Recently I read Laura E. Anderson’s When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion. Anderson, a psychotherapist specializing in trauma and herself a survivor of high-control religion, offers an unflinching look at the many ways that religion can cause harm, even (and especially) under the guise of protecting its “flock” from sin or evil. I think this is an important book because while Anderson is clear about the problems that are caused by religion, she recognizes that faith matters to people and so she doesn’t suggest that becoming an atheist or agnostic is necessarily the path to healing (although I think she recognizes that for some people, that kind of complete rejection of religious belief might be understandably necessary).
As I read the book, this particular passage especially caught my eye:
When I was an active participant in religion, I was very rigid with my routine. Every part of my life was built around practicing spiritual disciplines, participating in ministry, and serving others. After leaving religion, I discarded this unyielding routine. In fact, I became quite activated even thinking of having a routine. I eventually realized that my body had connected routine and structure with fear, shame, and guilt. When I stuck to my routine, it meant that my walk with God was going well. But missing an element of my carefully crafted schedule could lead to grave consequences, and not structuring my life around the disciplines of my faith brought on immense amounts of guilt. Anything that resembled the discipline with which I had to live my religious life felt triggering, so I discarded all aspects of structure. Even as I became less activated by this trigger, my life seemed to deteriorate in other areas. I struggled to take care of basic needs, was unable to perform daily tasks and chores, and, despite knowing what I could do to help myself, I felt unable to. Though it pained me to admit it, I could easily recognize that my religious routine and structure had provided me with a coping mechanism that helped me get through the day-to-day overwhelm of my environment, and I missed it. As I learned to uncouple—that is, to pull apart routine and structure from guilt, shame, and fear—I was able to realize that living in a healing body meant that it was necessary to have a routine without shaming myself. It was essential for me to prioritize this, even if doing so required certain accommodations.
Anderson is an evangelical, so she is not writing about the kinds of practices or disciplines that many of us associated with monastic, mystical or contemplative spirituality: practices like the Daily Office, the daily examen, the rosary, lectio divina, and so forth. But every one of those monastic/contemplative practices could be the subject of her observations regarding “routine.”
It’s so easy when beginning an intentional commitment to contemplative practices to decide that some sort of established routine is necessary. “Pray the Liturgy of the Hours seven times a day.” “Commit to Centering Prayer for at least twenty minutes per session, twice a day.” “Above all else, do not neglect the observance of your daily examen.” Again and again, this is the drumbeat of the contemplative world: you have to be as routine as monks in a monastery, and as committed to daily prayer as nuns in a convent. And while no one ever says this, it seems to be an unspoken, unstated principle: if you don’t keep this kind of routine, you’re just a slacker, a wannabe, or just simply not good enough.
Ouch.
I remember when I was first thinking about becoming a Catholic, a friend of mine who is a psychotherapist teased me that I was joining the mothership of obsessive-compulsive disorders. We laughed about it, but if anyone who struggles with OCD had overheard us, our little joke would have been deeply unkind. I’ve known of sober alcoholics who have fallen off the wagon after being exposed to one office of the Liturgy — because it brought her face-t0-face with her not-yet-healed childhood trauma from growing up in a Catholic family.
If you are tempted to simply pass judgment on someone like that, please stop, and please go and pray with Matthew 7:1 for as long as it takes to begin to touch a place of compassion in your heart.
Many of us love the trappings of monastic and contemplative spirituality; I know I do. That’s why I’ve written the books I’ve written and this blog as well. But I think it is so, so, vitally important for people who love religious or spiritual practices to recognize that those very same practices/disciplines can be experienced as traumatizing by people who have been hurt by religious abuse. And even if you haven’t had the extremes of suffering that obsessive-compulsive disorder or religious trauma can cause, it is still all too easily to innocently take on a spiritual discipline like praying the Liturgy or some other regular practice, and then feel like a failure, or a slacker, or simply feeling ashamed or even guilty simply for failing to maintain an ongoing daily discipline.
Friends, if you have ever felt shame, confusion, guilt, anxiety, disappointment or “being less than” because you tried to keep a spiritual discipline and “failed,” please listen to me: you are okay and God loves you unconditionally. Remember what Jesus has to say to people who had gotten OCD about sabbath laws: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The same principle applies to the Liturgy of the Hours, and to the daily examen, and even to Centering Prayer: these disciplines are meant to help us find deeper freedom in the presence of Divine Love. They are never meant to introduce feelings of shame, guilt, or being a failure into our lives, spiritual or otherwise.
Anderson recognizes that “living in a healing body meant that it was necessary to have a routine without shaming myself.” Routine (or liturgy, or contemplation) is not in itself the enemy. It is our all-too-human tendency to weaponize routine, even against ourselves, that creates problems. And of course, if you have been traumatized by religion, it’s quite possible that religious disciplines were weaponized against you, perhaps when you were a child or in some other way vulnerable. The solution, as Anderson acknowledges, is not simply to decide that all routine is bad and therefore the only real freedom is the lack of routine. Rather, we have to learn to make accommodations, which includes finding a balance between adopting a contemplative practice because we want to grow spiritually, and learning to accept that we may never do it “perfectly” and that some practices we might outgrow, or discover are simply not for us. All of this is okay.
Remember: God is a God of unconditional Love and infinite freedom: not a punitive source of toxic shame and soul-crushing guilt. If these kinds of feelings are especially troublesome for you, consider exploring them with a caring and qualified therapist. If they occur but are not debilitating, you might explore how to recalibrate your spiritual practice toward joy and freedom with the help of a kind and compassionate spiritual director. Either way, the moral of the story is the same: contemplative practice is meant to set us free. If we are in bondage — even just to our own painful emotions — then our first step is to do the necessary work to find the freedom that brings true and lasting healing.