Healing Sacred Wounds

In the last post, we discussed some basic signs of gaslighting and why it’s so hard to recognize it while it’s happening to you. However, most of the discussion centered on individual relationships and one-on-one interaction. In today’s post we’ll take a deeper look at how gaslighting can compound its effects when practiced within a larger group dynamic, and we’ll apply those insights to a religious context.

So, what does it look like when you’re in a group that practices gaslighting on a corporate level? I tend to think of it as a step further removed from reality. So, in individual gaslighting, the primary interaction occurs between two actors, but when it happens within a group dynamic, it can turn into three actors–the target, the agent, and the intangible cause. This might be easier to explain with an example.

Imagine you are volunteering at a local non-profit. You were really excited to get involved, but since agreeing to come in the first few times, you’re starting to feel drained. It’s cutting into your energy to do your job and take care of your kids. You’ve decided that instead of coming in for an hour three times a week, you’re going to have to cut back to one time a week. But once you inform the volunteer coordinator, she sighs heavily and begins explaining all the reasons that you only helping one time a week will be a hardship on their non-profit agency. You immediately feel bad for disappointing her, so you begin to apologize, but she cuts you off and reminds you that it’s really not about you or her–it’s about the people the agency helps. How are they going to be helped if you’re not there doing it?

This is what I mean when I say there are three actors in play with this type of institutional gaslighting. It’s bad enough when your friends or families make themselves the victim of your “hurtful behavior,” but now it’s beyond that. Now your behavior is hurting innocent recipients of a non-profit. Instead of the agent of gaslighting setting herself up as the victim, the “victim” is the mission of the non-profit itself. This practice can turn just about anything into the supposed victim–from an intangible cause to the group itself. It’s essentially gaslighting by proxy for lack of a better term.

So, what happens to this gaslighting group dynamic when a spiritual or religious element is introduced? What seems bad enough when weaponized at a group level, gets worse by raising the stakes to spirituality and faith. But what does this look like? Let’s try another example.

What seems bad enough when weaponized at a group level, gets worse by raising the stakes to spirituality and faith.

Suppose you are actively involved in your church. You are there multiple times a week for services and ministry opportunities. When they need you to sing or play an instrument, you do it. When they need volunteers in nursery or teachers for the children you do it. When they ran a toy drive for Christmas you were in the front of the line taking your kids shopping to get toys for the program. When a need suddenly arises within the church they ask you to help, but unfortunately, you can’t. It’s just not possible.

Suddenly, the atmosphere around church leadership feels different, but you can’t quite figure out why. The next week you offer to play your guitar for church, but they’ve already asked someone else. You watch for the next nursery rotation, but your name is conspicuously absent. When you try to ask why you’ve been shut out from all the ways you typically volunteer, you get blank stares and awkward shrugs.

Finally you can’t take it any longer, so you confront someone to find out why you’re getting shut out from all the ways you’ve served there in the past. The response astounds you, because they assure you that you aren’t being shut out of anything. You’re making this all about you, but it’s supposed to be about Jesus. After all, just last week the pastor said that the spiritual person takes every opportunity to serve… The conversation changes nothing, and now you feel guilty for even bring up your concerns. It takes six months before you are asked to do anything else in church, and by then you are so grateful for a second chance, you jump at it.

If this scenario sounds familiar, you might want to ask yourself why. What parts line up with your experiences–inside church or outside? It’s not unusual for people within the church, particularly women, to feel powerless over what roles they are allowed to play (another story for another post) and as a result, they accept whatever chances they are given. It’s also pretty common for women’s judgment and boundaries to be questioned and ridiculed. These are all potentially interesting blog posts of their own, but the issue here lies deeper still…

The part of this whole example that ties in the main point is the fact that the gaslighting doesn’t just cause you to question whether your senses are accurate (i.e. being too sensitive when nobody is shutting you out), now it’s also calling your spirituality into question. If you were REALLY spiritual you wouldn’t be missing out on chances to serve at church. This is how spiritual gaslighting becomes more dangerous than other types, because it questions both your sense of reality AND your sense of individual spirituality.

Sadly, the people who are targets of this type of spiritual abuse are often the ones seeking to do the right thing and love God. The hard part of leaving behind this type of environment is that these ways of thinking are so internalized you don’t easily walk away from them. Physical distance may be a simple task, but emotional distance can be much more difficult.

Next post will deal with the aftermath of religious gaslighting and how to find healing…