Nothing hurts like believing in something with your whole heart, pouring your life into it, building community around it, investing money and time and emotion into it, only for it all to fall apart - mostly this looks like relational breakdown on a catastrophic scale.
The sense of betrayal, of having lived a lie, of having been so wrong, of having your life turned upside down and inside out, is overwhelming. I am describing my experience of church hurt. Maybe it can even be broader than that; any collapse of a community built around a central idea can be catastrophic to our sense of self. It could be a start-up company, a sports team, an ecological farm community… the options are pretty endless. It just needs to be the central and organising factor in your life that you share with others.
In my experience, it has been issues of power and control that have led to things falling apart. As humans we have some pretty extreme ways of manipulating or controlling one another and we like to get our own way. Add to that any hint of a higher power or spiritual authority, an adherence to a value system organised somewhere else, and we have a great recipe for hurting one another in the name of something greater
When it all starts to fall apart we usually experience the first stage of the grief cycle - denial:
Everything will be ok.
This can’t be happening to us!
It probably isn’t as bad as I think it is.
Everyone will come to their senses and we will work through it.
Then we move to anger:
How can this be happening to us?
Who are these people? It’s like I don’t even know them.
I can’t be part of something so toxic.
Someone is to blame for this mess.
And finally, the depression part of the grief cycle sets in:
I feel so alone in this.
No one understands how it feels.
I am not able to trust anyone anymore.
It isn’t worth being committed to something because it will all fall apart anyway.
I’ve wasted my time, money and energy on something that has ended in disaster and hurt. I must have been wrong all along.
I can’t make good decisions.
People aren’t worth investing in.
We turn inward and start to make some adjustments to our worldview that protect us from this level of grief and disappointment ever happening to us again. We get our defences in order; humour to brush it off, isolation to avoid people hurting us, blaming others, making our lives smaller, controlling more, rethinking what we believe about ourselves and the nature of the divine… on and on the repercussions go.
Carl Rogers talked about the defence mechanisms - the things that we tell ourselves, or our protective strategies - that we use in order to go on living in a world that is full of imperfect humans likely to disappoint us at best, and decimate us at worst. His theory imagines that when you get into a relationship where 3 things exist your defence mechanisms can take a break and you can examine more authentically your hurt and disappointment and how to move on. The three conditions are;
Empathy - someone really understands what it is like to be you and have lived in your stories and they communicate to you that they get it.
Unconditional Positive Regard - every part of you is welcome, even the parts that feel shameful or bad (to you!), because every part has been created to allow you to survive in your life.
Congruence - the person you are with is being themselves. They aren’t masking, or pretending, they are reacting like a real person in the room with you and having their own experience of you.
I’ve walked through the journey of church hurt personally and walked alongside others going through it as well. It is a journey of grief, reevaluating your whole life, feeling misunderstood and like you’ve made bad choices and putting up defences to make sure it never happens again. But the hope is that eventually the hurt fades. Perhaps the defences aren’t as needed when we regain some of our confidence in making decisions - even if they are different to the ones we would have made before. We let people in again - carefully and slowly. We allow hope to exist again while knowing it can go wrong. A resilience, or a trust in our ability to recover if things go wrong, grows through recovering when things go wrong! This is the acceptance stage of the grief cycle.
Don’t misunderstand me - it is NOT a linear process and we can get stuck in one stage or go round and round them all over and over. However, grief, while maybe never going away completely, becomes a smaller and smaller part of our everyday life over time if we are able to find a safe space to process it.
I would suggest a therapist, obviously!
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