleasure.
SAM SELLERS:
It’s been wonderful.
JANE KENNEDY:
Good to chat.
SAM SELLERS:
We hope you enjoyed joining us inside the therapy room. Thanks for listening.