Center Yourself in Your Story

Winter greetings from San Diego!  I hope you have been having a gentle January.  It is raining here today, and the power is out – perfect conditions for writing a blog post 🙂  I wanted to dive into a concept that resonated with some people on my instagram page…the idea of centering yourself in your story, and how that plays an important plays in healing from religious trauma.  Let’s get into it!

In my practice working with religious trauma and spiritual abuse survivors, some version of the following exchange happens often:

Client:  (explains a difficult/challenging situation they experienced)

Me:  “That sounds really painful.  How has that affected you?”

Client: (explains all the ways in which the difficult situation affected everyone else in the story)

Me:  “I get the sense that it might be difficult for you to access how you feel about what happened.”  

Client:  (minimizes their experience and puts everyone else at the center of the story)

Me:  Maybe it’s time you allow yourself to have your own feelings about what happened?

For people who have experienced religious trauma, they may have been taught that it is a virtue to put others before themselves. While that is not inherently bad or wrong, unfortunately this is often taken to the extreme in faith communities and people are taught that it is sinful and selfish to put themselves first in any way. They end up neglecting themselves, their needs, their wants, and their feelings, and potentially compromise who they are because they believe their needs, wants, and feelings matter less than the needs, wants, and feelings of everyone else.  

Some of you may even be familiar with the acronym J-O-Y in some religious communities that is a hierarchy of who to put first in order to experience – you guessed it – joy:  Jesus, others, yourself.  In this scenario, a person’s needs, wants, and feelings come last behind everyone else’s.  

For people who are in a faith transition or a deconstruction, sometimes the directive to put everyone before self is the thing that starts to activate questions about problematic theology, feelings that your needs and wants are being neglected, and a sense that something is off.  

In religious systems, there are several factors that contribute to taking yourself out of the center of your story.  Here are just a few:

Harmful theological messages about selfishness and selflessness:

“Die to self.”  

“Be full of Christ and empty of yourself.”  

Mandates like these were common in my church growing up and into my adulthood.  Basically, self (and what it wants) is bad; serving others is good.  Several Bible verses were used to back up this line of reasoning:  

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” (Phillipians 2:3-4)  

 “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30) 

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” (Romans 12:1)

Though it is not wrong to put others before yourself in certain situations, it should not be a blanket command to put yourself last in all situations.  Putting others before yourself in all situations is problematic because it teaches you that what you need, want, and feel fundamentally don’t matter, and that you have to default to the needs, wants, and feelings of everyone around you.  This can result in feelings of resentment since your needs aren’t getting met.  Similarly, because time and energy are never spent tuning into your own needs (because everyone else’s needs matter more), it can also result in difficulty identifying what your needs and preferences are in the first place.

General distrust of personal experience:

Often in religious systems, it is taught that someone’s personal experience of something is to be tested/compared against what scripture and religious authorities have to say about it. For instance, if I am feeling stretched too thin related to how much I’m being asked or expected to serve, someone may have told me I needed to meditate on these verses:

“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35)

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9)

My own experience of feeling depleted from serving might be dismissed as invalid because it goes against what the Bible says about serving.  The more someone is asked to dismiss their personal experience about something, the more likely they are in the future to miss important cues and signals that their internal world is communicating about their limits, needs, and sense of safety.

Traditional gender roles / complementarianism:

Whenever there are strict sets of rules for living, there are bound to be situations where we have to take ourselves out of the center of our story in order to conform and belong.  For instance, traditional gender roles and complementarianism in religious communities appoint men as the heads of household, and women as the supportive helpers.  What happens when a woman wants to pursue a career outside the home, or does not want to have or raise children?  In order to remain in the community, the choice becomes setting aside personal needs and wants in order to belong.  

Homophobia:

For anyone who falls outside of the cisgendered and heterosexual identities in conservative religious communities, keeping oneself centered in their story is near impossible.  Hearing messages that condone certain gender and sexual identities yet condemn others, one is again left with a choice – “either I abandon myself, what I feel, and what I know to be true about me so that I can remain in my community, or I choose myself but lose everything else (community, belonging, worldview, etc.).”

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If you are in the midst of religious trauma recovery or faith deconstruction, I encourage you to center yourself in your story.  You are the main character, the protagonist, the hero / heroine.  How have YOU been affected by harmful religion?  What emotions surface for YOU when you think about your former faith community?  What do YOU need and want out of life as you are deconstructing your faith and trying to rebuild?

I would love to support you on your faith transition or healing from religious trauma journey.  Reach out today for a free consultation.